Belichick for the Hall

 

“You know he got a chance he can win. White dudes like to do shit like that...vote for the wrong dude as a goof. They get drunk and shit and go like:

‘Let's vote for Jesse Jackson!’

‘I just voted for Jesse Jackson!’
And next day would be like this: ‘He f---in' won?’" – Eddie Murphy in Delirious, talking about Jesse Jackson running for President.

In POTUS elections, many people “vote their conscience”. Instead of supporting the crazy Republican, they vote for the Libertarian candidate. Or instead of supporting the crazy Democrat, they vote for the Green Party candidate. They know that their own vote won’t affect the outcome since the election is “safe” (or unwinnable) in their red or blue state, so might as well make a statement.

Or sometimes, as Mr. Murphy suggests, they’ll vote non-optimally for a goof.

So Bill Belichick didn’t get into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. We still don’t know who did get elected, but we do know that he did not.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a Pats fan.

Background: A 50 person committee (mix of NFL people and media) has a slate of five finalists (each selected from separate semifinalist groups of 8-10): one Coach, one Contributor, and three Senior Players (last played no later than 1999; two of the three had their primes in the 1970s and the third in the 1980s, retiring after 1993 season). Each committee member votes for 3 of the 5. Anyone getting 80% is in (if no one gets 80%, the top vote getter is in). (The Hall specifies that it’s “top three getting 80%”, but it’s impossible for four candidates to each get 80%.) Last year, only one of the five was picked. This year's class hasn't been announced yet, but it was leaked that Belichick was not selected.

Belichick had "spirit" issues, as he was directly implicated in one cheating scandal (Spygate) and was there for another (Deflategate), plus was innovative with finding loopholes in the rules. He was known to be gruff with the media. Other coaches or owners may have resented him. So that could explain some of the non-votes (at least 11 of the 50 did not vote for him).

So there are many possible reasons for not getting to 80%:

1.       The Contributor was Bob Kraft, owner of the Patriots. One could imagine a voter saying, "i'm not going to use two of my three votes on candidates from one team." And some might actually think Kraft was more worthy, or was friends with Kraft but disliked Belichick and chose Kraft.

1a. Same logic, but “I’m not going to use two of my three votes on non-Players.”

2. It's not a given that the Senior Players will have another shot so voters may have prioritized voting for them.  They might still be eligible but there are many other worthy candidates in the category. In fact, one voter has come forward and cited this factor One reason Bill Belichick isn’t first-ballot Hall of Famer. | Kansas City Star

3. Voters may have thought that Belichick was getting in regardless so they used their precious votes on other people they felt worthy. What’s it matter if he gets 94% or 96%? But bumping someone else from 78% to 80% is huge. The problem is when other voters act this way, too. (He f---in’ lost?!) I think this was true of some of the voters but no one is going to cop to that this year.

4. The method matters and the quality of the other candidates matters. This exact process was only put in place last year and resulted in only one of the five being elected. If all candidates are exactly equal, each one gets 60%, far from the 80% threshold. If there is one guarantee on the slate, then the other four only have a 50% starting point. (Conversely, if one of the five is clearly not qualified and no one votes for them, the baseline is 75%.) So it wouldn’t be surprising if the votes are split and one or even zero candidates are elected. If you had a Yes/No on each candidate, that would reduce this problem. (Voters might feel reluctant to flood the Hall with five new inductees so might vote No on the least qualified even if that candidate is above the bar.)

5. It's hard to compare across groups and eras. Was Bob Kraft a more impactful owner than Roger Craig was as a running back? How can you even start to quantify this? Even comparing players, was LC Greenwood the defensive lineman better than Ken Anderson the quarterback? Greenwood’s teams were more successful (Go Steelers!) but there are nine Steelers from that era (plus the coach and owner) in the Hall. There are two Bengals, one of whom came on after Anderson’s prime.

5. Then there’s jealousy and general dislike. Bill Polian of the long-time rival Colts was one of the voters and claims not to remember whether he voted for Belichick or not but was rumored to have spoken out against Belichick in the committee meeting (it’s a violation of the rules for anyone to reveal what happened in that meeting other than revealing their own votes if they wish). The Colts suffered often, occasionally unfairly, at the hands of the Patriots. To paraphrase Mencken, he couldn’t get his hand upon the collar of his superior, so he got his thumb into his eyes.

6. And, of course, the scandal(s). Belichick was implicated in Spygate (filming other team’s practices), which cost them a big fine and a top draft pick. He was coach during Deflategate which led to Tom Brady (who will certainly get in first ballot, though through a different voting process) being suspended for four games but was never himself implicated. And he never hesitated to exploit a loophole in the rules no matter how unfair it seemed. Plus he was a bit gruff and didn’t suffer fools in the media. But football has had an interesting relationship with rule-breakers, certainly when compared to baseball or ultimate. Players have been suspended for steroid use without getting much flack (including possible GOAT Lawrence Taylor, who was first-ballot Hall inductee). (Take a look here List of suspensions in the NFL - Wikipedia and see how many of your favorite players are named.) Two Hall of Famers were even suspended for a year for gambling on football! I acknowledge that this should cost him some points, but his resume is just so far above the line that he’d had to go full OJ to fall below the line (and even then, I’m not sure; one of the Senior Player finalists last year killed his wife and himself but CTE had driven him mad). So football seems to be a little inconsistent on this one.

Then there are the ripple effects, at least if the current process holds. Mike Holmgren (coach for the Packers and Seahawks) was a finalist last year but the Coach committee chose Belichick as its sole finalist this year. Presumably Belichick will be chosen again next year and get elected after serving his penance, so Holmgren and other top coaches Coach Blue-Ribbon Committee names 9 Semifinalists for Hall of Fame Class of 2026 | Pro Football Hall of Fame will get bumped. Additionally, next year’s Contributor and Senior Players will be on the ballot with a near-unanimous choice, leaving fewer available votes to get to 80%, leading to more of a backlog.

The scandals alone are not enough to explain the failure to elect, so most analyses which focus on just that are misguided. If they don’t fix the process, it’s just going to get worse. You might not agree with the rationale of #1-5, but that's how some people see it.

 

Some observations on club Nationals 2024

 This was the first time in a while that I watched a lot of club Nationals (mostly the Men’s Division). I attended in 2018 but was more just taking in the atmosphere than watching with a critical eye. I played in two local leagues, an open beach tournament, and Men's Sectionals this year after being almost exclusively in age-limited play since at least 2010 and noticed some differences, both strategically and culturally.

Wow, what a performance by Rhino in the finals. Everything worked, and everyone made plays. And other than maybe one or two of the long shots being somewhat contested, I don’t think they were even close to turning it over. I remember when Sockeye had a turnover free first half c. 2006 in the finals, that included a greatest and a block that ended up on the prone defender’s back only to be picked up by the Sockeye receiver. There were a few passes caught very close to the lines, but those throws went exactly where they aimed. But you could just see and feel their sense of invincibility.

There were so many laser backhand hucks. Seems like back in the day backhands used to be more towering, which required the long cutter to be closer to the thrower at release so that the disc could still be in front of the receiver when it came down to catching height. I wonder how much of this is due to the marker having to be further away from the disc.  With the mark tight, the thrower has to step around more and keep the arm low to avoid the mark, and the disc naturally has more float. Forehands also come out a little hotter than before but there were always some laser long forehands.

Rhino claimed small ball is dead but I still saw plenty of two foot passes and immediate give and gos. I don’t find that style of play aesthetically pleasing to watch though it is fun to play and there is no doubt that it works and is hard to stop without doing something illegal (a little extra bodying on the mark or the cut) or possibly unethical (calling travel for minuscule changes in direction) or with a rule change (how’s this: once you get into the red zone, the stall count drops by one after every complete pass, to a minimum of 3).

Interesting parallel between this game and the 1995 finals, which was the last final with a larger margin of victory (though in a game to 21).  DoG 21, Sockeye 10. DoG only had 126 passes that game (six of them long, including all three turnovers). Stats haven’t come out yet but I would imaginer there were significantly more passes than that (especially on a per point basis). D line forced 10 turnovers and scored every time. Sockeye’s O line had a clean hold rate of 50% and their scoring percentage for the game (goals/possessions) was higher than their tournament average. We would have been the favorites going into the final but not heavy favorites. We had won in 1994, our first, but had a poor year, including a loss in the finals of Worlds to Double Happiness (SF) and a 17-6 beating by Cojones (NY) at Regionals. This was Sockeye’s first time at Nationals. They won their pool as a 3 seed and beat Double in semis.

1995 format: 2 pools of 6, games to 19. Two pool play games Thursday and Friday, final pool play game Saturday morning, then all semis at the same time (possibly staggered 30 or 60 minutes), finals on Sunday. Semis and finals to 21. DoG played about 225 points over seven games, or 83 points per player (19 players, which was smaller than most rosters at the time). All games now are to 15, except when they’re shorter, so Rhino played 151 points over six games, or 41 points per player (26 of them), just under half of what DoG averaged.

One of the announcers remarked how different the end zone offenses are now compared to even five years ago. Several things stood out to me. Offenses seemed to have three players standing spread out across the back of the end zone while their defenders were 10 yards in front of them facing the throwers. While occasionally they would get hit for easy goals, these seemed to come high in the stall count and there were also some blocks made. What struck me more was how many goals were scored in the middle of the field, a yard into the end zone, with the receiver cutting toward the thrower. I never actually took stats on this, but I used to say that 90% of non-long goals were scored near the cone. The prototypical end zone offense was a regenerative strike from the back, sometimes followed by a cut from near the back to the same side but a few yards inside the cone, if not open swing to the other side and repeat. Even when offenses updated and had cuts coming from the front and going straight across the field, they were still leading passes toward the sideline. But I don’t know how many times I saw a little backhand flip on a soft inside break pass. Not criticizing it, but I was almost shocked. Even when we ran a ho or a side stack, we’d still revert to a vert in the end zone. I guess this is somewhat driven by the defenses, which are forcing flat or middle more often.

But I do remember c.2006 we had an end zone offense with the setup being one cutter at each cone and two cutters at the back of the end zone spread apart, with the three handlers outside the end zone. It was devastating in practice when we were able to line up that way but in games we found it too hard to get into the set and abandoned it. I wonder now if we couldn’t have tried tweaking it a bit to keep the center of the field open and attack there.

Inside out forehands: These throws have been a pet peeve of mine for some time. Though sometimes it comes across as “all i/o are bad”, there are certain rules I have for them that just didn’t seem to be met. To reduce it to a single heuristic, they’re ok if the receiver is able to square up and catch it in the chest, but if they have to keep running and catch it in front, there are so many things that can go wrong with it. For many years, I’ve seen players try to jam that pass into a tight window and seen blocks, drops, and passes zing by. I really didn’t see that this year. The throws were a little softer, the cutters were to the middle of the field a little more, and there was more distance from the cutter defender. I saw Molly Brown hit three consecutive passes that were i/o forehands, and they all looked like good choices. I don’t know if there has been a collective wising up or if the defenses have shifted such that there is more margin on the throws or if it’s just selection bias, but it sure seemed different this year.

Travels: the casual extra steps taken by so many players just drove me crazy. Handlers catching it flat-footed, and then just stepping upfield. Cutters catching it while running (but not really sprinting) and then taking five or seven chop steps, often using their momentum to deliver their next pass without truly stopping until after the disc is released. I didn’t really notice excessive foot movement once the pivot was set, though.

Spikes: we get it, you scored. Maybe you’re excited, but more often it felt “look at me”. I did once write, “You want to spike the disc?  Spike it!! “, so maybe I shouldn’t be the one pointing this out, but it got a bit tiresome to watch. So many were disc-damaging as well.

Manu: hellvua thrower, great competitor. I watched two of the Molly Brown games, plus some of the Worlds. I often heard the commentators talk about the great players and ask, “what can they do to get even better?”  To me, the #1 thing isn’t for Manu to learn how to do anything. It’s to learn how to not do something. There were two admittedly sweet-looking breakmark backhands in the semis that soared out of bounds. Some long backhands looked forced (there were several holsters, but whether that’s because they were just fakes or if the marker prevented the throw or if Manu actually decided it wasn’t a good look, I couldn’t tell). It’s a fine line between creating and forcing, and I think Manu needs to explore where that line is and how it changes based on the environment.

Technology: I remember getting a phone call about two weeks after one of the 1980s Nationals I didn’t make and hearing, “you won’t believe how badly the Tunas did at Nationals”. And this was much quicker than usual, since I usually had to wait for the UPA Newsletter to arrive at my house sometime around Christmas. Now, there are complaints (some of them from me!) that not all the games are streamed, there isn’t a single page that automatically shows all the scores, all games should be free, etc. You don’t know how lucky you have it. (Still, the USAU website is not ideal.)

Format: I’m still not a fan of stadiums, turf fields, fields with lots of non-ultimate lines, and six separate rounds of semis (with only a tiny amount of overlap between two of the games). In particular, I abhor the night game. Though many players now play night games through the semi-pro leagues, it’s still a change from every other game of the club season. The Brute Squad/Scandal semis started at 10:15 PM ET. That’s an unfair disadvantage which extends into the finals. Scandal wouldn’t have been able to get to bed until  probably 3 am ET, and their bodies were probably still on East Coast time. And hearing that teams were probably fatigued because they had to play two games with their 26 players the previous day. Sure, the game is faster now, but that’s due in part to only having to play half as much. Pat King (NYNY) once told me he played 72 points in the semis and finals on one day.

Now get off my lawn.

(Cross-posted to rec.sport.disc, I mean, the ultimate subreddit. Thinking also about putting it on X.)

The Lake Wobegon Effect, or Why Most People Are Above Average

“Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."-- Garrison Keillor 

More generally, illusory superiority is the tendency to overestimate one’s ability compared to others. For instance, it’s widely quoted that 80% of drivers think they are above average in driving skill, and we all pooh-pooh those other dumb people who erroneously think they can somehow defy simple math. However, there is a perfectly rational reason for this to be the case.

For something like height that is easy to measure and easy to compare, you would probably find that close to 50% of people think they are above average. But what about more complex skills like driving or intelligence or soccer-playing? There are multiple dimensions in each of those. Person A hasn’t been in an accident in 10 years. Person B easily maneuvers through city traffic and can merge onto a highway seamlessly. Person C would win a race around a closed course. In soccer, some players score goals, some pass the ball well, and some play defense. Who’s the best? Well, the mother of the soccer player who scores goals thinks that goal-scoring is the most important skill, while the father of the defender thinks that defense wins championships, and the grandfather of the passer loves the beautiful game and wants to see the ball passed around. Who is best? “My kid!”

Let’s say that each player can accurately assess how good everyone is in each attribute. However, each of them thinks that the attribute they are best at is twice as important as the attribute they are second-best at, and four times as important as the one they are worst at (so, a 4x-2x-x weighting). What happens now?

Here’s a simple example with three players. Each is really good at one skill, average in another, and terrible in the third, but is average if each skill is equally important. Fairly evaluating each skill (but not their importance to “soccer playing ability”), each player thinks that they are the best. Similarly, each player is considered by one of the others to be the worst.

Player	Scoring	Passing	Defending	Equal assessment	Scorer’s assessment	Passer’s assessment	Defender’s assessment
Scorer	9	5	1	5	6.7	4.4	3.9
Passer	1	9	5	5	3.9	6.7	4.4
Defender	5	1	9	5	4.4	3.9	6.7

What about the broader case? I did a simple simulation for this. I have 10 000 individuals whose skills in three attributes are independent and are uniformly distributed. As you would expect, 50% of them are above average on each attribute and on the average of the three attributes. However, each weights the importance of the skill in accordance with their ability in that skill.            What happens now? As it turns out, 74% of these people are now above average! The median person is now in the 63^rd percentile.

Now let’s add in the illusory superiority bias and see where we get. Let’s assume each person overestimates their skill by a mere 5%, so if they are truly average, they think they are in the 55^th percentile. Now, 81% of the people are above average.

How about a real-life example? Who was the best hitter in the American League in 2017? I looked at three stats (batting average, home run rate, and strikeout avoidance) for all 78 qualifiers that year, and compared each player to the average qualifier in that stat. Using an equal weight for the three metrics, there were about an equal number of above-average and below-average hitters, as we would expect. But what if each qualifier got to choose what stat was most important and which was least important, like in the hypothetical example above? Then, the average player was suddenly 12% better than average, and 57 of 79 (73%) are above average. Welcome to Lake Wobegon.

How my team has done in every tournament I've played in since 1992

At Nathan Wicks' request, I made a chart of all 239 tournaments I've played in the last 24 years and how my team did (1st place is at the top). It's split out by division, and Nationals and Worlds are highlighted.

Live at skydmagazine.com

I am now writing a monthly feature at skydmagazine.com. The first feature is "Why I'm Still Around". In it, I trace my interest in playing over the years, starting out as an 18 year old who didn't have anything else better to do before going away to college, as a 20-something developing my game, as a 30-something at the top of my game, and as a 40-something waiting for death. One of the things I touch on but didn't get to develop enough is that I get a chance or take the opportunity to chat more. For instance, I played with Zip for several years, but I've probably had more serious conversations with him the past two years (bar run, party at his house I crashed, goaltimate) than I did during our time as teammates. DoG Masters and Beach Worlds 2011 also led to getting to know more people, and those have led to additional opportunities like playing with Los Zodiac at Paganello, where I got to team with modern luminaries Beau Kittredge and Bart Watson. Two quotes from Bart: "Beau on sand is like the rest of you on grass" and "So, what was it like to play before there was strategy?" I (and Alex) got on that team through our connection with Greg Husak of the Condors, who (along with Steve Dugan and Mike Namkung) played with DoG Masters at Worlds in 2008. Good quote from Husak after playing with us for a few days: "So, let me get this straight. Your offense is 'this guy cuts, then that guy cuts, and if he doesn't get it, this other guy cuts'." I guess the Condors offense was a bit more formally structured. If you have any suggestions for future articles, leave them in the comments.

Stat post for The Huddle

With all the stat posts at ultiworld.com, I thought I'd post an article I wrote for a stats issue of The Huddle which never got published.

Stats

In the early 1990s, my teams (Earth Atomizer and Big Brother) recorded every pass of the season, entering them in a notebook using a shorthand notation during games, and some friends and I would compile them afterwards. Among other things, we found that forehands were thrown away about 50% more frequently than backhands, about 60% of hucks were complete (except for a certain anti-stat hothead who went 4 for 16), and 1.5% of passes were dropped. We did use that first piece of knowledge (coupled with “scouting” observations) about forehands to decide to force forehand most of the time. But what else did we gain for all that time spent?

I have come around to believe that for the time being, the concrete value of tracking individual statistics to predict or to evaluate is doomed by two things, context and sample size. We tried to make one adjustment for context, namely, separating out “tough games” from “chump games”. But then that fed into the second issue, sample size, since we now had fewer games to draw from. And was the line between “tough” and “chump” in the right place? Some of the games were tough because of bad playing conditions, others because we just played badly or exceptionally well in a game that would normally be a blowout, and still others because we had a skeleton crew. Oh, and some teams played zone and forced the handlers to pile up twice as many throws as usual (without, I hope you realize, playing twice as well). But we counted them all equally.

(I should also add that “opportunities” is something that must be accounted for when trying to analyze. But it’s not always as simple as dividing by the number of touches. In the seminal basketball analytics book “Basketball on Paper”, Dean Oliver (now in charge of stats at ESPN) highlighted that player efficiency decreases with increased usage as the players who bear the brunt of the offensive load have to make plays that are closer to the margin. Furthermore, these players will also draw the toughest defenders.)

But we could still tell who was good at completing passes, right? Well, as I like to say at my job where I analyze my company’s engineering performance, it depends. They recorded individual stats on last year’s NexGen tour. I was very excited to get this dataset, because every game was against a quality opponent, almost everyone played almost every game, and each game was a showcase and not just one of many in a long weekend. As it turns out, this dataset too suffers from some confounders such as the first half of the tour beings spent figuring out how to play together and what roles to settle into, but it was still the purest dataset I know of. For the complete tour, turnover percentage* of the players ranged from 3.4% to 12.4%. But for the most part, the guys at the higher end of the turnover range also threw a higher percentage of their passes for goals, while the low-turnover guys didn’t throw as many goals. Here’s the graph for all of them, split out by how often they touched the disc per point: *They didn’t separate out drops from throwaways so we’ll have to use this instead of incompletion rate.

Note also that the high touch players were in the lower left corner. I can think of two explanations for this besides them being conservative handlers. One, an in-bounds pull almost always results in an uncontested completed pass. Two, passes in general in that half of the field are typically easier to complete because the defense has to respect the threat of the long pass, and I think that handlers have a higher percentage of the touches there than they do closer to the endzone, where pass frequency is more evenly distributed. At the other end of the graph, deeps are going to be catching more of their passes near the endzone, resulting in relatively more opportunities for goal throws but also with each completion a little more difficult because of the reduced space. The risk/benefit of a few extra yards changes near the goal line as well. I wrote in “Ultimate Techniques and Tactics”, a book co-authored with Eric Zaslow and published by Human Kinetics and still available through your favorite Internet reseller, that being in the endzone instead of just on the goal line increases your chance of scoring as much as being 10 yards closer elsewhere on the field.

I once set up a simulation of an offense where the players were equally talented (i.e., had the same incompletion rate per yard of throw) but had different roles in the offense and different throw choices. The first thing I noticed is that a particular player sometimes had MVP-level tournaments and sometimes had tournaments where he would have been benched. The more important point, though, was that the players’ stat lines resembled those of real teams such as NexGen, with some players racking up the goals and turnovers while others had lots of touches but few fantasy league stats. This leads me to conclude that much of the difference between the stat lines of any two players is not a difference in effectiveness but simply a matter of taste. (Note that there are still some players who stand out, either good or bad, but you generally don’t need a calculator to know that.) Two equally-efficient players can have drastically different stat lines due not to any difference in skill or on-field decision-making but to the difference in their roles.

So what do these detailed individual stats (at this stage in our history, where we have only the stats of our own team against a wide range of opponents in vastly different environments) bring to the table? Accountability and self-awareness. Lord Kelvin wrote, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Simply being aware of your actual completion percentage on hucks should force you to contemplate whether you are making good choices. I remember going over each of my turnovers in a weekend (with the aid of the stat pad) and being shocked to learn how many of them were simply poor risk/reward decisions, and I was able to eliminate some of those.

Lest you think I’ve given up on stats, I haven’t. But I think the payoff for now would come on analyzing team decisions. The first priority would be to get realistic baselines for performance. I routinely see people write that five turnovers in a game is typical or that drops never happen or that hucks are completed 75% of the time. While there are certainly examples of these happening, I would guess that they aren’t the typical performance. The other area I would like to quantify the value of particular scenarios. For instance, how much harder is it for a team to score off a deep, high pull vs a low pull vs a brick, and how consistent are good pullers at achieving good pulls? Could someone who is an otherwise bad defender still be a good D player simply by virtue of his pulls? On the offensive side, exactly how costly is it to rest one of your top players? How deadly is it to turn it over in your own half of the field? Might the Huck-‘n’-Hope offensive style actually be a reasonable strategy due to the long field left after a turnover? We might have opinions about those now, but until we measure these, we don’t know.

Future of Ultimate

I'll be attending the Ultimate Players and Coaches Conference tomorrow as a panelist for "the future of ultimate". Back in 2005, I blogged about trends in ultimate over the previous 10 years, over the upcoming 10 years, and that didn't happen. I have a feeling that the focus on tomorrow's discussion will be around the further professionalization of ultimate. This doesn't mean only whether the pro leagues will take off and how widespread they'll be, but what elite-level ultimate will look like. Will top players in 10 years still be attending Potlatch and Paganello and Poultry Days or will it just be unacceptable for them to risk getting hurt while wearing overalls? How much will decisions be about the players on the field versus the rest of the ultimate world or the spectating world? There has already been a movement toward less freedom, but how far will it go? Will Men's split off from Women's (and both say goodbye to Mixed) if a sponsor comes calling? Those were the kinds of questions that immediately popped into my head, and I brought up the topic at skydmagazine But then after I got into a conversation with one of the other commenters, I realized that once again I neglected 95% of the ultimate out there by thinking only about the competitive season in the US (or in those places where they could reasonably expect to challenge the top US teams). So maybe I need to think some more about how summer leagues, youth camps, fun coed tournaments, and semi-competitive (i.e., playing tournaments without devoting all your spare time to the game) ultimate.

2011 mid-year recap

Last year, of course, I had surgery in March and spent the rest of the year recovering. I managed to play in six tournaments anyway, but at only somewhere between 50% and 85%. I was still feeling a little stiff at Nationals, and I was definitely not at full strength due to the seven months of inactivity pre- and post-surgery.

But by springtime, I was back to 100%, though of course 100% ain't what it used to be. I did some sessions with a personal trainer through an online coupon, then I discovered a cardio/core group workout in town and have been going once or twice a week since then. Add in the usual basketball/softball/tournaments/other workouts and I'm actually feeling pretty strong these days (again, see above 100% comment).

Because it was free, I applied for the World Championship of Beach Ultimate team, and got picked for the Masters team. When applying, I thought that I probably wouldn't go if selected, but once the selection actually happened, I got a bit stoked about it, so I'll be heading to Italy this August.

My frisbee season kicked off at another Italian beach tournament, Paganello, which is like Spring Break but with a four-day ultimate tournament thrown in. I played again with the team known this year as Los Rabbit. We had 17 players, up from about 11 two years ago when we lost in the finals as Los Ox. (The team won last year as Los Tiger but I couldn't make it.) This time I spent the day in Milan on my way there and walked around the city. I'm always impressed by the huge churches, in this case the Duomo, which when built was supposed to be able to accommodate all 40 000 of the city's inhabitants. As always, hanging out with friends and taking part in the event's festivities are a large part of the tournament. We had cocktail hour at the seaside hotel every night, including one night where the hotel had a wine and cheese party for its guests (we assumed at first that there was a private function, but then we found out it was for us, fresh off a late game). The big tournament party as always featured lots of people wearing weird costumes to fit the theme.

This was the tournament where I felt most like a role player. I belonged on the team, and I could have played more without the team getting worse as a result, but I could have also played less without the team getting worse. PT was fairly even in pool play (we never called subs), and I was moving and playing very well. Prior to the quarterfinals, for some still undetermined reason, I completely hit the wall and felt like I was running in very thick and deep sand. I couldn't even play without feeling like I couldn't make it through the point if we turned it. (I did get a layout block early but am pretty sure it was gift-wrapped for me by the thrower.) I took myself out of the game because it was so close and we had lots of options. I recovered a bit for the semis later that day but still felt pretty crappy. Even the next day after a relatively calm Sunday night, I still felt like crap, so in some ways, my performance in the finals should rank among my career highlights, even though I only played 4 or 5 points (about half of our O points), since I had to go all-out just to play (and I distinctly remember hearing myself breathing fast while running down the field). Anyway, got my first Paganello championship. Perhaps my biggest accomplishment, though, was in making my flight back despite the Italian transportation system doing its best to thwart me. Don't believe it when you hear "at least the trains run on time."

A few weeks later was the White Mountain Open. Rain forced us to move to a multi-purpose sports facility in Quechee. But never before had I seen a combination driving range/inclined polo field. We started off the day with only 7 players and added two late in the first round. We played well enough through 1.5 games before collapsing. I had to start calling timeouts to give us some extra rest. (It didn't help me that I had done a particularly hard cardio/core workout the day before.) We got a few extra people on Sunday and that made a big difference, and we stormed back to take 9th place. At 13-13 in the finals we threw it away in their end zone, but Alex made the defensive play of the day. He ran "full speed" into an opponent and his girlish yelp of pain/fear threw off the cutter enough that he stopped his cut to see what was going on and the disc (which was in the air) hit the ground. We punched it in, then got a break to win 15-13.

Next was the GM qualifier. One of the teams bailed and blamed the USAU for their not knowing what was going on, so we played only two games. Again I had a hard cardio/core the day before so was a bit fatigued, but it didn't matter. Our whole team played a bit sloppy. We won, though, and qualified for the GM championship, which is this weekend in Ohio.

A few weeks later was the Boston Invite. The Masters RC was able to work it out with the TD that we could have a pool of Masters teams on Saturday, thus counting as a Masters tournament that will require one fewer team at fall Masters Regionals in order to avoid the anti-wildcard. We had our best day of DoG Masters in quite some time, winning all four games, including 15-10 against the Canadian team GLUM (who weren't at full strength). We played a team of Dominicans + Brodie + a couple other Americans in the 9-24 pre-quarters, jumped out to an 8-4 lead, and limped home to a 14-12 win. This put us in the 9-16 quarters against Mephisto. We were already starting to lose players and so did open subbing. We started out well, going up a break, and even had a second break but it was called back on a pick that the defender would have had no chance on, we turned it, and they didn't look back. We were then scheduled for two consolation games, but we were down to fewer than 10 people who _could_ play and nearly 1 who actually _wanted_ to play, so we discussed with the other teams and arranged it so that we didn't have to play and the teams who wanted to play could play.

And as I mentioned, this leads us to today. We are seeded 2nd in the GM tournament, with a likely semifinal matchup against Surly. Top seed and defending champ Old And In The Way is most likely not going to be as strong as last year due to having to leave Colorado this year (and the rest of us will not have to acclimate). It's always a pleasant change to go from playing against young kids who are eager to lay out into you to playing against old guys who are even more afraid of hurting themselves.

Value of a top player

I got a comment on the previous thread and posted a response but wanted to make a new post about it:
I would like to hear your statistically informed opinion on the following thought experiment: assume that there are thirteen players of roughly average (on the scale of all ultimate players) and equal ability (compared to each other). The fourteenth is a player of outstanding ability--someone widely thought to be one of the best players in the game.

They play a pickup game in which everyone is trying their best to win. What is the probability that the team with the elite player wins?

Hey, good question. I did some simulations about 15 years ago for a UPA Newsletter article. I will use the chart in there to make estimates.

(First, what is an "average" ultimate player? What is the average income between a homeless guy, Joe the Plumber, and Bill Gates? When you have such a range between high and low, "average" becomes a funny concept. I'll assume "average" is someone who would fit in nicely on a low-level regionals team.)

Two teams that score at equal rates will of course win an equal amount of the time (with a slight advantage to the team that receives in the first half, but we'll ignore that). A team that has a 5 percentage point advantage (e.g., 40% vs 35% of the time they touch the disc, they score) will win 65-75% of the time (with the bigger advantage when the percentages are at the lower end). A 10 point advantage goes from 76-87.

With the average groups, I'll assume that teams score about 30% of the time. Top Open teams playing against top Open teams in moderate wind might be around 50%. What effect does this awesome player have?

First, I think the effect on defense will be less than on offense. He will get some poach blocks but since there is no star on the other team he won't be able to thwart their offense. Let's assume he gets 3 additional blocks but otherwise has no effect on their offensive efficiency (such a player at the elite Open level would be possibly the best player in history). Previously they were 15/50 in a game to 15, change that to 15/53, that's a drop to only 28.3%. To lower their % to 25%, he'd need to get 10 blocks a game.

Let's pause for a minute and consider what a superstar team would do against this team. I'd guess 15-1 or 15-2 is a fairly typical score for a game like this, though there is a question of whether they are trying their best to win, if for no other reason than they have 4 games that day (but so does the other team, and I'll guess they aren't in as good shape so would be further from peak efficiency). If they had 5 turnovers, that'd only be 75%. So, adding 7 elite players to an average team would take you from 30% up to 75%. I suspect that most of the benefits come from the first one or two, and almost nothing from 5-7. (Dennis suggested 20 years ago that the highest marginal value is provided by the second player, because that gives the first player someone to throw to). So, to get those 45 percentage points, I'll say it's 14, 14, 9, 4, 2, 1, 1 for each added player.

That puts the O efficiency at 44%, D efficiency at 28%. That means the O will score 15/34 times instead of 15/50. The other team will score 28.3% of 33 times or 9.3 goals. Set the point spread at 5.5.

Using a Pythagorean exponent of somewhere between 4 and 6, which my earlier research has suggested, that gives an expected winning percentage of 87-95%. Interpolating my table would give an estimate of about 93%.

Also, IIRC, a 40 point difference in RRI translated to a 1 point difference in expected score.

Dorkapalooza, baby, Dorkapalooza!

I attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC) last week. I really wanted to go last year but wasn't sure when my surgery was going to be (it's a year ago tomorrow), and by the time I tried to sign up, it was sold out. This year I got in early.

For those of you who have been under a rock these last five years, the SSAC, termed "Dorkapalooza" by ESPN's Bill Simmons, brings together bigwigs from across professional sports and focuses on what the data can and cannot tell you. Somewhat surprisingly, it seems that much of the focus is turning toward the squishier side of things. One talk suggested that they could predict achievement and likelihood of arrest for NFL players based solely on what they said during pre-draft interviews. (I missed most of this one, but they had one dimension that was Distrust and two that dealt with how players handled nuance.)

The biggest problem was in trying to figure out what to attend. Except for the opening and closing panels, there were always five sessions going on at once. (Some or all of these will eventually appear on the web site; all were filmed.) The big ones were all panels with a moderator and four speakers. My favorite panel was the Referee Analytics hosted by the Sports Guy and featuring noted bad-ref-hater and Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban, longtime NFL ref Mike Carey, controversial author Jon Werstheim (who claims that most of home field advantage is due to referee bias), and sabermetrician Phil Birnbaum (who has rebutted (and confirmed) many of Werstheim and co-author's claims on his blog). Cuban muzzled himself a bit for fear of being fined yet again by the NBA (this was a frequent source of joking during the panel) but still managed to let his opinions be known. One of his pet peeves is that he feels (and Werstheim's book "Scorecasting" asserts as well) that NBA games are not called consistently over the course of the game. Carey couldn't stress strongly enough that in the NFL, a foul is a foul is a foul (though he did differentiate between grasping a jersey at the point of attack and doing so away from the play). Another interesting point brought up was whether refs profiled based on past history and whether it's more fair to do so or not.

The opening session was moderated by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the book "Outliers" which focused on talent and how people become experts. His book cited the "10 000 hour rule", that a person (who is talented above some threshold level) still has to do focused practice for 10 000 hours to truly become an expert. I calculated that I have only about 6000 or so hours of ultimate (counting games as 1 hour and practices as 2 hours, figuring that much of the time I'm at the field is down time). So does this mean that there are no experts at ultimate or other amateur sports? I've often wondered (not that it's even a meaningful question) how the best ultimate players rate compared to other sports, each within their sport. Obviously ultimate players aren't as good at ultimate as Tiger Woods is at golf, but where would they fall? My gut feel now is that it's somewhere around scratch golfers or low single-digit handicap (pros are 5-10 better than scratch), which is to say pretty damn good, but with inconsistencies and weaknesses and probably no aspect of their game truly world-class. (There are something like 25 million golfers in the US.)

Anyway, good discussion at this panel, which included Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey (one of the founders of the conference), NYG DE Justin Tuck, former NBA coach and current announcer Jeff Van Gundy, and training scientist/CEO Mark Verstegen. It was pointed out that talent can be a curse if the talent possessor relies too much on the talent during their development and doesn't hone the other skills that will be necessary when he gets to a high enough level. (In some cases, like with Tracy McGrady, talent alone might be enough to be a perennial All-Star but still be considered an underachiever, and that if he had had "a desire to practice", he could have been one of the best ever.) I really liked a quote from Van Gundy: "Soft, stupid, or selfish. You can be ONE of these, but not TWO." The most amazing statement I heard was that the panel thought that intelligence was more necessary for defense than for offense, the reason being that stupid players will make mistakes that are easily exploited and if this is on defense, the whole D will fall apart. This contrasts with my image of ultimate, where the guys who can run but don't know the game or aren't skilled get put on D, while the O players have to recognize patterns and feel the flow of the game and identify the open field space. I felt that intelligence is more useful on offense to do these things and to be able to recognize those defensive mistakes as soon as they happen and punish them. Perhaps this again speaks to the immaturity of ultimate, that "punishing mistakes" is not a given for elite players.

There were a couple underlying themes throughout. One is that the pro teams aren't especially interested in ranking the players from top to bottom with a single metric but are more interested in the marginal production they will have on their team in a particular role. Mike Zarren of the Celtics maintained that the Kendrick Perkins trade actually made them more likely to win this year and was not a trade for future considerations (and that they felt really bad trading him since they all liked him so much, but hey, it's a business). Another theme was that you need not only play-by-play data but inside information (blocking schemes, pass coverage responsibilities) to make sense of what happens on a lot of plays, and that pro teams are hoarding this information (except for baseball, which is doing amazing things with Pitch F/X, Hit F/X and Field F/X). A final theme, mentioned above, is that teams are trying to get analytics on what might be better thought of as psychology. How can a team decide whether Player A or Player B is more likely to develop based on their personalities? They are trying to quantify this to improve their drafts and their development systems. This was a big topic in the opening panel. I felt that the panel seemed to place too much of the blame on the players when they fail to develop to their full potential and not enough on the coaches or on the specific player/coach/organization interaction. I'm not sure how they would measure this, but how much of an organization's success at "developing talent" is due to making smart personnel picks and how much is due to having a good organization? What if JaMarcus Russell had been picked by the Patriots instead of the Raiders?

One final theme is that all the panelists were gracious except for Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders, who seemed irritated that all these idiots were preventing him from being known as the smartest man in football and that all these little people at the conference would deign to bother him. I talked to Mike Carey for several minutes one-on-one at the reception and discussed my own observing experiences and asked him how they deal with certain tough issues like profiling. (He said that they call everyone equally but did admit, I think, to focusing more on certain matchups where fouls were more likely to occur.) I chatted for several minutes with two of the golf panelists. (Mark Broadie, who developed the "strokes gained" formula, told me that all handicaps actually have about the same first putt distance on average but the pros will be hitting it to that distance with their five irons while the hackers are doing it with their chip shots.) I chatted for a couple minutes with basketball stat guru Dean Oliver about ultimate (he is friends with some West Coast ultimate players). I made acquaintance with one of the MIT Sloan students whose team won the AECOM business case contest and he was friendly.

Another favorite topic was on the "optical tracking" in the NBA. They put three cameras per half-court in a few arenas and captured 25 frames per second and so were able to track where everyone was all the time. Some interesting stats they came up:
A tip-in attempt is 22 percentage points lower in shooting average than a putback.
Every 1.5' in extra shot distance costs 1 percentage point.
A contested shot is 12 percentage points lower than an uncontested one from the same distance.
Defenders space themselves from the shooters close to optimally, so a shooter who steps back costs himself as much by having a longer shot as he gains by being more open.

I really enjoyed listening to Mark Cuban, who seemed to be on every panel. As befits a self-made billionnaire, he seemed quite sharp and tech-savvy and any fan should love to have him as his team's owner (though the Mavs do not use statistical process control on their metrics, he said). I do have to admit that I don't like the "game experience" that Cuban and other places offer these days, with the nonstop lights and loud noises that aren't part of the game-viewing experience. He seems to feel that it's about way more than just the game, that he needs to offer entertainment (in addition to a quality team playing basketball) in order to draw in fans and keep them. If you want to talk about the game, you can do it afterwards.

I was never quite sure from what perspective I was supposed to be listening during the conference, whether as an individual ultimate player, as an ultimate team leader, as a regular sports fan, as a wannabe sports stats nerd, or as an engineering metrics and stats guy. One of the presentations on some analytics software would have needed to have been modified only slightly to be presented at work, and they seemed even to have borrowed their "Analytics Maturity Model" from the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which specifies best business practices for engineering organizations and with which I deal with frequently (we're undergoing a CMMI appraisal right now, in fact). I do occasional little studies with baseball or basketball stats (most recent one was to examine whether NBA players and coaches target round scoring numbers like 40 or 50 points (they do; there are about 50% more 50-52 point games than would be expected based on the number of all other high scoring games) but nothing too rigorous or involving too much database diving, though I keep telling myself I'll start one day (and could even justify the time as professional training).

All in all, it was a fun and worthwhile use of $275 and a vacation day. I brought home some insights, possibly some tips for work, and a heightened interest in sports. I did not bring home any ideas on the ultimate ultimate stat, and indeed have come to the conclusion that this stat is impossible to obtain due to sample size and context issues, but there is still hope for evaluating some strategic questions.

Hall of Fame

This will be short.

1. Congratulations to all the inductees, but especially to old teammate Jeremy Seeger. Seeger was phenomenal in so many ways. He was the best I saw at reading the disc, was a great disc-catcher, had superb throwing form, and was versatile enough to play anywhere on the field, in addition to the normal great qualities you'd expect in a Hall of Famer.

2. Dobyns should be in the Hall already. The few teammates of mine that have offered an opinion to me agree. I understand why there is debate and agree that negative spirit/sportsmanship/cheating/whatever could be enough to push someone below the qualifying line, but my opinion is that his impact was so great that any reasonable evaluation of his negatives would be outweighed.

Two links

What motivates athletes . Article is about professional athletes, but it applies to ultimate players, too.

Cheating. I read it all, but still can't figure out whether he is advocating or confessing
or mocking or making atonement. I'm not nearly as offended as I thought I would be when I saw the title "How to Cheat to Win". (Of course, it's much better to cheat to win instead of cheating to lose by two.) Very interesting stuff, some of which could have come from even the most honest player who has been around.

Nationals 2010

"'If I wasn't done before, I'm done now.' ... I think there's a good chance I've played my last competitive ultimate game, and I can live with that, but I'll be really disappointed if I can't golf or play softball." Me, November 6, 2009.

Ok, I guess that wasn't accurate. Another year, another Nationals.

Physical report: Hard to estimate exactly, but I felt like I was at 80-90%. I haven't yet regained explosiveness on a first step. I didn't feel slow when sprinting but I didn't feel like I was lighting it up, either. In fact, I'm not ever sure I reached "top speed" on the weekend. I felt like there was a chance that any muscle in my legs might seize up at any moment, but never did during the day, only at night (and frequently during the night). At times I felt weak, at other times out of shape, but I made it, playing pretty much all the O points again, though with a less primary role. This was definitely the strongest I've felt all year. My neck muscles are sore now, and though I'm not aware of doing it, I'm told I still look pretty stiff doing certain things out there.

Wife and son stayed home this year. Just me and 1500 of my closest friends.

Tournament was fine. We could have done a little better, could have crumbled and done worse also. Our most important pool play game turned out to be our first one against Real Huck. It was hot, humid, and windless. We got one break early in the first half, had another break called back on something dubious or possibly just unrelated, and that was it. The O held serve the entire first half but got broke coming out of the half, again a little later, and once more at 14-13. This game turned out to be for 2nd place and the much easier crossover in the quarters.

Next up was Boneyard. The D's inadequacies continued, aided by the continuing lack of wind. Boneyard's hucks didn't seem to come on particularly good cuts, but due to good matchups or throws or something, they caught them anyway. O had one bad streak in the middle of the first half but otherwise played well. 15-9. I wasn't all that worried, as though we were 0-2, it was "a good 0-2", as I told others. There was still a lot of familiarization and improvement left to do.

Final game was against Rumble. I can't remember any specifics of the game, just that it was clear before the end that we would win. Some threatened to retire on the spot if we lost or if the D didn't play better. Though it was tempting, it was more important to do well, and we got that first W.

Friday first game was against #1 seed Beyondors, though that seed wasn't justified since they left behind most of the guys who were there last year. This game was tight. We got an upwind break to take half 8-7, were close to about 10-9, then ran off a few to win 15-10 and clinch a realistic chance to win in the quarters, as this guaranteed that we wouldn't match up with Surly.

Second game was uneventful. They were winless, and we were locked into 3rd place. Both of the other games in our pool mattered, with Boneyard taking out Real Huck for 1st, and Beyondors outlasting Rumble to make quarters.

Onto the quarters then. We once again were paired against Glum. Though they had beaten us four in a row dating back to 2009 Regionals, each of those games was winnable, and we hadn't faced them in a game as important as this, so I thought we had a better than might be expected chance. We started off ok, though our second goal was a crazy quadruple helix hammer from Karlinksy to me. The D had several opportunities for a break but couldn't convert, and the O hit a rough streak that proved to be the difference. The game was a little chippy, but already the details escape me. I don't attribute this failing memory to age or having been there a thousand times but instead to it being Masters and me just not caring as much.

The beer tent was already closed by the time we made it over there, so we just headed back to Siesta Key. We wanted to catch the beach, but felt obligated to pull into Mr. Big's. I had made the mistake on Wednesday of stopping there "just to see who was there" on my way back from the captains meeting, and due to a couple carbombs and a couple Guinni, I didn't make it to the grocery store, and as a result, we ate McDonald's every day for breakfast. This night, there was the usual crowd but they were in the parking lot. We said hi, walked in, and kept on walking out the side door and sneaked into the car. They eventually saw us and I almost had to run one of them over to avoid them, and off we went to the beach.

There, tragedy struck once more. While we were swimming, Alex's hat disappeared. I assumed that he had merely left it in the car or back in the room, because that is how he rolls, but he kept insisting that he had had it. Eventually he was proven correct. Thus followed a sleepless night worrying, but we learned that his hat was safe and sound and indeed became so popular that it decided to start a Facebook page. Please friend it.

To add insult to injury, someone pranked our room by getting in and locking the bedroom doors (they were the kind with the push-lock). We couldn't pick the lock, and ended up sleeping on the pullout couch in the living room and on the cushions from the couches. I wouldn't have slept well anyway, as I was waking every half hour or so to cramp.

Consolation games on Saturday. This was the first time since 1991 that my team was eliminated with a full day of games yet to play. (Lost in quarters in Open a couple times but those were first game Saturday; Open semis losses don't count either since there is only one game on Sunday; would have to be pre-quarters loss in Open (or worse) or quarters loss in Masters (or worse).) We played. We tried to get the second game for 7th/8th place played to 11 instead of 15, but our opponents insisted on 15, then started pulling our lame and/or bad travel calls in the second half. It was irritating enough to make me fired up and I got loose finally after previously trying merely hard enough to avoid getting hurt.

On Sunday, I actively watched the Open finals for the first time in years. I'd been "consulting" with Ironside this year, attending about a dozen practices, mostly just offering observations to their coaches and trying to find something worthwhile to say occasionally. It turned out to be a lot harder than I would have thought, to come up with something actionable. If I had been paid, I would have felt like I was ripping them off. But I did feel somewhat invested in the team, and so in the finals, every looked-off open throw or broken-off cut or blown deep coverage really hit hard. Revolver played a great game, Ironside didn't. It will be a good learning experience for the team, remembering what it was like to know that it was theirs but they just didn't take it. Historically, these are the exact circumstances in Boston (A team just misses, B team doesn't make Nationals after maintaining its distance from the A team for a few years) that lead to a major shakeup, but I suspect that this won't be the case this time.

I don't know what's next. I was glad to be able to play again, and occasionally play well. As I said several times, I am 45, and I did just come off major surgery seven months prior. Unlike previous years, I don't have strong feelings either way about whether to keep playing, or to just get the band back together one more time for Grand Masters, or see if there is enough interest in the 2000-2006 DoG to get something going. It's all good. As the great poet Bill Belichick says, "It is what it is."

Back on the horse

Last weekend saw my return to ultimate with the Grand Masters Nationals in Boulder. As you know, I had some tingling in my arms on occasion dating back to last year's GM tournament, then there was that little temporary paralysis thing after regular Nationals, and finally a four-level cervical laminoplasty to decompress the spinal cord on March 9. I had eased into things in the four months after surgery, going to Disney World, doing a tiny bit of exercise, a couple games of softball, a round of golf, snorkeling/diving, and a bunch of soccer in the yard with the boy, which can actually be a bit taxing. The most I ran was a set of about 10 20-30 yard striders, just enough to get to a full stride but nowhere near a full sprint.

So I went into the tournament unsure exactly what I could do. I promised my doctor's office that I wouldn't dive (not that I'm ever really flinging my body around). I ended up hitting the ground maybe three times, once catching a pass and twice after the pass aided by my defenders, but never too hard.

On Saturday, I definitely eased into things, playing maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the points (we had something like 18-20). Even more than usual, D was very hard. I never could sprint or accelerate very hard. At times it felt like I was running in water because my legs were so weak. I lost between 5 and 10 pounds over the last six months as my muscle mass pretty much disappeared. I saw a picture of myself from behind and was amazed by how slight I appeared. Offense wasn't nearly as bad, as I could pick when I wanted to run, and I figured out that I really didn't need to sprint so hard as often as I usually do. I even ran deep a few times.

We cruised through Saturday. The winds really picked up in our last game, and I had a couple throws that showed a lack of practice. I hadn't thrown very much this year either; I hurt my arm or shoulder throwing the softball a couple weeks prior and it had hurt to throw a forehand so I took it easy. This weekend, too, I took it easy, staying away from pulling and overheads, which figured to put a little too much stress on the neck/shoulders.

I really didn't even feel very tired after Saturday. When I woke on Sunday, my quads were sore, but not fatigued. The lack of real sprints makes it a lot easier on the body (I can see Alex and Dennis nodding as they read this, having been aware of this their entire careers).

Sunday was again hot. I noticed that today in Boulder it hit 103, close to an all-time high (though it appears that the records might only date back to 1990). Quarters were against Atlanta's Ball & Chain. Our O clicked, scoring nine times without a turnover, and we got enough breaks to win 15-8. We did notice that there D was putting more pressure on us in the second half. I was back to full-time O duty, playing all nine points as a receiver, though much less often as a primary in the play.

Semis were against the local Old and in the Way. Alex underthrew me deep on the first O point, thus removing the pressure of knowing we hadn't had a turnover all day. We still scored, then got a break a couple points later. We gave the break back at about 5-5, but then got it back on a misread and took half, 8-7, receiving to start the second half. OAITW's D was definitely better, forcing us to take more passes than in any other game, though we still managed to score on 6 of 7 points. I don't remember the specifics of the rest of the game, but we gave a break back at maybe 11-10, then two in a row at 12-12 before getting one last goal to make it 14-13. They then had an overthrow on the last point, but one of their other receivers was alert enough to track it down, and a couple passes later, we were eliminated. Overall, 2 breaks for in 13 chances, 4 breaks against in 15 chances.

The team played well enough on the weekend, though it's always disappointing to lose, especially when leading by 2 in the second half.

I was able to contribute a lot more than I expected to. Other than the wind game, my throws were sharper than I thought they'd be, and I was able to get open a lot more than I thought I would, though I found that certain cuts that relied on a good first step didn't work. It didn't feel like other first tournaments of the year, though, since I tend to feel exhausted and winded and sore in those, and in this one I was just weaker, as if I had aged five or ten years suddenly.

Well, it's good to be back and out there.

Field Vision

I have a new column on Field Vision up at the Huddle.

Here is the opening paragraph as a teaser:
How do we make decisions? In many real-life examples we create a list of choices and features, maybe take some data, rate how each option stacks up in each feature, and coolly select the optimum choice. In ultimate you don't have the time to go through this whole process. You have to rely on your trained inner self to figure out what to do based on internalized guidelines.

Comments? This was based on a presentation I gave at the Ultimate Coaches and Players Conference in 2007.

Now on the Huddle

I will be among the many authors on The Huddle this year.

My first piece is titled "Chain: The New DoG".

Comments about this or the other articles welcome here.

post-post surgery

It's now been 24 days since surgery, and I return to work on Tuesday. I plan to go back full-time, but I will have to see whether I will be able to work from home occasionally or if I would want to scale back temporarily to a 32 hour week.

I am feeling remarkably well. I've been taking about half of the allotment of pills (Oxycodone and Diazepam), one of each twice a day, but those are probably not necessary at this point, just a little help. We had a few friends over last weekend so I stopped taking them 8 hours prior so I could have a few beers without worrying too much about side effects. When I picked up my prescription, I had to ask the pharmacist several times and in several different ways about the interactions between alcohol and those drugs. His first answer was "don't", but as many of you have probably experienced with injuries and doctors, I eventually said something to the effect of "I am planning to do a stupid thing. What can I do to minimize the effect of this stupidity?"

My neck is still a little stiff and sore. It hurts a little to yawn, as it seems to stretch the incision. I was having a little difficulty swallowing for a few weeks, partly because I don't chew my food enough, but that seems to have finally passed. I had the staples removed after two weeks. It was a little painful to have them pulled out (see 15 second video at bottom). The cut seems to be doing ok. Sleeping hasn't really been much of a problem. I am aware of waking up once or twice a night to shift positions, and I frequently have weird dreams, but overall it's about the same. I've been more tired than usual, and was taking 2- or 3-hour naps for the first two weeks on most days. The last few days, I've gotten up at my normal time and have struggled to get out of bed. I think as long as I go to bed early these next few weeks, I should be able to manage a work schedule.

The weirdest part of the recovery is what passes for exercise now. If I walk faster than about 2 mph, my neck (both muscles and what feels like the spine) gets sore. Just this week I started riding the stationary bike in order to get my heart rate from about 75 bpm to about 100 bpm. The other day, I was playing Mario Kart Wii while riding the bike, and noticed that as I was trying to drive faster in the game, I was pedaling the bike faster, hard enough that I actually broke a sweat. I don't think my body is ready for that yet, though, so will need to back off. There is no exact timetable, but I'll be able to do more stuff gradually. I don't know yet when I will be able to run. There is a chance that I would be able to play at the GM event in July, assuming we are going to be able to put together a team, but wouldn't be able to contribute more than a token amount.

In general, life has been a lot slower these last few weeks. I've been home by myself for most of the past week and a half and haven't felt the need to rush around very much. Usually I am incredibly micro-efficient, but now am willing to take four trips to the car to carry in groceries where normally I would take them all in at once. I don't know if this lingering will carry over once I return to normal life, though. I've been trying to be "productive" in my down time, not necessarily getting anything done, but trying to avoid useless surfing or excessive game playing.

All things considered, though I would rather have skipped this whole thing, I've been pretty lucky with it.