Category: Sports
College football is education too
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
So far the data are fragmentary, but they indicate that parties, bar-going and after-hours fraternization — not athletic practices — have been the major risks contributing to Covid-19 clusters among young people of college age. For all the talk of banning athletics, how about university regulations banning all alcohol consumption (including off-campus) for all registered students, under the pain of academic suspension? [NB: more schools have started trying at least partial versions of this since I wrote the column.]…
There is the risk that football players and other collegiate athletes will bring the virus home to their parents and older relatives. Still, that danger seems to be at least as high if they are bored and going out drinking, compared to practicing and trying to secure their place on the team. It simply is not obvious that athletics create a new risk.
Under the current system, student athletes can opt not to participate, just as many NBA players have elected not to play in the league’s “bubble.” While there are social pressures to go ahead and play, they are no different than the pressures to socialize more generally. Yet there are no calls to ban young people from socializing, even though that too is clearly a dangerous activity — perhaps the most dangerous activity — in terms of Covid-19 spread.
There is much more at the link.
The greatest gaming performance ever?
Or is chess a sport?
First Magnus Carlsen “privatizes” chess competition, naming the major tournament after himself, setting all of the rules, and becoming the residual claimant on the income stream.
He reshapes the entire format into a seven set, four months-long series of shorter tournaments, consisting of multiple games per day, 15 minutes per player per game, with increment. It seems most chess fans find this new format far more exciting and watchable than the last two world championship matches, which have featured 22 slow draws and only two decisive games (with the title decided by rapid tiebreakers in each case — why not just head to the rapids?).
Magnus won all but one of the “sets” or mini-tournaments, along the way regularly dispatching the game’s top players at an astonishing pace, often tossing them aside like mere rag dolls. Even the #2 and #3 rated players — Caruana and Ding Liren — stood little chance against his onslaught. Carlsen kept on winning these mini-tournaments against fields of ten players, typically all at a world class level.
A Final Four then led to a 38-game, seven-day showdown between Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, not decided until the very last set of moves yesterday. Note that at the more rapid pace Nakamura may well be a better player than Carlsen and is perhaps the only real challenge to him (at slower classical speeds Nakamura would be in the top twenty but is not at the very top of the rankings).
Nonetheless Carlsen prevailed. Nakamura had the upper hand in terms of initiative, but in the final five-minute tie-breaking round, Carlsen needed to pull out 1.5 of the last 2 points, which indeed he did. He drew by constructing an impregnable fortress against Nakamura’s Queen, and in the final “sudden death Armageddon” round a draw is equivalent to a victory for Black.
Along the way, at the same time, Magnus participated in Fantasy Football, competing against millions, at times holding the #1 slot and finishing #11 in what is a very competitive and demanding endeavor.
The Covid cost of professional sports events
We compare COVID-19 case loads and mortality across geographic areas that hosted more vs fewer NHL hockey games, NBA basketball games, and NCAA basketball games during the early months of 2020, before any large outbreaks. We find that hosting one additional NHL/NBA game leads to an additional 783 COVID-19 cases during March-mid May and an additional 52 deaths. Similarly, we find that hosting an additional NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball games results in an additional 31 cases and an additional 2.4 deaths. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that the per-game fatality costs exceed consumption benefits by a wide margin.
That is from Coady Wing, Daniel H. Simon, and Patrick Carlin. I think we have not a good enough model of the heterogeneities of prevalence across regions for those to be reliable estimates. Still, I am happy to see more work on the question of what in particular causes Covid cases, and also whether sporting events play a significant role.
How to restart the baseball season sustainably
You may have read that a number of early games in the season have been cancelled due to many of the players testing positive for Covid-19. There is talk of the season being unsustainable, but it seems a simple remedy has not yet been tried — dock a player 30 percent of his salary if he tests positive. That should limit the degree of nightclubbing and carousing, keeping in mind that the already-infected are probably some of the worst offenders and they have been “taken care of.” Furthermore, the players would have a strong incentive to monitor each other, not wanting to be on the receiving end of an infection from a teammate.
While that arrangement presumably runs counter to the collective bargaining agreement, that agreement can and should be revised if season cancellation is the true alternative.
If need be, the fines can be redistributed to the players who never test positive, thus keeping total compensation constant.
Incentives don’t always work, but if you haven’t even tried them something is amiss. Do I hear “35 percent”? “Forty”? “Thirty-seven percent and three lashes”?
How to rename the Washington Redskins
McCauley first trademarked the Washington Pigskins in 2015, and while he has lost count himself, a search of the US Trademark and Patent Office website shows that he holds trademarks for names such as the Washington Monuments, Washington Redtails, Washington Veterans, Washington Red Wolves and Washington Warriors.
Somehow I don’t think it will be the Warriors, nor “the Washington Pandas” (story here).
I say “the Washington Redtails,” or my very first choice would be the Maryland Tolerations.
The Ivy League culture that is Major League Baseball
But the rise of analytics also has resulted in another massive shift: an influx of white, male graduates of Ivy League schools and other prestigious universities into teams’ front offices. In a data analysis conducted by ESPN, the percentage of Ivy League graduates holding an organization’s top baseball operations decision-making position — which, depending on the club, could be its president, vice president or general manager — has risen from just 3% in 2001 to 43% today; while the percentage of graduates from U.S. News & World Report’s list of the top 25 colleges — both universities and liberal arts schools — holding the same positions has risen from 24% to 67%.
Here is more from ESPN, via Adam Minter. How do you think other economic sectors will be evolving? And what would Malcolm Gladwell say?
How to identify interesting boats and sailors
I know nothing about this topic, so thought I should pass along this email from MR reader Edward Dixon:
Having benefited from your advice on restaurants, I thought I would pass on some simple tips for the identification of interesting boats & interesting sailors.
The method is actually a little like finding an interesting restaurant: most of the boats you see are more or less in the form in which they left the boatyard that built them. You can think of them and their owners as being akin to chain restaurants. These are the ones to ignore!
Watch instead for boats:
– Ignore anything suggested of a racing pedigree
– Equipped to sail. Two masts are better than one. Gaff rigs and junk rigs are also interesting indicators. The limited speed but unlimited range are attributes of sail that act as a sort of filder.
– extra hardware bolted on top, like a solar panel / wind-vane combination
– A complicated-looking wind-vane attachment bolted onto the stern indicates self-steering gear
– A cupola or dome, a little reminiscent of a turret on top of a WWII bomber somewhere on the coach-roof.
– Indications that the boat is a home-build – possible harder for you to assessBoats with quirks tend to contain interesting people; often they have made Unconventional Life Choices, including of course long sea voyages, often solo. They have often made extraordinary efforts to go to sea – I once met a man in late middle age who had crossed the Irish Sea in an easterly gale in a 17ft open boat he had constructed himself using (non-marine-grade) plywood, and who was engaged in a boat-based camping tour of Ireland. This turned out to be entirely consistent with the rest of his history.
Interesting boat folk, like interesting restaurants, are out there to be found, once you learn a few heuristics.
Claims about equities (and gamblers)
Mr. Young, 30, has only about $2,500 invested, making him a guppy among whales. But some Wall Street analysts see people who used to bet on sports as playing a big role in the market’s recent surge, which has largely erased its losses for the year.
“There’s zero doubt in my mind that it is a factor,” said Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivatives strategist at the brokerage firm BTIG. “Zero doubt.”
Millions of small-time investors have opened trading accounts in recent months, a flood of new buyers unlike anything the market had seen in years, just as lockdown orders halted entire sectors of the economy and sent unemployment soaring.
It’s not clear how many of the new arrivals are sports bettors, but some are behaving like aggressive gamblers. There has been a jump in small bets in the stock options market, where wagers on the direction of share prices can produce thrilling scores and gut-wrenching losses. And transactions that make little economic sense, like buying up the nearly valueless shares of bankrupt companies, are off the charts.
File under “speculative,” here is the full NYT story.
Which NBA teams will gain in relative prospects from the shutdown?
The Los Angeles Lakers, far and away.
The most valuable stars, such as LBJ, have their own private gyms and work-out rooms, often in their homes. They have stayed in the best shape, and of course LBJ has the discipline too. Those star players also are the most used to unusual circumstances (All-star games, Olympics, etc.) and being accustomed to higher than average levels of pressure. They rely less on crowd support than do the role players, noting it is the latter who benefit much more from home court advantage. If the games are played in Las Vegas and Orlando, and without crowds, no one will have home court advantage (except the Orlando Magic, sort of).
So teams built around star veterans will have higher chances of doing better in the playoffs.
The interrupted and probably shortened season also will be easier on the older players, which again covers LeBron. Anthony Davis is not so old but the Lakers would love to play him as many minutes as possible.
The teams with “many necessary complementary parts” will fare worst in relative terms. With such a long break, surely at least 10-20% of those players have “gone off the reservation,” so to speak, and will not return to quality form for some time. Those teams will not gel so easily and find their groove.
Who might that be? I know the Clippers have two big stars, but they seem to rely a lot on the team as a whole. Who else? The Celtics maybe? Indiana?
What are the implications of this analysis for management and business firms? Will teams built around a superstar have an advantage there too?
What sports I’ve been watching
Game 2, Celtics vs. Bulls, 1986, the one where Michael Jordan scored 63 points. Watching it over a number of days on the exercise bike, I was struck by the following:
1. The Chicago Bulls, to a remarkable degree, decided to run their offense through Orlando Woolridge, and not for the better.
2. The camera did not follow MJ around obsessively, nor do the announcers seem to realize how great he will become — this was his second season, and he spent much of it injured and not playing. And he was not yet able to make his teammates better (see #1).
3. One announcer remarks that Charles Oakley is not big and strong enough to play center. Admittedly Robert Parrish was taller, but Oakley was one of the strongest men ever to play in the NBA.
4. The game comes across as remarkably slow, and the Celtics as molasses slow and bad at defense. A swarming contemporary defense would shut down Kevin McHale. Ainge and Dennis Johnson are heralded as one of the best backcourts ever, but I believe Damian Lillard or a few other current peers would cut them to ribbons. Note that the Celtics were 40-1 at home that season, still a record, so they were a remarkable team for their time.
5. Michael Jordan scores most of his points on shots — the long 2 — that coaches strongly discourage players from taking these days because of their low expected value.
6. Few of them look good taking a three-pointer.
7. MJ aside, Bill Walton is the one who comes across as the world-class player on the court, despite his age of 33, a long history of foot and other injuries, and limited mobility.
8. 63 points is a lot, but the Bulls lost the game and Jordan was far from his later peak. It is nonetheless striking how much better was his conditioning than that of any other player on the court, and that is why he was able to score so much in the fourth quarter and take over the game.
Coronavirus sports markets in everything, multiple simulations edition
For $20, fans of German soccer club Borussia can have a cut-out of themselves placed in the stands at BORUSSIA-PARK. According to the club, over 12,000 cut-outs have been ordered and 4,500 have already been put in place.
Here is the tweet and photo.
And some sports bettors are betting on simulated sporting events. (Again, I’ve never understood gambling — why not save up your risk-taking for positive-sum activities? Is negative-sum gambling a kind of personality management game to remind yourself loss is real and to keep down your risk-taking in other areas?)
Via Samir Varma and Cory Waters.
America’s reopening will depend on trust
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic brought serious economic damage for thinly capitalized face-to-face retailers, such as small family-owned restaurants. But many of those same institutions will lead the recovery — that is, if they have built up trust among their patrons. If they ask me to sit outside to eat my meal, I will trust that their kitchen procedures are “clean enough,” because I believe that the boss is watching [there I am referring to two of my favorite local places].
It is also worth asking whom I do not trust. When it comes to providing a fully clean and safe store, I do not trust most of the big-box retailers. I trust them just fine in ordinary times, but no single manager can oversee the entire cleaning and disinfectant operation. And can they monitor Covid-19 in the air? If they tell me that “all possible precautions have been taken,” I might believe their words, but I won’t believe that is enough.
And:
The NBA is wondering if it can resurrect its playoffs at a dedicated location with television coverage but no audience in the stands. So far the teams are hesitant, in part because they are afraid of public resentment if the league’s millionaire players have access to Covid-19 tests while the general public does not.
The reality is that if the NBA announced it was buying up a lot of tests, it would boost the supply of tests. That could provide testing with valuable positive publicity, with the NBA serving as a role model for what other businesses might do. Yet the NBA does not yet trust its fans to see things in such a positive light, and so reopening is delayed. There might be some danger to playoffs games without fans, but surely less than in, say, collegiate or professional football, where injuries and concussions are built into the very nature of the competition.
Which are the businesses that you really trust in matters pandemic?
Why social distancing will persist
Some 72% of Americans polled said they would not attend if sporting events resumed without a vaccine for the coronavirus. The poll, which had a fairly small sample size of 762 respondents, was released Thursday by Seton Hall University’s Stillman School of Business.
When polling respondents who identified as sports fans, 61% said they would not go to a game without a vaccine. The margin of error is plus-or-minus 3.6%.
Only 12% of all respondents said they would go to games if social distancing could be maintained, which would likely lead to a highly reduced number of fans, staff and media at games.
I doubt if that poll is extremely scientific, but the key fact here is that people go to NBA games, and most other public entertainments, in groups. Fast forward a bit and see how the group negotiations will go. Of a foursome, maybe three people would go to the game and one would not. That group is likely to end up doing something else altogether different, without 19,000 other cheering fans screaming and breathing into their faces.
If half the people say they will go, that does not mean you get half the people. It means you hardly get anybody.
By the way, what percentage of the American population will refuse or otherwise evade this vaccine, assuming we come up with one of course?
Here is the ESPN story link.
Commercial silence about China, what is the equilibrium?
OK, the NBA and its players won’t much exercise their free speech rights, nor will university presidents, so how will this all look in the longer term? Surely India and other nations are learning from the Chinese experience, and so here is one excerpt from my Bloomberg column:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is an avowed student of the Chinese experiment. Is it so far-fetched to imagine that he would help to create comparable pressures on speech for institutions doing business with India? The more China’s strategy succeeds, the more likely it is to spread. Modi has not shied away from controversy in making Indian policy, so the domestic pressure to follow the Chinese model could be quite strong.
Imagine a world, not so far off, where Indonesia is a business’s fifth-largest customer or a university’s seventh-largest supplier of students. Will it really be so safe to criticize the government of Indonesia, even for employees of those institutions on their social media accounts? U.S. businesses today are quite reluctant to criticize their customers at all, regardless of how much they collectively or individually account for revenue.
The world is evolving into a place where countries and regimes are exempt from all significant public criticism from any entity (or its employees) with substantial interests overseas — whether commercial or academic. That scenario may sound dystopian, but in fact it would not be a major shift from the status quo.
It is also easy to imagine a norm evolving where major customers, say China and India, become offended if a business or its employees criticize a much smaller nation. The theory might be that if any criticism is allowed at all, eventually it will reach the larger (and more controversial) nations. Or perhaps the smaller nation is an ally or friend of the larger, more powerful one. So you had better not criticize Kiribati, either.
And my parenthetical:
(Paradoxically, China’s concern for speech over actions shows a respect for the power of discourse — and free speech — that contemporary America could learn from.)
Recommended, and here is India already flexing its muscle over Bezos and WaPo (NYT).
My look back at the last decade
Via Bloomberg, here is one bit:
Consider the 10 best-selling books of the decade. All have female protagonists, and the top seven are authored by women. (“Fifty Shades of Grey” and its sequels take the top three spots, with three others having the word “Girl” in the title.)
The feminization of our culture is for me trend number one. Next in line is screens:
They simply convey more interesting narratives than most of the other spaces in our lives.
There is much more at the link.