Tuesday Football: By about a field goal

By a 28-4 rule, the NFL has modified its playoff tiebreaking rules.  A field goal scored on the fist possession in overtime no longer wins the game.  If that first field goal does happen, or the first possession ends with no score, the old sudden-death rules return into force.

This is a little like giving people ordinary flu shots, then telling them that they've been vaccinated against H1N1.  The treatment won't work, because either the underlying diagnosis is wrong, or the doctor is just lying about it.  The trouble with NFL overtime periods isn't that too many of them end with field goals; it's that too many end after only one possession.  Even if it did fix the problem, the new rule currently applies only to playoff games.  In May, the owners may extend the revision to regular-season games, which would be a small improvement.  Either way, this won't make the NFL overtime rules fair; it will just render them less unfair.

By about a field goal.

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Tuesday Gridiron (2/2009)

Last year, I made a new post after every week of NFL games.  Each post showed only the standings with my Victory Weighting system, with a few comments here and there.  This year, since Blogger allows HTML-based gadgets, the current Victory Weighted standings will appear at the bottom of the blog.  Actual Victory Weighting related posts will appear most Tuesdays until the Pro Bowl in February, but they'll consist of comments on the standings.

To recap what's been posted here at the Cat: In Victory Weighting, each team has a Strength rating.  At the end of each game that ends in regulation, the winning team adds 4 points to its Strength.  For games that end in overtime, the winner adds 3 points to its Strength, and the loser adds 1 point.  In the rare case of a tie, each team adds 2 points to its Strength.

Teams are then ranked by Strength.  If two teams have the same Strength, the one with the better winning percentage gets the higher rank. Victory Weighting also modifies some NFL tie-breaking procedures:

1. For tiebreakers that compare sub-records, Strength precedes winning percentage. For example, if two teams have the same Strength from division games, then the team with the better winning percentage in its division advances.
2. For head-to-head tiebreakers, Strength from the relevant game(s) replaces winning percentage.
3. A team's strength of schedule, most commonly used as the final draft-order tiebreaker, is redefined as the sum of all of its opponents' Strength ratings. Division opponents count twice in this calculation, since every team plays its division rivals (but no one else) twice.
   
4. Likewise, the definition of the rarely used strength of victory becomes the VP-weighted sum of opponents' Strength ratings. Each game played contributes a "game strength," which is the product of (a) the number of Strength points the team earned from that game and (b) the opponent's overall Strength. The strength of victory, then, is the sum of all the game strengths.
   

Besides mitigating the inherent unfairness of sudden-death overtime, Victory Weighting offers additional advantages:

• Fairer playoff seeding:  Since victory-point totals better reflect the quality of teams' victories, they also better reflect the quality of the teams themselves.
  
• Faster tiebreakers:  Because Victory Weighting changes the standings every time an overtime period is played, it spreads teams out. Rivals who share a common won-loss record can nevertheless have different Strengths. If the rivals are competing for playoff spots, no tiebreakers need apply, since the different Strengths sort them out.
  
• Quicker playoff scenario resolution:  One team's performance in its last regular-season game can affect not only its own playoff status but also those of several rivals. Under traditional rules, the rivals have to wait until the whole of this central game is completed, even it it requires overtime. Under Victory Weighting, however, overtime itself can either provide or take away the single Strength point required to determine everyone's fate. The waiting ends when regulation time does.
  

Victory Weighting does expand the number of playoff scenarios. Instead of three potential outcomes (win, loss, draw), each game now has five (win, OT win, loss, OT loss, draw).  For a two-team race, the total number of scenarios increases from 9 to 25; for three teams, from 27 to 125. On the other hand, the resulting tiebreakers work faster, resolving the additional scenarios almost as quickly as they are added.

Finally, Victory Weighting exerts an impact that is neither positive or negative. At the end of the season, it does affect draft order, especially for those teams whose final Strength falls between 26 and 38. These are the teams in the middle of the overall table, with 7-9, 8-8 and 9-7 records.  Even when Victory Weighting jumbles their draft positions, such teams can usually work their way around the changes – just as they do now.

How To Improve NFL Overtime

Baseball resolves ties by playing full extra innings. In basketball, tied teams play extra time in 5-minute parcels. Even in soccer and hockey, they get it partly right, with fixed overtime periods preceding those dreaded shootouts. In none of these sports does the game stop at the first score. But in the NFL, overtime consists of a sudden-death period that ends the first time somebody scores. Sometimes, the result of an NFL overtime has some fairness. When both teams are allowed to possess the ball at least once, they can reasonably claim that the OT period tested all of one team against all of the other. (That's why OT works in those other sports.) Unfortunately, many NFL overtimes end after only one possession. When that happens, overtime tests only one of half of the winning team against half the losing team. Yet, the winning team still gets full credit for the win. That's wrong. College football teams use a different scheme, giving each team in a tie game an additional possession at the same place (usually the near 25-yard line). The team that scores more points in its possession wins the game. In case of tie, the teams get another possession and try again. That's more fair than sudden-death, but each team gets more than a couple of chances, it can occasionally take a while. Let's review: NFL overtime doesn't work fairly, but the best fix, the college OT scheme, takes too long for the NFL to implement. The good news is, I have a solution. Enter Victory Weighting. The basic idea is this:

The winner of an NFL game should get more credit if they do it in regulation.

If overtime is required, the winners shouldn't get full credit for the win. On the other hand, the loser of an overtime should get a little credit for forcing overtime in the first place. To enforce this principle, we just add another column to the standings. In addition to a won-loss record, each team receives a Strength score. Every game played adds up to four points to a team's Strength, based on how the team fared:

• Regulation win: +4 Strength
• Overtime win: +3 Strength
• Tie: +2 Strength
• Overtime loss: +1 Strength
• Regulation win: 0 Strength

For example, as a result of last night's game, the Steelers now have a Strength of 3, while the Titans have Strength 1. Both team's Strengths have been weighted by the fact that their game required overtime. (Hence, the term Victory Weighting.) In most cases, the standings using Victory Weighting will be the same, but there will be deviations, especially during midseason, when some teams have taken their byes while others are still waiting for their weeks off. As we'll see next time, when we review the 2008-9 season, Victory Weighting can also impact playoff bids.

"Eat Yer Burritos," Take Two

Hi! "Take one" was something called "Shaddup and Eat Yet Burritos," which also lived on Blogspot. I had hoped it would be a general-purpose blog, but somehow, it turned instead into a football blog. That really wasn't what I wanted. At the beginning of this year, I had to turn my attention to more pressing matters, like moving halfway across North America. Of course, I could have just added new posts to the old blog, whose last entry was in January. On further review, however, I decided to move the blog to a new place. For one thing, it was inspired by the fact that I was living in Maricopa County, home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his anti-immigrant obsessions. While Illinois has plenty of immigrants, the obssession isn't as strong, so the title doesn't mean as much. More to the point, it occurred to me that I have something else to talk about in a blog. One of my favorite things about the 1970s was the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, the nine-year, 1400-episode extravaganza that marked the end of radio drama in the U.S. I have quite a few things to say about CBSRMT, enough for years' worth of weekly or bi-weekly posts. Hence: The Ghost-Grey Cat. The new title is a play on "The Ghost-Grey Bat," one of the best horror installments of the entire CBSRMT run. I'll discuss this episode, and CBSRMT in general, in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the NFL season has started again, so I'll first talk about Victory Weighting, my proposal for making sudden-death overtime periods fairer to the teams that have to endure them. Happily, the Titans and Steelers gave me more material last night. Anyway, welcome to The Ghost-Grey Cat!