I did.
you asked for it
"Soon he will start appearing in historically significant photos and no one will remember that he was not, in fact, present."
-Nick
Harbaugh put his Jim Harbaugh on the Declaration of Independence, and war was avoided. The British decided to do anything else at all; Harbaugh was forced to invent the game of baseball so he could play it with himself.
Shot clock effect on upsets.
Brian,
Given that lowering the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds had little to no effect in the NIT, and that we can expect the same for a full season, I wonder if a side effect of the change might be fewer upsets. While efficiency might not change, the number of possessions will. I would think that with more possessions the better team is likely to win, because more possessions mean less randomness and greater reversion to the mean overall.
Give EMU 50 possessions against Michigan vs. 100 possessions against Michigan, and I would think that they would have a better chance to win with 50 possessions than 100. Could the 30 second shot clock actually make March Madness less maddening by reducing upsets? Thoughts?
-A slightly amused reader who still hopes for upsets
I think that's correct. I still remember that game back in the Amaker era when Illinois was at their apex and Michigan was rolling out Dion Harris and walk-ons named Dani. Michigan's strategy was to run the clock down without running offense and have Harris take a contested shot—the most Amaker strategy ever—and it worked for a while.
Anything that increases the number of trials without making those trials significantly less reliable indicators of talent should reduce upsets. It should be a real effect, but it might be so small as to not be reliably measurable. Maybe Kenpom will address it once he's got a big ol' bag of data.
I have gotten a lot of questions/assertions about the 30 second shot clock—far more than I think the change warrants. The differences are going to be minor. The median NCAA team saw only 10.7% of its shots go up in the period of time just erased. Some of that time can be reclaimed by being more urgent about getting the ball up the floor. (For example, the NBA's back court violation is an eight second call, not a ten second call.) The net impact is likely to be less wasted time and approximately equal efficiency. That's a good change for the game.
More on shot clock
I don’t believe this will affect the quality of shots as much as it will affect substitutions…
On a number of occasions I watched several teams, Wisconsin and Michigan included, essentially ‘waste’ at least 5 seconds tossing the ball back and forth outside the 3 point arc without any other movement. Case could be made this was simply being used to offer the players a short rest on offense, meaning that the top players likely play longer before substitution.
This may mean that teams with deep and talented benches gain an advantage…so the question may become whether it is the team with the best starters or the team with the best top 9 that wins.
-Howard [ed: a basketball referee]
There's another effect: if teams do decide to make those five seconds up by being quicker that's going to result in more pressure to get up and down the floor and more tired legs late in games. That'll be something to watch next year: does the percentage of bench minutes go up as a result?
Again: probably marginal impact but one that I would argue is unambiguously good.
[After the JUMP: another theory of baseball competitiveness, sea cucumbers.]
More baseball.
I got another interesting post on the sudden competitiveness of Big Ten baseball with a pretty good theory:
Hey Brian,
I enjoyed reading your take on the increasing parity in college baseball, at least in the case of the B1G v. South and West. My brother played in the College World Series in what I like to call the Gorilla Ball Era (mid 90s - early 2000s), I played at an East Coast college during more reasonable offensive years (mid 2000s), then I have been loosely following college baseball since.
I think the biggest driver behind the Midwest schools and East Coast schools gaining ground on the SEC, ACC, and Pac12 is the bat change. While the bats have been detuned over the last 15 years by way of barrel size (2 3/4 to 2 5/8) and weight ratios (-5 to -3), until 2011, the biggest, most talented dudes would just beat the hell out of the non-baseball schools with 8 doubles and 3 HRs per game.
In 2011, for the first time, they materially deadened the bats to where it looks like most guys are hitting with wood or really explosive wet paper towel rolls. Offensive numbers plummeted immediately, and in 2012, Purdue got a #1 seed in the regionals, and Stony Brook and Kent State made the CWS. In 2013, we had Indiana get a national seed and make the CWS.
This wouldn't have happened with gorilla bats or even the pre-2011 slightly detuned gorilla bats. With significantly less offense, games have become closer, and it has enabled the team that can play small ball, pitch well, and play solid defense compete with anyone. Basically, as long as you can recruit reasonable athletes, good coaching can go a much longer way than it used to. With the gorilla bats, if you weren't LSU, Miami, Stanford, USC, etc. and didn't have 3 monsters and 4 other guys that could rake naturally or via roids, you were going to be chasing 12 runs with singles.
Chris
College baseball went to a vastly less run-heavy configuration. That was going to increase parity no matter what. The Big Ten investing in the sport only closed that gap further.
Whether you like that likely depends on your geographic location. I'm not a big baseball fan because so much of the game feels random. 100 wins is a benchmark of the best team, which is equivalent to an NFL team going 10-6 or an NBA team winning 51 games. The playoffs are a literal crapshoot in which teams of approximately equal quality face off in series about 50 games too short to determine which of them is actually better. It's tense, I'll give it that. It doesn't feel particularly meaningful. (College hockey, which I do like a lot, has this problem worse than any other sport in the universe.)
Gorilla Ball era college baseball may not have been particularly competitive but with a short season with limited interaction it was at least definitive. Your tastes will vary on how much upset potential you like in your sports. I prefer football and basketball to soccer (on the foreordained side of things) and baseball and hockey (on random side of things).
I wanted to announce this collaboration some other way.
Thanks for backing Hail To The Victors 2015 by Brian @ MGoBlog.
just fyi, this showed up as a "you might also like" when i backed HTTV: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/953213599/manifesto?ref=thanks
"Manifesto is a playful, queer dance narrative performance that explores Womanhood. And California Red Sea Cucumbers."
i can see the parallels.
-Ben
I wanted to keep my side hobby on the DL until it was ready, but here we are.
Sea cucumbers have always bothered and enthralled. They have mouths. They wave about. They look more like enormous multi-colored slugs than cucumbers. Cucumbers are only notable for being very boring. I mean:
I wonder where Sea Cucumbers land on the Bo Ryan index
Someone screwed up the naming spectacularly here. And now I will dance about this conflict.