I promised in my last post that I had an idea spurred by an astonishingly bad record amongst the "expert" picks when it comes to predicting game outcomes. About forty years ago one intrepid football fan took it upon himself to track expert picks and success rate in college and NFL football games. His conclusions were that the experts had a success rate of.476. Not bad for a baseball player, but not exactly Pro Bowl material for sports predicting. Think about it, a less than .500 record means they could have just flipped a coin to determine the outcomes and come out better. So, where does this lead me? I have a couple of experiments I want to try.

I came up with this plan last night, near the end of spending thirty five out of forty eight hours in a radio station during a snow snow with about three hours of sleep, and today I have already discovered some crucial flaws, but we're going to try it anyway and keep it as an on going project.

Here's the plan as I wrote it last night:

Since we are nearing NCAA tourny time, my plan is to try something a little different with my bracket picks this year. I'm not going to pick them. Instead, I'm going to let George Washington pick them. (Embarassing realization: I just checked to make sure it was indeed George Washington on the quarter.) (Before you laugh at me, how many of you thought I was referring to the dollar bill when I said George Washington?) Here's my plan. This year I'm going to to flip a coin to determine my choices. Heads the higher seed wins, Tales the lower seed. Now admittedly I haven't thought this completely through, so I will probably tweak my methodology slightly before the tourny starts. I'm going to spend the next month working out exactly the best way to do this. I think I will have two controls. One will be my own bracket with my own actual picks, the other will be the "expert pick. I will determine the expert at a later date, but rest assured, I'm not going to cheat. I'll pick somebody who "really knows" what he's doing. Next I will have a bracket determined with a simple coin toss. Heads the higher seed wins, tales the lower seed. My final bracket I will pick the first round and let a coin determine every ensuing round. In the time running up to the tourny, I'm going to be going back to past brackets at trying the quarter toss (or how 'bout the GW toss?) and see how it stacks up to the actual results. This will serve a couple of purposes: one, I think it will give me something to do while I'm not sleeping at 4:00 in the morning, two it will give us some preleminary data, and three, it will tell me ahead of time which bracket I should enter in the work pool this year. As soon as I figure out how to insert pictures into this blog I will post my first set of findings.

That was the plan as written at 4:00 in the morning after being up for nearly two consecutive days. Anyone spot the flaw?

If you said George Washington doesn't know anything about football, then you're right. If you said that stat I quoted up there (.476) pertained to football predictions, you are right again. I went back and did my first test run with the 2009 NCAA Tournament, and apparently George Washington is an Alabama State fan. GW picked them upsetting first seed Louisville, going on to defeat Ohio State, Arizona, and finally losing to West Virgina in the fourth round. Ok, flaw.

My second bracket experiment faired a little better. For the first round I gave the higher seeds a pass and then proceeded with the coin flip all the way to the end. This prevented any lunacy like Alabama State going to the elite eight, but still gave me some rather screwy results. Generally I'm a big fan of screwy results, but in this case, we're looking for the perfect bracket (or at least a better than .500 bracket), not to screw with the data. Clearly I needed a new tactic.

Once again, while at work, I revised my methodology and ran a few more brackets to see how it turned out. At this point I'm up to six brackets, six different methods of picking them. Each bracket seems to become a little more viable than the last, so I think I'm working towards something very cool. Coming up next I'll walk you through my method and show you the results of my insanity.

-C

Why you ask? Well, because....er.....well.....

The idea for this blog came to me over the course of about a week. I picked up Julia and Julie (or was it Julie and Julia?) through Netflix last week and decided for certain something I had always suspected (and declared loudly): Any idiot can write a blog. The question became, what to blog about? With a background in english lit, rock and roll, country music, radio, and politics, the possibilities seemed endless, and yet, none of those really seemed to jump out at me.

Politics of course is out, it's too divisive, I'm too opinionated, and quite frankly just because I'm good at them doesn't mean i actually like them. I'm a bit too anarchic for that.

Country music is out because if I call Taylor Swift a no talent teeny bopper one more time I suspect I'll have a mob of angry middle school girls attempting to strangle me with a rope made of bras with pictures of the Jonas Brothers on them.

Rock and roll seemed a likely option for a while, but really, how long can I proclaim once again that Clapton is God, John, Paul, George, and Ringo are the greatest no matter what band you put them in, and for a third example I'm already running into another problem with a rock and roll blog: way, way, way too much to say and every time I start I feel like I've something out. Like for instance I feel like I can't continue without rattling off a few more geniuses like Dylan, Orbison, Holly, Waits, Russell, and I'm going to cut myself off now.

Literature of course holds a special place in my heart, but the only people who read lit blogs are other English majors and we just like to talk to hear ourselves talk and try and name the most obscure books possible to win the on going "I'm better read than you" contest. Off Magazine Street. If you don't know it then I win.

So with those out, what to write about? the answer came to me in a article about professons that are statisticaly pretty much full of it.

Aside from getting a good laugh out of it, the last entry caught my attention. To save you the trouble of reading it, it's about how laughably inaccurate sports "experts" are at predicting the outcomes of games. It's basketball season, and just around the corner is March Madness and the ever favorite bracket picking. Last year I didn't do too bad, but that article got me thinking and I decided to try a little experiment. I'll tell you a little more about that in a minute.

Anyway, I like sports. I'm terrible at most of them. I can't hit, I'm only passably average at soccer, my golf game is in the 90's (the decade, not the score), and the only sport I actually enjoy playing is football. I'm 5'8 130 pounds. You do the math on that. All that said, I enjoy watching them. In football season I'm never bored on Sunday afternoon, in baseball season I'm forever disappointed (I'm a Nationals fan), and in basketball season I get to ride a lovely ACC rollercoaster of joy (N.C. Sate 88, Duke 74), disgust (Carolina 77, State 63), and total bewilderment (hasn't happened yet, but I'll have something for you by the end of the season).

All of that said, I'm not statistician, I couldn't tell you the starting line up of way too many of the teams out there, and I don't immediately flip the TV to ESPN when I turn it on. I go to TCM or the Scifi (SyFy?) channel. My older brother is the sports genius, and I leave all of those things to him. I suspect that the vast majority of people in this fine sports loving country are very similar to myself, and this blog is for you. It's not sports for women, or for idiots, or for any number of other high selling book titles out there, but rather one by a casual fan that can tell you exactly what happened on the last play, but maybe not all about the third inning of the '76 World Series.

My intention is to use this platform to discuss all manner of sports related items, as well as non sports things. Something like Hunter S. Thompson's column "Hey Rube" with less drugs. I don't follow rules very well, so expect me to stray from the topic unexpectedly with little or no apology. It's what i do.
-C

Supposedly if I include this link this site will link to my blog. We shall see.....

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