Tarr's Blog

Being the bully (no Ultimate content)

2007-11-19T21:38:00.001-07:00

Disclaimer: My two favorite teams are the Redskins (remember 52-7?) and Indianapolis. I have argued (and continue to argue) for Manning in the endless Manning vs. Brady debates. I pretty much hate the Pats, although I certainly admire them.

So... the 10-0 Patriots are running up the score. Everybody's favorite Monday morning water cooler topic, it seems. So, what up?

Firstly - the argument that they are running up the score because "you gotta play your starters for three quarters" is bullshit, plain and simple. Belichick is a very smart guy and has a well documented history of behaving in unconventional ways (going for it on 4th all the time, drastically differing schemes for different games, using players both ways, using more starters on special teams, et cetera) and would have absolutely no problem rolling out the second string in the third quarter if that was what he thought was best for his team.

Furthermore, there's an obvious reason why he should roll out the reserves - injuries. You have to look no further than the arch-rival Colts, whose chance to derail the Patriots year of destiny seems to have shattered along with Dwight Freeney's midfoot (and a tidal wave of other injuries). They looked nearly as spectacular as the Patriots when they were dismantling Jacksonville 5 weeks ago, but now they are playing a 6th string tackle and can barely eke out victories against average teams. Injuries are a fact of life in the NFL, and aside from a few relatively unimportant players, the Patriots have skirted them so far. The earlier you get your key guys off the field, the less risk you incur.

Add to the concern that, if anything, the risk of injury is even greater in a blowout. It's easy to imagine a Jets defender diving into Randy Moss's knees when he makes a catch with a 40 point lead. (And holy crap, what a shit storm that would cause.)

The reality, which seems blatantly obvious to me, is that Belichick and the Patriots have made a conscious decision to run up the score, in spite of at least one very good reason to not do so. The question then becomes, why did they make that choice? As I see it, there are two reasons, one for the other team, and the other for the Patriots.

1) Intimidation. It works, plain and simple. It's psychological warfare. Not for the game they are playing, which is already effectively over, but for the next game and the game after that. Most teams have already lost the game in their minds when they take the field against the Pats. They aren't playing to win; they just don't want to be embarrassed. It's an extra edge, and if there's anything we know about Belichick, it's that he is always looking for an extra edge, no matter how much of an edge he already has.

2) The legacy. These Patriots want all the records. They want Brady to shatter (not just break, but shatter) Manning's TD record and passer rating record. They want Moss to break Rice's receiving TD record. They want to break the record for most points by a team in a season. They want to break the record for average margin of victory. They want to be the first team to go 19-0.

Here's the thing: why the heck not? Why should they settle for winning games by 20, resting the starters and losing their last game, and just taking home the title without extra fanfare? If you had already won 3 titles in the last six years, and you had a chance to put a giant stamp on the history books, so that nobody would EVER forget to mention your team when they discussed the all-time greats, then why wouldn't you? Why should they feel bad about this?

I know that if I was a Pats fan, I'd be loving every garbage time toss to Moss. I know that I wish Peyton had piled on another 10 TDs on his record in 2004. If you don't think he could have, look at the game logs. Only 1 of the 49 could be reasonably considered a garbage time throw. He didn't play the second half in the blowouts. I guess he really didn't care about the individual stuff that much. But these Patriots, as a team, clearly do. They consider the numbers to be part of their legacy.

Belichick, a football history buff himself, recognizes this and plays into it. He does pull the starters, but only after they have put the exclamation point on the game and he's past the point of having even the slightest argument that they're not running up the score. There have been some pretty hilarious press conferences this year where Belichick has tried to argue that they weren't piling on.

I guess this is really the only thing about the situation that annoys me (other than the fact that it's a team I generally root against) - the denials and the fact that they are taken seriously. I wouldn't expect Belichick to do anything other than dodge the question, as that's the best way to minimize scrutiny. I just don't know why the media either questions whether they are running up the the score (they clearly are), or questions why they are (the two reasons above).

I think both of the reasons they are running it up invite criticism - nobody likes a bully, and you're "supposed" to only care about winning as oppose to stats. But again, if I were a Pats fan, I'd be loving it.

Updated approach to plus/minus stat

2007-10-16T14:56:00.001-06:00

A few folks out there are familiar with my wonky "adjusted plus/minus" stat. This statistic does not consider touches, turnovers, blocks, assists, or scores. All that is considered is who was in and whether they scored the point. As such, this data can be compiled using a pretty bare bones stat sheet.

I have made some updates to my approach to using this stat, partially motivated by some suggestions I have received. This new approach tries to compare a player not in an absolute sense, but in stead in a relative sense based on team expectations. Here's a summary of the approach, followed by an example.

1a) For a given game, divide points scored by total points to obtain overall efficiency.
1b) Obtain expected efficiency by comparing teams in the score reporter. For instance, this comparison of Jam and Sockeye currently predicts a 15-13.3 Sockeye win. So Sockeye's expected efficiency would be 52%.
1c) Divide overall efficiency by expected efficiency to get the "expectation ratio".

For the purposes of this algorithm, I would ideally collect the predicted score from the score reporter after the tournament is fully reported, before any future tournaments. Since recent games are weighted more in the RRI algorithm, this probably gives the truest measure of what should have been expected at that tournament.

2a) Count the number of offensive points the team played in each game, and how many they scored. Divide O-point scores by O points to get offensive efficiency for each game.
2b) Divide this total by the expectation ratio to get "expected offensive efficiency"

3ab) Repeat the above to get expected defensive efficiency for the game.

I debated whether there should be some "expected O/D split" in efficiency, but in the end I decided that the character of each game is unique due to wind effects and the like, and as such it's better to assume the O/D splits are as they should be.

4a) For any given player, compute their offensive efficiency based on the ratio of O points to O scores when they were on the field.
4b) Subtract the players offensive efficiency from the expected offensive efficiency in that game to obtain marginal offensive efficiency.
4c) Multiply marginal offensive efficiency by offensive points played to get that player's offensive plus/minus for that game.

5abc) Repeat the same for defensive points.

6) If desired, add the player's offensive and defensive plus/minus together to get overall plus/minus. This can then be divided by points played, and added to expected efficiency, to get the player's adjusted efficiency.

example:

When Ripe played Bad Larry at sectionals, we lost 13-12, for an efficiency of 48%. Our expected efficency in that game was 45%, giving us an expectation ratio of about 1.05.

We scored 9 of 12 O points, for an O efficiency of 75% and an expected O efficiency of 71.6% (i.e. we scored 3.4% more often than you would expect).

We scored 3 of 13 D points, for a D efficiency of 23.1% and an expected D efficiency of 22%.

We scored 5 of 6 O points I played, 11.7% more often than expected (83.3% - 71.6% = +11.7%). When multiplied by 6 O points played, this gives me an adjusted O plus/minus of .7 points (.117*6 = .7).

We scored 2 of 8 D points I played, 3% more than expected, for an adjusted D plus/minus of .24 points.

My overall adjusted plus/minus for the game was therefore +.94.

To give some context to that: the overall range for the game went from +2.47 (scored all four of her O points, and 2/3 D points) to -.88 (scored 0/4 D points, did not play on O). For the entire weekend, total plus/minus ranged from +8.67 to -2.41. Overall plus/minus was skewed toward positive because we exceeded our expected score in most games. (Also, the negative scores tend to be lower because people who are playing well play more.)

Time-saving form letter for August 25th

2007-07-25T07:05:00.001-06:00

As a service to the community, I am providing this letter. With a few simple text replacements, this letter should be appropriate for blog entries, letters to the UPA, and most of all, posts to rec.sport.disc.

---------------

SUBJECT: Let (team) play!

I just heard that the UPA is not going to let (team) play in (location) sectionals. This is ridiculous!

From what I heard from a friend of somebody on the team, (team) had their roster 99% legit on the UPA page at the deadline, but they just needed one more day to get those last few names in. They were only ONE DAY LATE!! It was probably the UPA's fault anyway, because the site was pretty slow on the 24th. There was no way (team) could have predicted that.

(Team) is one of the top teams in the (division) division. Without their presence in the fall series, the (division) championship will carry an asterisk, because we'll never know what (team) would have done.

I know the UPA loves to screw people, and say "rules are rules", but they should make an exception here. (team) didn't do anything wrong, and deserves to play.

---------------

If you plan ahead now, you could be all ready to send it out on the 25th. If you don't get your post out until the 26th because you had to do all the search-and-replace stuff on the 25th, you have nobody to blame except yourself.

I wish every team the best of luck in lodging complaints this fall.

The importance of saying stupid things

2007-07-23T06:43:00.000-06:00

Not counting league, I've been in a leadership position on five different teams, including my current club mixed team. As I've gotten older, I've gradually become a little more aware of the way other people take my comments, and it's definitely affected the way I talk when I'm addressing either the team or the individual. A couple things I've figured out:

- There's a limit to how many detailed ideas a team can absorb in a huddle. I'd generally say that that number is one, or (on average) slightly less than one. I think that, oddly enough, this is why saying what I would consider stupid or pointless comments are so important. Comments like "they're tired, if we keep running hard we're going to run away with this game" are, on the face of it, pretty pointless. I mean, when I say that, I don't think there's a single person on my team who

1) was thinking "gosh, we can win this game without working very hard", and
2) was convinced of the error of their ways by my comment.

But that's not the point. The point is twofold. One, these sorts of comments are easily understood and get people agreeing with what you are saying, which helps set up any more meaty comments you have in store. Second, there's really nothing better to say there, because too many ideas is just as bad as none at all.

- In order to help people get better, you really have to treat them like individuals. What I mean is that you have to understand how they deal with failure and how they take criticism. There are some people (I am one of them) who are perfectly willing to discuss the thing(s) they screwed up that point the moment they leave the field. But there are other people who both need time away from the play, and need for constructive criticism to be couched in positive language*. This is more common when I'm dealing with women, but it is NOT just a male/female thing - there are definitely women who want to discuss things right away, and there are men who I really have to walk on eggshells with.

OK, I'm done icing my left heel and my right ankle, so that's enough for now.

* for clarity - when I don't "couch things in positive language", I still avoid expressing anger/frustration at them. My "non-positive" approach is a straightforward "you did X, this is why Y is better". Particularly on a mixed team, I try to make sure people know it's unacceptable to lapse into the pointless habit of screaming at someone when they screw up.

Behind the wall

2007-07-02T14:19:00.000-06:00

I had an interesting conversation at a recent tournament with a guy who played on a high profile college team around a decade back. This was one of the top teams in the nation, and it was also one of the teams that had a reputation for aggressive play and bending the rules. This was before the days of (widespread, well trained) observers, and the gray area for rules abuse was much bigger. He was in a very different place as a player now, so he offered some interesting inside perspectives to me looking back on those days.

I've always been curious about what it was like to be on those teams, because they had to know, on some level, that they were blatantly breaking some rules and were winning through intimidation (in addition to talent). And yet, while these teams had always freely admitted to enjoying a physical style of play and occasionally fouling as a result, I've never heard admissions of intentionally breaking the rules. Despite this, these players have often seemed exceptionally mellow and friendly off the field. This contrast - nice guys acting in a way that earns them hatred, and then being somewhat dishonest about it - seems jarring to me.

A few tidbits I got from this conversation:

- He basically confirmed hat there was a (largely unspoken) rule on this team that you back your teammate up, no matter what the call or situation. And you do it vocally. That was just the culture of the team. That's not too different from a lot of teams now, I suppose.

- Although he couldn't be sure, he was fairly convinced that many of the worst fouls /calls/infractions that the team leaders made were made intentionally. That's no shocker, but what I found interesting was that he thought the motivation was not to get that one possession, but rather to control the pace/style/mood of the game.

- Most interesting to me was an anecdote he told about a bad call he made. He had a layout catch that he got his hand under, but the disc was down. He called it up, and stood by his call after a huge argument broke out. Nobody on his team said a word in dissent at the time. Over a week later, however, after a team meeting, one older player on the team pulled him aside and said "if the disc is down, call it down".

So, you get total support at the time of the call, but on some level, at least some players on the team wanted to win without making any obviously bad calls along the way. So, the culture of SOTG did seep in to these teams, if only to a tiny degree.

Cleats

2007-06-18T16:41:00.000-06:00

Sweet.
Sweet.

Yes, I got two pair. Yes, I paid the "buy it now" price rather than bid and cross my fingers. When a cleat that's been discontinued for two years shows up in my size, I don't mess around. For me, the perfect cleat is the 3/4 height speed TD. Maybe they will start making them again, and/or I will find another cleat as light, durable, comfotable, supportive, and effective. But I'm not taking any chances. I have four pairs now, which should last me into the next decade.

I just wanted to share my good fortune. Idris has blogged about cleats (more than once) before, and there are recurring rsd threads on the subject, too.

NBA divisions (no ultimate content)

2007-06-15T07:18:00.000-06:00

A lot of talk from various sports columnists about how to fix the NBA. When the lottery happened a lot of people wrote about how to improve it (this was my favorite idea although it's too kooky to ever get implemented). Now the in-vogue idea is to re-seed the playoffs 1-16. That way the west/east imbalance (which, amazingly, looks like it is going to get worse before it gets better) is not an issue.

I actually like this idea, however, if you're going to do away with the conferences for seeding, why not trash them altogether? Let's look at it:

current NBA: 6 divisions of 5, 4 games against each team in your division, 3-4 against other teams in your conference (randomly determined), 2 games against the out of conference teams. Division winners are guaranteed to be a top 4 seed in their half of the playoffs.

my proposal: 5 divisions of 6, 6 games against each team in your division, 2 against every other team, except an extra game against the 4 teams that finished the same place last year in their division (so, if you win your division, you play 3 games against the other four division winners next year). 5 division winners are guaranteed a top 8 seed.

Both are 82 games. 6 game sets against your division rivals brings rivalries back to the NBA. Realigning to 5 divisions allows for more geographically reasonable divisions:

Pacific: Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Golden State, LA, LA
Southwest: Utah, Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio
Midwest: Minnesota, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indiana, Detroit, Cleveland
Atlantic: Toronto, Boston, New York, New Jersey, Philly, Washington
Southeast: Memphis, Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, New Orleans

Seriously, look at the current map and tell me that setup doesn't make more sense. Minnesota plays Portland and Utah twice as often as they play Chicago and Milwaukee? Dumb.

The only issue there is that the new SW div is insanely stacked (the top six seeds in the western conference playoffs!), but with 1-16 seeding, this can still work out.

"Tournament stratification" sounds like a good title...

2007-06-14T19:32:00.000-06:00

I'm doing requests, it seems. I mean really, when he wrote that, he may as well have put it as "Tarr should blog about tournament stratification". I guess he could have been thinking of George or maybe Dusty, but this is right in my wheelhouse. I have 3-4 other topics I've been meaning to blog, but they can wait.

We're talking about tournaments that have "elite" and "lower" devisions. Sometimes these divisions cross into one another; sometimes they do not. Let's lead right out with the main pros and cons of formats with power pools like these:

Pro: teams get more meaningful games, which is the point of playing.
Con: fundamentally not even-handed. Relies more on initial seeding.

That pro is crucial, and is enough to justify power pools a lot of the time. The bottom line on power pools is that the elite club teams are not going to pay airfare to travel to a tournament unless they know they are getting a full slate of games against other elite teams. So having, at least, a power pool (or two or four) on the top is basically a requirement of any top tournament.

The first con, i.e. lack of even-handedness, is not a major concern. You night have a harder path to win the tournament, or only be able to place 9th, but nobody's season is ending as a result. The point of preseason tournaments is to play, and teams should be judged by individual game results as oppose to the number attached to their finish.

The second con, however, is more significant than you might realize. Allow me a meandering, self-indulgent anecdote to demonstrate my point:

My new job has a sand volleyball court outside, and there is a formal lunchtime volleyball league. Rather than attempt to make balanced teams and a full schedule, the league is split into 8-person divisions, and each league game is a different 4v4 matchup within that division. There are 56 players, and consequently 7 divisions. After describing myself as "tall and reasonably athletic, but with very little V-ball experience", I got placed in div 5.

This week, one of my teammates couldn't make the game, so a player from another division subbed in. He was decent; I thought he was about average among the players on the court. I figured he was a good 6 or a bad 4, but when I looked him up on the league spreadsheet later, I was quite surprised to discover that he was div 2.

What was the point of that story that applies to Ultimate? Most people drastically overrate their ability to predict the relative strength of teams/players. In the case of the V-ball league, the idea to have divisions is a very good one. Div 1 has a guy who can two-hand dunk with ease and a former varsity volleyball player at Stanford. But with 7 divisions, the variation within a division is far greater than the variation between divisions. The league would be well served by 3 or 4 divisions. The rest is just noise.

The same is absolutely true in Ultimate. The only arguable exception is the few elite men's teams, which are pretty stable. As I said, you need to have a power pool at the top anyway, to attract the top teams. But even there, the worst "elite" teams usually have very little (if any) edge over the best "open" teams.

In conclusion, some stratification in preseason tournaments is a good thing. But there should be some room for crossover whenever possible, and care should be taken to not overstratify. It's easy to talk yourself into believing that there are several big obvious breaks in team strength, but the results will often defy such expectations.

Getting the hang of this league thing (4 for 21)

2007-06-09T22:49:00.000-06:00

Not too long ago, I posted jubilantly about winning the second league championship of my career, and the first in 17 tries. Now my personal winning percentage since the end of last fall is a neat 75%, as I captured the championship in two of the three spring leagues I played in.

Two of these leagues were fairly novel experiences for me. The first of those two was the first men's league I have ever played in. This was offered as a supplemental league to the mixed leagues by the local organization. The games were played on Sunday morning, before the mixed games started, so it was possible to double dip. This league was notable for a pretty high level of play. Every team was capable of putting out a full line of players with club experience, although a lot of these were masters players. In fact, one team, our finals opponents, were entirely masters eligible.

The finals game was a seesaw affair. The old guys jumped out to an early lead. They were running very efficient offense - using the "Boston" 4-man play, staying patient, and using any mismatches they had. On defense, they generated some key turns with their zone - ironically, most of our turns came from our oldest and most experienced players. We adjusted and started beating their zone with regularity, and got a few big D's ourselves, and managed to pull close at halftime. We came out in the second half with a lot more energy, and we got a lot smarter about matchups. We pulled ahead late in the second half, and then both teams got tired and we had some very costly and unnecessary turns. I was pretty sure the cap was going to deny us a comeback, but we managed a four goal run to close the game out and win by two.

The game was a nice contrast of styles, with the old guys running a mix of zone and man, and a straight stack offense, while we ran almost exclusively force backhand man defense and a horizontal stack offense. Personally, I had a pretty good game - two turns, including one of my three hucks, but a couple D's, a lot more touches than my man, and several goals, including a 60 yard backhand that tied the game in the final run.

I thought the experience of a men's league was a lot of fun. I don't think the spirit level was any worse than the mixed leagues, and the level of play was really high. I hope that (as I mentioned a while back) the league goes to a "overflow men play men's league" model, which will both increase the size of the men's league and improve the gender ratio of the mixed league.

The other "novel" league I played in was a clique league. I've played in a corporate league before, but it's been a long time, and other corporate leagues I've played in always required some ostensible link other than "we want to play together". This league was entirely open registration, and it showed in the talent spread. My team, which had several of my club teammates as well as some other strong pickups, probably had an average margin of victory in the 2:1 range. There was exactly one team that gave us trouble - another club-heavy team that had a couple of my teammates as well. In the regular season matchup (where we were missing all our tall guys except me), they beat us by 1. In the finals, we returned the favor.

We struggled in finals since our women had to play savage. Normally Yelena and Emily are a huge part of our success, but Yelena was worn out by halftime and Emily wasn't there. Still, we managed to gut out the win despite a pretty ugly final few points. I'm obviously biased, but I thought they made two very bad calls in the last three points, including a RIDICULOUS speed-up stall call on a goal. The game left a bad taste in my mouth despite the win, and it would have left a much worse taste had we lost.

The third league, the only one I didn't win, was the draft mixed B league. I played the B league in order to play with my wife. Considering how many goals I threw to her this spring, though, I think she's ready to play in the A league. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to play in the playoffs of this league, as the first round of B league playoffs was scheduled across from the men's finals (the rest of the men's league playoffs had been played over the previous week). I was the only player in the finals of men's league who was in B league, so I was the only person screwed by this setup. While I'm very confident my B league team would have won their opening game with my help (they lost by three), I seriously doubt we would have won the league, so I will count this as a loss.

Still, 4/21 sounds a lot better than 1/17, which is where I sat last fall.

I'm not playing any summer leagues - partly because my new job is really far from the fields, and I can get a good workout with lunchtime basketball in stead of fighting rush hour to play mediocre ultimate. I might join up late to a league somewhere though. We'll see.

In defense of the "3 handler" zone offense

2007-05-07T14:07:00.000-06:00

Note the title of this post is NOT "In defense of the traditional dump-swing zone offense". I am not arguing this. I am arguing that the traditional structure, with three handlers, two poppers, and two wings/deeps, has several advantages.

The "two handler zone offense", as explained in Jim & Zaz's book, has been steadily gaining popularity. There are plenty of good reasons for that. The best reason, really, is that the traditional dump-swing zone offense (where the middle handler just swings it back and forth and the side handlers look for a single continuation pass to a wing or popper) sucks. It's really not that hard to come up with an offense that's more effective than that, particularly when it's windy.

The other reason it has grown in popularity is that it has lots of good ideas, notably:

not losing yards on the dump
crashing the cup and doing other things to keep the cup from staying set
overloading an area of the defense to create an opening
exploiting fast breaks downfield once you beat the cup

My point is that these ideas can be used out of almost any offensive structure, provided you are creative enough. And personally, I think it is easier to take advantage of these principles with a three-handler set.

The key to the three-handler zone offense, in my opinion, is to have the handlers be extremely active. Basically, at any given time, one of the handlers should be acting more like a traditional popper than a handler. Let me give a handful of examples of handler action to show what I mean.

One handler has the disc, forced middle, close to the middle of the field. Rather than play behind the disc for a dump, the break-side handler sets up slightly downfield, 5-10 yards directly behind the mark. This handler can move upfield to catch an inside break, or run back to catch a swing (outside break). The third handler sets up as a force-side swing, essentially playing the off-point in the same way the break-side handler is playing the mark. Late in the count, either of the handlers can move into or behind the cup for a crash or short dump.
Forced middle on the sideline. Rather than set up dump/swing, the middle handler becomes a popper, moving downfield and attempting to find a hole in the cup or crash the cup. The far handler sets up in the middle of the field and trusts the thrower can swing it directly using an overhead or curving throw. If that pass is completed, you are in a fast break situation.
Handler throws a short swing. The handler follows the throw and looks to receive a give-and-go pass, either inside or beyond the cup. If the give-and-go throw is completed, the cup will be out of position and the original thrower will now have an easy opportunity to hit a popper. If the cup crashes on the original thrower's cut, there should be options for a throw against the grain to a popper or a swing against the grain to the third handler.
Wing or popper catches the disc, but doesn't have a good continuation look. Rather than throw the dump for a loss of yardage, the receiver fakes the dump, and then the handler quickly moves into the cup for a extremely short pass - often jumping just before the catch so that the handler catches the disc in the middle of the three defenders. The cup is now out of position and it's relatively easy to thread a pass to a popper or wing.

Some similar ideas about beating a zone are covered in this oldie but goodie from Idris's blog.

Basically, I am proposing a similar philosophy to the new two-handler set, but based out of the traditional three-handler formation. The fundamental difference is that in stead of having a full-time deep, you have an additional handler. I think that, for most teams, this is an advantage. I will give two main reasons:

The three-handler structure leads to less reliance on overheads. Fundamentally, it requires a few more passes, with a slightly higher completion percentage per pass. It is not nearly as conservative as the traditional dump-swing zone offense, but it is closer to it than the two-handler set is. Most teams are not that great at overheads, and as such, for most teams I think this set is closer to optimal in a risk vs. reward sense.
Having a set deep cutter makes the job of the defensive deep easier. I know that when I play the position, it is a relative relief to have one player back there who I can worry about. Yes, this keeps me from making as many plays underneath, but I am taking a cutter out in the process, and furthermore I am available to help on other deep cutters. By contrast, if I have four cutters in front of me, several of which may strike deep, it can be very hard to figure out who to play on. I may not be able to help deep on all cutters, which means the wings have to be more conservative. Furthermore, because I have to be available to help deep, I can't play in front of poppers, so I am less effective covering the underneath cutters than a short deep or wing can be.

One last benefit of this approach is that it's easier to break people into it. I have converted more than one league team to this approach, just by calling myself a handler and then buzzing around all over the place, and encouraging people to "be greedy" and not lose so many yards on the dump. Trying to talk league vets into the two-handler set is generally a non-starter.

The last rematch post EVER.

2007-05-01T11:45:00.000-06:00

OK, the title is a lie. Unfortunately, this will not be the last time I write about why we play rematches is UPA formats. In fact, I will probably look back at this in a few months and feel like revising or adding to it. But this issue comes up so often, and I think it would be helpful for me to try to lay out all the main arguments in one place. So here it is.

---

Why do we play the final game to go in UPA formats even when this game is a rematch?

1) Teams should be able to plan ahead knowing that a specific sequence of wins and losses will effect a specific outcome. From both a psychological perspective and (more significantly) a physical one, this makes the tournament more fair. Teams can plan their rotations and strategy based on knowing what games they will be in depending on the results of the games they are playing. In my opinion, it makes the tournament seem more professional if the brackets are played out.

2) It introduces an element of uncertainty and randomness to the event if a team loses in bracket play, and then has to accept that their season may be over if things don't go "their way" in other games. I've often thought that it's a galvanizing moment when you lose your first game in double elimination, and someone says "OK, now we win the rest of our games". I don't want to have to respond "unless (the team that just beat us) loses in the finals… then we're fucked no matter what we do." Emotionally, having your season end with a win and being shut out of the game to go would be extrodinarily anticlimactic (and devastating).

3) Making the final game no-rematch conditional would introduce similar issues to the problems with three-way ties in pool play – namely, that something happening in another game on a different field could change where you finish.

In pool play, one loss usually puts you in second place, but if some other games go a certain way, you could end up third, and you have relatively little control over this. Similarly, if the final game to go is no-rematch conditional, then the results on another field can change whether you have a chance to advance or not. In both cases, yes, you could have avoided any potential issues just by winning all of your games. But unless we are talking about only running single elimination, one advance formats, such an argument is a non-starter.

Normally, bracket play avoids these issues – your results on the field and your results alone will decide where you finish. This is the main reason why almost every format uses brackets to determine which teams advance. Making the last game no-rematch conditional muddies the waters and, in my opinion, negates much of the benefit and simple elegance of using a bracket to figure out this spot.

4) If we make the final game no-rematch conditional, then we are introducing a fundamental inconsistency in our approach. We will be saying that rematches should be played UNLESS they are in the last game. Why is the last game different? The practical reason, of course, is that otherwise you are introducing all sorts of extra byes into the format, which is certainly more unfair than a rematch is. But if we're making this concession that avoiding rematches is a priority of the format, then in some sense we are saying, "this game is bad but you have to play it anyway".

This is not an argument against avoiding the final rematch, per se; I'm simply pointing out that pursuing the goal of avoiding rematches does not lead us to formats where we just make the final game no-rematch conditional. It leads us to single elimination brackets, or round robin formats with no brackets, or a few specialized formats with extremely abbreviated brackets. Those are the only formats where we can assure ourselves of avoiding rematches throughout.

5) "dead team/clinched team" scenarios and fairness issues.

There's several varieties of negative scenarios that can crop up if we make the last game no-rematch conditional. There are two basic variations. In both cases, AvB is the "upper" game, where the winner is done, and CvD is the "lower" game where the loser is eliminated, and the AvB loser plays the CvD winner in the game for the final spot.

a) D has lost to both A and B. D's season is over, they are a "dead team walking". They are likely to open up the rotation, or even worse, just forfeit the game. This unfairly benefits C and unfairly punishes A and B (ironically, they are being punished for their victories, not their defeats).

b) A has beaten both C and D, B has beaten neither. A has clinched advancement, and has no motivation for the next level except placement, while B is playing for a spot. B beats a relatively unmotivated A and ends the event.

There are also crosses of these scenarios. For example, A has already beaten C and B has already beaten D. (This scenario would appear in 16 teams, 2 advance if the semifinalists meet in the game to reach the backdoor finals.) Any final result in the top game eliminates one of the bottom teams, and any result in the bottom game clinches for one of the top teams – effectively moving you into one of the two scenarios I outlined above. In these cases, both the upper and lower games become extremely uncertain affairs and you have a lot of scoreboard watching. Some people might consider this sort of uncertainty and randomness exciting, but I personally think we owe the players a more predictable experience.

6) Potential gamesmanhip

If we make the final game no-rematch conditional, then the desire to avoid being shut out of that game can actually lead a team to want to intentionally lose a game. If the final game is no-rematch conditional, you have one of two ways to advance to the next level:

a) reach the "upper game" (i.e. the game where the loser is in the final game to go)
b) make sure that you don't lose to the team you expect will lose the "upper game"

If you think your chances of reaching the "upper game" are low, for whatever reason, then your best strategy could become intentionally losing to avoid your most likely opponent in the final game to go. Consider the following scenario:

The tournament is the standard 16 team, 2 advance bracket format. There is a very large talent gap between the 1 and 2, and between the 3 and the remaining teams. The 3 has a very deep roster, while the 2 relies on a small core of players. If you are on the 3 seed, it may be in your interest to intentionally lose in the quarterfinals. This will allow you to get your (only) shot at the 2 seed in the last game of the weekend, rather than in the semifinals when they are relatively fresh.

It actually takes a fairly peculiar set of relative team strengths to make this strategy viable, but in my opinion it is more realistic than any gamesmanship scenario that results from our current no-rematch policy.

---

Now, allow me to address three of the more common arguments against playing the rematch:

"If we lose the rematch, then winning the first game was meaningless"

I consider this to be the weakest argument against playing the rematch. The only sense in which this is accurate is the same sense as the statement "all of our games were meaningless since we didn't qualify".

There are multiple, tangible benefits to winning the first meeting between two teams, even if you are fairly confident you will end up having to beat the same team a second time to qualify. Namely:

1) You save a loss for later. In all the bracket formats you have a finite number of losses. If the first meeting between the teams is the front-door semifinals, then winning means you don't have to win another game to reach the final game to go.

2) In many formats, you have to play one fewer game to reach the final game to go. This isn't true of the first "3v4" game in the 16 team, 3 advance bracket format – nor is it true in the four team double elimination that is played in a few formats. But in most formats it is true, and playing one fewer game can be very significant.

3) If you lose the first game, there is a non-trivial chance that you will be upset in a subsequent elimination game and not even reach the game to go. This is a variation on the first reason I cited.

4) Conversely, if you win the first game, you have at least some chance to win later games (perhaps in an upset), and therefore qualify without even having to play in the final game to go.

5) Even if you feel your chances of winning finals or losing backdoor games are trivially small, winning the first contest gives you the opportunity to rest your starters and save yourself for the game to go. This amounts to cashing in the loss you saved by winning the first game. If you really feel that first game is meaningless, let the other team be the one to tank.

"statistical argument – 1-1 proves nothing except ambiguity"

This argument at first appears quite strong, but upon further examination it is, in my opinion, something of a mirage.

Consider a final game to go that pits two teams against each other that had played earlier in the event, with the team from the "upper game" winning the first contest. This game can have one of two outcomes:

- the team from the upper game wins, and advances with a 2-0 record against the team from the lower game.

- the team from the lower game wins, and advances with a 1-1 record against the team from the upper game.

From the perspective of this "ambiguity" argument, the first scenario is irrelevant, so let's consider only the second case.

Imagine for a moment that you have an oracle with you, and you know that the lower team will win, even before the game starts. You have the choice of either allowing the game to go on or cancelling it, on account of it being a rematch. Should you cancel it? The first instinctive answer might be yes, because you want to avoid the ambiguity.

But are you really avoiding it? No, it already exists. You know, after all, that the lower team would win. No, what you are doing is avoiding the APPEARANCE of ambiguity. The ambiguity is there whether you like it or not.

Like I said, the ambiguity argument is, to me, a mirage. Making the game no-rematch conditional is not preventing ambiguity; it is merely hiding it by protecting the 1-0 team.

A slight variant of this argument is the argument that "the rematch does not consistently help us find the better team". Again, the 2-0 upper game winner case is irrelevant. So the question really becomes: who is more likely to be the better/more deserving team – the team that won the first game, or the team that won the second game? Here I don't have an answer, but my suspicion would be the team that won the second game. I have two reasons for this suspicion:

1) Everyone knows the format and knows that the second game is the one that truly settles your fate. While I reject the idea that the first game is meaningless, the stakes are even higher in the second game, and I would place a lot of emphasis on that high stakes contest.

2) Most people who I have discussed it with agree that nationals is about the most physically gruelling tournament you will ever play in. The winner of the second game is probably the team in better shape and/or or that relies on a deeper rotation, and that team is more likely to represent their region well at nationals.

"letdown/momentum/revenge argument – the team coming into the final game on a win has an edge"

I don't want to dismiss this argument out of hand. I am definitely a believer in sports psychology. I would simply state that I don't believe this mental edge argument to be consistently true, moreover I don't think it is true consistently enough to base policy on. All of these factors (upper game loser being deflated from a tight loss, lower game winner being confident and fresh, lower game winner motivated for revenge while upper game loser is anxious or complacent) are possible. But it could just as easily be the opposite factors in play (upper game loser well rested from a quick loss, lower game winner spent from a nailbiter, upper game loser confident but not cocky while the lower game winner is in their own heads and thinks they have to play past their level to win).

Which of these factors is dominant? I don't know. You don't know, either. Nobody knows. I would like to do a study of every rematch game-to-go that's ever happened, see the statistics on the upsets, and see how the teams did at the next level. I'd like to be able to draw some conclusions on the average physical/psychological state of the teams in the rematch games, but the data is just not there.

This is actually a good idea for a UPA grant in my opinion. Somebody should get a grant, go through every UPA event that has ever been played, and try to compile the available results into a database. Obviously the results would get increasingly sparse the further back you go, but the old newsletters do have much of the results from nationals at least, going back into the 70s. It would be really cool to be able to just pull up 1990 club nationals on the score reporter.

Until that happens, though, I consider this argument speculative at best and inaccurate at worst.

---

OK, that's all, for now. I consider this a work in progress.

Is there really less depth at the top in the women's game?

2007-03-27T13:07:00.000-06:00

The general consensus seems to be that there is a greater dropoff between the best teams in the women's game and the middle tier teams, compared to the dropoff in the open division. I am not really going to try to dispute that viewpoint here. What I am going to do is dispute that the scores in open games, versus those in women's games, actually suggest that.

Take this example:
In an open game, team A commits 14% fewer turnovers than team B over the course of the game.
In a women's game, team A commits 16% fewer turnovers than team B over the course of the game.

Based on this information alone, would you conclude that the talent gap between teams A and B is much smaller on the open side than the women's side? I doubt it. It's more likely you would conclude that the teams are similarly evenly matched and that the 2% difference in the gap is too small to draw conclusions from.

Now, here comes the twist:
In the open game, team A committed 6 turnovers to team B's 7, and won by 2.
In the women's game, team A committed 26 turnovers to team B's 31, and won by 6.

Based on this information, you would be tempted to conclude that the open game was a tight match between equals, while the women's game was a blowout between two teams that were playing on different levels. But this is really a statistical artifact of the different turnover rates in the women's game versus the open game. Because there are fewer turnovers in open ultimate, there is less opportunity for teams to pile up a high margin of victory based on a slight edge in scoring efficiency.

Again, I'm not arguing that there is not a larger dropoff in the women's game than in the open game. What I'm arguing is that the scoring gaps alone don't suggest that. They are just a reflection of the different turnover rates in women's and open. What the above does suggest is that the results in women's are less random than open, since a small efficiency gap has more chance to snowball into a safe lead.

Some may have already figured this out, but teams A and B are the winners and losers of the 2006 UPA club finals.

Two for Eighteen, BABY!

2007-03-12T12:21:00.000-06:00

In the summer of 1997, I played in my first two leagues - DC "competitive" league and DC "corporate" league. The corporate league playoffs were first, and my team (Bethesda-Chevy Chase Alumni, a high school that I didn't attend) won the championship. One league, one championship. This stuff is easy! My team was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the 20-team competitive league the next weekend, but still, one for two wasn't bad. (Coincidentally, these were the last two league teams I played on for which I wasn't good enough to be a starter. At least, I'd like to think that's a coincidence.)

Fast forward to yesterday. I was working on a 0-16 streak of winning league titles, dating back to 1997, and stretching across leagues all over this great nation of ours. My team was the sixth seed of eight teams in Denver's winter outdoor league. The league was played at night on fieldturf under the lights, but for the tournament we were blessed with a calm, sunny Denver spring day. In the first game, we threw zone on the three seed and jumped out to a 4-0 lead before our opponent's captain (a former IU and Union Crew guy) showed up. His handling along with that of the other club vets (including the only Johnny Bravo player in the league) proved to be too much for our zone, and we ended up giving up the lead by halftime, 7-6. But we switched to man and went on another run to take the game by two at the cap.

Semifinals pitted our heroes against the two seed, another team with a pair of talented players - this time, the only two male players that Bad Larry had added to their roster in fall 2006. Again, we got a quick 4-0 lead with the zone, but this time, we were wise enough to switch to man as soon as the other team called time out to collect themselves. They tried a zone of their own, but only a fool thinks they can trap me on the line. We coasted with the lead and ended up winning by two after allowing a late mini-run.

Finals were against the four seed, which had ousted the hated top seed in the semifinals. (I say "hated" because the top seed was a bunch of fast but lesser-skilled players who played huck-and-zone all the time, and I would have found it galling if that style had won the league.) Once again, our opponents had a pair of extremely talented male players - probably the best high school player in the city, and fellow Brown alum (and O-team player for the 2005 champs) Reid Hopkins. They also had the high school player's twin sister, who was one of the top women in the league. Unlike the rest of the league games, the finals were played on a full width field, which we discovered made our zone fairly useless. We discovered this by spotting our opponents a 5-2 lead. We embraced the wide-open spaces and big throws (not much of a stretch for me) and quickly climbed back, taking half 8-7. From there out it was a tight game with its share of crowd-pleasing big plays, and the bad guys had a lead as late as 10-9, but we managed to make a few more big throws work and won by two.

Championship! Two for eighteen, baby.

Although my overall record in league play is well over 500, championships have eluded me. What made this one different? Well, a couple things. The most obvious is that I had two really top notch teammates: Dan "Pokey" Hunt, a Mamabird vet who plays on Boulder's Boomslang, and Jesse Burnette, a 6'6" former Midwest college player who has played club in the area as well. As I mentioned, those other teams had pairs of club-level men, but we always had a mismatch at at least one spot when we put our best lines out. Throw in one other tall club vet and we had the top matchups on our side.

On the other end of the roster, our captain (Jesse) had used his lower picks on a bunch of athletic guys he knew who had basically never played ultimate before. While none of them learned a good flick by season's end, all had learned to catch and dump and how to play a couple positions in a zone. Even if their skills didn't dramatically improve, their decision making did, and that made all the difference.

All the teams we played probably had at least one woman who could beat the coverage of any of our women, but the (not unfortunate for us, but unfortunate in general) fact of the matter is that at the league level, particularly in a 5-2 gender ratio league, having the best women is a luxury, not a necessity. (This is why I think Denver's spring league has made a great choice by including a men's league. Not only could the men's league be great, but the diversion of male players will probably allow the mixed divisions to both use a 4/3 ratio, which makes the women matter a lot more.) When the chips were down, our long game overcame our shortcomings.

To a degree, how successful a league team is depends on how clear-eyed that team is at evaluating its talents and picking the best strategy. The team that had the best regular season record (the fast but lower skilled huck-and-zone team) may have been annoying to play against, but the fact is, they were probably the most strategically optimal team in the league, and this nearly overcame their lack of club players.

Sometimes league presents me with a moral quandary: do I throw underneath to a player who might drop the disc, makes bad throwing choices, and doesn't dump very well? Or do I just put the disc in the endzone and hope for the best? The second is the maximum-likelihood scoring choice, but if you make that choice every time, you will not be very popular (unless your team is unusually rational about these things). Of course, sometimes you have the better "wait for one of the top players to get open" choice, but not always. On this team I generally slanted toward throwing underneath during the regular season and switched a bit toward the more selfish/rational choices yesterday. Things seemed to work out fine.

"Optimum" dimensions/rules for levels of play

2007-02-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

The genesis for this post comes from a post a long while back from the Atlantans, with a subsequent follow up by Parinella. It was also hit on by Degs on his/Hectors blog. This got me thinking about the subject more generally - the length of the stall count, the field dimensions, and the effect of these rules on the game.

I like the rules of Ultimate in general, and I wouldn't want to drastically change anything. But it seems to me that by tweaking some of these more adjustable rules, you could get the "desired" dynamic in terms of scoring frequency. In order addressperly adress this, we need to know two things: how various changes will change the dynamics of the game, and what dynamics we really want.

The dynamic I would like can be defined very simply. I would like the offense to tend to score on about one half of its initial posessions, and the defense to score on roughly one half of the following posessions if they get a turnover. I'm not too concerned about the third and subsequent posessions, but if we got the first two close to 50% each, I suspect that later ones would be around 50% as well.

I'll define the following five "variables" that we can change:

1) Field width
2) Endzone depth
3) Maximum stall count
4) Brick - the distance from the endzone line to the brick mark.
5) Brick-to-Goal - the distance from the brick mark to the goal for the offense.

The effects of these, as I see it, are as follows:

1) A wider field increases all chances of scoring. It probably helps the initial offense more, in this case because they can use set plays and complex spread offenses more consistently. Also, the most effective offense for a defense can be the fast break, which doesn't rely on a wide field to the same degree.

Aside from offensive/defensive slant, a wider field increases the effectiveness of spread offenses and reduces the effectiveness of zones and clams.

2) The deeper the endzone, the more likely either team is to score. It probably encourages more hucking, as you have more space to find the goal, and it reduces the efficacy of goal-line defense. The net effect of a deeper endzone is probably slanted slightly toward the initial offense as they are more likely to score on a big throw to space than the defense, but this is a marginal effect.

Deepening the endzone continues to have an impact all the way out to 40 yards at least, as extreme depth would mean teams would not need a separate endzone offense.

Aside from offensive/defensive slant, a deeper endzone encourages more long passing and places less of a premium on breakmarks and short cuts.

3) A higher stall count increases all chances of scoring. There is some point of diminishing returns at 20 or 25 seconds, at which point any team that cares at all aboupossessionning posession should be able to find a reset pass. The effect is about equal on initial offense and defense-turned-offense.

Aside from offensive/defensive slant, a higer stall count will probably discourage hucking and encourage teams to work underneath more, as they will have more confidence in their ability to find an easy look before they get stalled.

4) The longer the brick, the higher the chance of an initial offensive score. The effect on the defense scoring on its first chance is smaller, but a longer brick does hurt them, as it increases the average field position they need to cover to score. So longer bricks are a pretty easy way to help the offense, and vice versa.

5) Surprise time (for some): a longer distance from the brick to the goal does not dramatically hurt the offense's chances of scoring. It does hurt them, but only in the case of the brick. On all other pulls, however, the additional distance does not matter.

This conclusion is based on the assumption that very few teams have pullers who can consistently land a hanging pull in the back of the endzone. As such, the distance the offense has to go on non-brick pulls is determined not by the length of the field, but by the length of the pull.

On the other hand, the effect this has the defense's chance of scoring on its first posession is essentially the same as the effect that a longer brick distance has. A longer field means farther to go for the defense when they get the disc.

So, in total, a longer brick-to-goal distance does hurt both teams' chances of scoring. If pulling is extremely good or very brick-heavy, it hurts the offense more; for most normal pulling conditions, though, it hurts the defense more. There is a point (>70 yards or so) where any additional length is almost eniterely a negative for the defense and has no significant effect on the offense.

OK, with all that in mind, how do we tweak things? Obviously, it depends on the level of play. I'll provide a few examples:

Low-level play, few good hucks, short pulls, frequent turnovers: Wider field, deeper endzones, higher stall count, shorter brick-to-goal. Everything is slanted toward whoever is on offense scoring.

Low-level with lots of hucks, frequent turnovers: Wider field, shorter endzones, higher stall count, shorter brick-to-goal. This is a common dynamic in juniors ultimate, low-level open college, and some league play. The goal is still to make it easy on the offense, but the shorter endzones discourages playing the field position game (otherwise the optimum strategy in these games) in favor of trying to work the disc more.

Mid-level, fairly skilled play, still plenty of turnovers: slightly higher stall count, longer brick. I'm thinking of a lower-level club game here.

Elite play, great pulling, good hucks, few defensive breaks: narrower field, shorter stall count, slightly longer brick-to-goal.

You could keep coming up with more permutations. The idea is that these things should match the level of play. I'd be comfortable with different divisions using different dimensions and different stall counts.

The 50/50 ball is neither 50/50, nor a ball. Discuss.

2007-02-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

I think a decent working definition of a "50/50 ball" would be, "a throw that is too high to be caught towards the end of its flight, and takes long enough to descend to catchable height that at least one player from each team could easily reach the disc and catch it if there was no opponent contesting the catch." That's terribly wordy, but I think it's a decent working definition.

My point is just that a 50/50 throw is not truly 50/50, even if the players are equally good at reading and going up for the disc. Each side has a major advantage, at least in theory.

The defense has the advantage that if nobody catches it, they win. This means they can just swipe at the disc, which means that the defender effectively has a few more inches of reach. This also becomes a decisive advantage on a crappy throw or a throw that is wobbling in the wind, as nobody has a good look at catching those.

The offense has two advantages - one technical and one more subtle but much more important. The technical advantage is that if both players catch the disc at the same time, offense retains possession. The chance of this really happening is pretty close to zero, but it makes for a good argument in favor of keeping the disc when both players get a grip on it.

The other, much more significant advantage is that presumably the offensive player was at least somewhat open when the disc was thrown. Yes, this isn't always true, but it usually is. And even if all spatial separation is erased by the time the disc arrives, the offensive player still has the chance to get to the spot first. This means that, if you can read the disc, you can get the right spot. Having good position is far more important than the extra few inches being the defender gives you.

I know people aren't trying to say that a 50/50 throw is exactly 50/50, but it's useful to recognize the factors that go into it, other than the relative abilities of the intended receiver and the defender.

A statistical thought on "high percentage throws" and turnovers

2007-02-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

I played a winter league game yesterday. It was a rather galling experience because I felt the four best players on the field were all on my team, and yet we lost by two. It was especially galling because two other Purdue alums were on the other team, and I don't like giving those guys bragging rights. This game was a great example of a truism in league play - it's more important to have the better worst player than the better best player. In this case, we also had the three worst players, so there you go.

Anyway, at one point in the game, one of the league vets on my team was preaching short throws, patience, and the usual pablum. This was significantly directed at me, for (as I am wont to do in league play) I was letting it fly quite a bit. It seemed like an odd criticism to me, though, as I was actually having a pretty good day throwing long. I think the focus on me resulted from the combination of us having a lot of long turnovers, and me having a lot of long throws. At that point in the game I had had two long throwaways, and I had one more (in my defense, a terrible misread by the receiver) later on. But I also threw for five of the eight goals we had in the game.

Significantly, I had three short throw turnovers that I remember as well. (I probably had one or two other turnovers that I don't recall.) Even though I disagreed with my teammate's comment, his comment led me to think about how one's turnovers are distributed and what this says about your decision process. Let's assume for argument's sake that there is not a huge upwind-downwind effect which would motivate a field position game or drastically slant one's huck counts based on the offensive direction. Given that, and given that your team wants to employ a deep threat, what does the distribution of your turnovers say about your choices?

My instinct is that the proper choices in throws, as a team, would lead to a fairly even division between deep throw turnovers and short throw turnovers. That is, a histogram of team turnover frequency versus distance would be flat. High percentage throws are only higher percentage if they produce fewer turnovers.

This does NOT imply that you throw deep as often as you throw short, unless you are equally successful at both throws. Say you turn the disc over 10% of the time on short throws and 40% of the time on deep throws. (Yes, I know those numbers suck - if I was talking about club I would set the percentages lower.) In that case, assuming your deep throw percentage is not a lot lower than a teammate's, you should probably be throwing deep on about one fifth of your throws. This means you will turn the disc over 16% of the time you throw, with an 8%/8% split between short and deep.

Of course, your "true" percentage is unknowable, and you could end up throwing more or less deep throws depending on the situations you end up in. But I think this serves as a useful guide for both individual players who throw deep a lot, and team captains. As a hucker, take note if your huck turnovers exceed your other turnovers. There are exceptions to this (for example, Lucy's role on Purdue in 2005 was to huck it half the time she touched the disc, which was fine) but it is a red flag. And as a team, if your deep turnovers exceed your short turnovers, then unless field position demands that strategy, it's time to scale it back.

11th edition

2006-12-31T16:03:00.000-07:00

I regret not getting involved in the discussions on the google group, mainly because I think my voice would have been respected. But after looking through the new rule set thoroughly, I don’t feel as bad.

Before I looked at the 11th edition, the main things I wanted to see were:

- Re-stating and clarifying the thrower/marker fouls. I wanted stationary arms and legs to have the right to their position.

- Re-organizing the section about putting the disc in play so that it's clear that a defender who intercepts a disc in the end zone can't be stalled as they walk the disc up.

- I wanted the penalties for violations made clearer.

- I was a little torn on this, but I wasn't sure I liked the distinction between a foul and a strip.

Obviously, I got everything I wanted. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really disagree with anything else they changed. I’m not convinced the “back to 6 on a second contested stall” is good, but I’d at least like to try it before I come to an opinion.

I like the re-wording of the caps and the continuation rule. I didn’t mind the old pivot rule, but the new one is fine too. The more specific language on re-starting play after a call is great. Lots of little things, like making delay of game be specifically 2 seconds, is also good. I really like the way all the minor marking violations are grouped together. It’s slick and set up in a way that encourages people to play by the rules.

I’m sure if I worked at it I could come up with something, but honestly I have no issues with any of the changes. I think the SRC deserves kudos for a great job.

Now, on to the next edition of the formats manual...

#1 dumb thing people do when defending cutters

2006-06-28T14:02:00.000-06:00

OK, I don't really know that title is true. But this is definitely the way I get open the easiest, and it happens all the time.

I'm in the stack/hostack/whatever. I start moving deeper, often in more of a jog or shuffle than a full run. Often at this time I'm not even thinking about getting open; I'm just moving to stay ahead of the disc and letting other people do the work. But my defender overreacts by turning his hips and jogging slightly deeper than me. If you drew a line straight forward from my hips and straight forward from my defender's hips, I would be crossing the "T" with my line. At this point, all I have to do is take off and run directly behind my defender, and I'm wide open. My defender has to be dramatically faster and quicker to keep up. No fake required - I'm open.

You can take a lesson from this from both an offensive or a defensive persective. From a defensive perspective, just be careful about turning your hips away from your man. Again, this really happens all the time, and it makes it so easy to get beat. I think a lot of weaker players fail to realize how good players get open at will on them. It's not a huge speed or quickness gap - it's just bad positioning.

From an offensive perspective, realize how often you can get open without trying if you keep moving away from the action. I think most good cutters instinctively recognize this and get open in these spots, but again, a lot of weaker players miss this and can't understand why they can't run past their defender while good cutters can. You can get open a lot just by punishing defensive lapses.

I'm probably noticing this because I've played a bunch of league lately, and beaten up on some tryouts at club practices. It happens a lot less at the elite level, although you have a similar situation when your defender is afraid of the deep shot and flies past you. At that point it's not really a defensive lapse anymore - it's just good cutting.

What, you don't know me?

2006-05-09T22:54:00.000-06:00

Yeah, returning from hibernation. I still had a lot to say, I was just tired of posting. We'll see if this takes.

Y'know, I'd like to think I didn't care whether people knew me, but damnit, I guess I do. I got in a rules argument at club level pickup today. The guy ran into the endzone after the catch, and he was claiming that I could not stall him while he walked back to the line. For the curious, it's XIV.C.2, and note the use of the phrase "point of ground contact" and not "pivot".

Now, this guy is a very good player, a rotation guy for Sack Lunch, and confident in his knowledge of the rules... but he does not know me. So when I say "look, I know the rule word for word, I've been wrong in a rules argument once in six years, I'm right about this, you can look it up", I just sound like an asshole. One could even make the argument that, in this instance, I am, in fact, an asshole. But if he knew me, he at least allows the seed of doubt to creep in, in stead of firing back with "well, you're wrong about this one."

Lessons to be learned from this incident:

1) The world would be a better place if everyone just believed everything I said.
2) I need to make sure the other guy knows me and respects my opinion before I get in a messy rules argument in an utterly, utterly meaningless game. If he doesn't, I need to be mature enough to let it go.

Response to "Facing Reality"

2006-03-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

This is a bit of a copy of Hector's criticism of one of their earlier articles, but I thought this piece on Collegeulti.com by Michael Fiedler of Yale is so obviously flawed that I'd take a chance to respond.

Firstly, it's a semifinal BERTH. You go to Yale. Jeez. Secondly, Oregon scored 8 in the 2003 finals. Check your facts.

Anyway, isn't this blowing the whole "2 consecutive semis losses" thing out of proportion? He talks us star-powered Berkeley and acts as if Stanford had nothing in 2004, and yet, it was Stanford that gave Colorado their best game of the championship bracket, not Berkeley. Granted, Berkeley had the stronger season that year, but if we're bringing that up, we may as well bring up 2003 as well, where Stanford would have been the favorite to repeat had they not lost a 1-bid regional final to Oregon.

Finally, let's really tackle the central premise here - that Stanford lost because they lack a superstar. While Zip blew up in the 2005 semifinals, and Beau made some amazing plays as well in 2004, both of those games were won by the team with more great players, not just the greatest player. Look at that 2005 Brown team - they had the Mahoney brothers, Will Arnold, Dan MacArthur, Alex Bowman... and that's just guys with club open nationals experience. That Colorado team had not just Richter and Beau, but Parker, JV, Jolian Dahl, Adam Simon... and a couple more Johnny Bravo players.

Bottom line: Stanford has been beaten by better teams. It's a team sport. One spectactular player can provide you instant offense, but it's not the only way to score, and no single player can stifle the opposition defensively. (Incidentally, his claim, "No one could get open on Beau, if you threw to his guy, you lost the disc", is just silly. Nobody shuts down everybody all the time.) He points out the 2003 Hodags as a team lacking one obvious superstar powering their game; I'd add as a converse argument that the 1997-1998 LSU team had the hands-down best player at nationals, and couldn't produce a semifinals berth because the other teams were deeper.

We'll have a much better sense of the college open landscape after a couple more big events, but there's no reason to expect anything less than great ultimate from Stanford. And if nobody has a stronger, deeper team this year, then they might pull off a championship. They might beat a team with a "superstar", but an inferior supporting cast, along the way, too.

Just a quick link

2006-03-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

I thought this story on ESPN.com was interesting; it's a conversation between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. Simmons I've mentioned before. Gladwell is a great writer; I've had conversations about "Blink"'s application to Ultimate before and it might have been blogged about before although I can't remember.

Anyway, the part that made me want to link it was the section that begins, "You're probably right." The application to Ultimate is fairly obvious.

How I "teach" field sense

2006-02-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

I was pretty intrigued when I read Idris saying that he doesn’t like to answer “what if” questions. The idea was that you want people developing instincts, field sense, whatever you want to call it – and giving people too much of a script to follow gets in the way of that.

Jim touched on this topic, but his “applications” don’t definitely support either the “principles” camp or the “scripted” camp.

I find this interesting because, for the most part, I am firmly in the "scripted" or, perhaps better, the "specifics" camp. I think that in the short term, you help players be effective by giving them simple rules on the field. Only as a player develops and becomes comfortable playing some role will they develop real “field sense”. The obvious question is, does giving a newer player specific rules on what to do on the field impede their learning more nuanced rules? My opinion is not only no, but utter diametric disagreement – by giving them rules, you give them a framework upon which to hang exceptions and additions, until their internal, instinctive “playbook” develops into a fully nuanced field sense. By giving rules, I am building a young player’s field sense from the ground up.

As I said before on the coaching blog, the Purdue Women’s offense last year had a rather rigid structure. In particular, it was possible for a cutter to be effective by following extremely simple rules – when the handlers do A, I do B; when the handlers do X, I do Y. Now, the more experienced cutters did break out of this at times, and that was OK. As the season progressed, more patterns in the offense started emerging as players found consistent effective strategies within the offense. I even designed a couple new drills last spring specifically to reinforce good flow patterns that I had seen for the first time on the field.

To me, the idea of teaching someone field sense by just making them figure things out on their own is as likely to create bad habits as it is good field sense. Just keep adding to your players’ internal playbooks. Eventually, if they have any instincts, they will be able to start applying all those rules to different situations. That’s how you teach field sense.

The right coach for the job?

2006-02-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I focused on the different buttons a coach has to push in order to motivate and connect with players. But beyond those questions of style, there’s a ton of different roles that a coach (and other leadership) needs to fill. The following is an incomplete list:

- recruiting/retention of new players
- designing team strategy
- organizing/planning practices
- organizing training
- explaining things at practices
- working on fundamentals with individual players
- in-game strategy and in-game adjustments
- sub-calling
- sundry administrative details

Very few people can wear all these hats and really pull it off. At the same time, if the roles are ill-defined, you can have the “too many voices” problem, which is often worse than one person muddling along themselves. It’s important for a coach, or any other leader, to recognize their strengths and their limitations. Figure out where others should take the role, and where you should take charge.

As those who have worked with me in team administration in the past will tell you, I’m pretty terrible at team administration. Fortunately that was not my job last year.

Last spring, I had essentially no role in recruitment/retention. The fall is the big recruiting season for college. In the four fall seasons where I have been somewhat in charge of an open college program (Georgia Tech 2000, Purdue 2002, 2003, 2004) I have really only had one good recruiting class (Purdue 2002). The logical conclusion is that this was a combination of luck and the work of others around me. So, this is not my thing. Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to help, but it does mean that I’m probably not the sort who would be extremely successful building a team from scratch on my own.

Sub-calling is, in my opinion, very hard to do well without several people involved. I am a pretty good tactical sub-caller, but I have a hard time keeping track of who’s been in a lot and who hasn’t, and balancing egos and PT. Eventually we worked things out last year to the point where there were few complaints, but this was after a lot of drama, a long meeting with the team leaders, a designated clip-board holder, and the emergence of a clear starting seven that simplified things. I have a lot of respect for people who can do effective sub-calling while playing, or teams that can work out subbing without anyone making the calls. It’s certainly beyond me.

So, I guess those are my weak points. Training is something I’m getting better at, although I’m no George Cooke. I gave some advice in this area, but I was not in charge. This was to a degree just a matter of delegation because I lacked the time to tackle it. I rarely made a strong effort to plan practices ahead of time, but I’d have an idea of what I wanted to get out of a practice and I’d have enough drills in my back pocket to get it done. And the other stuff – strategy, adjustments, explanations, fundamentals – are my strong suits.

Once again, I’m not sure I really have a point. Maybe one good question that can come of this is, what is the ideal leadership structure for a team? It varies from team to team, of course, but are there any general rules? Can a team ever be effective if there are three or four voices in the huddle? Can a team deal with having one person in charge in training, one in charge during practice, and a third on game-day, and maintain a consistent message?

Random thoughts for (first day of work week)

2006-02-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

- Remember when I said my basement was finally done? Irony, thy name is a burst pipe. We noticed after a couple hours Monday morning and shut the water off, but even with the pump pushing water out, most of the carpet was FUBAR. Back to concrete floors for the next couple days. Fortunately, the tide stopped short of my computer, and the drywall was still dry. We're very lucky that we couldn't find a hotel room in the mountains Sunday night, or we would have lost a lot more than a carpet.

- For the RSD afficionados among us, Hector's latest post is pure gold. A brilliant synthesis of the Onion's advice columns and the insanity of RSD. I actually remembered all the posts referenced, which made it all the better. Of course, rec.sport.disc is pretty much the motherlode of people saying stupid, indefensible things. (No offense to Hope college, that was just the first one that came to mind. I mean, that was a team that finished third in their SECTION with a full roster.)

- Does anyone still like going to movie theaters? I think they suck horrendously. Planning your day around the movie, dealing with the traffic and the lines, getting a shitty seat and/or sitting through 15 minutes of commercials, paying through the nose for lousy food/drinks, dealing with the obnoxious people around you, not being able to pause to take a piss or blow your nose... how is this even remotely comparable to the experience of watching a DVD at home on even a reasonably good home theater setup? Or just on a regular TV, even? There are very, very few movies that I would not wait three months for in order to see it at home, if left to my own devices.

I hope everybody enjoyed President's day - more than I did anyway. Back to more useful thoughts tomorrow.

Coaching styles

2006-02-16T13:45:00.001-07:00

Now I come to a series of coaching-related thoughts.

If you’ve read the last few posts, you probably get the feeling that I’m both long winded and analytical. This happens to be true. I’ve also been described as somewhat blunt – I’m quite willing to tell someone exactly what they did wrong and how they can do it differently. I know that these are my strengths as a coach – my ability to analyze play and suggest specific improvements. I’m a good “X’s and O’s” guy; this is who I am.

On the other hand, I am decidedly NOT a great inspiration/motivation coach. I know this; this is who I am. I am perhaps comfortable with this limitation to a fault. That is, as a coach I play to my strengths and avoid my weaknesses. I don’t spend a lot of time doing motivation stuff because I know this is not my thing. Here’s the thing – some players need that different sort of coach, and I have a hard time being that guy. You could make the argument that I should try to play against type a bit more, spend more time trying to motivate players 1-on-1 as oppose to just giving them tips 1-on-1, et cetera.

While almost all of the players on the Purdue women’s team last year improved from the perspective of working within the new offensive and defensive systems I put in place, two or three players stand out as having improved dramatically on an individual level. The common thread between these players is that they are all great academic performers, and very level-headed, rational people. These are the players for whom my usual long-winded explanations were not sufficient, and they would ask more questions after I was done. (One of my favorite pictures from the season is a picture of the team during a half-time at regionals, where I’m talking and every visible player is looking somewhere else, except two of these players. I would guess that one or two other players might have been looking at me, but you can’t tell. To me, this picture is hilarious.)

The point is, while I think I was an effective coach overall, I was most effective in helping people who were naturally inclined to respond to my somewhat pedagogic style. This is unsurprising, and I can’t say I really do anything special to fight it.

So what does all this mean? I’m not really sure. Should teams have more than one coach/leader when it is needed to cover for a certain coach’s stylistic shortcomings? It’s possible, I guess. To a degree, this can just garble the message. Moreover, it’s not like there’s only one sort of motivation. Catt Wilson (CU Mamabird) and Michael Baccarini (Paideia) are both very good motivators, but their means of motivation could not be more different. There are an enormous number of variables involved in this.

In defense of good throwing fakes.

2006-02-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

This will be my last throwing-specific post for a bit.

A lot of people don’t make effective throwing fakes. The classic poor faking technique is people who pivot all the way out, fake forehand, pivot all the way out, fake backhand, and so on. The idea at the core is solid – to get your marker moving the wrong way in order to open up the throw you want. There are a couple problems, however:

1) Most people who fake this way aren’t doing it in order to set up a particular throw to a particular place. In fact, faking this way can cause you to miss an open throw because you are faking the wrong throw, and you don’t have time to get to the right throw.

2) Against a good marker, this approach is not terribly effective. You are extending way out to fake. Your marker, on the other hand, has the advantage of being able to move both feet, and can move back to the middle just as quickly as you do. A good marker can just go back and forth with you.

If you have “Stacked”, watch the first clip in the “fakes” highlight reel for a classic example of this sort of “bad” faking. A Fury player catches the disc on the sideline against the zone. She throws a forehand fake, backhand fake, and forehand fake, to nobody in particular. Then Liz Penny comes in to set the trap. Another forehand fake and backhand fake barely move Liz at all. Finally the thrower just drops a dying quail of a high-release backhand over the mark and back to JD. It gets the job done, so I have no problem with the throw. But the point is, the previous five fakes did literally nothing to help the thrower get off the throw she ultimately used. She may as well have just stood still until she put up the high-release.

Basically, the only times a good thrower should be making a full pivot and throw fake are:
- when you’re setting up a big throw against a very aggressive marker who’s trying to block too much. The big fake will get an overaggressive marker to move way out, and open up the huck from the other side.
- when you’re trying to move a defender other than the marker. Sometimes a deeper zone defender will turn their hips or dive due to a full throwing fake, which can open things up behind them.

A weaker thrower can also sometimes use a full throw fake to set up a dump throw, especially if the marker is overaggressive (angling for a point block on the new player). Also, big pivot fakes of this sort are sometimes the only sort of fake a new player really understands how to do. But generally, this sort of fake is not too effective. It just takes too long to recover from.

Now, Al and Idris both claim to not fake at all. Well, Idris admits to faking, but only in the sense that it is a throw that he does not release. There’s no motion before the throw if he’s not at least considering throwing it. Obviously, these are a couple of the game’s best throwers, so there is something to what they say.

But as a way to teach people to break the mark, I think this overstates things. If you have great pivoting, great extension, great balance, and a fast release, you’re going to be able to break a lot of marks without throwing fakes, sure. But proper faking can allow you to still throw in rhythm, and can do a lot to open up your breakmark throws.

Unless you’re breaking using a quick-release or flip under or over the marker’s hands, breaking the mark comes down to being more balanced than the marker. As a thrower, you are trying to make the marker fail to react in time to your pivot and throw. A well-balanced marker can stay with you on pivot after pivot – again, they can move both feet and you can’t. But get them leaning the wrong way while you’re moving the other way, and it’s all over. So a great fake, to me, is a quick motion that forces your marker to commit to stop the wrong throw, without making you shift your weight too far off center. If you have to go all the way out, then the marker has time to get back along with you. In stead, you want the marker to shuffle all the way out to defense your throw while you are already going back the other way.

A perfect example of a good fake is this clip of Shank from Furious. After Shank catches it, he has a cutter moving breakmark. He has to get the disc to a specific spot at a specific time – he knows it and his marker (who takes a peek at the cut) knows it too. Shank throws a quick abbreviated forehand fake, twisting his shoulders and loading his weight on that side, before coming across to break with an inside backhand.

Watch it frame-by-frame. Shank pivots out to the forehand side for just three frames. He is back to the middle by the fifth frame, fully pivoted to the backhand side by the twelfth frame, and releasing the disc on the fourteenth frame. Meanwhile, the marker only STARTS moving with the fake in the third frame (just as Shank starts coming back), and spends the next eight frames moving the wrong way. I could point out at least two or three other video examples of Shank using this exact same fake and throw to great effect.

Now, Shank probably breaks this guy even if he had been moving the right way for those eight frames. His extension is so good and his release is so fast that the mark has basically no prayer unless he just camps out on the inside backhand. But for the rest of us, that sort of temporal advantage is pretty huge. The key is to make the fake believable (i.e. looks just like the beginning of your throwing motion) while it is abbreviated enough to allow you to quickly come back the other way.

A "swing-neutral" throwing motion?

2006-02-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

I’m going to build into this topic with a long discussion of golf, a game I am terrible at. (Wait… uh, nevermind.) I guess I started thinking about this after reading posts like this one.

Tiger Woods won the Masters in 1997 as a second-year pro, utterly dominating the field in the process. 1997 Tiger had a big exaggerated swing that wrapped around his body on the follow through. It was fundamentally the same motion that he had had when he appeared on the Tonight Show as a five year-old. So there were two obvious things going for this motion:

1 - Tiger had been using it for at least 17 years and was obviously totally comfortable with it.

2 – This motion (in Tiger’s hands of course) was good enough to absolutely crush all of pro golf on one of the two or three most storied courses in the game.

And yet, a little over a year later, Tiger made the decision to basically dismantle the motion he had used for 18+ years and build a new one. He went through a bit of a mini-drought as a result (by his standards), not winning a major for a year and a half. But when he emerged from his cocoon, he went on a tear at the majors: W, L, W, W, W, W, L, L, L, W, W. Given the context of era and competition, this run is unparalleled in golf history. He’s had his ups and downs since then, but the bottom line is that nobody can reasonably question the success of his decision to re-work his swing.

So, the obvious question is, why did he do it? What was he trying to change? One of the biggest things he was trying to do is found in the title of this post. He was trying to become “swing-neutral”. Like many power hitters in golf, 1997 Tiger’s natural motion led to a small hook – sidespin that carries a righty’s ball from right to left. There are times when this is useful - most obviously when a hole has a left turn in the fairway, but other times as well. But most of the time, a straight shot is best, and at times you want a slice (right to left carry) as well. One of the primary things Tiger achieved with his reworked swing was a motion that does not naturally carry the ball one way or the other. He can still use a hook or slice, of course, but now both are equally available to him.

By now you’ve probably pieced together the connection to ultimate. If you have a “swing-neutral” throwing motion, then your natural throw (in relatively calm conditions) is a straight shot, and all options are equally available to you. However, the concept in ultimate extends beyond just inside-out and outside-in. I think the ideal, neutral motion would allow you to easily adapt to a variety of throwing stances and release heights. A perfectly “swing-neutral” motion should allow a whole range of curves from a whole range of release points.

“Wow Tarr. Being ‘swing-neutral’ sounds awesome. Tell me, how I can achieve this?”

I’m glad you asked. Well, really all the advice that goes into having a good throwing motion applies. But it is possible to be a good thrower and not be at all swing-neutral. (Conversely, somebody could be swing neutral, but have really weak snap and no control on their throws.) I would probably boil my advice on this subject to three fundamental pieces:

1 – A backswing that gets back and away from your body, NOT wrapping around it.

2 – Throwing in a fairly linear motion, with extension. A nice, natural arm swing that stays away from your torso.

Idris has touched on these points before.

3 – A wrist snap that imparts spin without pitching or rolling the disc out of the plane that it starts in at the end of the backswing.

Basically, the result of these three things is the disc moving in a very simple motion. If you were invisible and all I could see is the disc, I would see the disc moving straight forward in the direction of motion, and not tilting at all as it moves forward. Once you capture that in your basic motion, you can adapt it to all sorts of throws.

As an aside, I don’t think I’ve fully achieved this personally. It’s something I think about when I’m working on my throws. I’m getting closer, but I’m not there. But I am increasingly convinced that it's a good thing to think about when you're working on your throws.

Random thoughts for Monday

2006-02-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: this post contains nothing useful. (Arguably) useful content will resume shortly.

- My basement, after over six months of work, has finally been converted from a brick and concrete cellar into a fully furnished floor. I'm finally able to move all my crap out of the garage and into the house. This makes doing doctoral research a lot easier, so that I'm not wasting my time while job hunting.

- Of course, my comupter has decided to konk out (power supply is fine, but no post) as of last night. So, so much for that. Hopefully not a big (expensive, time-consuming) problem.

- Rainy dragged me out to a Flamenco dance performance downtown last Friday. Holy fucking shit, those people are good. At the end of the day you're still watching people dance on stage, but holy fucking shit. They make the best tapdancers and Irish step dancers look like they're stumbling around drunk. And the guitarists are flat-out amazing too. If your significant other tries to drag you out to such a performance, I advise you to not resist.

There are good bad hucks, and bad bad hucks.

2006-02-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

I occasionally get accused of throwing floaty, piece-of-shit hucks. OK, more than occasionally. But I would argue that my huck completion percentage is a fair bit higher than a lot of throwers who have "prettier" deep throws than me. Why is this? Simple, really.

The ideal huck is one that leads the receiver enough so that they can run full out, maintain their separation from the defender, and catch the huck in-stride. Assuming you get the throw off and into space, there are basically two ways a bad throw can deviate from this ideal. At one extreme is the "uncatchable disc", which flies out of bounds or just too low and fast to be reached. At the other extreme is the "hospital pass" that floats above the receiver and defender for an eternity, forcing the receiver to win a jump ball.

So, when I mess up a deep throw, I nearly always err toward "hostpital pass" as oppose to "uncatchable disc". While this doesn't make me look that great (and in fact, I am not that great), it has a positive impact on my stats. I'd guess that last weekend, I had something like three nice hucks (all caught), four completed hucks that were too floaty to catch the cutter in stride, five turnovers on floaty hucks, and one uncatchable huck. In my (lukewarm) defense, probably six of those nine floaty hucks were in wind games where getting the disc down the field was priority. Still, even this rather unflattering line highlights the value of giving your receiver a play on the disc, as almost half of my floaty mistakes (or intentionally floaty punts -- whatever) were converted into goals by the receiver.

The point is not that you should lean back and toss up garbage all the time. Rather, the point is that, as a thrower, as a cutter, and as a designer of your team's offense, you should think about how your bad hucks will end up. If you are constantly cutting deep (and/or throwing to cutters who are going deep) at tight angles, with the priority on getting the disc out in front of the receiver, then you should expect lots of turnovers on uncatchable discs. Think about setting up your offense such that your receivers will have a chance to redeem your throwers' errors.

It is not hard to change your throwing motion.

2006-02-09T09:08:00.000-07:00

And now, I begin my deep thoughts about ultimate. I have a few different thoughts about throwing, so this topic seems like a good place to start.

Like the title says, it is not hard to change your throwing motion. Seriously. It's not. People get so hung up about this. If you don't like something about your throws, change it. Think about the change during some time off, implement it in practices and league play, and before long it will be instinctive.

I had utterly terrible mechanics on my forehand for a long time. A long time. I toyed a lot with it my first two years playing, but then I sort of let it be for a while. I made an effort to change my fourth year playing, but didn't stick with it (mistake*). It wasn’t until my seventh year that I finally decided to break the motion down completely and build it again. Within a few months I had a better forehand than I ever had before.

Just this summer, I made the decision to re-work the way I gripped and released the disc on both my backhand and my forehand. I felt I was getting lazy with my backhand grip, letting the fingertips slip to the middle of the disc too often, so I made the commitment to throw all my throws except short high-releases with a pure power grip, and on my forehand side, I had switched to a power grip a while before, but I rotated my grip so that the pads of my fingers were more forward, so that I could use a finger snap to add spin on the release. I immediately lost a lot of control on both throws, but within a few months, I got it back, along with more power.

At the most fundamental physiological/mechanical level, the throwing motion is not all that complicated. (Compared to, for example, a golf shot, or even writing in cursive.) What really makes throwing difficult is decisions, timing, and precision in a fast-paced game. But these things are not as tied to your mechanics as you might think. Once you are comfortable with a new motion, your brain will make the adjustments to throw it at the right times without too much difficulty. It’s just a matter of a few weeks of practice.

* of course, part of the reason I gave up fixing my forehand in my fourth year was that I didn't really understand HOW a good forehand is produced. But once you know, you can change.

A Renegade NEVER pulls in-bounds.

2006-02-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

So, I spent the weekend at trouble in Vegas. The pickup team I played on "Renegades", turned out to be a fairly high-quality squad. Palmer Porter provided some star power, as well as the best introduction: "Hi, I'm Palmer Porter, I played five and three quarters years at Florida, and I didn't go to nationals because of that guy (pointing at me - a reference to the 16 teams, 3 advance format changing in 2003, such that they had to beat Georgia twice and lost the second time)." Fetch from Chico put the squad together and got a boatload of D's while roaming in the back of the various clam looks that we spent most of the weekend playing. And we got pretty solid contributions all the way down the roster, which was 13 players most of the weekend. As an added bonus, our team had the guy who was suspended by the UPA for socking Dar at 2004 club regionals.

First two games were fairly uneventful defeats of a college team and an Idaho State reunion team (headed up by Idaho). For our third game, we rolled over to the fields of the Wisconsin alums, leading to this exchange:

Hector: "are we playing you guys next?"
Me: "Yep."
Hector: "Muhahahahahahahaha. (long pause.) Was that ominous enough?"

It was, and the Iceholes (who had brought in a few ringers from Sockeye and Bravo since, you know, Wisconsin doesn't have enough good alumni) jumped out to an 8-2 lead before trading with us in the second half. In the crossover game to make quarters, we beat the Oregon State alums, and that was it for Saturday.

Saturday evening was probably more eventful for most than it was for me. There was a "party" that was little more than a meeting place and a drink line. Skip, I appreciate the thought, but save the money next year. If I want to get drunk, I can play poker at the Excalibur and get drinks for the price of tips. Even if I fold every time that's maybe four bucks an hour in blinds.

Anyway, I schmoozed with the Wisconsin guys and the Lawless Guile Committee ladies, met up with some Purdue friends, wandered around the Bellagio for a while, saw Doyle Brunson (the trip was worth it right there), played a couple hours of $3-$6 limit poker at the Alladin, won exactly one dollar, and called it a night. Best starting hands I had all night were pocket 7's and Ace-Jack offsuit, neither of which got me anything. My big winner was Queen-4 suited in the big blind, where I flopped a pair of queens, then drew a backdoor flush to beat the guy with pocket Aces. I made about $70 on that hand.

As chance would have it, Sunday's brackets were pretty unbalanced. This was by no fault of the format. Somehow, Wesleyan alums and William and Mary alums had beaten Santa Cruz Alums and Texas alums, respectively, in pool play, and Wesleyan alums had gone on to defeat Oregon alums. Maybe it was the effects of a night in Vegas, but when the teams stumbled on to the field Sunday, the best four teams in my estimation were Texas, Santa Cruz, Wisconsin, and Oregon, and they were all on one end of the draw. Furthermore, the strong upwind-downwind of the early rounds made upsets more likely. Capitalizing on our unconventional defensive looks and our willingness to jack it into and against the wind, the Renegades managed the early round upset of Wesleyan, and Harvard did the same to William and Mary.

Our tentative plan had been to lose our second game regardless of the result of the first game, so that we could get off the fields in time to enjoy the Super Bowl in its entirety. Somehow, this idea got lost, and we continued our winning ways in upwind-downwind affairs against Harvard. In the finals, we moved over to the crosswind field (although the wind was much weaker at this point anyway) and ran into the buzz saw of C-K, Idris, Cram, and the rest of the Santa Cruz alumni. Thus ended the dream of a pickup team winning the inaugural Vegas tourney.

Personally, I played OK considering I hadn't played in almost three months. I played terribly in the first game (early jitters) and the last game (nothing left), but reasonably well in between.

The Super Bowl brought my only money loss of the weekend - I put $20 on the money line ($20 to win $53) for the Seahawks. I still think it was the smart bet. Fucking phantom holding call. Sunday night was another typical night in Vegas for me. Played $2-$4 at the Tropicana, this time for about three hours, and again won exactly one dollar. Best hand I got was pocket queens, and they treated me right, giving a set of queens to beat the guy who had A-Q and flopped Aces and Queens. I out-kicked the same guy on another hand with A-J suited. I lost a bunch of money with middle pair and a flush draw in another hand.

Monday turned out to be the good day for my gambling. My legs were in agony, so I decided to delay Air Alert workouts until Tuesday morning, and get well at the Poker tables in stead. After hanging out with Tom and Katie for a while, I sat down at a $3-$6 game at Caesar's palace, with a nice view of Mike Matusow and Sean Sheikan at a mixed game table. If you know who these guys are, you know I was in for a treat. Best line came from Sheikan, talking to the next table over - "he's lost fifty thousand dollars in the last half hour. You couldn't play any worse, it's not possible." Anyway, this session was the big winner, for me, as I netted over sixty dollars in not much more than an hour of play. I love loose players, and Caesar's has plenty of them. I topped off my gambling at the spread limit game at the Excalibur, where I made a little over $20 in pretty short order. My total winnings on the trip were $70, including the $20 lost on the Seahawks bet. Of course, take away the club on the river at the Alladin and I only make $10, but so it is.

Workout crap that I ordered

2006-02-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

I tend to consider most large exercise machines a waste of money. They tend to be really expensive, and all the new research seems to suggest that dynamic pylometric workouts are a better way to build strength and prevent injury anyway. I suppose if you're a powerlifter or football player you need to have some heavy weights, but the heaviest thing us ultimate players need to lift is ourselves. If I were going to get a big machine I suppose I might spring for a Nordictrack - they give a good full-body cardio workout, and my dad's has survived 20 years of regular use.

But for now, I've just ordered a bunch of random stuff from bodytrends.com, a pretty well-stocked fitness equipment website. Crap I bought:

- A large (75 cm) inflatable ball. Useful for stretching and for some core exercises. Also, I'm sitting on it right now. A hell of a lot cheaper than an Aeron.

- A 5/16" thick workout mat. It wasn't cheap ($47) but it's amazing how much less impact I feel when I do the Air Alert jumping exercises on this mat.

- Some of those stretchy rubber bands to do strength work with. Also handy for all sorts of rehab exercises.

- A 10 pound rubber medicine ball. I need to look up some workouts to use with this (the Rival guys mention one possible source). I also currently lack a nice spot to throw it against, although once it gets a little warmer I guess I could throw it against the brick wall of my garage in the back yard.

I also picked up some random stuff from local sporting goods stores, like jump rope and tennis balls to do hand workouts with and those portable handle things that help me do push-ups and back bridges without stressing my wrists.

Anyway, hope that planted some useful ideas in somebody out there.

I just can't let go.

2006-02-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

As many of you probably know, last spring I coached the Purdue Women's team. It was a dream season - we swept the region, qualified for nationals. Nationals was disappointing, due to the combination of hot weather decimating our thin roster and the team just not being ready for the tougher marking from the nationals teams. (Me not being there the second day didn't help, either.) But still, a dream season. My only real regret was that I only coached them for 5 months, in stead of 2 years like I should have.

OK, so fast forward to the present, I'm in Denver, a good 17 hour drive from Purdue. Another local club guy has taken up the coaching duties. You'd expect that I would wish them the best and move on, right? Well, I'm having a hard time with that. In stead, I'm composing e-mails to individual players breaking down their play on video from Michigan indoor, and sending the current coach and captain drill sequences for practice, and pdf diagrams of new plays to run.

Why am I doing this? Possible reasons that are probably all true to some degree:

- I like the players on the team and want to see them succeed for their sake.
- I want to believe that I've "created something" at Purdue, and last year wasn't just a flash in the pan, so continued success will somehow validate last year.
- (Less charitable variant of above) Further success will just underscore what a great job I did and feeds my ego.
- I found coaching really fulfilling and just want to do what I can in an effort to satisfy my coaching joneses.
- (Less charitable variant of above) I enjoyed the authority associated with being the coach, and my current efforts are an attempt to still have some small degree of influence.

Uh... so, maybe I haven't painted the prettiest picture of my psyche there. I don't think coaching is mostly about ego and control for me, but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't about that at all.

What I really need to do is land a coaching gig somewhere around here. There's actually a pretty healthy high school league around here, and I have my coaching certification, so I'm sure I could find something. Of course, that could mess with my 1:1 Season:Regional Title ratio, but I think I could deal with it.

Bill Simmons and what he means for society

2006-01-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

I swear, I've got a ton of good ultimate material, but no point in using it when this site gets about three hits a day. So, for now I'm just going to enjoy a place to put random crap.

So apparently, the job of writing a blog about super bowl week for ESPN.com, which has gone to Bill Simmons for the last four years (except one year maybe?), has now been given to Chuck Klosterman. Now, the reason for this is probably something innocuous, like that Simmons has a new kid in the house and was tired of traveling on his book tour and his Patriots are not in the game anyway, so he'd just as soon stay home this year. But nevertheless, it makes me think about the whole Bill Simmons phenomenon.

If you are in the center target ESPN demographic (21-35 year old male who has no problem watching a couple hours of sports broadcasting a week), then it's very likely you already know who Bill Simmons is. He's easily the most-referenced writer on the message board of the football fantasy league I play with my high school friends. He gets brought up all over the place on fan boards around the net. Heck, some people even call him their favorite writer.

There's an anti-intellectualism in American culture in general, and in the "ESPN demographic" population in particular. What I call the "Bill Simmons phenomenon" is the fact that a writer, a columnist, has managed to transcend this anti-intellectualism, to the point that macho 20somethings having an argument in a bar can reference something he said by name and not get ridiculed for it. He's managed this trick through a variety of factors, but mostly through two things. One is the subject matter of his columns - gambling advice, talking about fantasy sports, running commentaries of sporting events, TV shows, and NBA drafts where he is constantly on the prowl for "unintentional comedy", mailbags where he virtually banters with his readers, and columns where he indulges his New England fanboy side. The other is his writing style - tons of pop culture references, undisguised homerism, opinions that are admittedly based on emotion rather than fact, and a willingness to make fun of his own writing or other media sources without hesitation. In short, in both subject matter and writing style, he sounds a lot more like a fan than the average sports columnist.

I find this interesting because, once you've read him for a while, it becomes clear that he does not fit the fratboy demographic that he is writing to. He is a writer, through and through, and he shares a lot more in common with the typical gen X writer than his target audience. He drinks a lot more coffee than alcohol, he is intensely self-critical, and he is always drinking in his surroundings in a never-ending search for material. I think there's a common perception out there that Bill Simmons is the everyman sports fan and that's why his writing is enjoyable, but that's wrong. He's just a writer who figured out how to write the way the everyman thinks he would write if he had a column. In truth, the everyman would suck as a writer, but reading Simmons allows him to indulge himself and believe, if only on a subconscious level, that he would and could sound like that too. There's nothing wrong or dishonest about this. Simmons is legitimately a sports nut, and he's developed a writing style that hits his audience in a unique and successful way.

For this reason, I find it especially interesting that they chose to replace Simmons with Klosterman this week. For Klosterman is essentially the archetypical gen X writer. The big difference between him and Simmons is that Klosterman's material is not generally targeted at the sporting demographic, or written from the perspective of the typical sports fan. In the abstract, I think Klosterman's the better writer (although Simmons is certainly a good writer). It will be interesting to see how the Superbowl blog, a Simmons staple, plays out in his less specialized hands.

Vegas, baby

2006-01-28T22:39:00.000-07:00

So, I found a decent fare, sprung for tickets, and I'm heading to trouble in Vegas next week. I made an effort to put a team together, but that fell through, so I'm going on the assurance of the TD that I'll find a team. Worst comes to worst, I hang out with the ladies of the Lawless Guile Committee. At any rate, I'm excited to get out and play a little, as my exercise has been exclusively skiing and plyometrics for a while now. Weather in Denver has actually been pretty nice of late, but getting out for crappy weekend pickup has just not revved my engine.

This is actually my fourth trip to Vegas in the last 14 months after not visiting for around 12 years. I've gotten much more familiar with the town since my brother moved there to play poker full time. (And I am a net winner at the Vegas poker tables, although not by an enormous margin.)

Anyway, I'll come back in 10 days with a writeup of anything notable.

Following the herd

2006-01-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

So, I'm joining the throngs that are trying out the Air Alert III workout program. (I find it funny that the Air Alert guys insist that you shouldn't use the old, free version, and should in stead pay them a bunch of money for the new and improved version. Sorry guys.) The Rival guys are doing it, along with a bunch of other people I know, and some folks I know have already finished it to great effect.

Supposedly it adds over a foot to your vert. Since I'm typically between first and second knuckle on the rim (if you've never been 6'2" and lanky before, then rest assured, that's not very impressive), a foot should be enough to allow me to dunk with two hands. So, if I can throw it down, I'll consider this a success.

/comment

2006-01-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

According to Genesis, Abraham circumcised himself. Of course, many ancient Semitic peoples practices circumcision before the Hebrews. But since all the pre-Exodus biblical stuff is apocryphal (in the non-biblical sense) anyway, let's just allow that "Abraham" was a tough dude. Fortunately I've got his particular issue squared away, but after yesterday I like to think I'm, well, sort of tough.

This wasn't supposed to start yet. I sort of enjoyed my unofficial title as "most prolific ulty blog poster who lacked his own blog". I figured I'd start my own blog eventually, but I didn't think the right moment had hit.

However, I have this rule. Whenever I take a sewing needle, grab it with a pair of pliers, hold it in a fire until it's red hot, and then jab it into my own big toe, sending blood spurting everywhere, I'm going to tell as many people about it as possible. And since nobody has posted a "what's the coolest self-surgery you've performed lately" entry for me to comment on, I have no choice but to start out on my own.

So, this blog will probably be slow and boring for a bit. I'm just going to post random crap while I tinker with settings. Once people have taken due notice, I'll unleash a stream of original ultimate thought, the likes of which has not been seen in almost four months.