If you are like me, you really haven’t given too much thought to Father’s Day too much thought. Then it is upon you, and you realize that you didn’t get anything. Time to scramble and figure out that last minute gift.
This is my suggestion if your dad likes sports and to think a little (or you get it for yourself): Scorecasting by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. Full disclosure, I was sent a free copy of the book to review.
Scorecasting is a kind of Freakonomics for sports. Tobias Moskowitz is a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, and L. Jon Wertheim is a veteran Sports Illustrated writer. They put together a good read exploring some of the myths in sports and applied economic principles to explain and understand them. .
There isn’t much math in this book, so you don’t have to worry about integers or any complex formulas. It is done in a way that makes it comprehensible.
Each chapter discusses a certain area. One of the more interesting chapters for football, “Go For It.” It talks about risk and loss aversion by coaches — especially in football. How the fear of losing or making a mistake outweighs the chance of winning in the minds of so many football coaches (Hmmm. That seems familiar). Punting versus going for it on 4th down is the primary discussion, but there is also a discussion on the idea that coaches favor conventional decisions (such as punting) because they are the safer choice for job security.
Loss aversion plays a big part in much of the book, and is explained in terms of coaching decisions in many sports that has at times altered the way I have watched games since reading the book.
While most of the book is primarily devoted to professional sports, much of it can be applied to college games. Especially relevant is the chapter discussing home field advantage. To the surprise of no one, basketball — pro and college — has the greatest disparity of home/road differences. The reason for the advantage has little to do with the comfort of home for the players or familiarity with the rims or what not. The impact has much more to do with how home court — and the fans particularly — influence the referees. Something, we all are aware is how officiating impacts basketball far more than other sports.
The impact on the refs isn’t even so much the foul disparity. It has much more to do with possessions and the type of fouls called. In the NBA, it was found that offensive and looseball fouls (such as a block vs. a charge) favor the home team by a 2-to-1 margin. Change of possession fouls and calls for turnovers are a whopping 4-to-1 in favor of the hometeam. There is a real reticence on the part of refs to make calls that result in turnovers for the hometeam — and suddenly the completely blown call at the end of the St. John’s game has a much more rational (though, still unsatisfying) answer.
As I said, this is not a hard read. The chapters are not too long, and with varying topics, it is book you put down and come back to later. I like numbers, so I kind of wish there had been more stats to examine. But this is a great primer to introduce a lot of behavioral economic concepts (many of which will also be familiar to people with backgrounds in psychology and marketing) and apply them to sports.
Scorecasting can be found on Amazon (and for Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (as well as for Nook).
This is not to say that the non-call vs SJU referenced above wasn’t a sham as was the charging call on Gil Brown when Pitt was on a big run vs Butler … but the fact remains that well established coaches and big pro stars usually fare better than others.
The reference to a conservative ccach not taking chances of course hits home. This is why I am very anxious to see what a ‘college’ coach can do. It is not so much the new ‘high octane’ offense than the mentality of not playing to lose.
I pretty much didn’t have too much difficulty with the type of offense or defense that was run over the past several years as it was the way it was run. The offesnive stats actually show a lot of production over the past decade when the QB was a seasoned veteran, but tended to suffer with inexperience at that position (for example, Cignetti looked like a genius 2 years ago but not so much last year).. maybe a modified strategy would have worked better. But my biggest beef was on defense, specifically the lack of blitzing especially since the LBs and DBs were not real good … but of course , a conservative coach would argue that is the reason not to blitz.
But it brought back memories of the last few seconds of the SJU game. What a homer non-call.