FanNation - The Republic of Sport

Just some thoughts about FN posts, based on my observations during the past season.

Disrespecting your opponent

Given what I see in many of the so-called debates about the current situation in college football, it's pretty tough to imagine such a debate being meaningful if you consider your opponents in the discussion to be morons.  This doesn't mean that you can't disagree about the interpretation of the facts - far from it.  But if you believe that a person's capability for rational thought is entirely contingent on agreeing with you about virtually everything, then you're manifestly disrespecting your opponent.  It amounts to a form of closed-mindedness, and an absolutely closed mind in any argument renders the argument meaningless.  

To describe your “opponent” in an argument as an idiot for thinking in a way that differs from yours immediately terminates the meaningful part of the debate.  From then on, it’s name-calling and posturing.  Of course, there’s the logical possibility that you’re indeed having an argument with a fool – but continuing such an argument is inherently pointless, so it need not go on with invective and insults. If this is the way you choose to proceed, you and the fool are on equal footing!

I'm a fan of University of Oklahoma (OU) football, and have been since I matriculated here at OU as a new graduate student.  I love nothing more than seeing University of Texas (UT) football fans in anguish over OU's advancement to the BCS National Championship Game with the University of Florida (UF).  An important reason for the sweetness of that situation is that I know in my own heart that it could just as easily be OU that was "left out" of the running for a national championship! Listening to futile weeping and gnashing of teeth by UT fans was pure joy!

There were meaningful arguments in favor of all three teams tied for the top of the Big-12 South Division - OU, UT, and Texas Tech. University (TT) - and the tie-breaker came down to which team was getting the most positive national attention at the end of the year.  The schedule definitely favored OU in this respect, which had to play three very challenging games at the end of the year, whereas the opponents UT played at the end of the year were considerably less challenging.  Bad luck for UT and good luck for OU, which went out and won those last three games by substantial margins.  Is this fair?  No.  But many things in life aren't fair.  Had the shoe been on the other foot and UT had advanced to the Big-12 Championship game instead of OU, I certainly would be unhappy about that outcome, but - I wouldn't thereby consider all UT fans to be brainless bozos for believing their team deserved to be there.  The problem is that the BCS almost inevitably is unfair to someone every year, and it’s not the fault of OU football and its fans. I respect and understand the fervor of UT fans, but don't believe they're justified in seeing arguments in favor of OU playing in the BCS National Championship game as entirely without basis.

I happen to be friends with quite a few UT fans, and I think we can enjoy the good-natured ribbing about the outcome of the season that flows from one team winning and the other losing, without losing any respect for each other. Do I take pleasure in the unhappiness of UT fans?  You bet!  And when the shoe is on the other foot, as it inevitably is from time to time, I'm sure they enjoy my discomfort.  So what?  They're still my friends!!  The whole thing about these never-ending arguments is that they're fun!  After all, these aren't life and death issues.  There's no need to demonize or dehumanize opposing fans.  Agreeing with me is not a criterion for my respect or my friendship, and my UT fan friends are equally rational about the situation, despite their foolish commitment to the wrong team! <);-)

A significant fraction of the content of FN message boards on this subject is dominated by abusive, mean-spirited remarks about the fans of the opposing team, to the point where whole states are being condemned as slimeballs, rednecks, and morons. When someone makes such blanket statements about the fans of another team, they ignore the fact that some of their own fans are guilty of similar behavior.  I make no denials that some OU fans also participate in abusive "arguments" in these message boards.  There's no more excuse for that than comparable remarks from non-OU fans.

The Heisman debate

Moving on, consider the now-pointless argument over who should get the Heisman trophy for 2008.  The general consensus is that the three top candidates were Colt McCoy (UT), Sam Bradford (OU), and Tim Tebow (UF).  All three fan bases supported their candidate and offered various arguments in favor of their team's candidate.  Of course, there were other candidates besides this trio, each of whom had valid arguments in their favor, but they didn’t manage to break into the top three, much less win the Heisman trophy - fair or not.  Various interpretations of the factual information can be used to buttress the candidacy of any candidate.  The Big-12 apparently had better offenses and weaker defenses than the SEC, so Tebow was clearly the top candidate because of the stronger defenses he had to overcome to win.  Apparently, OU and UF had better skill players on offense than UT, so Colt McCoy was better because he has to do more with less for his team to win than either Bradford or Tebow.  Bradford's statistics were obviously superior regarding touchdown passes, interceptions, etc., so his numbers made him better than McCoy or Tebow.

The problem with these arguments is that although they had varying degrees of validity (I'll get to that later), they were all logically valid interpretations of the facts, chosen to favor one candidate or another (see below), whereas the notion of the Heisman Trophy recipient being the nation's "best collegiate football player" is very ill-defined.  Traditionally, it goes to offensive rather than defensive players, which is not a necessary limitation on deciding which football player is the "best in the nation".  Why couldn't the best player be on defense? How do we define the "best collegiate football player"?  By statistics?  Sort of.  By the quality of the team around the candidate?  Well, sort of.  By consistent performance through the season?  Sort of.  B \y career accomplishments?  Sort of.  By potential to make it in the NFL?  Sort of.  It seems to me that every year, the combination of ingredients that go into picking the Heisman trophy winner varies, depending on who's out there for folks to consider.  Minor college players are apparently out of the running altogether - perhaps because of the perceived caliber of the opposing teams, despite the established fact that many Heisman winners fail to succeed in the NFL, whereas many minor college players do perform well in the NFL.

Best by comparison with whom?  Although the notion of "best collegiate football player" leaves the issue pretty much wide open, the tradition always has been to select quarterbacks or running backs from a limited set of "big-time" schools contending for the mythical national championship in Division 1-A (FBS).  If it must be an offensive player (for some as-yet unspecified reason), why not a tight end?  Why not an offensive lineman?  Why not a blocking back?  We can have all the debates we want, but without a clear definition agreed upon by all participants, the arguments are all essentially meaningless.  They generate a lot of sound and fury, and may even be fun, but they signify nothing, in the end.  Someone gets an award and everyone else is in last place, fair or not.

Appropriate comparisons

When a debate involves quantitative comparisons, it's important that the comparisons be appropriate and robust.  This issue is frequently described as "comparing apples and oranges" - the essential point is rather more complicated than that, but the metaphor captures at least part of the issue.  There are times when comparing apples and oranges is entirely logical, as in a quantitative comparison of their nutritional value, for instance.

Anyway, in college football, comparisons typically involve one or more of the quantitative aspects of the game (scores, rushing offense, passing defense, turnover margin, etc.).  Team A beats Team B, Team C then beats Team A, and Team B then beats Team C.  Which team is best?  If the games don't produce a clear-cut winner, statistical comparisons of various sorts can be used to buttress arguments in favor of one team over another.  This was precisely the problem in the Big-12 South Division this year.  Not only does this set of game outcomes leave the issue of which team is best in doubt, but comparing the specific outcomes is ultimately flawed, for numerous reasons:

1. Although football is a team game, individual player-to-player matchups on both offense and defense often affect the outcome of the game
2. Injuries to key players (and/or player suspensions and ejections) before or during the game can alter the lineups during the game (which comes back to point #1)
3. Teams typically have only a limited number of opponents in common, and the outcomes with common opponents are affected by other components of this list
4. On any given day, the "breaks" (good or bad officiating, random bounces of the ball, etc.) can have a large impact on the outcome of a game
5. "Big plays" also often have a large impact on the outcome of a game, but may depend on factors other than pure player ability (e.g., #4)
6. Home versus road versus neutral site arguments are of some value but are not so determinative as many people chose to infer
7. Team and individual psychological factors play a major role in a team's performance on a given day
8. External factors, such as weather or playing field conditions, may favor one team over another

In college football, even "head-to-head" outcomes don't always determine which team is the better of the two teams playing that day.  The game does determine a winner, but the best team doesn’t win every game!  A single-elimination tournament doesn't always wind up with the best team as its champion.  Seedings and the factors listed above all enter into the way such a tournament plays out.  One way to solve this dilemma would be to vary the player lineups, weather conditions, fields, and seedings randomly and play hundreds of games amongst all possible team pairings, with the final decision about which team is best determined by the average of the ensemble of outcomes. Such an ensemble is completely impractical, but if done, it would make a much stronger and robust statement about overall team quality than any single game.

To the extent that we can look to head-to-head outcomes as deterministic, we can bask in the joy of winning or hang our heads in disappointment over losing, but such outcomes really are not deterministic.  In many cases where rematches occur (as in bowl games or conference championships), they often go the other way from the first game between a pair of relatively evenly-matched teams.

Note that I'm not saying that game outcomes are completely random and without any meaning whatsoever about overall team quality.  But when comparing relatively evenly-matched teams, past outcomes and piles of statistics are not completely reliable indicators of which team is 'best'.  In fact, when we compare teams, deciding which is 'best' can be difficult, not only for all the reasons I've listed, but because there's no completely robust definition of 'bestness' (save perhaps my abstract notion of an ensemble of outcomes under varying conditions). It's a concept we love to argue about, but without such a definition, the arguments ultimately are pointless.  The games are played, and a winner emerges.  The rest remains unsettled.

If all the factors that we know about and measure were, in some combination, completely determinative, then it simply wouldn't be necessary to play the games.  A computer program using all those factors would never be wrong in deciding the winner in every game.  Would that be awful, or what?  Predicting outcomes would be an exact science and all of the fun would be taken out of college football.  If we can't predict the outcomes with perfect accuracy, and no one can, then there's always uncertainty about the outcome.  Upsets are a symptom of this. OU 'upset' FSU for the 2000 National Championship.  In 2008, OU was 'upset' by UT, then UT was 'upset' by TT, and then TT was 'upset' by OU.  The arguments that ensue from this set of outcomes can be fun, but aren't very meaningful.

Cherry-picking

Another common problem is seeing what you want to see as opposed to seeing what's actually there.  There's nothing that prevents any of us from having a prejudiced view of the situation, and that's something that anyone who wishes to have a meaningful argument needs to guard against.  This is another form of misinterpretation of the facts, but is associated with directly with fan prejudices.  Fans pick and choose which aspects of the numbers favor their teams.  If you recognize you have a prejudice, you have to accept that someone else who has a different prejudice could evaluate the same evidence in an opposite way from the way you did, picking different things to emphasize.  If the results are not so unambiguously one way or another, at the very least, you should understand why someone might feel differently from you about the facts.  It might be that you couldn't sway your opponent nor could you be swayed by your opponent's arguments, but you wouldn't be so inclined to disrespect that opposing view.  And you might learn something useful from having to defend your interpretation from someone with a different version.  A closed mind in an argument over which evidence is most important often renders the argument meaningless.