Tuesday Football: New Victory Weighting definitions

Yes, the last third of April is an odd time to bring up my Victory Weighting scheme, but there's the little matter of the NFL Draft, which, for 2011, starts next Thursday.  That event provides the perfect pretext to introduce definitions for a couple of terms that occasionally occur in tiebreaking contexts.  [If you haven't done so already, please click on the Victory Weighting line in the top bar for an overview of the system.]

Strength of Victory

This figure provides an estimate of the quality of the opponents a team has defeated.  As a tiebreaker, it applied only when all comparisions of sub-records (e.g. records vs. common opponents) have failed.

The NFL calculates strength of victory as the combined won-lost-tied percentages of those opponents a team has beaten.  For Victory Weighting, it has a more formal definition.

For a given season, a team's strength of victory is the sum of the weighted current Strengths of its opponents, taken over all completed games.   For each game the team has played, the Strength it earned from that game weights the opponent's current Strength.  At the beginning of the season, strength of victory is 0 for all teams.

Written as a formula,

where

• W_i is the Strength the team earned from game i.  It ranges from 0 to 4, per the standard Victory Weighting rules.  Once established, it never changes.
• S_i(N) is the current strength of opponent i; that is, its Strength as of week N during the season.  This value usually increases over the course of the season.

For example, consider two teams who meet in the first week of the season.  While the game was in progress, N=0, and, by definition, both teams have zero strength of victory.  Upon completion of the game, N increments to 1.  If the game ended in overtime, the winner's strength of victory increases by 0.750 (W_i = 3, S_i(1) = 1, 3*1/4 = 0.75).   After eight weeks (N = 8), if the loser has earned 16 Strength, that contribution increases from 0.75 to 3*16/4=12.00.

Only completed games count toward strength of victory.  Games remaining on the schedule do not count, since their game weights cannot be determined until they have been played.

A few easy colloraries follow:

• After the first week, every team's strength of victory is either 0, 3 or 4.
• A team that has not managed even an overtime loss has a strength of victory of zero.  The  Detroit Lions accomplished this dubious feat in 2008.
• If a team has not played any overtime games, its strength of victory is equal to the combined Strength of all the teams it has defeated.  If, that team also finishes undefeated, its strength of victory is also equal to its strength of schedule.  The 2007 New England Patriots are the only team to achieve this distinction since the NFL adopted overtime.^*

Strength of Schedule

For the 32-team NFL, this statistic isn't as crititcal as it is for the NCAA, which has to evaluate 120 to 350 teams at once for its tournaments.  Accordingly, the NFL can use a less rigorous formula for each team: the combined won-loss-tied percentage of all its opponents.  Typically, strength of schedule is evaluated only at the end of a season, after all games have been played.

Victory Weighting provides a more rigorous definition:

For a given season, a team's strength of schedule is the sum of all its opponents' current Strengths, taken over the entire season.

Its formula is

where

• N_max is the length of the season in games, currently 16.
• S_i(N) is the current strength of opponent i; that is, its Strength as of week N during the season.  This value usually increases over the course of the season.

At any point in the season, the strength-of-schedule calculation includes games yet to be played, as well as games already played.

In both the official and VW schemes, strength of schedule is the first tiebreaker used to determine draft order.  If that fails, then any division and conference tiebreakers that were used for playoff seeding apply.

With both terms defined for Victory Weighting, two more corollaries emerge:

• After the first week, all winners have a strength of schedule equal to 0 or 1; all losers, 3 or 4.  If the first game ends in a tie, both teams have a strength of schedule equal to 2.
• If a team has not played any overtime games, the ratio between its strength of victory and its strength of schedule is equal to its won-loss-tied percentage.

Some examples follow the fold.

Friday Double: (1) Planet Earth

When I remarked on the passing of composer John Barry several weeks ago, I noted that I haven't brought up my love film or video soundtracks here often enough.  Hopefully, this new Friday Double feature will fix that.  The idea is simply to cite two cuts that I like every Friday, both from the same movie, TV series or composer.  The BBC/Discovery documentary Planet Earth stars in our premiere edition.

George Fenton has earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for the score to 1983 Best Picture Gandhi, but most of his work has been for British television.  Planet Earth won him his second Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition (after the equally stunning Blue Planet). While he could give the next quarter-billion-dollar Hollywood epic a proper score, Fenton is probably a lot happier doing what he does now.  Good on him.

I'll probably post more examples of Fenton's incredible range in the future, but here's "Surfing Dolphins."  In the film segment, the dolphins aren't just surfing near a small beach; they're teaching their kids how to track down dinner.  The NFL fan in me has also noted that, poorly as they've played recently, this same music could easily accompany the numerous miscues from the Miami Dolphins' last few seasons.



I wouldn't have brought gridiron up had I not heard the Planet Earth theme backgrounding an NFL Network report last fall.  That struck me oddly, because the NFL strongly prefers to commission its own incidental music, via NFL Films.  Yet, here they were, using the work of George Fenton (an outsider!) to help document the decline and fall of wide receiver Randy Moss.

Well, the NFL was using outside music, and it was the theme to Planet Earth... but George Fenton didn't write it.  The theme is a 51-second cut from "The Time Has Come," whose actual authors are Tobias Marberger and Gabriel Shadid.



There it is: my first Friday Double.   Hope you like it.

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Bloggers's block

I hate when this happens:  I spend hours working on a new blog post (this one about the Rebecca Black fiasco), make the edits, add the pictures and links, and proofread it one last time.  Upon that final review, I then realize that I've said either nothing or, even worse, overextended my logic the way Napoleon sent his armies too far.  The grammar is sound, the spelling is all correct, but the post is just an unreadable mess.

While I plot out a post that might actually work, I'll just decompress and bask in the fact that my alma mater just won the better played NCAA basketball championship game.  Whoop!

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What I'd like to see this weekend

The you-take-it-no-you-take-it ending of that Pittsburgh-Butler third-round game last Saturday will go down as one of the NCAA tournament's most exasperating moments ever.  While you wait for Butler to complete another shocking march to the men's Final Four, enjoy this shining moment from Spain's pro-basketball league, courtesy of Awful Announcing (which doesn't seem to cover much awful announcing these days).



Overdue update (6 April):  That Butler-UConn mess?  Did not want!

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Hitting a new bracketologic low

With all the bad news, I was hoping that I would at least get my predictions right for this year's NCAA men's-basketball tournament.  No such luck.  My primary bracket fell completely apart, with the right side almost completely wiped out.   Among the actual eighth-finalists in the Southwest and East regions, I correctly picked only Kansas.  I've never had a bracket fall apart like that on the first weekend.  I also picked Richmond in a secondary bracket, but that one has sucked, too.

The only comfort is that with the vaunted Big East crapping out so thoroughly, not many other people have decent brackets this year.   Bleah.

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A fantasy episode for The Outer Limits

Trust me, I'll get around to explaining the title of this post.

The latest I'm hearing from Fukushima, via MSNBC, is the following:

1. Reactor 2 has suffered an explosion, that's reported to be worse than the ones that preceded it.
2. Prime Minister Naoto Kan has widened the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi complex from 20 to 30 kilometers.
3. Now a fourth reactor at the complex is on fire.

Even if the situation doesn't get any worse and there's no major meltdown, it's already a crippling blow to Japan.  The outlook for the rest of the world just got an order of magnitude worse, as nations start abandoning nuclear energy altogether.  Without a serious nuclear-power capability to tide us over, I'm beginning to worry that our civilization no longer has enough time to develop alternative sources of energy.

Not that some Dominionists aren't celebrating.  They look at disasters like Fukushima Daiichi and Deepwater Horizon and see a sign that they'll be magically whisked into heaven, while the rest of us endure one catastrophe after another.  [To paraphrase Barack Obama, they worship a truly awesome douchebag of a God.]

Discussion of the legendary End Times invariably reminds me of the later version of The Outer Limits, which ran from 1995 to 2002.  Its predecessor from the 1960s was a serviceable science-fiction anthology, which did well with a special-effects budget not much bigger than the original Twilight Zone had.  The 1990s series had better special effects, but it took Zone's penchant for climactic twists to an awful extreme.  Occasionally, as in "The Deprogrammers," the twist truly worked.  Unfortunately, for most episodes, I spent less energy actually watching than calculating the nature of the twist.  [Even worse, I was usually right.] It wasn't too difficult, then, to write a framework for my fantasy episode for The Outer Limits.

The teaser describes a major environmental disaster that's irreparably polluted a large portion of the Earth.  We see people in mourning all over the world... except in Uplift, a medium-sized American suburb populated whose main factions are the followers of two Dominionist mega-churches.  There, an angelic figure descends from the sky, sending the residents into an ecstatic frenzy.  Surely, this is the angel who will take them to Heaven, safe from the Tribulation that is to follow.

Cue the intro:  "Do not adjust your television set... ."

As even more catastrophes unfold elsewhere, the Dominionist factions of Uplift fight each other for the favor of this "angel" (and a trip to Heaven).  Both sides spend most of the episode wondering what the rest of the world will think when Uplift suddenly becomes empty of people.  They're too delirious to notice that the "angel" is actually talking to only one resident, a surly Teenager who's ready to leave Uplift at the first opportunity.  Of course, this lone dissident tries to warn his/her fellow townsfolk about the plans the "angel" truly has -- and, of course, (s)he's almost stoned for the trouble.

Only at the end, when the Rapture actually take place, does either faction realize that the Teenager they both hate was right.  The "angel" even announces it to the holier-than-thou people of Uplift.  The Rapture has come, all right -- and, except for the Teenager, they're not to be saved.  They get only enough time to mourn their fate for the voice-over announcer to start pontificating on the Human Frailty of the Week.  [It wouldn't episode of The Outer Limits without such a pronouncement!]  After that, a tornado starts ripping Uplift to shreds.

In the very last shot, it turns out that every man, woman, child and pet companion animal has suddenly disappeared from San Francisco, California.

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Another 90 seconds closer to midnight

This will be a day that will be long remembered.  To riff on the rest of Darth Vader's famous line near the climax of Star Wars: A New Hope, it has seen the end of collective bargaining in Wisconsin, and it will soon see the end of National Public Radio.

When I woke up today to the news that NPR has forced out its CEO, Vivian Schiller, I was furious.  Yet another institution had collapsed under the least pressure from con man James O'Keefe and his teabagger allies.  The timing of this latest Obama Administration capitulation was especially galling:  it took place right in the middle of a pledge drive.  Needless to say, a lot fewer progressives feel like staying on this sinking ship.  [It doesn't matter whether I care to pledge anymore.  I don't have the spare money to pledge.]

And that's going to suck.  Away from larger cities, the listening choices on ordinary radios are limited to lousy country-music stations, lousy pop-music stations, right-wing talk-radio stations¹... and the local NPR station.  What's going to happen to public-radio stations in places like Jonesboro, Arkansas, or Elko, Nevada, once the funding stops from (a) the Federal government and (b) frustrated progressives who've decided to quit NPR?  KASU in Jonesboro might do okay, as might its sisters in other college towns.  But what about KNCC in Elko?  Will the University of Nevada still be able to maintain a signal 400 kilometers from its Reno campus?

I'm sure the Dominionists running the GOP would love to see public radio banished from as much of rural America as possible.  What are rural listeners who don't care for right-wing-dominated radio supposed to do?  Subscribe to satellite radio?  Rely on broadband Internet connections?  Move to larger towns where public radio has survived?  Are those even options for cash-strapped small-town residents?

Maybe Darth Vader had the right idea.  Then again, he did utter that famous line shortly before the Death Star blew up.  There's always that two-meter-wide conduit of hope.

1.  No need to precede "right-wing talk-radio" with "lousy."  That would be redundant.

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