Musings on sports blogging and the interplay between new and old media

The internet has sparked an unheaval in media's traditional order: legendary newspapers have slashed staffs or gone out of business; magazines I used to read are now defunct; and my daily digest is composed not of one trusty periodical but instead largely of an instantaneous compendium of smart, expert, piratical, and (mostly) independent bloggers. The old media is hurting: how to keep up? how to stay relevant? Magazines, which have been hit as hard as anything else, are underdoing massive change; Newsweek and Time both want to be the Economist.

Sports media is its own strange animal. It begins (and all too often also ends) with ESPN, the behemoth everyone must reckon with. No matter how independent a blogger or fan might think themselves, their sports they consume has at some point passed through ESPN's loud, garish filters. But with the internet there are clearly more choices, though it seems the local beat writer has been hit harder than ESPN the megalodon.

But new media is clearly on the rise, and the heat between the two sides is often fun to watch: I admit to experiencing a frisson whenever a sports blogger destroys a particularly inept pundit. The pundits naturally do not take kindly to this, because, apart from exposing the weakness of their analyses, they also are helping to drive them out of business. Yet many bloggers would like what the old media types have, or at least had until recently: a stable situation enabling them to write about sports for a living. If anyone should be allowed that luxury (I do not have such grand hopes for my modest site), it should be many of these bloggers.

This past weekend New York City played host to the Blogs With Balls conference. Brian Cook attended and cogently wrote about the conference, highlighting the incoherence that (a) somewhat blighted its good intentions, yet (b) could only be expected when old and new media alike were thrown together to talk about whatever the hell it is they are all doing and where this ship is headed. I can safely say that I am happy with my strange little corner of the internet, though I just wish I had (read: would make) more time to post more frequently and in greater depth about the subjects I really enjoy. But the question is: in all this heat between new and old media, is there any light?

I was a resistant blogger. Like many who start blogs, I had semi-delusions of grandeur in starting Smart Football (and its predecessor the Chalk & Talk) in that I told myself, "Oh, it's not really a blog" -- nevermind that it is hosted by something called "Blogger." That attitude manifested itself in the paucity of updates combined with each post's length. (It is still the case that I post less frequently but with longer articles than other blogs, though far different in degree from my earlier days.) Over time however I've really grown to embrace the blog format, including diagrams, pictures, and videos, which are obviously impossible in print, as well as, well, the blog movement: Smart Football is a blog, and damn proud to be a (small) part of the community.

This flows from embracing the paradigm shift in media and, specifically, in sports media. Blogs are here to stay, and their immediacy and interactivity give them huge advantages in certain respects. Yet old media can co-opt the technology (and even sometimes the people); ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and many others can get themselves a potent web presence. But what the blogosphere and the internet generally have done is democratized analysis. J-Dub of Blue Gray Sky discussed some of the mechanics of the sports punditocracy before this massive change, but the short answer is that sports journalism, for several decades, was a tournament where the few coveted spots went to the willing and the lucky, while everyone else went off to some other area of employment. Now, those with day jobs can contribute, and the punditocracy is more meritocratic than ever.

So there are certain things that the blogosphere is simply better at delivering than than the old guard, and that includes both analysis and humor -- two rather huge categories. (I tend to focus on one versus the other. You be the judge.) Beat reporting and real journalism will never die -- Deadspin's famous motto, "Sports News without access, favor, or discretion" is cute but it has its limits -- yet the future of the old-school salaried pundit who chimes in with periodic nuggets of wisdom is in peril; he is in peril because he's been exposed as not very good.

There are many examples. Humans can only read so much stuff in a given day, and as a result there's a substitution effect: a small difference in quality leads to vastly different results -- i.e. a complete swapping out of the inferior good for the superior one even if the difference between them is only slight. It is a little like selecting a starting quarterback: they might be similar, but you can pretty much only have one guy, and to the victor go the spoils. The practical upshot is: why read Stewart Mandel so long as Brian Cook and Matt Hinton retain the ability to type? (Hint: There is not one, unless you count masochism.) My comparatively low-traffic site is not a great example, but I do know that my driving philosophy is to write the kind of articles that I would like to read but the mainstream media seems incapable of producing.

This is really the same phenomenon that is gutting newspapers around the country. There are some bitter, sad stories about good journalists who have succumbed to the pressures imposed, in part, by new media, including the Baltimore Sun laying off reporters during a game they were covering. But there's really no way around this. Old media had an incredible bottleneck, and one economic effect of bottlenecks is that they push up wages; when the bottleneck is cleared or, maybe more apt when describing the internet, is transformed into a fire hose, the wages of the old style "pundits" are driven down, way, way down.

(There is also the possibility of a reverse effect, where after the initial deluge of options a few winners emerge from the sea of blogs and become essential because of their centrality and as a touchstone, though this process is at least slightly more meritocratic than the old order. Each Bill Simmons column gets roughly a million viewers; relatedly, newspapers around the country are dying but I am fairly convinced that, at least as brands, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and a few others will remain necessary and of even increased importance because their reach will remain international while the locals go out of business. So, even in the blogosphere there will be winners and losers, at least somewhat determined by luck, but I leave this aside for now.)

The result is that old media types like Mandel can't resist the temptation (admittedly, his column is a few years old) of deriding bloggers by saying banal things like: "I'm guessing you'd have a better chance getting these guys to actually shave and shower on consecutive days than participate in any idea that originated from me." And it's understandable why: many bloggers are better than him at his job and their very existence is driving him and his kind out of business (though apparently not quickly enough). One reason, covered above, is the replacement value of clicking on one website (say, Dr Saturday, where the analysis will be timely, exceptionally well-written, and sharp), or another (SI.com where you get Mandel and his lame mailbag). But the other is that nobody, or at least only a few winners, will be able to make some kind of steady living solely by churning out football analysis. Now I don't want to get into what good wages might be, and I'm aware of several bloggers who are doing quite well, but the days of every city having several sports columnists and big newspapers and networks having bloated staffs of salaried sports guys is over; the part-time on-the-side blogger is here to stay.

So when the Mandel-types snipe at bloggers and (on the rare occasion!) that bloggers snipe back at the big media, there's an element of class warfare going on, but it is increasingly irrelevant class warfare because we're at a new world. All this seems both more, and less, salient considering it is blogs and twitter that is providing superior coverage of what is going on in Iran as we speak. It is all connected. This is why the Blogs With balls idea was a good one, at least in theory: there needs to be some integration. And maybe we're seeing it: Pro Football Talk has partnered with NBC Sports. It's maybe the biggest deal in the "15-year history of online sports -- and the 5-year history of sports blogs."

A few years ago (long, long ago in 2005) I read an essay by Richard Posner where he talked about the decline of old media in the face of new technology, and particularly blogs. He took a lot of heat for it, but, while it now reads a bit dated, the overarching message seems rather prescient; old media is hurting right now.

This is not an unmitigated good, and no doubt blogs and other internet media -- much of it without any access or even a desire for it -- can only complement traditional reporting. But the Mandels, Dennis Dodds, and, more unfortunately, many regional sports columnists paid to opine on the usual stuff, are an endangered species, and the net result of that is more immediate, more fun, and just plain better analysis from bloggers.

So my advice to all is to do what it took me a few years to do: Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Blog.

"Confabulatory" rankings of college football players

So I stumbled on "The College Football Performance Awards" site. Its mission statement is "to provide the most scientifically rigorous conferments in college football. Recipients are selected exclusively based upon objective scientific rankings." The basic driver seems to be that the ballot system, whereby some names are picked, some folks vote, and somebody wins, is an inherently flawed way to select football players; indeed, it is, they argue, more like a "popularity contest."

I suppose there's some merit to that proposition. The idea is that there must be some better way to evaluate a player, particularly if a player wins an award because of his strong supporting cast as opposed to what he individually brings to the field. Brad Smith, former Davidson and USC kicker who runs the site, also seems to have the laudable goal of including more mid-major program players into the final award mix. For example, in his rankings Rice quarterback Chase Clement finished higher in the overall rankings than Tim Tebow (Colt McCoy finished #1). So these are generally laudable goals but I still don't quite know what to make of all this.

First, the value of any so-called "objective metric" is in how good the algorithm is. On that score, despite journalists telling us that Mr. Smith's "methodology is all there on the website," I come to find out that it is not.

Smith tells us simply:

The goal of this research is to advance a sophisticated representation of college football; a just, refined, and elegant measurement of performance; a precise, objective, and scientifically reliable selection of deserving recipients; an inherently dispassionate, methodologically sound, and experimentally valid celebration of individual achievement.

But that's really it for explanation, just cool assurances that it is an elegant, sound, and valid "celebration." My favorite of course is his discussion of why rushing yards is inadequate, which I must paste in full:

Q: Is football performance analysis a form of scientific enquiry?

A: The question, "Who are the top performers in college football?" is an inherently empirical question. In other words, any attempt to answer this question trespasses overtly on the domain of science.

PERFORMANCE 101: ANALYZING RUSHING DATA

The college football player with the most rushing yards per game is sometimes referred to as the "rushing leader". This usage is misleading and, in some sense, even confabulatory. In reality, the rushing yards per game statistic is not very helpful in evaluating rushing performance and is a poor predictor of team success. For an example of this, consider running back A with 900 yards on 300 carries, B with 870 yards on 145 carries, C with 840 yards on 120 carries, and D with 800 yards on 80 carries. Further, assume that A, B, C, and D have all played the same number of games, and all other rushing variables are held constant. According to the rushing yards per game statistic, A is the rushing leader, B is second, C is third, and D is fourth. Yet, almost certainly, these rankings are inverted. After all, in this case, the discrepancies in rushing yards per game are fairly small, while there are significant differences in rushing yards per carry. To declare A the rushing leader merely based upon A's standing in rushing yards per game without careful review of other factors and considerations is at best -- a cursory and superficial analysis, and at worst -- a specious and obfuscatory one.

I know what is "obfuscatory," and it is not just the ballot system. (I also enjoy spelling "enquiry" with an "E"; he was a philosophy major so I guess he has to spell it the way David Hume did.)

But all this begs this question. He tell us that subjective views of a runningback, or even a "scientific" review based on total yards doesn't tell us much. This is of course all rather pedestrian, but he he doesn't tell us what the next step is. Is it average yards per carry? Some mixture? He doesn't say. There is no explanation of his methodology.

He does have an "academic review" section, but these fine folk don't really discuss his actual methods, and instead seem to comment only on the general idea that objective, statistics-based criteria for ballots is inherently better than the ad hoc poll/ballot system currently in use. All quite possibly true, but merely stating that is not enough. (He also has a section titled "models," which I clicked on thinking it would tell me about his algorithms or the models he used to rank players. I was wrong, but it is likely worth clicking on anyway.)

The reason this is significant is because, contrary to what he seems to think, he's not the first guy to try to evaluate players based on the statistics. Football Outsiders has been trying to do this for over a decade, and the Pro-Football Reference site is another notable site which has gone into great detail and has laid it out for the world to understand. These enquiries, along with many others, have been going on for some time, and are free from the ballot box problems he identifies.

But the other reason it is significant, in light of his apparent thought that he is the first to finally Rank All That Is Good in Football, is that we've learned a lot about how difficult it is to model and evaluate players because of the hard work and transparency of these other sites and books. It isn't easy. He claims to be able to extract the fact that Colt McCoy is better individually than Sam Bradford, or that Dez Bryant was better than Michael Crabtree; any differences in results were just based on teammates. Maybe so, but how can you be sure? And how do you apply that kind of analysis to teammates, or offensive line play, or even quarterbacks, whose job is to distribute the ball around while relying on other guys to protect, get open, make the right play, etc? It's not that it can't be done, it is silly to act like you're first, or to but acting like you're the first to have thought about these questions, or to convince journalists to write things like:

Smith says on his website: "Who are the top performers in college football?" is an inherently empirical question. In other words, any attempt to answer this question trespasses overtly on the domain of science.

Science.

There's college football's seven-letter word. It suggests computers, which suggests BCS, which will make some of you stop reading right here.

And Let The Light of Discovery Shine Down Upon Thee. The answer is that it's all a bit silly, and this majestic quest to give awards based on elegant and objective science is a commendable goal, but Mount Everest hasn't been climbed yet, and the way has been paved for some time.

But the other reason why this is so bizarre to me, is why is this so focused on post-season awards? The article linked to implies a suggestion: that Mr. Smith's (perfectly acceptable) goal is to sell his ideas to various decisionmakers who hand out the Doak Walker Award, or the Unitas Quarterback Award, Lou Groza, and the like. That's fine, but for all the arguments about how subjective the post-season awards are, it ignores the question of why they shouldn't be somewhat subjective?

What should be wholly objective is a coaching decision to start one player or another, or to recruit a guy or for an NFL team to hire one as a free agent (marketing aside). That is 100% about getting the best players on the field to perform. (Though that analysis ignores the correlations that might exist among different groups of players, an idea studied much more in depth in basketball than football.)

But with awards, why is it so bad if the Big Schools win? What are these awards? No one has ever sufficiently answered for me whether the Heisman trophy is a "most valuable player" award designed to go to the critical member of a great team without whom the team would fail, or whether it is simply the best individual player in the country, or alternatively (and this is not the same thing), the player who has put in the best performance.

The implicit premise of Smith's site is that it should go to the latter, but I'm not certain that others would agree. Why shouldn't Danny Wuerrfel win the Heisman when the Gators were rolling over people rather than Troy Davis, who was individually quite impressive with over 2,000 yards rushing? Would a supposedly "objective" result be any fairer, one that not only would be subject to the vagaries of the model (which we can't review), but also would discount Wuerrfel's leadership, or ability to get up to throw pass after pass after defender and defender slammed into him head first?

I'm not so convinced that all that is flatly irrelevant in the limited context of postseason awards. Is it a crime that we take all those "subjective" impressions into account? I think not, especially with little to no explanation of the supposedly grand "science" behind the endeavor.

Hub Fans Bid Rabbit Adieu

Sad day: writer John Updike has passed away. Not known for his sports writing, Updike wrote one of my favorite sports essays of all-time: Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. It's a baseball essay about Ted Williams's last game at Fenway Park, so it is technically off topic for this site, but it is both elegant and brilliant. Anyone who has ever been to a baseball game -- or ever lived in Boston -- can't help but feel the essay's immediacy and even importance. Some brief snippets below, but read it for yourself.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. . . .
. . .
The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause — no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

What does (should) it mean to be crowned "National Champion"?

There is much debate now whether Utah or Texas ought to share in the college National Championship in some way, though it is unlikely that they actually will). From the WSJ's Daily Fix:

[I]n an open letter to the 72 members of the media who choose the Associated Press No. 1, the Washington Post’s John Feinstein makes a strong case for them to place undefeated Utah at the top of their ballot.

“The reason to vote for Utah is simple: This is the one and only way you can stand up to the BCS bullies — the university presidents, commissioners, athletic directors and the TV networks who enable them — and, to renew a catch phrase, just say no,” Feinstein argues. “Say no to this horrible, hypocritical, feed-the-big-boys system. Say no to the idea that fair competition doesn’t matter. Say no to all the hype surrounding the power conferences and power teams. To co-opt yet another catch phrase, say yes to change.”

Feinstein isn’t the only one who thinks Utah didn’t get a fair shake at the national championship. Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel agrees, pointing out that some voters in the Harris Interactive poll, which determines the title-game participants, admit they didn’t see the Utes play at all this season. “Even by the absurd standards of the BCS, having voters not bother to watch an undefeated team play a single game is a new low,” Wetzel writes. “Whether Utah deserved to be ranked No. 1, 2 or 25 isn’t the point of this argument. The Utes deserved to have voters at least see them.”

But not all agree:

Gregg Doyel disagrees that Utah deserves to be No. 1. “People, please. Utah is the same team that beat Michigan 25-23. Michigan went 3-9 this season,” he writes at CBS Sports. “Utah is the same team that beat Air Force 30-23. Air Force went 8-5. Utah beat Weber State 37-21. Weber State isn’t even in Division I. Utah beat New Mexico 13-10. New Mexico went 4-8.”

I'm not sure if, given a vote, I would vote Utah #1, but Doyel's argument seems bizarre to me. There's a lot of weaknesses with arguing that, because, say, USC beat the Citadel by 20, while Ohio State only beat then by 10, then USC is better. And his argument is just a series of those assertions. I mean, that kind of thing happens all the time and no one believes those predictions because they are entirely unhelpful. All the time one team gets blown out only to turn around and beat a team that blew out the team that originally beat them. Some teams just match up differently; football teams are complex, and some just match up with others better. To paraphrase Herm Edwards, it's about who won. Nevertheless, we saw some of this reasoning this year with Oklahoma and Texas, where Texas's win over Oklahoma eventually counted for less than the subjective impressiveness of Oklahoma's victories down the stretch.

But, more fundamentally, all this made me wonder what the designation "National Champion" is supposed to capture, anyway. The baseline that everyone -- including the President-elect -- seems to push for is a playoff. So we can use that to ask about each view.

Doyel's argument seems to be that Utah doesn't deserve to be #1 because -- "People, please" -- you wouldn't really expect them to beat Texas, OU, or Florida, right? I mean, just look at all their bare victories over mediocre or mid-level teams. In other words, one could phrase the Doyel view as the "National Champion" is the team that you think is the absolute best team in the sense that, were they to be matched up against any other team in the country, they would always be favored to win.

That can't be right, though. That's not at all what a single-elimination playoff gives you. Had the 2007 Giants played the 2007 Patriots the week following the Giants' Super Bowl win, would Eli and Co. suddenly have become the favorite? I think not. In March Madness, with teams playing every couple of days, do we really think that the better team always wins each game? No, and that's kind of the point of a playoff.

Indeed, series-based playoff systems, like with MLB or the NBA, are presumably based on the very idea that one-game is not enough to determine the best team. So, if we still think the playoff is the best solution, then it makes no sense to say that Utah can't be the National Champion just because you think the other teams might actually be better overall. Though, if you subscribe to the Doyel view of "National Champion," then the BCS probably does a better job for you than a playoff would, because the system is all about crowning the perceived best overall team. Although it lacks the precision of a playoff, it gives you fudge-factors so that Florida's and Oklahoma's (though not Texas's) losses can be overlooked.

So, maybe instead of crowning as National Champion the best team in absolute terms, that distinction is a reward for having the best overall season. I don't really watch racing, but that seems to be what they go for with their points system. And many BCS defenders say that it makes "every week a playoff," so the best overall season gets rewarded (let's just pretend like that is true). Well, a playoff doesn't give you that either: Exhibit A - the 2007 New England Patriots. They played unbelievably all year, blew everyone out, and then lost. No one -- not even them -- tried to argue that they should get a share of the Super Bowl via media vote or whatnot.

And that sort of thing happens all the time in playoff systems. It seems like a lot of the recent Super Bowl winners haven't been that great overall, or certainly were not considered the best teams going into the playoffs. Even when the Colts won the Super Bowl, it was with arguably their worst team in something like four or five years. Luck and circumstance play a huge factor, and again, the playoffs are decided by single, permanently binding, contests.

So what does a playoff give you, and why is it probably a better solution for crowning a National Champion? Let me say first that I think it would be a better system than the current BCS morass. But the advantage the playoff gives you is not anything metaphysically correct. It probably does not crown the best team. And it does not reward the best season (sorry Utah).

It merely gives you relative certitude. It's not perfect -- some clunker teams can be crowned, some historically great teams will get the relative shaft -- but, before the season, during the season, and in the playoffs, everyone knows what it takes to be the champion: you must get into the playoffs, and you must win every game once you're there. The Patriots couldn't lobby for votes, they couldn't say that they got jerked around, and they even couldn't say that they didn't get their chance. They played and they lost. They were probably better, they might only have had a bad day, but hey, you knew what you were getting into.

Which is really the issue here. No one has any idea what being "National Champion" ought to mean -- especially in college football where you have over a hundred D-1 programs and no team can come close to playing all the others. A playoff would simply lay some ground rules people could follow. As it stands, without a playoff, everyone may mount their high horse and argue past each other.

Update: Rocky Top Talk and the good Senator both weigh in on this issue. And Bill James says that all self-respecting statiscians should boycott the BCS, because the computer side of the BCS is irrational, incomprehensible, and, worse still, used only to justify the coaches poll: "Throughout the 11 years of the BCS, whenever the 'computer' rankings have diverged markedly from the polls, the consensus reaction has been, we have to do something about those computers. And they have; whenever the computer rankings don't jibe with the 'human polls,' they fix the computers."