Tag Archives: NFL

ESPN pushing unscientific “NFL Hazing Survey”

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On Sportscenter last night as well as on their website, ESPN last night was pushing a survey of 72 NFL players regarding the recent locker room troubles involving the Miami Dolphins. The problem: the survey is unscientific, something they mentioned at the beginning of the TV reports. The online story includes a similar disclaimer at the beginning of the third paragraph:

But in an unscientific survey conducted by team reporters for ESPN.com’s NFL Nation over two days this week, Incognito does not have the same level of support from some of his peers. Three players participated from each team surveyed, with 72 players in all asked three questions. The players taking part were granted anonymity.

If the survey is unscientific, why do they then spend time discussing the results? If they admit upfront that it is unscientific, what exactly could the viewer/reader learn from the data? It is good that they mentioned the unscientific sample but their own statement suggests we shouldn’t put much stock in what they say next.

Quick Review: League of Denial

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I had a chance this past week to read the book League of Denial and see the PBS documentary by the same name. Some thoughts about the story of the NFL and concussion research (focusing mostly on the book which provides a more detailed narrative):

1. I know some fans are already complaining of “concussion fatigue” but it is hard to think of football the same way after hearing this story. For decades, we have held up players for their toughness and yet it may be ruining their brains.

2. The human story in all of this is quite interesting. This includes some of the former football players who have been driven to the edge by their football-related brain injuries. At the same time, the story amongst the doctors is also pretty fascinating, the chase for fame, publishing articles, and acquiring brains. Running through the whole book is this question of “who is really doing this research for the right reasons?” Even if the NFL research appears to be irrevocably tainted, are the researchers on the other side completely neutral or pure of heart?

3. The whole scientific process is laid out in the book (glossed over more in the documentary)…and I’m not sure how it fares. You have scientists fighting each other to acquire brains. You have peer-reviewed research – supposed to help prevent erroneous findings – that is viewed by many as erroneous from the start. You have scientists fighting for funding, an ongoing battle for all researchers as they must support their work and have their own livelihoods. In the end, consensus seems to be emerging but the book and documentary highlight the messy process it takes to get there.

4. The comparisons of the NFL to Big Tobacco seem compelling: the NFL tried to bury concussions research for a few decades and still doesn’t admit to a long-term impact of concussions on its players. One place where the comparison might break down for the general public (and scientific research could change this in the near future): the worst problems seem to be in long-time NFL players. When exactly does CTE start in the brains of football players? There is some evidence younger players, college or high school, might already have CTE but we need more evidence of this to be sure. If that is established, that perhaps kids as young as junior high already have CTE and that CTE is derived from regular hits at a young age (not the big knock-out blows), the link to Big Tobacco might be complete.

5. It is not really part of this story but I was struck again by how relatively little we know about the brain. Concussion research didn’t really take off until the 1990s, even as this had happened with football players for decades. (One sports area where it had been studied: boxing.) Much of this research is quite new and is a reminder that we humans don’t know as much as we might think.

6. This also provides a big reminder that the NFL is big business. Players seem the most aware of this: they can be cut at any time and an injury outside of their control could end their careers. The league and owners do not come off well here as they try to protect their holdings. The employees – the players – are generally treated badly: paid well if they perform but thrown aside otherwise. This may lead to a “better product” on the field but the human toll is staggering.

7. How exactly you change people’s opinions, both fans and players, regarding concussions will be fascinating to watch. It will take quite a shift among players from the tough-guy image to being willing to consider their futures more carefully. For fans, they may become more understanding as their favorite players consider what concussions might do to their lives. Will the NFL remain as popular? Hard to say though I imagine most fans this past weekend of football had little problem watching lots of gridiron action Saturday and Sunday.

Denver Broncos scoring at 3.13 standard deviations above the NFL average

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Bill Barnwell puts the scoring of the 2013 Denver Broncos in statistical perspective:

That brings us to z-score (or standard score), the measure that analyzes a figure’s distance from the rest of the data set using the mean and standard deviation from the set. By comparing each team’s points scored to the league average (and calculating the standard deviation) for the points scored of each team from that given season, we can get a measure of how much better or worse it was than the average team from that season. Fortuitously, that measure also allows us to compare teams across different years and eras. It’s not perfect, since it can’t account for things like strength of schedule or whether a team let up late in games or not, but it’s a much better measure than raw points scored.

As it turns out, even after we make these adjustments, the 2013 Denver Broncos have still scored points at a higher rate through four games than anybody else since the merger. The Broncos are scoring points on a per-game basis at a rate of 3.13 standard deviations over the mean, which is unmatched over that 43-year run. No team has ever scored more frequently, relative to its peers, than the Broncos have done relative to the rest of the league in 2013.

Because these are standardized figures, it’s possible to translate each team’s scoring rate in 2013 figures and see how close it is to Denver. In this case, after we account for the different populations, a bunch of teams move closer to Denver’s throne. Chief among them is the 1991 Super Bowl–winning team from Washington, which scored 146 points through four games in a league whose teams averaged a mere 72 points through their first four tilts. Washington’s figure placed it 2.85 standard deviations above the mean and translates to 170.9 points scored in 2013, just 8.1 points behind the Broncos. Other famous teams follow: the 2000 Rams, 1992 Bills, 1996 Packers, 1981 Chargers, 2005 Giants …

And you thought standard deviations were good only for statisticians. If you know your normal distribution, that’s way above the league average. I can only imagine how Sportscenter anchors might try to present this information…

Actually, this is quite useful for two reasons: (1) it allows us to look at the Broncos compared to the rest of the league without having to rely on the actual points scored; (2) it allows us to standardize points scored over the years so you can compare figures over a 43 year stretch. Both advantages are part of the wave of new statistical analysis taking over sports: don’t just look at the absolute value of statistics but put them in comparison to others teams or players and also provide statistics that allow for comparisons across time periods.

Look to the NFL for taypayer funded stadiums, sweet tax deals

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Gregg Easterbrook provides a reminder of the amount of public money funneled to NFL owners in recent decades:

Judith Grant Long, a Harvard University professor of urban planning, calculates that league-wide, 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers, not NFL owners. Many cities, counties, and states also pay the stadiums’ ongoing costs, by providing power, sewer services, other infrastructure, and stadium improvements. When ongoing costs are added, Long’s research finds, the Buffalo Bills, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints, San Diego Chargers, St. Louis Rams, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Tennessee Titans have turned a profit on stadium subsidies alone—receiving more money from the public than they needed to build their facilities. Long’s estimates show that just three NFL franchises—the New England Patriots, New York Giants, and New York Jets—have paid three-quarters or more of their stadium capital costs.

Many NFL teams have also cut sweetheart deals to avoid taxes. The futuristic new field where the Dallas Cowboys play, with its 80,000 seats, go-go dancers on upper decks, and built-in nightclubs, has been appraised at nearly $1 billion. At the basic property-tax rate of Arlington, Texas, where the stadium is located, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones would owe at least $6 million a year in property taxes. Instead he receives no property-tax bill, so Tarrant County taxes the property of average people more than it otherwise would…

The insertion of professional football leagues into the definition of not-for-profit organizations was a transparent sellout of public interest. This decision has saved the NFL uncounted millions in tax obligations, which means that ordinary people must pay higher taxes, public spending must decline, or the national debt must increase to make up for the shortfall. Nonprofit status applies to the NFL’s headquarters, which administers the league and its all-important television contracts. Individual teams are for-profit and presumably pay income taxes—though because all except the Green Bay Packers are privately held and do not disclose their finances, it’s impossible to be sure.

It is more difficult to justify such public spending when it is laid out like this. But, the money spent is complicated by two factors:

1. Americans like football. What if they wanted to provide taxpayer dollars for football? The assumption Easterbrook and others make who point out the public money spent on football is that people who read the stories will get outraged and demand change. But, football is the most popular sport and the money problems aren’t just present in the NFL – look at how college football continues to be a financial juggernaut even as it struggles with issues of amateurism. If the money isn’t spent on football, would the public be confident that money would be spent effectively elsewhere?

2. Individual cities, states, and other bodies of government are put in tough spots when teams threaten to leave unless they get a good stadium deal. Even with studies that show the economic benefits tend to be primarily in the direction of the team owners and not the taxpayers, losing the team might be even worse. Who wants to be the politician who let the team go? On one hand, spending tax money on sports might be unpopular but so would be politicians who let a source of civic pride walk away.

Just thinking out loud, it seems like the main way politicians and local governments could fight back is to all band together and refuse to spend public money this way. In a time of tough economic competition between communities for jobs and prestige, all it takes is one city to be the escape hatch for teams. Look at how NFL teams in recent years have used Los Angeles as a bargaining chip. Even though no one has moved there, they can all say plans are in the works in Los Angeles unless you give us a better deal. At the same time, politicians across the board could examine cities without major football teams and how they “survive” the lack of a team. How does Portland make it? What about Los Angeles? San Antonio? Las Vegas? In other words, having a football team is not a necessity and there are other ways to spend the money that might go towards sports teams. Individually, cities have a hard time standing up to teams but collectively they might have the ability.

Mapping NFL fandom by county with Facebook likes

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Facebook has put their massive data trove to use and examined the geographies of NFL fandom. Here is what they came up with:

The National Football League is one of the most popular sports in America with some incredibly devoted fans. At Facebook we have about 35 million account holders in the United States who have Liked a page for one of the 32 teams in the league, representing one of the most comprehensive samples of sports fanship ever collected. Put another way, more than 1 in 10 Americans have declared their support for an NFL team on Facebook…

While winning seems to matter, NFL teams have local followings that are probably heavily influenced by family ties and/or where a person grew up,  so we were obviously curious to see where the fans for various teams live now. By considering the physical locations of NFL fans, we can construct a map of the top team for each county in the US. It tells an interesting story about the ways that football rivalries and allegiances alternately divide and unite the country, and sometimes even individual states.

In some cases, whole states and even entire regions of the country uniformly support a single team.  For instance the Vikings are easily the only game in town in Minnesota, while New England appears to be comprised of entirely Patriots fans except for a small portion of Connecticut.

There are some states which are divided into regions by teams.  Florida has three teams–the Tampa Bay Bucs, Miami Dolphins, and the Jacksonville Jaguars–and Facebook users there seems fractured in their support, with some counties even defecting to teams from the North. Ohio is another interesting story, with the Cleveland Browns in the North, Cincinatti Bengals in the South, and Pittsburgh Steelers fans occupying the middle of the state.

Some teams, like the Steelers, Cowboys, and Packers, seem to transcend geography, with pockets of fans all over the country. On the other end of the spectrum, the Jets have to share New York with the Giants and are only the most popular team for a single stronghold county in Long Island.

Five quick thoughts:

1. There are few other organizations that could put together such a map without undertaking a major survey (since this is measured at the county level).

2. The best part for Facebook: users voluntarily provided this data.

3. Could Facebook end up being the most important future source for telling us about American society? There are still difficulties: users have to opt in (in this particular case, they had to “like” a NFL team), not everyone is involved (though it seems like pretty close), and not all users are putting everything in their profiles.

4. Is there a way to weight this map with population density? For example, the Cowboys may have a really broad geographic reach but many of those counties have fewer people. In contrast, teams like the Jets or Eagles have smaller reaches yet more people live in those areas.

5. Is there a way to show the percentage of county respondents who liked the dominant team? I imagine there are plenty of counties where one team does not have a strong majority, let alone even much of a plurality. For example, Jets fans barely show up on the map because they are only the top team in one county. Yet, there are plenty of Jets fans.

Lack of black offensive playcallers in the NFL

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The NFL has only one black offensive coordinator:

“We are very, very conscious of this issue, and it’s something that needs to be addressed,” said John Wooten, the chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization charged with promoting equality of job opportunity in NFL coaching and front office staffs. “We have alluded to it and spoken to it directly, and we feel our only course of action is to push more people up the pipeline.”

Complicating matters for Wooten and the legions of aspiring minority offensive coordinators is that the pipeline is also disproportionately dry…

Right now, the NFL’s sole African-American offensive coordinator is the Buffalo Bills’ Curtis Modkins, who doubles as the team’s running backs coach. However, Bills coach Chan Gailey is the team’s de facto offensive coordinator and primary play-caller. Only two African-Americans, the Houston Texans’ Karl Dorrell and the Minnesota Vikings’ Craig Johnson, are quarterbacks coaches, the position-coach job which most frequently leads to offensive-coordinator opportunities.

“This is the biggest travesty that’s taking place in this league, and every black coach is well aware of it,” said one anonymous African-American assistant for an AFC team. “They don’t promote you from running backs coach or receivers coach to offensive coordinator. When guys do get coordinator titles, they have to be position coaches at the same time, and they don’t get paid as much as other coordinators, because they’re not the play-callers. And in a lot of cases, guys believe they’re really there for locker-room reasons, to ‘take care of’ the minority players.”

A classic example in the sociology of sport of how race plays out in sports is to look at the expectations for and portrayal of black and white quarterbacks: black quarterbacks are expected to be more mobile and use their natural ability while white quarterbacks tend to be viewed as tacticians. I wonder if the same thing is going on here. Defense is said to require more reaction ability and athletic skills while offense is about strategy and throwing off the defense. Offensive playcalling is more of a sacred art that requires an intelligent guru to make things happen. Also, it sounds like this is a social network problem: black playcallers need to be able to have access to lower offensive positions, be able to prove themselves there, and then have the opportunity to move up when jobs become available. Without this chain in place, it could be a very similar issue to what might be behind the unemployment gap between whites and blacks.

The article doesn’t say much about this but the NFL has put policies in place for helping to ensure minority candidates are interviewed for head coaching positions so will something similar happen here?

Thursday Night Football logo takes over Philadelphia skyline

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While watching a bit of the match-up last night featuring the Cincinnati Bengals at the Philadelphia Eagles, I saw this image where the Thursday Night Football takes over the Philadelphia skyline:

Sports broadcasts have been using this technique for at least a few years now. I first noticed it on Fox NFL broadcasts. They will often put fake video boards at different points around the stadium and then show the Fox logo or advertisements on this fake board before panning back to the field and game action. The NBA on TNT also uses this quite a bit though I’ve noticed they tend to use the same settings when in certain cities. For example, when they do Bulls home games, the same location is used: the camera, probably mounted on a tall building, looks southeast from Wolf Point with the fake video board mounted on the first bridge, Lake Street, on the South Branch of the Chicago River. Imagine if the board in Chicago moved around a bit: there it is popping out of the trees in Grant Park. There it is on the top of the John Hancock building. There it is on Navy Pier blocking the view of the Ferris Wheel.

However, these examples feature fake video screens built on existing structures while this Thursday Night Football segue involved a giant logo attached to two buildings on the Philadelphia skyline. In my opinion, this stretches the idea a little too far. It doesn’t look very realistic and even among big buildings it looks disproportionately large. At the same time, perhaps it is meant to be commentary about the power of the NFL: it is so big that it dominates the skyline of a major American city!

The sociological tree of William Julius Wilson

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As part of a larger article looking at the legacy of William Julius Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged and his study of neighborhood effects, there is an interesting graphic: Wilson’s “web of influence.” Here who is on the list (listed here in clockwise order from the top):

-Robert Sampson – Harvard

-Sandra Smith – UC Berkeley

-Sudhir Venkatesh – Columbia

-Stefanie DeLuca – Johns Hopkins

-Christopher Jencks – Harvard

-Lawrence Katz – Harvard

-Patrick Sharkey – NYU

-Douglas Massey – Princeton

-Loic Wacquant – UC Berkeley

-Mary Patillo – Northwestern

This reminded me of NFL coaching trees: see the Bill Walsh, Marty Schottenheimer, and Bill Parcells trees here (and there could be other trees based on Paul Brown, Bill Belichick, and others). Why don’t we do more of this within the field of sociology? We know there are influential thinkers and graduate school mentors who influence broader ranges of students and academics than others. Indeed, quickly looking at this list shows these people tend to be clustered in higher ranking departments which attract more capable researchers as well as graduate students.

A classic example of this in sociology is the Chicago School: decades of American sociology were heavily influenced by a group of sociologists at the University of Chicago in the early 1900s who trained a number of notable graduate students and helped shape the field (urban sociology in particular). Such social networks or trees or “bloodlines” don’t have to be deterministic; new scholars don’t just parrot what they heard before but there are key ideas and methodologies that these networks share while also analyzing new social realms.

There would be multiple ways to measure this. We could start with grad school training: who was trained at what institution and with which advisers and dissertation committee members. Another way to look at this would be to examine who is citing whom and who is utilizing theories and concepts developed by others. A third way could explore who is actually collaborating on works with each other. While all of this would take some time, I wonder if such trees would really help explain more of the underlying structure of sociology as a discipline in the United States.

Correlation and not causation: Redskins games predict results of presidential election

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Big events like presidential elections tend to bring out some crazy data patterns. Here is my nomination for the oddest one of this election season: how the Washington Redskins do in their final game before the election predicts the presidential election.

Since 1940 — when the Redskins moved to D.C. — the team’s outcome in its final game before the presidential election has predicted which party would win the White House each time but once.

When the Redskins win their game before the election, the incumbent party wins the presidential vote. If the Redskins lose, the non-incumbent wins.

The only exception was in 2004, when Washington fell to Green Bay, but George W. Bush still went on to win the election over John Kerry.

This is simply a quirk of data: how the Redskins do should have little to no effect on voting in other states. This is exactly what correlation without causation is about; there may be a clear pattern ut it doesn’t necessarily mean the two related facts cause each other. There may be some spurious association here, some variable that predicts both outcomes, but even that is hard to imagine. Yet, the Redskins Rule has garnered a lot of attention in recent days. Why? A few possible reasons:

1. It connects two American obsessions: presidential elections and the NFL. A sidelight: both may involve a lot of betting.

2. So much reporting has been done on the 2012 elections that this adds a more whimsical and mysterious element.

3. Humans like to find patterns, even if these patterns don’t make much sense.

What’s next, an American octopus who can predict presidential elections?

Why would Mayor Daley want a second NFL team? Sounds like he wants prestige, economic development

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Chicago’s former Mayor Daley said he wants a second NFL team for Chicago and a new stadium:

“I really believe we could get a second football team,” the former mayor said. “I’ve always believed — the Chicago Cardinals, Bears — why is it that New York has two? Florida has three, San Francisco has two. Now you think of that, we could easily take — Chicago loves sports and we could get a second team in here.

“You could build a new stadium, you could have huge international soccer teams come in, you could do the Final Four, you could do anything you wanted with a brand new stadium.”

Many in Chicago believe the city should have a stadium with a retractable roof to be able to host events like the Super Bowl and the Final Four. Renovations to Solider Field left the stadium as the second smallest in the NFL. That, coupled with the lack of a roof, makes it a longshot to host a Super Bowl…

“It would be privately funded, the government could help a little bit,” Daley said. “But I’ve always believed we could take a second team. And every Sunday we would have a team playing in the National Football League. That would be unbelievable.”

If I had to guess, here is what I think is behind these comments:

1. This is about prestige and status. Chicago is a world-class city yet other cities, including less notable ones like San Francisco/Oakland, have two teams and Chicago does not. Having another NFL team would generate more attention in and for Chicago plus allow other major events to be held in the new stadium. Chicago could become a center for all sports and grab away some of the business places like Indianapolis, New Orleans, Atlanta, and other places get because of having closed stadiums. Mayor Daley is also old enough to remember the days when Chicago did have a second team, the Chicago Cardinals, that ended up leaving for the Sunbelt. Arguments against this line of thinking: is there really fan interest in a second team? Would Chicagoans easily adapt to a team moving to the city from somewhere else (like the Vikings, Chargers, etc.)? Los Angeles is a world-class city and does not have any team – just because a city has a certain population doesn’t necessarily mean it has to have a certain number of NFL teams.

2. This is about economic growth. Having a second team would bring in more money and more events. A new stadium could be viewed as an economic boon. However, research clearly shows that publicly funded stadiums don’t return money to taxpayers and residents will spend their money on other entertainment options if a sports team is not available. Plus, a new stadium would likely have to be located in a suburban locale (the Bears threatened at various points to move to the northwest suburbs or to Warrenville on what later became the Cantera site) so the economic benefits would be spread throughout the region rather than directly in the city of Chicago.

From a social science perspective, I don’t find the second reason compelling. Government officials tend to justify stadium spending by arguing it will bring economic benefits but I think it is also really about prestige: it helps put or keep the city on the map and also attracts more media attention. The same politicians that don’t want to be the ones held responsible for a favorite team leaving the city would also like to take the credit for adding a new team.