The Tigers never had a chance (World Series 2012)

There are very few things that get my wife interested in sports. The only truly reliable trick is to have a Detroit team do well. Imagine my luck, then, that the Detroit Tigers entered the World Series as heavy favorites among the various experts. Before parades down Woodward became a realistic option, the San Francisco Giants showed up with all the momentum that comes from winning a decisive game 7 and swept Detroit.

Momentum, no wait, rest!

Once it became apparent that the Giants would be taking the series – somewhere late in game 3 – the notion that San Francisco had momentum and Detroit was rusty started to seep into coverage. Nevermind that the narrative before the series was that Detroit’s opportunity to get rested and get Justin Verlander lined up to pitch games 1 and 5 (Ha! Game 5!) would give the Tigers two guaranteed wins with favorable matchups for the rest of the series.

So which is it? Do teams benefit from a long layoff before the World Series to get their rotation set and heal nagging injuries from the long season and postseason? Alternatively, do they build momentum and roll from a dramatic seven game series win to a sweep of the World Series (I mean generally, obviously that is what happened this time)?

James Harden to the Rockets

James Harden made what was unquestionably the right business decision when he turned down Oklahoma City's offer. The offer included a hometown discount that would have cost Harden approximately $2 million per year AND OKC was not able to offer a 5th year on the deal because they already have a "Designated Player" in Russell Westbrook. Under the new collective bargaining agreement a team can have one player on a five year extension of their rookie deal at a time. Westbrook's extension runs through 2017 so the Thunder will not be able to designate a different player until then.

The interesting thing for me is that Houston was on the other end of the deal. Daryl Morey has made no secret of his desire to get a superstar and Daryl Morey tends to approach these things from a more quantitative perspective than most, so what did he see in Harden that convinced him that he could make the leap from 6th man to star? John Hollinger helpfully provides the answer:

"Thanks to NBA.com's whiz-bang stats tool, we can see that Harden's per-minute scoring more than doubled when Durant was on the bench, from 14.9 points per 36 minutes to 31.2, and he did it with a higher shooting percentage and an absurdly high free throw rate. The same shift happened without Westbrook on the court, from 13.7 to 29.0, and again it was accompanied by a five-point jump in shooting percentage and a near-tripling of his free throw rate."

Of course, Harden and his beard went off tonight and he ran up 37 points and 12 assists so maybe this is all understood by now. Just don't be surprised if he keeps it up. Morey is probably feeling pretty good about the deal today between that domination and getting Harden extended at the maximum $80 million over five years.

Revisiting Replacement Officials in the NFL

The go-to story for sportswriters in the first few weeks of the season was the use of replacement officials in the NFL. In the first week, when things appeared to be going well, a few of them trotted out the “they’re not so bad” line. By week two, however, there was solid consensus around the fact that things needed to change. After some further shenanigans in week three the NFL came around and settled with the real officials.

A couple weeks ago I took a look at how the replacements did. The conclusion: they were pretty much as bad as people said. They didn’t call a ton of extra penalties, but the increase was concentrated in some high-impact calls: Offensive Holding, Defensive Pass Interference, Defensive Holding and Personal Fouls. What better way to return from vacation than to circle back on this now that we have several weeks each of the replacements and the real officials.

Replacement Officials: They are that bad

Replacement officials in the NFL have been mildly controversial lately. From players to coaches to numerous columnists, it appears that the call for the real refs is universal.

Several of my usual reads have already analyzed various aspects of the situation. At advancednflstats.com, Brian Burke took a look at home field advantage and concluded that the numbers for this season are not conclusively different from the long-term trend. Bill Barnwell comes at it from more of an “integrity of the game” approach that a great number of columnists are favoring.

Are they really that bad?

Year	Avg Penalties per Week (1-3)
2005	237.3
2003	233.0
2004	218.33
2012	218.30
2010	208.7
2011	207.7
2002	203.0
2009	200.3
2008	191.3
2006	188.7
2007	182.0

Stats-wise, any time I see this kind of consensus opinion I want to look into it and see what’s up. Through three weeks, the replacement refs are averaging 218 penalty calls per week. This puts them comfortably in range of the past ten seasons when compared against the first three weeks of each. When compared against the full-season numbers, 2012 looks terrible with only 2004 and 2005 above 200. But this is because the replacements have so far participated only in 16 game weeks while full seasons have several weeks with 13 or 14 games to accommodate byes. Penalties per week also tend to go down slightly throughout the season even accounting for byes.

So if they aren’t calling more penalties, what is the problem? The 2012 season is seeing more penalties than 2011, about 0.5 extra calls per game, but that doesn’t seem like enough to cause this outcry.

Why are NFL preseason win projections so bad?

I have been unable to avoid looking at predictions for the upcoming NFL season. After spending some time picking apart ESPN’s Future Power Rankings back in May, these predictions have again piqued my interest – so I will pick them apart too. When will they ever learn that I will go away if they pick the Browns to make the playoffs (I’m not even asking for a Super Bowl, just to make the playoffs and maybe also to have Pittsburgh not do well).

Projecting win totals is definitely hard. Brian Burke, the very talented founder of AdvancedNFLStats.com, has had a significant amount of fun deconstructing Football Outsiders’ projections over the years. Among other things, he has shown that the results could be improved by picking all teams to finish 8-8 (he refers to this as the CoMA strategy) and picking all teams to regress somewhat by projecting 6 wins plus ¼ of the prior year’s win total – 10-6 becomes 6 + 10/4 = 8.5 wins (he refers to this as the ‘Koko the Monkey’ strategy, fans of Seinfeld approve).