Foul!

March 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Philip Cohen says (though not in his Family Inequality blog) that of the players in the NCAA tournament, sociology majors have the highest average (game points, not grade point). He links to an article by Justin Peters in Slate about “student athletes.”

Sociology is nowhere near the most popular major on the floor. Business, Communications, Humanities, and Sports Science beat us out. Nevertheless, Peters delivers this bit of trash talk

Forty-two players study sociology, that tried-and-true slackers' major. While it’s possible that UCLA players are disproportionately drawn to the sociology department for the chance to study with famed Marxist theorist Perry Anderson, it's more likely that a shooting guard would choose it because, as one of the largest majors at UCLA, nobody will notice if you don't come to class.

Hey, ref, how ’bout a T for that?

Athletes do tend to cluster in certain majors. Which major it is depends on the school and the team. For UCLA hoops, it may be sociology, for Georgia Tech football, it’s business. But the reasons for these learning communities are not the ones Perry mentions. More likely, coaches direct their players to jock-friendly majors. Different coaches have different ideas about what a good major is (and perhaps different friends on the faculty).

(I blogged this a couple of years ago – here ,with a link to an interactive graphic which I think is still working.)

The Wisdom of Crowds XLV

February 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s become almost a tradition here at the SocioBlog: A big football game that generates widespread betting, and we once again consider “the wisdom of crowds” – the idea that the collective guess of the crowd (those people interested enough to take a stand) will be superior to the that of any one expert or group of experts.

I’ve been skeptical about this idea, at least with regards to football betting. This blog was only a few months old when I first posted about it (here), and readers who took the hint and went against the crowd won a sweet bet on the Bears. I’ve revisited the hypothesis a few times (here and here), including last year’s Superbowl (here), when the crowd was heavily backing the favorites, the Colts, driving the line from 3½ points up to 6. But the Saints won the game outright.

This year, the line opened with the Packers favored by 2½ or 3 points* and has not budged. The betting is equally divided, which is good news for the bookies. They’ll make their 5-10% no matter which side wins.

The only movement has been on the under/over line – the combined total points by both teams. That line opened at about 46, and went down to 44½. My guess is that this early shift represented “the smart money.” Now the line is gradually going back up, and may be as high as 46 by game time. Apparently the public is looking for a high-scoring game.

If you’re a contrarian, if you lean towards the wisdom of bookmakers rather than the wisdom of crowds, you’ll take the under and be happy with a 23-21 final score. It’s not a bet I would be eager to make however. The trouble with betting the under, as a gambler explained to me long ago, is that you sit there watching the game rooting for nothing to happen.

Go Steelers.**

UPDATE: The under/over line did not move much. Apparently, there was no strong crowd consensus, though if there was an imbalance, it was towards the over, which turned out to be the right choice. Final score: Packers 31, Steelers 25. The Packers played well; the Steelers made some costly errors.

* As of this writing (Saturday night), if you want to bet the Steelers plus the three points, you have to give up odds of 120-100 (i.e., you get $100 if you win; you pay $120 if you lose). If you take only 2½ points, you can get odds as low as 105-100. And conversely, if you bet the Packers, you pay more to give only the 2½. But it looks as though the line is inching up. By game time, I expect most bookmakers will have the line at 3.

** It is a bit more difficult to root for Pittsburgh this year – not-so-gentle Ben and his deserved rating among fans as the Superbowl’s most disliked player, James Harrison as #1 in being fined by the NFL. And according to yesterday’s New York Times, the Steelers are even on the wrong side of the concussion issue while the Packers are on the side of the angels.

What’s in a Team Name?

August 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Flip Flop Fly Ball has wonderful graphics about sports, mostly baseball. For some reason, I especially liked this Venn diagram of team names.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

In football, only a couple of the oldest organizations have regional-industrial names – Packers, Steelers. In baseball, industry-based names are more typical of recent franchises. It’s also interesting to see what a team with a regional name does when it moves to a new location. The borough of Brooklyn was a tangle of trolley lines that street people (bums, the homeless, whatever) had to dodge. Not so the Los Angeles of the 1950s. Nor does LA have Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes. The most egregious example of name retention is the New Orleans basketball franchise, named, appropriately, the Jazz. When they moved to Utah, they might have changed their name to The Choir (Tabernacle), but they didn’t, and so they play on as sportsdom’s greatest oxymoron.

Note: “Self-referential” names are those taken from a reference to the team. For example, when the Pittsburgh Alleghenys signed a player away from the Philadelphia Athletics, a baseball official referred to the deal as “piratical.” Similarly, a St. Louis sportswriter heard a woman refer to the color of the trim on the team’s uniform as “a lovely shade of cardinal.” He used the name in his column, and it stuck.

Visualizing TV Viewers - Sports and Politics

April 14, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

How do you turn data into a good graph? Of course you could ask flâneuse . But suppose you wanted to do it yourself.

Here are the results of a study on preferences in TV sports and in politics – 218,000 interviews conducted over a 13-month period. I’m not sure what the questions were that determined the Democratic and Republican index. The other variables, “Likelihood of voting” and being “very interested” in watching the sport on TV, are fairly straightforward.

The data in the table are sorted on the politics column (R-minus-D Index). PGA golf has the most Republican audience, WNBA the most Democratic.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

How would you graph the data?

Here’s one possibility, found at dqydj (which stands for “Don’t quit your day job,” but you knew that already, didn’t you?).

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

Blue bars represent political leaning – the difference between the GOP and Democratic indices. Green bars show likelihood of voting. Sports are listed on the x-axis.

I prefer this one, found here.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

For more on creating visualizations, go to Many Eyes , which has a ton of data sets to play around with.

(Hat tip: Andrew Gelman)

Accounting for March Madness

March 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The powers at SUNY Binghamton tried to sell their academic soul to the devil. All they asked in return was a good basketball team. I wondered aloud (here) if, in these hard times of budget cutbacks, they might have thought a top team would bring in the big bucks, and I added my opinion that if that was their view, they were shooting from well beyond the three-point line.

But a story by Chris Isidore at CNN supports the idea that college hoops are a good investment.

it’s clear that men’s basketball is a major source of funding for many colleges, and that profits are still far more common than losses for the major teams in March Madness.

Isidore gives the basic accounting for 342 Division I teams.

• Total revenues $1.08 billion
• Total expenses $796 million.
• The bottom line: a profit of $281 million. (That’s either 26% of revenues, or a 35% return on the expenses.)

The CNN article has the complete list. In the graph below, I’ve grouped the schools according to net profit as reported in the article.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Clearly, the winners outnumber the losers. Even SUNY Binghamton is in the black, with a profit of $29,000 on total revues of $1.6 million, about 1.8%.

But what’s up with that very large number of teams that broke exactly even? It suggests that we need to take a closer look at the Revenue column.

Victor Matheson of The Sports Economist and Holy Cross looked at the books at his own school, which had expenses of about $1.5 million and, miraculously, revenues of exactly the same amount. It turns out that $1 million of these “revenues”

came from direct institutional support. The team didn't break even. It lost about $1 million.

The same is probably true of many of these break-even teams. Their “revenues” are what the school shells out to cover their expenses. In this sense, the Sociology Department at Montclair State is a break-even unit.*  Our revenues (entirely in the form of money from the University) exactly matched out expenses.  We do not know just how far to the red-ink side of the graph those break-even schools really are, but it’s clear that the CNN reporter is wrong.  Losses are more common that profits.

Even some of the profitable schools may be using Enron-inspired accounting measures. UNC Chapel Hill, whose $12.3 million basketball profit is second only to Louisville,** counts only revenues from ticket sales, TV, and other legit sources. But on the expense side, as Matheson notes,

the University allocated exactly zero dollars in expenses to the basketball team for things like medical trainers, facilities and maintenence, promotion, or indirect institutional support. It’s pretty easy to have a profitable basketball team when all of your revenues count towards the bottom line but many of your expenses don’t.

* I’m going to suggest to our president that if the department could just sign a good power forward, we might actually turn a small profit.

** FWIW, UNC didn’t make it to the 65-team NCAA draw, and Louisville lost in the first round.

Superbowl 2010 – The Wisdom of Crowds vs. The Smart Money

February 7, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Wisdom-of-Crowds theory says that the “crowd” – the average of interested speculators – is smarter than any one expert. If you want to figure out the weight of an ox or the location of a lost ship or the outcome of an election, go with the flow.

The contrarian position, at least on football games, says that the bookies are smarter than the general public. (For an earlier post on this topic, with links to still earlier posts, go here .)

Here’s what that means in the Superbowl. The bookmakers’ initial line had the Colts favored by 3½ to 4 points.* The money poured in on the Colts.

Bookmakers do not like to change their lines, especially by more than a half-point,** but in order to attract money on the Saints, they moved the line up to 5½ or even 6. That, plus some injury news on a Colts player, brought in Saints money, so much that some books moved the line down as low as 4 ½. The public is back on the Colts, and the line is going back up. As of this writing (11:45 a.m.), at some online, offshore books, you can get the Saints plus 6 (though you may have to pay 15% rather than the customary 10% on losing bets).

If you believe in the Wisdom of Crowds, you’ll follow the herd, give the points, and take the Colts. If you are a Smart Money contrarian, you’ll take the Saints and the points. (You’ll wait till game time draws closer, hoping that even more public money comes in on the Colts, driving up the line even higher.)

Of course, the Superbowl is one game, far too small an n to confirm one theory or another. On the whole this season, my impression is that public teams did better than usual – not enough to put the bookies out of business, but paring their profit margins somewhat.

If I were betting tonight, I’d take the Saints. I might even take them to win on the field and repay me to the tune of $170 to $100. But the Steelers didn’t even make it to the playoffs this year, so who really cares?

-------------

* Strictly speaking, the bookmakers set the line not to balance score but to balance the action. With an equal amount bet on each side, they make their 5% regardless of who wins on the field. But, especially in big games that will draw a lot of action, the initial line closely reflects the books’ assessment of the teams. (Old sax players may also be fond of Balanced Action.)

** A bookmaker who moves the line runs the risk of getting “middled.” Suppose the original line is Colts -3 ½ and everyone bets the Colts. The bookie raises the line to 5 and everyone now bets the Saints +5. If the final score is Colts 35, Saints 31, the outcome falls in the middle of the two lines, and the bookie loses all bets.

UPDATE 9:45 p.m.: If you’ve read this far, you probably know the outcome. The Saints won 31-17. The crowd was wrong on the point spread and on the under/over.

Wisdom and Crowds, One More Time

October 25, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the early months of this blog, I had some posts about The Wisdom of Crowds. The argument that James Surowiecki makes in his book of that name is that the collective wisdom of the general public, at least those who are interested in some topic, is superior to that of a few experts. (See this post for an example).

In other posts, I framed the issue as The Wisdom of Crowds vs. The Smart Money, and I wanted to see how the contest played out on the gridiron. Well, not the gridiron exactly, but in the betting about what went on there. My thesis was that the bookies (The Smart Money) were better at predicting outcomes than was the general public. (See here and here.)

Today, the NFL offers us two games that will provide more evidence. In the Steelers-Vikings game, the bookies made the Steelers a 4-point favorite. Since the beginning of the week, the public has been backing the Vikes. Three-fourths of the money has been bet on Minnesota. Usually, that would drive the line lower as bookmakers tried to make Steeler action more attractive in order to balance their books. But instead, the line has gone up to 6. Even with their books heavily weighted with Viking bets, the bookies seem to be asking the public to bet still more on the Vikes.

The Jets-Raiders game later this afternoon has a similar discrepancy. Jets opened as 7-point favorites. Public money came in on the Jets (about two-thirds of all action), but the line went down. Most books have it as 6 ½ or even 6, and it may go even lower by 4 p.m.

In both games, the bookies were responding not to the wisdom of the crowd but to the wisdom of a small number of sharp bettors, i.e, smart money.

If you follow the smart money, take the Steelers minus 6 (less, if you can find it) and Oakland plus as many as you can get (one online book still has them at 7). On the other side, the crowd, in its wisdom, 1) loves Bret Favre, and 2) doesn’t see how anyone can ever bet on the Raiders.

Sociologists, of course, will back the team whose head coach was a sociology major. Go Steelers!

(Mike and Ben having a chuckle over a basic flaw in Parsons' Social System.)

UPDATE: The Steelers won and covered, thanks to a couple of turnarounds by the defense. Twice, the Vikings looked certain to score only to have the great Bret Favre fumble or toss an interception that the Steelers returned for a TD. The smart money on the Raiders didn't look so smart. The Jets won easily, 38-0.

March Madness

March 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“When Losing Leads to Winning.” That’s the title of the paper by Jonah Berger and Devin Pope. In the New York Times recently, they put it like this:

Surprisingly, the data show that trailing by a little can actually be a good thing.
Take games in which one team is ahead by a point at the half. . . . The team trailing by a point actually wins more often and, relative to expectation, being slightly behind increases a team’s chance of winning by 5 percent to 7 percent.

They had data on over 6500 NCAA games in four seasons. Here’s the key graph.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The surprise they refer to is in the red circle I drew. The dot one point to the left of the tie-game point is higher than the dot one point to the right. Teams behind by one point at the half won 51.3% of the games; teams leading by a point won only 48.7.*

Justin Wolfers** at Freakonomics reprints the graph and adds that Berger and Pope are “two of the brightest young behavioral economists around.”

I’m not a bright behavioral economist, I’m not young, I’m not a methodologist or a statistician, and truth be told, I’m not much of an NCAA fan. But here’s what I see. First of all, the right half of the graph is just the mirror image of the left. If teams down by one win 51.3%, teams ahead by one have to lose 51.3%, and similarly for every other dot on the chart.

Second, this is not the only discontinuity in the graph. I’ve put yellow squares around the others.


Teams down by 7 points at the half have a slightly higher win percentage than do teams down by 6. By the same graph-reading logic, it’s better to be down by 4 points than by only 3. And the percentage difference for these points is greater than the one-point/tie-game difference.

Then, what about that statement that being down by one point at the half “ increases a team’s chance of winning by 5 percent to 7 percent”? Remember, those teams won 51.3% of the games. How did 1.3 percentage points above 50-50 become a 5-7% increase? You have to read the fine print: “relative to expectation.” That expectation is based on a straight-line equation presumably derived from the ten data points (all the score differentials from 10 points to one – no sense in including games tied at the half). That model predicts that teams down by one at the half will win only 46% of the time. Instead, they won 51.3%.

Berger and Pope’s explanation of their finding is basically the Avis factor. The teams that are behind try harder. Maybe so, but that doesn’t explain the other discontinuities in the graph. Using this logic, we would conclude that teams behind by seven try harder than teams behind by six. But teams behind by 5 don’t try harder than teams behind by four. And so on. Why do only some point deficits produce the Avis effect?


* Their results are significant at the .05 level. With 6500 games in the sample, I’d bet that any difference will turn out to be statistically significant, though the authors don’t say how many of those 6500 games had 1-point halftime differences.

**Wolfers himself is the author of another economics journal article on basketball, a study purporting to reveal unwitting racism among NBA referees. In that article as well, I thought there might be less there than meets the economist’s eye.

Yessss

February 28, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
I had dinner last weekend with a group of people that included the voice of the New York Knicks. Since 1994, he has been doing the play-by-play for every Knicks game. And I had no idea who he was.

Now I’m not a big Knicks fan, but you’d think I’d have at least heard of him. My friends and relatives who are Knicks fans didn’t know of him either, and here’s why: he broadcasts the games in Spanish. His name is Clemson Smith Muñiz

I didn’t even know there was a Spanish basketball broadcast, but as Clemson said, the Spanish-speaking people in this media market far outnumber the entire population of Utah. (I did not point out that those three or four million Hispanics – or the basketball fans among them – would probably be happier if they could follow the Jazz rather than the Knicks.)

He reminded me of something else, an obvious point about the relation between content and structure. Announcers work for the team, not the TV or radio station. I should know that, right? After all, at some point in every broadcast they tell you that the descriptions and accounts blah blah blah are the property of the team. So are the describers and accounters.

That makes it harder for announcers to make trenchant criticisms of the team (a restriction that in the Knicks’ case might make for a lot of dead air time.). But there are ways around it. “I learned this from Marv,” Clemson said, “You don’t say, ‘This guy’s terrible.’ You say, ‘He’s six-eleven and he has one rebound.’”

There’s also a cultural factor. “When you do the games in Spanish, you’re more emotional than when you do them in English.”

He does the radio broadcast, so he has to do a lot more description than what TV announcers give. Out loud I imagined a sequence ending with Crawford coming off the pick for the 18-foot jumper, ending with the classic Marv Alpert “Yessss.”

I asked if there were a Spanish equivalent of that “yesss.”

“Si, señor,” he said, “Si, señor.”

I want to hear that. So I’m going to have figure out how to do that SAP thing on the TV. Los Knicks, 6-22 on the road, go into Atlanta tomorrow night with a one-game winning streak. If only they had a schedule brought to you by the letter “M” (Milwaukee, Miami, Memphis, Minnesota).

The Wisdom of Crowds IV (Superbowl LXII)

February 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

1. The Statistical Wisdom of Oddsmakers.

Andrew Gelman writes:

if you look up "football" in the index of Bayesian Data Analysis, you'll see that football point spreads are accurate to within a standard deviation of 14 points, with the discrepancy being approximately normally distributed. So, a 14-point underdog has something like a 15% chance of winning. It's funny how people don't get this sort of thing.

The Giants were a 12-point underdog. The money line was about 9:2 – very close to the line Andrew would have set given the point-spread. Do bookies all have well-thumbed copies of Bayesian Data Analysis on their bookshelves?

2. The NonWisdom of Oddsmakers, the Wisdom of Crowds.

The oddsmakers set the opening line at 13 ½, but not because they thought that represented the strengths of the teams. They thought that the “true” line should be 12 or 12 ½. They reasoned that a lot of unwise bettors – people who bet on only the Superbowl and don’t know much about football – would be bet New England. The Patriots after all were undefeated, the Team of the Century, and all the rest of the hype. These bettors, so the logic went, would bet the Pats even at the inflated line.

But from the start, the supposedly naive money came in on the Giants. The line came down, and people still bet the Giants. The bookies took a bath. It happens.

3. Local Color.

David Tyree, the Giant who made The Catch, is a graduate of Montclair High School.

For other posts in this blog on football, betting, and the wisdom of crowds, go here.

Sports Betting as a Prediction Market

January 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s been some discussion of prediction markets at sociology blogs like Statistical Modeling and Scatterplot. Prediction markets are like stock markets: in stock markets, investors are betting on the ultimate price of a stock; in prediction markets they are betting on the outcome of events like elections, Academy Awards, American Idol, or when the US will start withdrawing troops from Iraq.

The collective wisdom of the investors is reflected in the price of the different options. If you want to buy shares in Obama as the Democratic nominee, you have to pay a higher price now than you would have three days ago.

The question is whether that collective wisdom has more predictive power than do the so-called experts.

Sports betting is essentially a prediction market. The odds or the betting line reflects the collective wisdom of the bettors (or “investors” – the term applied to people who bet on stocks). I blogged about this a year ago, and I came down on the side of the experts – the bookies and oddsmakers who set the initial line.

Yesterday’s NFL games offered a good example (i.e., anecdotal evidence) of what I meant. The oddsmakers made the Seahawks a 4-point favorite over Washington. But the public bet Washington, and the line came down to 3. The Seahawks covered easily, winning by 21. The crowd lost.

The Steeler game was an example of the worst-case scenario of following the “wisdom of crowds.” The Jaguars opened as 1 point favorites. The public bet them heavily, and by game time, the line was 3. If you had bet the Jaguars early in the week, you would have given up one point. But suppose you had waited to see wisdom of the crowd. You see the line going up, you see that the collective wisdom is heavily in favor of the Jaguars, and on Saturday you put down your bet, giving the Steelers 3 points.

The Jaguars won but by only two points. Following the wisdom of the crowd turned a winning bet into a losing bet. (That was cold comfort for us Steeler fans, who may have won our bets but saw our team lose a heartbreaker.)

In today’s games, the 3-point line on the Bucs and Giants hasn’t moved, at least not as of this morning. But in the Chargers-Titans game, the public has been favoring the Chargers. The line opened at 9 and is now up to 10 at most bookmakers. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds, you bet the Chargers. If you think the oddsmakers are smarter than the public, you bet the Titans plus ten points.

Jocks - Wealth vs. Power

December 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Phil, in his comment on the previous post, says that as food for thought, he asks students “to chew on the class position of David Beckham.” How to reconcile the fabulous incomes of these sports stars with their subjugated structural position? True, Beckham and Barry Bonds are not exactly the proletariat of Dickensian London. But they do earn most of their money, whether on the field or from endorsements, by working for the owners. They have much wealth but relatively little power. Is the fault in our superstars, dear Beckham, in our Marxist theories, or in sport itself?

William Rhoden, a sports writer for the New York Times, argues that black athletes, even the very well paid, are still the exploited. They are Forty Million Dollar Slaves, and when they threaten to revolt or seize some small bit of power, the white establishment reacted strongly to retain control. We all know what happened to Ali when he challenged the Vietnam war, and if we’ve seen The Great White Hope, we know about Jack Johnson. But who knows about Rube Foster, who tried to form a baseball league with black-owned teams?

What’s interesting – and disappointing to Rhoden – is how few black athletes have used their wealth to move into positions of ownership. Successful musicians start their own record labels or even clothing lines (P. Diddy). But athletes, white or black, have not become brands, nor even noticeably entrepreneurs or owners. It’s Jay-Z, not some former athlete, who’s a co-owner of the Nets.

Steeler Nation

September 30, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s nice to have your ideas confirmed in the newspaper of record.

Last November, after the Democratic win in the election, I blogged to the effect that the Steelers had replaced the Cowboys as America’s team. I had thought of doing a follow-up post on the same topic, but I’ve been scooped. On Saturday, the central piece on the New York Times op-ed page was an essay about Steeler Nation.

The author, fashion writer Holly Brubach, writes about finding Steeler fans at bars in Rochester, MN, San Francisco, Toronto, and other cities. “Steeler nation seems to outnumber the fans of every other franchise.”

“Seems.” As a social scientist, I know not “seems,” lady. I was waiting till I found some data. And when I do, I’ll blog the Steelers again.

But I admit what inspired me was something like Brubach’s personal experience. A couple of weeks ago, my son, who has become something of a Steelers fan, was prodding me to find a sports bar where we might watch the game. I Googled local sports bars and called the closest one.

Yes, said the woman who answered the phone, they have football games that the regular channels don’t.

“Will you have the Steelers game?” I asked.

“This is a Steeler bar,” she said, surprised, almost offended, as though I’d asked whether they served beer. She added, however, that all the tables had been reserved long ago, though if I showed up early enough, I might be able to squeeze in at the bar.

On Sunday, we walked past that bar. It was about 15 minutes till gametime, and outside on the sidewalk, where smokers are now exiled in New York City, a woman in a Jerome Bettis jersey was talking with a Mean Joe Greene. Through the large front window I could see that the bar area was packed with people in Steeler regalia.

(On days when the Steelers play the 4:15 game, Steeler Nation waits on the sidewalk for the one-o’clock game fans to clear out of the bar, as in these pictures.)

We went to a less crowded bar three blocks further on. Only two people were in black-and-gold jerseys. But even there, pride of place (i.e., the large projection screen and the audio) was given to the Steelers. They crushed the Bills, 26-3.

Sports Psych - Junior Edition

August 5, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

I remember my social studies teachers in high school having a difficult time when communist countries like the Soviet Union or China would do well in the Olympics. For some reason, they thought – and wanted us to think – that bad systems had to be bad in every respect. And if an evil country did produce medal winners, it must have used evil methods to do so.

So my teachers told us horror stories about the government selecting kids who showed some talent in a sport, shipping them off to special training centers – high-pressure environments for turning kids into professional athletes. (The US media are still pushing this image, at least as regards China. ) Yes, the system may produce Olympic medals, but the cost is heavy – the loss of childhood and untold psychological damage.

Thank goodness we didn’t live in such a system.

This morning, the New York Times has an article about sports psychologists treating young athletes. How young? Some of them still count their age in single digits.

The idea that mental coaching can help the youngest athletes has pervaded the upper reaches of the country’s zealous youth sports culture. . . . The families of young athletes routinely pay for personal strength coaches, conditioning coaches, specialized skill coaches, . . . nutritionists and recruiting consultants. Now, the personal sports psychologist has joined the entourage.

I was especially startled by this quote from one of these psychologists: “The parents have the right intentions. They want their kid to be the next Tiger Woods.” Deciding that your child, as young as eight or nine, will have a career as a professional athlete, choosing the particular sport, and bringing in psychologists when the kid can’t take the pressure – that’s the right intentions?

As I was reading this, I remembered the cautionary tales my teachers told me decades ago about the Soviets and the Chinese. The difference between them and us apparently is that in the US, the role of the state is being played by the parents. If the state brings all its force and resources into turning a child into a top-notch athlete, that’s bad. If parents do so, that’s good.

The NBA Referees Story: Turnovers and Steals

May 5, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

Well, I was right about at least one thing in my previous post about NBA referees: the story was heavily blogged. For the next two days it was #1 on the Times website list of most blogged articles. Bloggers on race (blackprof.com), sports and all angles on sports (thesportslawprofessor), and especially economists. The authors of the original article are economists. Levitt and Dubner of Freakonomics fame blogged it in reaction to popular demand: “Never in the history of the Freakonomics blog have so many people sent e-mails requesting comment on a newspaper article.”

But wait a minute. Excuse me. Why is this economics? This is a multiple-regression analysis of the effects of race on perception. Sociologists and social psychologists have been doing this sort of thing for over half a century. In college we read about Gordon Allport’s classic study, the one that resembled the parlor game “telephone.” One person views a picture, describes it as fully as possible to another, who in turn describes it to another and so on down the line. In the original picture, there is a black man (in 1945 he was probably a Negro) and a white man. The white man is holding a knife. Somewhere in the chain of telling and retelling, the knife changes hands.

The idea of the NBA study is that white refs perceive fouls differently depending on the race of the player. The effects were so tiny as to be invisible except under the microscope of a very large sample size. But regardless of the results, this is not economics. Money has absolutely nothing to do with it.

This is merely the latest incursion of economics into sociology’s court. Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt with Stephen Dubner, was a huge hit, a best-seller. But the topics in it often have little or nothing to do with economics: match-fixing in sumo tournaments; the popularity of baby names as a function of social class; the effect of “black” first names (e.g., DeShawn) on social mobility; the effect of Roe v. Wade on crime rates. Sounds like sociology to me.

Even sociologist Kieran Healy, in his Sociological Forum review of Freakonomics, seems to concede the turf to the economists. “Sociologists should pay attention to the substance of what he [Levitt] is doing, and then ask whether we think we have something better to offer in response.” But the substance of what he is doing is sociology. And the same goes for the NBA study. I wonder if that unpublished paper would have gotten as much ink and bandwidth if the authors were sociologists and it had been submitted to a sociology journal.
Six years ago, Joel Best surveyed the history of sociological ideas that eventually became popular or practical: social work, public opinion polling, criminology, etc. “It seems as though every time sociologists develop something that looks like it could turn a buck, we get rid of it.” The title of Best’s article was “Giving It Away.” (American Sociologist, Spring 2001. Sorry, no link; it's not on line.)

But the NBA ref research and the kinds of studies in Freakonomics and elsewhere seem less like a clumsy turnover— dribbling the ball off our foot and into the other team’s hands— than an outright steal by the economist team. A take-away rather than a give-away.
I don’t think Best is asking for the refs to blow the whistle. But maybe more sociologists can get back on the floor and into the game.

Black and White in Black and White

May 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The New York Times had a front page sports story today. Not ARod’s homers, not Daisuke’s K’s. It was a story based on an unpublished paper by two academic economists. “Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls,” said the headline.

“We find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.”

Bloggers everywhere are going to be all over this story, but here's my take.

Are the NBA refs racially biased? The Times couldn’t find anyone in the NBA who would say so. Doc Rivers and Mo Cheeks—both black, both coaches— declined to comment, and Rod Thorn, president of the Nets said he didn’t believe it. There may be a difference between what guys in the NBA can say publicly and what they really think. Still, “no comment” is hardly ringing endorsement of the economists’ thesis, and you’d think the Times might have been able to get at least one or two retired players to say that maybe the white refs might have made some questionable calls against black players.

Why haven’t any players made the racism call against the refs? Why did it take two professors? Mostly because the racism, if it exists, is invisible to the naked eye. First, any racism on the part of the refs has to be unconscious. I can’t imagine a real racist anywhere in the NBA, certainly not among the referees.

More important, the bias effects are so small, you have to collect a mountain of data in order to detect them. It’s like a coin that you have to flip 10,000 times to detect its slight bias. The economists used thirteen NBA seasons with 600,000 fouls. And what did they come up with? A difference of at most 0.20 fouls per player per game. Five players, one-fifth of a foul. Imagine an all-black team playing an all-white team; at the end of the game, the black team would have been called for one more foul than the whites. (In my mind’s eye, I picture the all-white team, their shooting guard hacked while attempting a two-hand set shot, then going to the line and shooting his free throws using the old underhand scoop technique.)

In the real NBA of course, there are no all-white teams; blacks account for 83% of all playing minutes. How often do you see a team with even three white guys on the floor, even when the coach has gone deep into the bench? So with 17% white players, it works out to less than one extra foul every five games. It may be “statistically significant,” but statistically significant is not always meaningful.

The Celtics finished the 2006-07 season 24-58; they lost more than 70% of their games. They are not the Celtics I remember, the Celtics of the 1980s with Bird and McHale and Parrish. The difference is painful. But it’s not about the refs calling one extra foul a week.

Organizing the Fun out of Play

March 21, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Parents, with the best of intentions, organize sports teams and leagues for kids, and then are dismayed that the kids are stressed by the pressure of winning. “Have fun,” parents tell the kids. “Enjoy playing the game. That’s more important than winning.”

But structures speak more loudly than words, and if you structure kids’ play as a formal competition, with teams and leagues and won-lost records, the message is clear: it’s about winning. It’s as though parents had organized a military marching band for their musically inclined children and then wondered why kids weren’t jamming on the blues.

That was the gist of my previous post. But there’s something else contradictory about organized sports for kids. The whole idea — at least the officially stated idea — is to provide more opportunity for kids to play. But the result can turn out to be less opportunity, less play.

In the suburb where I grew up, there was a nice field where kids often played pick-up baseball. Maybe kids would arrange beforehand to meet there. But often, you’d just go up to the field, and if there was a game, you’d get in. But then the grown-ups who ran Little League, probably in some arrangement with the town government, converted this space into an official Little League field. They sodded the outfield and smoothed down the infield, and when it was done, it was beautiful. A perfectly shaped dirt infield without a pebble, surrounded by neatly trimmed grass, the whole thing surrounded by a chain-link fence.

The only trouble was that the field now became forbidden territory for everything except Little League games. The wise adults who ran the show didn’t want this beautiful field that they had created worn down by kids who just wanted to play there. So now, the field provided less play time than it had before it was taken over by Little League. The goal of having this wonderful official field for the organized games won out over the original goal of providing more opportunity for kids to play.

I saw something similar last September. I happened to be in a park where a girls’ soccer match was just getting started. The girls looked to be about six or seven years old, incredibly cute, one team in shiny pink shirts, the other in blue. It was a scene you could easily imagine parents taking pictures of. But as it turned out, it wasn’t much of a match. The blue team had a couple of really good players, and the game was never close. The pink team would put the ball in play, but after a few seconds the blue team would get it, and one of the good players would take the ball downfield and kick a goal. After a few such scores, the girls in pink were becoming demoralized, and even the girls in blue didn’t seem very excited or happy. The coach of the blue team even benched one of the good players to try to even things up. It didn’t help. Mercifully, six-year-olds don’t play long matches, and the whole dismal thing was over in twenty minutes or so.

What was wrong with this picture? For the purpose of making it easier for girls to play soccer, parents had organized a league with teams and uniforms and scheduled matches. But today, it wasn’t working very well. How might they have had a good match? In other circumstances, the solution would be so obvious that even six-year-olds could think of it: have one or two of the good Blue players switch sides with some of the weaker Pink players. But I doubt that this thought occurred to any of the parents. Even if some of the soccer moms or dads had thought of it, what could they have done? The uniforms, the necessity of keeping won-lost records, and everything else based on the idea of permanent teams in an organized league make that solution all but impossible.

Instead, the coach made her best player stop playing, and for all I know the adults ended the match early rather than let the score get even more lopsided. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but I wonder if anyone thought, “Hey, the whole idea of this league was to get the girls to play soccer? How can our solution be to have one of them, or all of them, play less or not at all?”

The way we organize something carries its own logic, and that logic that often overwhelms our best personal intentions.

Groups and Wisdom III

January 20, 2007 
Posted by Jay Livingston

James Surowiecki argues for the “wisdom of crowds.” The average of the guesses of a lot of interested people will be closer to the right answer than will the guess of the smartest individual. If you want to get the answer to something, let them all bet on it and then watch where the money pushes the market.

The “wisdom of crowds” runs smack up against another concept in betting— the “smart money” — the conventional idea that some bettors are consistently more astute, while others are “punching bags.” After all, if the crowd, the majority of bettors, were usually right, they would long ago have driven the bookmakers out of business.

Ideally of course, a sports book makes money on the “vig,” the 10% surcharge on losing bets. (When you bet on a football game, you put up $11 to win $10. The point spread supposedly makes both sides equally attractive. If the bookie has the same amount bet on each side — say $1100 on the Bears and $1100 on the Saints —he’s guaranteed to make $100, collecting $1100 from the losers but paying out only $1000 to the winners.)

Sociologist Ray D’Angelo, who has studied bookies, says that yes, it’s the vig that the bookies count on. That plus a few out-of-control gamblers. But how often do the bets on the two sides of a game balance out? And what happens if they don’t?

One thing bookmakers do to correct an imbalance in betting is to change the point spread. By watching changes in the point spread, you can often tell which team the crowd likes. For example, in last week’s Bears-Seahawks game, the original line suggested to Las Vegas casinos was Bears minus 7. But bettors loved the Bears, and the line quickly changed to 8. Even that didn’t deter Bear bettors or attract enough Seahawks money. Oddsmakers continued to move the line up to 8 ½ and even 9. In the end, the crowd was not wise. The Bears won, 27-24, but their bettors, who gave up a lot more than three points, lost.

This week it’s the Saints and the Bears (not, as I nearly typed from force of habit, the Saints and the Roughnecks). And apparently the crowd likes the Saints. They opened as three-point underdogs. But today, some books have cut the line 2 ½ or 2, and one big book (Bodog.com) is giving Saints bettors only 1½ points. One Website that allows you to see the number of bets confirms this crowd preference: twice as many people have taken the Saints.

So do we follow the crowd? Or should we be “contrarians” and bet against the crowd? The contrarian view says that the bookies stay in business by being smarter than the public. Bookmakers probably also subscribe to the smart money view. That’s why Ray D’Angelo’s small-time bookmakers didn’t worry about bets from “out of control” gamblers. Those bettors were definitely not smart money.

But some bettors really are the smart money. I once heard an interview with a man who sets the line for one of the big Las Vegas casinos. He said he might not be worried by a lot of money from the general public coming in on one side. But there are particular sports bettors whose opinion he respected so much that even a relatively small bet from one of them would cause him to move the line.

My guess is that in tomorrow’s game, it’s the sheer volume of money on the Saints, not the bets of a few experts, that has pushed the line down. In any case, if you’re a contrarian, you’ll go with the Bears (also if you’re a Chicagoan, but that’s a different matter). If you believe in the wisdom of crowds, you’ll bet the Saints.

There’s one more risk in going with the crowd when their betting has moved the line — the worst-case scenario: You call up your bookie on Sunday and find that all the money coming in on the Saints has driven down the line. Instead of getting three points, the line is 2 ½. You figure, hey, it’s only a half-point, a minor consideration far outweighed by the wisdom of the crowd. You take the Saints and settle in to watch the game. It’s a close one, tied for much of the fourth quarter, right up until the final seconds, when the Bears kick a field goal to win 24-21. If you had been able to get the three points, you'd have a push. But the crowd pushed the line down to 2½, leaving you a half-point short, and you hurl your copy of The Wisdom of Crowds through the TV screen.

UPDATE: The Bears won 39-14. The bookies cleaned up, and the crowd was left to reconsider its collective wisdom.

The NBA's Worst Day?

December 17, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
A long time observer of American society once said, “The other night I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out.”

Last night it was basketball. Knicks vs. Nuggets at the Garden. It was late in the game, and the Knicks had no chance of winning. Mardy Collins of the Knicks committed a flagrant foul, horse-collaring J.R. Smith of the Nuggets, who was about to jump for an otherwise uncontested breakaway jam.

Smith reacted. In-your-face chest bumping, led to pushing. Other players joined in, some pushing and grabbing, some trying to separate the combatants. Others threw punches. Some of the punches may even have landed. The refs ejected all ten players.

The tongue clucking in the media afterwards was so loud it could have been heard above a NASCAR race. “The worst day in NBA history,” said someone on ESPN. “The only ones to benefit from this will be the charities,” said someone else, referring to the ultimate recipients of the heavy fines that the NBA will levy on the players.

Really? I’m sure that the NBA commissioner will, in his media appearance, look as stern as possible. He will deplore the actions of these players and say how terrible it is for the league. Then he’ll go back to his office and watch the TV ratings for the NBA, especially the Knicks and Nuggets, for the next couple of weeks, especially in they have a rematch. We should watch the ratings too, and we shouldn’t be surprised if they rise.

I suspect something similar is true about NASCAR fans. For spectator interest, the best race is not the one that is crash-free. It’s the one with the the spectacular, multi-car crash where all the drivers walk away unhurt.

Regardless of ratings, the NBA may actually want to end these brawls. I am more skeptical about the NHL. I suspect they could greatly reduce the fighting if they wanted to, and if they were willing to impose real penalties. Deterrence works, at least in some circumstances. Sure, fights are crimes of passion, and in the heat of the moment, players are not thinking about all the contingencies. But players are aware of the penalties. I don’t have the data, but I’d bet a lot that if you looked at when flagrant fouls and fights occur in the NBA, there would be a very strong correlation with the point differential. Nobody wants to give up a technical or get thrown out of a game they might win.

Political Football

November 14, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thinking back on the Democratic sweep of a week ago, I now realize that I should have seen it coming last year during football season. It was the year of the Steelers.

I don’t mean anything silly, like the idea that the Superbowl forecasts the stock market— if the NFC team wins, buy; if the AFC wins, sell. It’s worked about three-quarters of the time, but if it’s anything more than coincidence, it’s mostly because the NFC has won more often than the AFC, and the stock market has gone up more often than down.

But the link between the Steelers and the election may be real. It wasn’t that the Steelers won the Superbowl; it was that somehow along the way, they had become “America’s Team.”
That title used to belong to the Dallas Cowboys. I imagine that some PR person for the Cowboys dreamed up the phrase, but it was true in a way. The Cowboys weren’t really America’s team so much as they were what we might now call the Red States’ Team. Through a wide swath of the South and West, people rooted for the Cowboys, mostly because football fans had no other good pro team to root for, maybe no team at all.

Today, fans in places like Arizona, North Carolina, and Tennessee have local teams. Not so in the 1960s and 70s. And the teams that did make their home in the South and West were in the AFC. On Sunday, NBC would broadcast the local AFC team (Broncos, Dolphins). But the CBS affiliate would be broadcasting the NFC, and usually it was the Cowboys.

So the people who listened to Country & Western on the radio watched the Cowboys on TV. Rooting for Dallas was easy in those days. The Cowboys were good. They went to the Superbowl four times in the 1970s, winning twice. Beyond the won-lost record, they had an image, a brand. The Cowboys represented the individualist strain in American culture. The Cowboys were Texas, the land of big thinking, big opportunity, and every man for himself. They were rugged, independent, a football version of the Marlboro man. And just as Americans bought Marlboro cigarettes, America also bought a lot of Cowboys jerseys and other paraphernalia. For a while, the Cowboys alone accounted for 30% of all NFL merchandise sales.

As the red states got more NFL teams, the Cowboys position as “America’s Team” started to fade. There were teams closer to home to root for, and the Cowboys’ performance in the past few years hasn’t exactly been the kind that makes distant fans remain loyal.

The Steeler brand is something else entirely. If the Cowboys were the team of the Sun Belt, the Steelers are the team of the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh produces very little steel these days. The economy of the region is dominated by medical complexes. That and unemployment. But the team is still called the Steelers, not the Medics, and it still represents the values of an industrial past. Steelworkers are working class wage earners bringing home a paycheck. Their families depend on the New Deal kind of government they pay taxes to or the union they are part of to help protect them from the uncertainties of life — sudden turns of fortune like layoffs at work and serious illness at home. These people stress the public and collective over the private and individual. Remember, the Steelers’ powerful running back Jerome Bettis was not called the SUV or the Pick-up Truck; he was public transportation, The Bus.

Is there a parallel in the election? We all know that people were voting against Republican policies in Iraq and against Republican sleaze. But Democrats weren’t just non-Republicans. Many of the Democrats who won ran as economic populists. They support policies that benefit ordinary people and perhaps cut into the profits of corporations. One of the first things the new Democratic congress will do is pass an increase in the minimum wage. They will also try to change the new Medicare law to allow the Government to negotiate with drug companies to get lower prices, something forbidden under the Republicans’ Medicare bill.

In 2005, the Steelers became America’s team. They won the Superbowl. But more tellingly, Americans, voting with their wallets, bought more Steeler merchandise than that of any other team. Nine months later, Americans voted for a congressional majority that could easily be wearing black and gold under their red, white, and blue.

(An ironic footnote: The election did feature one actual Steeler. Lynn Swann, the great receiver for the great Steeler teams of the seventies, ran for governor of Pennsylvania as a Republican. He lost badly.)