Take a plate and keep moving.
- Groo makes some good points that in retrospect, Georgia’s schedule wasn’t as weak as many insist it was.
- John Pennington reminds us what a Vegas line really is.
- USA Today makes a projection about how much SEC revenues are about to jump. (Hint: a lot.)
- Did a brawl break out in Southern Cal’s locker room after the embarrassing loss to Georgia Tech? I hope so.
- It sounds like Tajh Boyd and Aaron Murray are ready to get it on.
- Latest Harris Poll sampling sports fans favorites shows a slight downtick in support for college football.
- Believe it or not, somebody said this yesterday: “To get a quality coach like John L. Smith, we’re very fortunate.”
Get The Picture 
Re: John L. Smith
The Peter Principle can self correct.
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Ya know, I don’t think that John L. Smith is nearly as bad as the Arkansas debacle might lead one to believe. He was competitive at Michigan State, though we all primarily remember him for that one awesome and insane postgame press conference. And Arkansas, man, that was a bad situation. He wasn’t allowed to bring in his own assistants so he basically had to work with another person’s staff, though he did have a working relationship with them. As for the team itself, it’s pretty clear that football team wasn’t bought in early after what happened with Petrino and after the first few setbacks, they just quit. Now, clearly, he wasn’t a good enough head coach to prevent all that. I’m just saying that he might be a good enough coach to put a competitive team together when he isn’t facing such long odds.
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I agree, plus I’m kind of pulling for the guy. He’s had a tough year losing his brother, epic fail at Arky, bankruptcy. This looks like a good way for a guy that likes football to ride off into the sunset. I hope he does well and has a good time…and gives us a few more good pressers.
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Sorta like William Munney heading back out West to right some wrongs, ya know?
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That’s the nicest thing anybody has ever said about J.L.
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Don’t you talk about me on this blog. If you do, I’ll kill you, your wife and kids, your parents, all your friends, any living thing you own that walks or crawls, John L. Smith, the entire football team at that backwater school where he coaches and burn down all their houses….and don’t be hurtin’ no whores either…..
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Arson too, Bill?
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What are our thoughts on GA Tech’s new AD?
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I would say he came from a school which hasn’t had a football team in 40 years and moved to a school which hasn’t had a football team in 20 years. Sounds like a step up for him personally, but I can’t say the same for Tech.
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He claims to be a Notre Dame grad.
Look for some tall stories to spin out of Tech’s athletic department soon.
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Bet he was hoaxed into graduating from there
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DIF- you are really after it today. This latest hoaxing from ND has us all in a foul mood since it detracted from Jarvis. But leave some blame for the media ;i.e, the attempt to make Barkley the best QB in America at Murray’s expense.
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It’s the coffee. Credit some of the media for trying to do something about the Notre Dame public relations onslaught
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/12/04/why-i-wont-be-cheering-for-old-notre-dame/
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already covered…now remember why article looked familiar
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As someone who read the comics by Sergio Aragones, it is quite funny to read someone saying “Groo makes some good points.”
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Despicable
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Did I err?
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No …I was thinking of the wrong groo
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So, uhhh… Georgia’s schedule ended up with a final Sagarin ranking of 27 while SC’s ended up with a final ranking of 23. Is that what all the fuss was about? Really? Is that difference statistically significant enough to justify 8+ solid months of otherworldly bitching by their coach and fans? I would say it isn’t, but I’m admittedly biased. 🙂
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Thanks, Senator. I sure have missed The Buffet.
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I don’t feel like we have thoroughly fleshed out our panic over the likely loss of Coach Grantham.
This is the internet, people. I don’t even remember a single commenter referring to something they had heard from a “friend of the program.” I can be circumspect in the real world. This is the place to let out my inner 20-year-old.*
(If you are reading this and you ARE 20, please don’t tell me about it; this weather is already threatening to tip the scale from seasonal melancholy to full-blown depression.)
*Not desperate enough to visit the DawgVent, however; never again
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ESPN is reporting he’s likely staying. I thought Towers did a poor to pitiful job in his AJC article, which is not surprising. He said, “If he’s offered, he’s likely to take it.” I did 2 minutes of research to learn that Wade Phillips is the highest paid DC in the NFL at $700K, $125 less than CTG. Plus, cost of living in Athens is much less and Philly.
If he wants the NFL, then that’s a different story. I’m not convinced he does. Moreover, are we to assume that the Eagles would offer to make him the highest paid DC in the NFL? How would you like to come home and tell your wife that you quit your job in Athens to take a $150K paycut to move to Philly?
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Monte Kiffin just got $1M from Jerrah to take over the Cowboys dumpster fire.
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I’m offended.
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That caused me to spit a little diet Coke.
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“fleshed out our panic over the likely loss of Coach Grantham.”
Which just goes to show the power of imaginary tail
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As in Te’o’s tail of woe?
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And pennington shows why non-math people should not attempt to write about mathematical topics…
A vegas line absolutely, 100% IS a prediction, and is the best one known to mankind (particularly the money line, spread is a little more indirect). Yes, he is correct that it moves to balance the wagers so that losers balance winners and the house gets the vig. But in doing so, it induces the number that best reflects all available information (see Efficient Markets Theory from economics).
He can be forgiven for saying that ‘vegas’ is not making the prediction, because that’s true. The opening line is a prediction of what the line will ultimately be, but if you use the term ‘vegas’ to mean ‘all the money folks are wagering worldwide’ and where the line ends up then yes, ‘vegas’ is making a prediction.
His breakdown of how results differed from spreads is laughable. What is he comparing those results to? F*** all! So if it’s not a predicition, what is the more accurate predictor? Sagarin? ELO Chess? W-L? Any statistical measure under the sun? NO, the answer is NOTHING is a better predictor. If there is a better one that actually beats vegas over a long period of time, please show it to me. But please don’t show it to anyone else, because you and I have some money to make.
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It’s not a mathematical argument. It’s a question of incentive. The point he was making is that Vegas is predicting what the perception of the outcome of the game will be, rather than the outcome of the game itself. If Vegas sets a spread that accurately reflects what the gambling public believes the spread will be, it will induce equal betting on both sides. The fact that they have any success at all is a reflection of an educated gambling public. A good way to express this concept: if a sports handicapper knew the outcome of a game in advance – a la Biff in Back to the Future – but also knew with certainty that equal betting would take place with a spread that did NOT reflect what the actual final score would be, he would set the spread at the number that would generate equal betting, the actual score be damned. Vegas doesn’t make money by predicting the right score, it makes money by having equal money on both sides of the bet.
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…and to do so, they must most accurately predict the eventual spread, which is itself the most accurate predictor of actual outcome that exists. So their goal is precisely identical to prediction, there is just one layer of abstraction.
And if he isn’t making a mathematical argument, why bother listing the diffs between vegas lines and actual outcomes and then summarizing them statistically? He’s saying ‘har har, look how bad vegas lines are’, but bad compared to what? The answer, as he would find if he put more time into this, is nothing. There is no prediction mechanism that doesn’t look just as bad or worse under a similar analysis.
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no, to do so, they must accurately gauge the point at which the public will evenly bet on either side. In other words, they dont have to predict the actual outcome, they have to predict what the betting public THINKS the actual outcome will be.
while that may have some relation to figuring out what the actual outcome will be, it isnt necessarily a math exercise where the actual outcome is going to be x, so if we give Notre Dame x + 8, or x + 9, we should be ok. In South Bend, you probably could have done well as a bookie with a much smaller point offering on ND than you could have gotten in Tuscaloosa.. Ditto for midwest versus southeast.
It’s not about the actual score. It’s about the perception of the bettors, which as far as the general public goes, is about as likely to be right as the approach of letting a dolphin pick games by squealing at the logo he likes the best. That’s why the guys who own the sports books and casinos have all the big hotels in Vegas.
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“That’s why the guys who own the sports books and casinos have all the big hotels in Vegas.”
No, that’s because of the vig. The average, dumb, betting sports fan may be a terrible predictor. Collectively, they are brilliant. This is probably due to the fact that the ones that actually know what they are doing are constantly putting money on games where the spread is out of whack, bringing it back into balance.
That’s why I will never, ever, bet on a college football game. You don’t have to be smarter than the average gambler, you have to be in the top 1% to make money.
The reason spreads are so often wrong is because they aim to predict the outcome of a game. A game that depends on every physical and psychological characteristic of 22 grown men colliding with each other for 3 hours with every ounce of their will bent on influencing the position of
a very oddly shaped bag of gas. I’d like to see anyone do better than vegas as prediction in such a context.
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I feel like that guy in the commercial that’s on his computer late at night who says to his wife, who is pleading with him to come to bed, “BUT SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG.”
Yes, collectively they are brilliant. That drives the casinos to be accurate. But the target they are aiming for is that collective brilliant opinion, not the actual score (and even though those targets line up most of the time, in the event there is variance, the casino would choose to be right about the perception of the outcome, rather than the outcome itself). A casino who made a strategic decision to favor the actual outcome as a more favorable target than the perception of the outcome would not be in business very long.
Pennington was not arguing that this is how betting lines are set, this IS how they are set. The collective brilliance of the gambling public does have the indirect effect of making the point spreads accurate, but that is a byproduct of their actual intent: which is simply to encourage equal betting.
Where Pennington WAS making an argument – and I agree with you that he is wrong – is when he argues that betting lines are not very accurate. This fact would be irrelevant if it were true, and it’s not. In the collective sense, betting lines are very accurate.
I have too much time on my hands.
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Nonsense. Reasoned debate on the internet is a time-honored american tradition, how do you think we got the Treaty of Versailles?
It seems like we mostly agree now. The ridiculous part of Pennington’s article was breaking down the degree to which spreads are ‘wrong’. He is correct about the objectives of the vegas line setters, but my point is only that such an objective aligns perfectly with prediction. To illustrate the point further, I would bet if you compared opening lines to the ultimate lines, they would perform significantly more poorly. This would indicate that vegas were to predict the eventual line better they would ALSO predict real outcomes better, and thus that their objective really IS prediction of real outcomes, even if they don’t know it (although I strongly suspect they do).
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I agree with your premise, Rick. Well stated. Penninton’s article struck me the same way. He made flat statements of opinion that he wants us to digest as truth. It is nice and comforting in this day of inaccurate reporting to read a Doubting Thomas from time to time. It always improves my inner-held opinions of bloggers. 🙂
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Speaking of schedules, I recently took a look at Bama’s in 2013. It’s cake. Fluffy, fluffy cake especially when the two biggest challenges on the schedule come after a Bamer off-week.
I guess they’re still getting payback from that brutal 2010 schedule.
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Except in this case they have their cake and are eating ours as well.
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Boo. I am anti-this.
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The 2013 Bama schedule is an example of behind the scenes how an AD can influence scheduling. You will never convince me that the 2 open dates before Bama’s 2 most difficult games is an accident. This is reminiscent of Steve Spurrier and Jeremy Foley getting an open date for the Gators before the WLOCP for all those years. No accident–I guarantee it.
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Anybody else see that UF DC Dan Quinn left to take the Seattle Seahawks DC job?
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Yes. Would have been happier had he gone to the Eagles
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Interesting, but not surprising. Quinn was also mentioned in the Philadelphia Eagles website article (since deleted) as a top DC candidate along with Grantham. The PFT commenters seemed to think that the Eagles HC job was going to go to the former Seattle DC (Bradley) who is now the HC of the Jaguars. Many expected the Eagles and the Seahawks as the choices for Quinn (with Grantham taking over in Philly) if Quinn went to Seattle.
I think with Chip Kelly landing in Philadelphia, Grantham still might be the guy there, but I predict if he does leave it will be in Jacksonville. Chances are really good that I am wrong.
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