Feb

4

Here's a quick list of what I came up with but I hasten to add I know nothing about football.

1. Don't try to be tricky. The members are too enabled.

2. Slow but steady wins the race. Don't go from long to short in one day.

3. Stick with the drift. Bonds and stocks have a drift.

4. Be calm and steady. Stay away from exotic and barrier options and all prop things in markets.

5. Regression fallacy is ubiquitous. The last pass to Butler was good. Don't think it will work again.

6. Don't try to make money the same way two times in row.

7. Stay with the quants. You would think that sabermetrics would tell the right way.

8. Never force your opponent to hit a good shot. They set up a play that allowed Butler to reach it.

9. The cobbler should stick to the last.

10. Don't over strategize. Stick with winning.

anonymous writes: 

If nothing else (not being much of a sports fan), Monday morning analyses often emphasize (to me) the existence of the recency bias, or in wikipedian terms, the serial position effect.

The likelihood that the end of the game last night actually had one of the worst play calls ever is actually fairly low. I suspect that lots of decisions poorer than that one have been made in the past. Similarly, there seems to be a longstanding tendency that when the public is surveyed about their opinion of the quality of presidents' administrations in recent history, the current office holder nearly always is at one extreme or the other.

Ralph Vince writes: 

39 F Curl X-back up. Montana through that to win the 89 Super Bowl. The ball was on the 9 yard line with 39 seconds to go. It was a pass right up the middle, in the back of the end zone however, when the more obvious play would be to throw it right at the goal line, by the sidelines — that would have been much harder to intercept, and if you came up short, there was time to finish it. That up the middle pass left Cincinnatti time to try one last flailing attempt, but, most importantly, it is the kind of pass that led itself to being picked-off.

But no one second guesses the plays the worked, or the fact that every play mismanages the clock one way or the other. You never get top tick.

Andrew Goodwin writes: 

Point 9 of the Chair indicates that one should stick to what one knows. The "last" is a form that shoemakers use.

The Seahawks failed in not sticking to their "last." Their footmen were capable and the excessive trickery failed in the pass call.

The right play was run to Lynch on foot instead of to pass. Let the star who got you to the endgame be the one of who fails. You can pay him less next time even if you lose the game.

Point 8 contains the concept of never cornering the opponent in order to avoid his making a brilliancy. That encapsulates a wonderful ambiguity –Never answering but always provoking thought and sometimes provoking profitable action.

Dan Murphy adds:

It was, indeed, the worst play call in Super Bowl history for the following reasons:

1. The Patriots were almost certainly incapable of stopping Lynch from getting one yard if aligned directly behind Wilson. They were by some metrics, the worst team at stopping runs on 3rd or 4th and short this season, and Seattle the best at picking up those yards on the ground with Lynch. There was one key 3rd and 1 earlier where the Pats stopped Lynch in the Red Zone…but that is only because the backside OT pulled on the read-option and the unblocked DE (Ninkovitch) ran the play down from the backside. Straight ahead man-on-man blocking and there is little chance NE prevents a touchdown (maybe 25%) …give them two chances and the probability of success is probably over 90% (and there was a remote chance of a 3rd play with a quick time-out if the first attempt failed)

2. The explanation of “it was being done to run time off the clock” was as dumb as the call itself. An incomplete pass runs no less time off the clock than an unsuccessful run AND if the Patriots were desperate to stop the clock (it would have been running on a failed rush but stopped after an incompletion) they would have been forced to use a time-out (although seems unlikely that they would have called time-out given that they didn’t use one to stop the clock at :50 after the first Lynch run). What would have been a reasonable explanation was “We wanted to make sure that we had three chances to score instead of two.” At least there is some logic to this. With two failed runs and only one time-out, they might not have gotten off a 3rd play before the clock expired. By passing on 2nd down, they had the potential to throw an incompletion, fail by rushing on 3rd down, and then get a last play by calling time-out.

Regarding the throw itself ..as anybody who has watched a lot of Tom Brady over the years can tell you …the safest place to throw that ball is ankle high.. where only your guy can get it. The problem with that is Russell Wilson is 5'10? and therefore throwing in the seams can be dangerous from the perspective of tipped / batted balls. Throwing the ball between the #s from the pocket is his weakest point as a QB … yet another reason why this play call was a disaster.

Personally, I thought the Patriots were going to win the SB from the pre-season…finally Belichick had the personnel to play his kind of defense on a high level (for the first time in nearly a decade), although I’ll admit I didn’t feel too good about this prediction with 30 seconds left in the game.

anonymous writes: 

Caution: Professor Phil will probably disagree with most or all of this.

Even the very best major league hitter can only cover (at most) half the hitting zone for any one pitch. He can, if he is Altuve or Posey or any of the other dozen or so HOF quality current players, cover the entire plate side to side and 90% of it up and down (hence, "high" and "low" ball hitters) with his stance and swing. But, at the speed and spin that good pitchers throw, even with 20/10 vision and complete concentration he can only cover half the plate. So, the challenge for the hitter is where to look and, for the pitcher, to do a reverse Wee Willie Keeler. Sabermetrics "works" in the same way that the having a legal tender convertible to a fixed weight and measure of gold works; it offers a yardstick that is not political. Where sabermetrics fails is in the details of a particular contest; probabilities cannot forecast a game any more than the Constitutional dollar standard could predict the credit markets. 


Comments

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

2 Comments so far

  1. Cristian on February 3, 2015 9:50 am

    Patriots have won, so market will go down ? :)

  2. Arthur Barbato on February 10, 2015 3:31 pm

    I tweeted number 3.;) Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Victor!

Archives

Resources & Links

Search