Hey, y’all. It’s that time again. LET’S DISSECT SOME SHITTY BASEBALLING!
Before we start, I’d suggest that you loop this and listen to it whilst reading because … ugh.
**** REFRESH TO UPDATE! ****
And that’s it from the Xbox Reveal. We’ll post some more high quality screens in a separate post after Microsoft puts it on-demand.
An exclusive look from Wired on the design of the Xbox One:
What in the hell is up with Ricky Rubio’s legs?
The NFL and Microsoft ALSO teaming up for fantasy football.
Lionel Messi in action on the Xbox One:
GIF of RGIII in action on the Xbox One:
Looks like the XBOX is getting exclusive Ultimate Team content for FIFA 14.
FIFA, Madden, UFC, NBA Live (lol) will be developed for release within the next 12 months. No NHL mention.
Controller specs.
The full specs for anyone interested. Buddy on stage just called it “space-age technology”… chill with that.
You’ll be able to live track your sports fantasy teams WHILE watching sports:
Here’s how your Xbox One controller looks:
Official name: The Xbox One. Here’s how it looks:
“For the first time you and your TV are going to have a relationship. It’s going to recognize my voice, my face, etc.” A little creepy.
3 minutes away. Before we begin, just wanted to say that by 360 red ringed on me yesterday, while in the second round of a NBA 2K13 Online Association Mode playoffs. THANKS.
Seats being filled right now.
Touched on this earlier, but we will for sure be seeing how the FIFA franchise looks on the next-gen consoles, but all other games are just rumors. I can also see NBA Live getting some sort of mention as they’re pushing that game for the next-gens.
The tent the event will be held in. Looks fun. Or kinds cult-ish. Whatever.
Today’s the day Microsoft unveils the next Xbox system, and we are here to cover and rip into every minute of their presentation. There’s a ton of rumors as what we should be expecting, but since we focus more on sports gaming, look for this liveblog to be sports heavy. I’m hearing reports that we’ll be seeing some features from FIFA, UFC, Madden and others. Will try and update as much as possible with timestamps (all timestamps in Eastern time).
Not all successful junior coaches are cut out to coach pro hockey, but a certain type should expect to have an even tougher time: “name” junior coaches.
I bring this up in light of the news over the past day or two from Adrian Dater of the Denver Post that Patrick Roy is very likely to be named the head coach of the Colorado Avalanche. Dater relays the news from Stéphane Roy, Patrick’s brother:
“They’re discussing the final details of an arrangement. Colorado is going to be very happy. Patrick is looking for a new challenge,” said Stephane Roy, the younger brother of his famous sibling.
And:
Stephane Roy, who played briefly in the NHL, posted on his Facebook page Monday night, “For all my friends I’d like you to know before the official news spreads that my older brother will be the new coach of the Colorado Avalanch(sic).”
So yeah, it sounds like this is happening.
Roy may very well go to Colorado and succeed, but I can think of a few reasons to be skeptical. Read the rest of this entry »
The season is over, and some of the model assessments among the soccer analytics community are starting to trickle in. Martin Eastwood is first out of the gate, whose eponymous index was included in Counter Attack’s Friday Football Predictions model comparison. It turns out the Index did rather well:
Looking at Figure 1 you can see that the Eastwood Index has consistently outperformed the bookmakers all season – and this isn’t just one bookmaker that the Eastwood Index has beaten but the combined knowledge of the industry as I’ve aggregated multiple bookmakers’ odds together and stripped out the overround to make the comparison as tough as possible.
Interestingly, the difference in accuracy seems to be greatest as both ends of the season. I expected the start of the season to be difficult to forecast as new teams have been promoted, players have been bought and sold, and managers may have changed clubs but the Eastwood Index seems to have coped with these variables better than the bookmakers’ odds have.
While Eastwood published his promising results today, the post follows nicely on a Twitter discussion I had earlier on the weekend. One prominent anaytics blogger was calling out a popular stats site for posting game recommendations from professional “tipsters,” those guys who have a lock on this, that, or the next thing. All he needed to do was post up their success percentage. A bitchy thing to do perhaps, but necessary.
I don’t think it needs too much stressing, but if you’re hoping to make money on the subjective recommendations of a guy on the Internet relying on nothing but his heuristic hunch and his self-proclaimed expert status, you’re going to have a bad time. But this got me thinking about ways to address sceptical attitudes about the predictive efficacy of analytics, and about the use and application of football analytics in general.
Let’s imagine for a moment a weird and implausible dystopian future in which governments forced citizens to bet all their earnings on football matches. Chances are, a lot more people would have a vested interest in football, and Bill Shankly’s claim that football is more than life and death would take on a whole new meaning.
Within this world, experts would come out of the woodwork with advice on how to make your weekly, government enforced football wagers. Some opportunist characters might claim you could make a quick buck fast by betting against the odds on one or two matches based on their advice. Others might go on the basis of pundits and opinion-shapers in the big papers. Still others would argue for a safe investment strategy that doesn’t stray far from the official betting lines. And then you’d get people like Eastwood publishing predictions based on an internal empirically-based betting model.
Remember: these bets are enforced. You don’t have the choice here not to play. You’re entire livelihood depends on your ability to make safe wagers, and if you’re lucky, you can earn a little when the games break against the odds. Which approach do you choose?
Well, the smart investor would likely choose a proven, ever-improving predictive model provided by one of the analysts, right? Particularly as the tipsters’ success rates are all noise and no signal. While this should be obvious, even in our normal, everyday world, many investors make decisions based on gut feelings, some of which turn out well, and some don’t. This isn’t to completely dismiss subjective impressions in making investment choices, but to show that they cannot compete with a a solid statistical model built for long-term success.
Perhaps over time, those model forecasters would show the most consistently stable return on investment. If you were a football betting advisor, you know which portfolio you’d choose. You probably wouldn’t look too much into the model’s methods, and you’d stop watching football, confident it will all balance out in the long run.
This should be self-evident, and yet time and time again many in football choose to trust the subjective impression of journalists or TV pundits over the boring, hard evidence provided in by good statistical analysis. Remember: in betting analytics, statistics are not used to proscribe how football should be played. Rather, for the most part it’s more interested in football as it is already played. No one is currently or at least credibly calling for wholesale changes to how the game is played based on this kind of analysis, or at least not yet.
As long as football is won or lost on tactical decisions and good players with luck thrown in to make things interesting, there will always be a place for storytelling provided by chumps like yours truly. The problem is when chumps like me start sniffing their own farts and trusting their subjective impressions over the record of evidence. If you’re livelihood depended on it though, the choice should be obvious.
After a 47-win season during his first year in control of the Raptors’ holodeck, Bryan Colangelo has struggled to put together a winning team. In the six seasons since, Toronto has reached .500 only one other time, and even that was just a 41-41 campaign during the 2007-08 season. It’s Bad News Bears over there, and Bryan Colangelo is kind of Walter Matthau.
But that’s OK, because the Raptors brought in some new management, which means Bryan Colangelo is on his way out. Sort of, if by “out” you mean “down the hall.” From the Globe and Mail:
Bryan Colangelo will remain on as team president, but the search for a new general manager has begun, the Toronto Raptors confirmed on Tuesday.
The revamped senior leadership of the National Basketball Association team was outlined by Tim Leiweke, the incoming president and chief executive officer of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, in a news release.
MSLE is also continuing a search, with input from Colangelo, to identify candidates for the new GM, a process the team hopes to complete in the next 30 days.
“After thorough evaluation and considering all the options, we have concluded that these changes will be in the best interest of the organization,” said Leiweke. “By splitting the roles and having both men report directly to me, we are adding depth to the basketball operations group and giving the Toronto Raptors the best chance of competing for championships in the future. The new GM will inherit a great situation in Toronto, as all of my due diligence around the League indicates that we have a fine, young core and a few key moves will make us a playoff contender next season.”
While the new GM will have autonomy over basketball decisions, Colangelo will continue to advise Leiweke on basketball-related matters while also broadening his involvement with the business side of the franchise.
I know what you’re thinking and I’m thinking it too — this is gonna get weird … two GMs. I mean, why would you keep a largely failed GM around to give advice on basketball decisions when you are hiring a new GM who is actually in charge of basketball decisions? It’s bizarre, and the only thing I can think of that is even comparable is the John Paxson/Gar Forman braintrust that makes decisions for the Chicago Bulls.
So why would the Raptors want to keep Bryan Colangelo around when it’s not really necessary? Well, there are actually a lot of reasons.
As you can see, keeping Bryan Colangelo around to make the Raptors more interesting is simply a matter of convenience. No one wants to give up Portugese chicken or high-collared dress shirts. It makes sense.
Type Armond Armstead’s name into YouTube, and you’ll stumble upon a six-minute clip that highlights the talent of the 22-year-old defensive lineman. As expected, there are plays of hell-raising, and backfield penetration throughout the video. It’s supposed to be that way — it’s a highlight film after all — and then once you watch a full-length game of his, you’re supposed to come away somewhat disappointed.
Except you don’t.
In a dizzying chain of events that it seems only Toronto sports fans have been forced to get used to, the Raptors announced on Tuesday morning that Bryan Colangelo would be relieved of his General Manager duties while maintaining the seemingly higher position of team President.
While there is certainly some merit to believing such traits to be beneficial, we mostly elevated the glory of our menial tasks for the purpose of justifying our current state and forgetting the bad decisions that led us to physical labor as a livelihood. In addition to fooling ourselves in this manner, we’d mock office workers, imagining their professions to be less honorable than our own.
“How can they feel any measure of self-worth?” we’d ask ourselves.
Ten years later, as part of my job, I would embed a YouTube clip of a Callaway Golf executive putting a golf ball down two sets of staggered stairs and into a cup. If my former co-workers could only see me now.
A seat at the 19th hole for Shane Bacon of the Devil Ball golf blog.
