Transmogrified Tiger

The other best case scenario is that if the US keeps winning then qualifying is not the primary concern, and having Mexico endanger themselves is 1) awesome and hilarious 2) maybe better for the US's chances at getting into Pot 1? Even if not, the disarray leading up to our trip to the Azteca bumping the win probability might be worth the marginal hurt to the FIFA ranking.

Looking at this again, there is a 9th outcome needed, Costa Rica wins v. Panama tonight. A draw would also keep alive the possibility of the US not mathematically qualifying, but functionally qualifying by being 9 points ahead and about 10+ goals ahead in goal differential. Summing up, if you want the best case scenario, from today's games we need: - US wins v. El Salvador - Costa Rica wins v. Panama - Mexico wins v. Jamaica* *technically a draw would work but a win keeps margin for error in the Jamaica/CR matchup

To make it less abstract, the likeliest/easiest path to qualifying this window is: US wins all 3 Mexico wins all 3 Jamaica wins @ Panama Jamaica wins or draws v. Costa Rica There's only 1 game that is a fairly significant underdog in that group (Jamaica win @ Panama), but going 8 for 8 is always gonna be an extreme longshot.

why would that matter? It illustrates how much playing time and injury risk you're actually saving with the convoluted rules. If you just play a 10 minute period it's a rounding error in terms of how much additional football is being played. And actually now that I think of it, this probably undercounts slightly because I was going by the the time of the last score, and it's possible to have the last score in overtime be prior to the final whistle if the first drive is a FG. At the same time it also points to the coin flip advantage not necessarily being in winning off the bat like the Chiefs did on Sunday(only 1 overtime went less than 4 minutes, also Mahomes and the Chiefs winning with a TD), but that they get their 2nd/3rd/4th drives of OT(when it is sudden death) before the opponent.

Just to put some numbers behind it, there were 20 overtime games in the regular season, so 1.11 per week and 1.25 per team. By my envelope math, the average duration was 6:55, which means that just playing the full 10 minute period without extra win conditions would have added 61 minutes of gametime(3.4 per week, 1.9 per team) across the entire season.

I had to go relook up the new GM was again, honestly. Care to share what you found? yeesh guys, it's Caden Braden-McFayden

why would a team ever NOT take the ball, regardless of where it is spotted. I can't think of any scenarios. I don't know a ton about the specific expected value from various drive starting points, but I would guess that there's a point where the expected points from each team's first drive tip in the favor of the team without the ball to start because of field position. And with the time it takes for 2 drives you'd be signing up to likely be ahead with only a couple minutes left at most. The prisoner's dilemma of one team picking spot and the other team picking ball would keep that advantage from being too extreme though, if you pick the 1 your opponent is gonna stick you there, but if you pick the 10? The 15? Probably closer to a coin flip(again, with the caveat that I know nothing about football probabilities)

Ramsdale has been the breakout keeper of the year so Turner would be a backup/cup keeper. This apparently frees them to dump Leno. Yes, but all the people who thought Steffen can't be on his game because he's a cup goalkeeper would have to switch too.

An extra year of control of a player you think is good enough to win MVP/CY/ROY in their rookie year, but they play 25-30 fewer games or An extra supplemental draft pick if a rookie wins MVP/CY/ROY and they play 25-30 more games yes this will clearly solve the incentive problem

I'd still be a little uneasy about Dest going to Chelsea, but reading about all the CBs out of contract after this year(increasing the likelihood James could move there) and remembering Chilwell's out long term makes it a little easier to see the path forward. Regularly playing in a back 5 isn't ideal but at least Tuchel is like Berhalter in that he really emphasizes defensive solidity first.

I had a response to your original plan that said it was pretty similar to this one. The obvious issue is that the major league teams and their fans just don't care nearly enough about the MLB draft. Fans especially don't care, but teams increasingly do, or at least they care about the spending pools associated with them. Right now even if you set aside payroll, it's a viable strategy to target a future 2-4 years away and not care about anything but making the team good on that date, since the team being worse in the meantime is a feature. If you can't reliably count on that benefit, then teams are more incentivized to try to at least be watchable even if they're waiting for a wave of prospects. For example, last year the Orioles and D-Backs had 2 of the 7 worst records since the turn of the century, but here's some envelope math(I'm really eyeballing this so don't quote me) on 2021 post-elimination wins: Texas 13 Baltimore 12 Pittsburgh 11 Minnesota 9 Arizona 8 Kansas City 8 Washington 5 Miami 5 Cubs 4 Given the difference in leagues you might need to normalize this to choose 'elimination' as when you can no longer get a Top 10(or 14) record in MLB, and I'm not gonna re-do the envelope math for that, but if Arizona can lose 110 games and barely get a Top 5 pick/pool, that's gonna change some behaviors.

I think it would have to be like the top 3 of each division automatically qualify for the next senior circuit, and then the top four from the junior circuit playoff fills out the spots? Still think there's some serious timing issues there, though his idea of idea of spreading the senior circuit playoff throughout the year would help a little? I hand waved the specific numbers a little bit because reasonable people can disagree on the specific qualification line, but Squally has the right idea. The missing piece is when. This year's division play and Junior Circuit playoffs determine the composition of *next year's* Senior Circuit, which is why you don't have to wait for the Junior Circuit playoffs to finish to start the Senior Circuit. That "multi-year championship" change would definitely be the biggest adjustment. To move away from my hypothetical that will never happen, BN has been evangelizing the "Gold Plan" that has circulated in a couple different sports as an anti-tanking measure: https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2022/01/04/i-think-im-in-love-with-the-the-anti-tanking-gold-plan/ The tl;dr is draft order is determined by who has the most wins after the point where they are eliminated from the playoffs. So the worst teams still have the most opportunity to get a high pick, but they're still incentivized to try and it's harder to intentionally be a bottom 5 team for the draft+pool benefits

'Attendance is better for sporting events with competitive stakes' is not a fact I expected to have to argue, because is obviously and objectively true. This is more true for sports with short seasons where every game could tilt the outcome of the season. A 162 game season means that the stakes are relatively low on a per-game basis, and there isn't much the commissioner can do to juice ticket sales for a random Reds v Pirates game. I'm genuinely confused, is this a bit? If the Reds and Pirates are in 1st/2nd place in September their attendance will be very different than if they're playing out the string in the cellar. The Pirates drew a million more fans per year during their playoff runs than they did in their 4th/5th place finishes a couple years later. That's a fair question, I don't know. It'd definitely be a change in those specifics, and while I think fans are used to thinking in multi-year timelines already(given how many of them understand and/or approve of teams optimizing draft position and years of team control) and would acclimate to a new norm pretty quickly, it's possible they wouldn't. In other sports the idea of division/conference record mattering separately from other games outside that group doesn't seem to be too alienating, at least.

Correct. Baseball constantly trying to appeal to people who don't like baseball rather than make the experience better for people who do. 'Attendance is better for sporting events with competitive stakes' is not a fact I expected to have to argue, because is obviously and objectively true.

I think this would definitely hurt attendance for Junior Circuit teams. Possibly! But our baseline is attendance for the bottom half of the league post-trade deadline, not a high bar. Almost all of those teams were 8+ games out of playoff position at the start of August, in this example they are starting with a clean slate that gives them a second chance at advancing and in a pool that doesn't include the best teams to improve their odds.

Multiple competitions is a great way to make more games matter, but they cant just be a random sideshow, they have to connect together, and the best way to do that is to connect them over multiple seasons. Here’s a hypothetical I put some thought into, but don’t get hung up on the specific numbers. Imagine a 32 team MLB with 4 divisions of 8. The regular season is ~100 games only against your division(limiting travel, helping weeknight attendance, deepening rivalries), where the top 4 in each division qualify for next year’s ‘senior circuit’ and the bottom 4 qualify for the ‘junior circuit’(call them what you want). Those 2 ‘tournaments’ are ~50 games (everyone plays one series against everyone) with a 4-8 team playoff at the end. The senior circuit playoff is the world series, and the junior circuit playoff is a play in to next year’s senior circuit(and draft position/rev sharing if you want). I’d prefer that competition be intertwined through the regular season too, but you could do it all at the end if you prefer. The upshot is that there’s way fewer meaningless games, even bad teams will have only a week or so in each competition where they’re truly out of it, and a team could be bad in one competition and good in another. It also disincentivizes tanking in multiple ways. There’s probably unintended consequences and it’ll almost certainly never happen, but it’s the best way I can think of to balance the tension baseball has where its biggest asset as an entertainment property is volume of games, but way too many of them are meaningless(even in a world without tanking).

things can be 2 things

Probably because people are not intellectually curious and would assume(or do assume, since they almost certainty tested it in groups) that another red+noun nickname is also bad and therefore complain about it, not buy merch, etc

man, looking at that SOS link it's really too bad that every Cavs guard aside from Garland had a catastrophic injury, they might've been able to make some real noise

Yeah, I love the current setup. I literally take the week of the Division series off every year. Unfortunately, I think we're 100% getting expanded playoffs. It's pretty clearly the Players' biggest negotiating chip. Fortunately, it sounds like the MLBPA knows it's a Trojan horse for owners to be less competitive. So we'll see some incentives to maintain competitive balance. Like I'm expecting something like this: - 3 division winners + 3 wildcards in each league - Top 2 division winners get byes in the WC round - 3rd division winner plays against WC#3 in WC round, but gets all three games at home - WCs 1 & 2 play a 3 game set, but they DO have to travel without an off day The owners get up to 10 additional playoff games, but I don't think this actually hurts competitive balance. In fact I think this is a win pretty much up and down the win curve. As a viewer I hate hate hate losing the 1 game wildcard round, but something like this might be much better for the game macroeconomically I don't expect it because the players likely aren't huge fans, but if we are going down this path I really want games 1 and 2 to be double-headers. It adds the potential for single day finality and keeps the TV event nature of the round, plus it helps reward regular season performance in a couple ways. Not only the hosting of the double header(and Game 3 too for all I care) for higher seeded teams, but the nature of those games will reward deeper rosters/stronger SP performance, and help with the increasing divide between regular season and playoff play styles.

I think it applies to not only every sport, but almost every corporate entity, the #1 criteria for hiring is prior experience (even if that experience was effectively destroying a franchise), but after that, the #2 is knowing someone already in the business, and nepotism is a built in version of that. However, the NFL does seem particularly egregious for inbred coaching hires. How many chances did Rex Ryan get to fail because he was the son of Buddy Ryan? Yeah, it was the scope that got me. For a sport that creates more ex-players at the college and pro level than any other, having so many legacy coaches as the norm was really striking. Especially when the article gets into some of the specifics and how comparatively unqualified they are(the Belichick sons in particular made me raise my eyebrows).

I don't follow the NFL that closely and maybe other sports are similar, but I found this piece about nepotism in NFL coaching to be interesting: https://defector.com/just-how-big-a-problem-is-nepotism-in-nfl-coaching/

The two young american strikers in MLS got their permanent European moves. Dike to West Brom for 8-10 million. On the upside Dike should get some playing time at a level he's had success in, especially reuniting with his old Barnsley coach. On the downside, reuniting with that coach means going back to playing bumper car soccer(I assume, can't say I've watched West Brom this year) so I'm not sure how well this is going to prepare him to move up the USMNT depth chart outside of taking Pefok's "big guy to win the ball in the air off the bench" role. Plus there's a little bit of purgatory where with West Brom either he stays in the Championship which isn't a huge step up competitively, or he goes to the Prem and gets even fewer chances to play actual soccer against teams with 10x the budget. Best case scenario is he goes back to scoring for fun in the Championship but they don't get promoted, which keeps him in form through the world cup and maybe a move that winter or summer 2023. Pepi to Augsburg for 18-20 million. This one has more going for it. Augsburg play a 2 striker system with neither performing and just made Pepi their record transfer, so he's gonna play. Despite being in the relegation zone they do attempt to play attacking soccer(hopefully avoiding the Sargent at Bremen problem) and the Bundesliga has a lot more parity so they don't have to starve the forwards of attacking reps in half their games. The downside here is that relegation risk, they're only 1 point clear of the playoff and several of the teams surrounding them(Stuttgart, Gladbach, Wolfsburg) have been better than Augsburg in the past. If they don't stay up then Pepi's going to be playing at (imo) a sub-MLS level heading into the world cup, which isn't great. Hopefully they hit their stride with a striker who can score and someone like Bochum runs out of steam.

Every day is a sad day that the original Twitter rule #1 tweet is gone, but some moreso than others

I think you’ve got some big spurs-colored glasses with the framing of the play here, man. Don’t what else to say but I disagree on every word. 1) keepers are uniquely exposed when coming out for a ball, like a wide receiver reaching for a pass over the middle 2) keepers are significantly more valuable to take out of a play than anyone else on the field, there’s a reason that some corner kick routines try to box them out, to allow some contact is to invite everyone to try to take out the keeper legally because there’s huge rewards even if you don’t win the ball 3) because of 1 and 2, adding any leeway increases injury risk to keepers significantly, because they’re vulnerable and valuable you’ve now made it the logical play to try to physically box them out of every play, hoping that a small percentage get the judgment call to go your way. That means keepers are taking bumps left and right on balls in the box, and all because a keeper fumbled a ball while being hip checked on a hopeful cross? All rules are arbitrary but these ones are fine.