Tag: Football

Simulating an Epic Moment

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So in Action PC Football, I decided to simulate one of the classic Madden moments. Up by multiple touchdowns with one second left in the game and somehow almost in their own end-zone, the Packers naturally try a pass play with the quarterback in the shotgun formation (standing some distance behind the center when he snaps the ball).

Rodgers throws the ball to wide receiver Greg Jennings, who catches it and runs. With a broken leg. He makes it across the field to score and avoids Darren Sharper, one of the most hardest hitting safeties in the league.

So under a far more grounded simulation, I used the play analysis tool, running 10,000 repeats of the epic play.

  • It was a traditional pro set of 2 running backs, a tight end, and two wide receivers, including Jennings.
  • The pass was a medium fly route. “QB Must Pass” was set on, because otherwise the ball would often get thrown to someone else and that wouldn’t be Jennings putting the team on his back now, would it?
  • Wide Receiver and Running Back wear and tear was set to the highest level to simulate the effect on Jennings’ leg.
  • Otherwise no special plans were done.

Jennings reached the end zone and scored 21 times out of the 10,000 plays.

  • 51.7% of the passes were complete. The average distance Jennings made it after catching the ball was 10.3 yards.
  • 7.4% of the passes were intercepted by the Saints.
  • 7% of the time, Rodgers got sacked for a safety.

Elvis Presto

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It’s no secret that Super Bowl halftime shows prior to Michael Jackson’s historic 1993 one were rightfully regarded as throwaway novelty acts. But one in particular stands out for its “questionable” judgement. That would be 1989’s Elvis Presto.

Now there wasn’t a successful Elvis impersonator thirteen years after the death of the real one known as “Elvis Presto” already. Nor was it someone famous already doing an Elvis impression. No, this was just an Elvis impersonator doing silly magic tricks and music. Ok, that’s still in the ballpark of what old halftime shows were like, except for the small problem of that, save for one snippet of Burning Love…

NONE OF THE SONGS HE SANG WERE ACTUAL ELVIS PRESLEY ONES

It’s like “why?” It’s not like he was known as the “king of rock and roll”? I’m sure they could, with difficulty, find fifteen minutes of worthy Elvis songs to play. I mean, he was one of those artists who didn’t really record much mater-oh wait.

Yeah, there’s a reason why halftime shows are now filled with star power.

Review: Freezing Cold Takes

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Freezing Cold Takes: Football Media’s Most Inaccurate Predictions and the Fascinating Stories Behind Them

With both the college and pro football seasons having started, it’s time to look at Fred Segal’s Freezing Cold Takes, a compilation of football media predictions that ended up being extremely wrong as well as the context surrounding them. It’s not the deepest book, but it’s certainly deeper than the fired-off hot takes concerning sports that long predate the internet.

As a fun bit of NFL history, this book is worth a read. You’ll laugh and you just might learn something. While it shouldn’t be the last word, its good as a first one.

Wither The Running Back

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With NFL season approaching, a hot topic for (some) football fans is-the salary of running backs?

The short answer is that running backs have recently gotten a significantly smaller portion of the pie compared to other players (especially wide receivers). This is due to a decades-long trend towards more passing and also due to a more recent trend where a rookie wage scale was implemented-and almost all running backs burning out in that period before they could theoretically enjoy free agency riches. Because of this and because running backs thrive in the different college game, a team can draft a running back, use him, then draft another one.

It’s hard not to sympathize with someone whose career is short even by athlete standards and who has to be slammed by giants over twenty times a day. But it’s also important to note that the other 45 or so players on an NFL team are also facing physical pressure. There’s no realistic way that the owners and other players are going to give their share to appease players who can be reasonably considered more replaceable. And a certain subset of fan and reporter will always talk about the poor struggling running back and not the players who are earning much more (and not just in absolute terms) than they did in the past.

I do feel like the old “walking tank” running back may be more in vogue. People who otherwise would have trained as Barry Sanders-type “agility running backs” are likely to want to aim for a wealthier, safer receiver position instead. But since you can’t teach size….

A Thousand Words: Action PC Football

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, ReviewLeave a comment

Action PC Football

From the same company as Action PC Baseball comes [American] Football. It’s a season simulator that can offer both historical and (my favorite) draft seasons. It has a similar minimal visual interface (that can be enhanced by the player if they add more stuff into the folders) and a similar statistical crunchiness. This later part makes it more interesting than Baseball.

See, in baseball, each plate appearance is basically its own thing. It’s a high variance sport where even having a great shortstop and centerfielder on the other team just makes getting hits a little less likely. But in football, if you have two excellent safeties, a good pass is a lot less likely. Both Action PC games simulate this well.

So Action PC Baseball is more a relaxing “see what happens” game. Action PC Football is a more cerebral and demanding game. They’re apples and oranges, but both are tasty.

World War III Sports

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With the actual war done, the WW31987 blog turns its attention to the really important things: Sports! My personal hunches, since this is in July/August.

  • MLB stops the season and probably either voids it (sure beats the real life World Series cancelations of the 94 strike and the 1904 boycott), or goes straight to the playoffs after the war ends.
  • The NFL hasn’t started yet and won’t start the first game until the second week of September, and the war ends in late August. (Ironically, there was a disruptive strike that year, dunno how the war would affect that). Given its lucrative nature, I can see a wait and see approach followed by starting the season after the war.
  • The NBA and NHL start in the late fall and are thus largely unaffected.
  • For European soccer leagues, I’d say it depends on the country. The historical Bundesliga started several days before the war would have begun, though a crisis could have averted it. My hunch is that the countries not directly hit (ie, France, etc…, would just launch a delayed and possibly shortened season after the war’s end), while Germany, the nuke victims, and the Scandanavian countries that were invaded would wait and possibly cancel the seasons.

One footnote: 2020 was the historical season that Mike Trout qualified for the Hall of Fame (played in at least 10 seasons). With obvious fears of the season not being able to be completed due to COVID, there was talk as if it would count as official. The Hall responded by saying that 1994 counted for the sake of eligibility, and thus even a World Series less 2020 would as well. Or a World Series-less 1987.

Stable Diffusion Team Logos Part 1

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The Logo Project

So Action PC sports games let you insert custom logos. When making a draft league in the newest edition of Action PC Football, I felt “why not fire up the Evil Abominable Intelligence Art Machine”? And I loved the results. Logos were made for all teams in this American Football league. Some were tongue in cheek references to existing teams, some were original, some were multiple iterations that I’ll gladly show here, and so on.

Division A-East

New York

Yep, the pseudo-“Jets” have a knight standing in front of a fighter jet. This is the first “Roundel Logo”, which I ended up with a lot of. Maybe it was the prompts, maybe it was the model, but oh well.

Boston

This was the logo I had the most fun making. I wanted something with the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden snake style, a tricorn hat, and something weird. The prompt was done in the style of eccentric artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and I’m glad with how it turned out.

Miami

Not very surprising. Don’t really have much to say about this.

Canton

A maroon bulldog. This looks the most like an actual team logo. Probably the most fun “realistic” logo I had.

Jacksonville

Based on the USFL team and an ancient execution technique, the “Brazen Bulls” have, well, a brass bull and a shield on their logo.

RIP Jim Brown

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Jim Brown, former Cleveland Browns football player, activist, actor, and mixed martial arts commentator, has just passed away. RIP to a football legend. Calling him the greatest running back of all time is not particularly controversial, unlike other such claims. He rushed for more yards per game than anyone else at his position and did so in a low-offense era.

Betting on Obscure Sports

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I’ve said multiple times that the depths to which sportsbooks scraped the bottom of the barrel in the spring of 2020 was darkly amusing and inspiring at the same time. The thing is, they were doing this before the crunch. And after. Maybe not to the extent of splashing Taiwanese women’s basketball on their front pages, but you still could and can find really weird sports. And the use of obscure sports is a glaring weak point for integrity.

So who actually bets on the Laotian 2nd Floorball League?

Well, from what I’ve gathered, there’s three main categories of bettors. Only one of these is beneficial to the sportsbook, and is probably the reason they keep doing it. None are what would be considered beneficial to society or even the sports betting ecosystem as a whole.

Degenerates

The most innocent group of people to bet on obscure markets consistently (as opposed to the occasional novelty bet that no one expects anything out of) are “degenerates”, the same gambling addicts who will just bet on whatever’s in front of their faces. If it’s the middle of the night and some soccer league halfway around the world is what’s on the screen, they’ll bet it. Everything from table tennis to bizarre half-rink hockey to totally legitimate Indian cricket. This was in fact the reason for those Eastern European ping pong leagues running around the clock and existing at all-it was to ensure that there was something on screen at all times, purely for the purposes of gambling.

Something that greases the skids for a huge and inevitable problem with gambling doesn’t seem like the best thing. But it’s sweet and virtuous compared to the other two.

Line Munchkins

Many of the sharp/plus EV [Expected value] bettors are these, pouncing on whatever mismatch they get. They have little to no handicapping or serious modeling ability (the stereotype is that they’re green lumberjacks who don’t even know the players). After all, obscure sports are the most vulnerable to bad/slow lines. Which of course leads to the cycle of them getting restricted/banned after the book finds out.

I find neither the sportsbooks themselves who blast ads about the road to riches yet restrict successful bettors nor the line munchkins (coming from a tabletop RPG term for players who crudely optimize for maximum power) who act like martyrs to genius instead of people who gamed the system to be very sympathetic. So something that amplifies this sludgy mess does not seem desirable.

Crooks

The smallest, weakest, and most obscure sports are the most vulnerable to manipulation and fixes. So naturally either fixers or people aware of the fix will flock to bet on these crooked games. I don’t think I need to really explain why this is a bad thing.

What Next?

On one hand, the sportsbooks can simply not list the Guinea-Bissau Ferret Legging Third Division, the regulators can forbid it, and the data providers (the biggest, most important, and least visible part of the whole ecosystem), can not provide information about them. On the other, it only takes one offshore data provider and an offshore book wanting to fill that niche to break the restrictions.

So yes, like a lot of sports betting issues, this is not completely solvable. I do think that forbidding bets on the lowest hanging fruit-minor league baseball and tennis or low-division college basketball to use an American example, would still be a wise and prudent thing to do.