Note to Peter - it's not actually about the guns...

Peter King, writing in Monday Morning Quarterback:

Think we shouldn't do anything about gun violence in this country? Read this dispatch from Saturday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

...((Horrible story omitted))...

I'm sick of stories like this getting ignored. We've got to do something to take guns out of the hands of gangs and other young criminals in this country. How many more of those idiotically horrible stories do there need to be on the front page of papers around the country before we do something tangible about gun violence?

Hey Peter - in England, they've done tangible things about gun violence. Guns are outlawed, and people who defend themselves against criminals are prosecuted. So that should fix everything, right?

Or not.

Toby Young, writing in the London Telegraph:

I’m writing this at 3.30am on Tuesday morning, unable to sleep thanks to the outbreak of lawlessness that has engulfed large parts of London. At around 10pm, a mob of several hundred youths ran amok in Ealing, about two miles from where I live in Acton, smashing shop windows, setting property ablaze and looting the local shopping centre. Sky News reported two separate incidents of homes in the area being broken into, with one elderly lady waking to find a masked boy at the end of her bed. According to eyewitnesses I’ve been corresponding with on Twitter, it took the police 90 minutes to respond, so overstretched are they.
...
Like hundreds of thousands of people all over London, I’m not relishing another night of feeling this vulnerable. David Cameron is going to have to come up with a suitably robust response at this morning’s COBRA meeting if he’s going to persuade ordinary Londoners not to organise themselves into vigilante squads to protect their families and their property on the nights ahead. It’s increasingly clear that the police are becoming overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the lawlessness.
...
The problem isn’t that the police aren’t equipped with effective enough weapons, it’s that the lawlessness is so widespread that the police aren’t able to get to the trouble spots in time.
...
Looking at the television pictures a few hours ago, I felt as if I was witnessing the collapse of Western civilisation as depicted in countless Hollywood disaster movies. We need to restore the rule of law by whatever means necessary and we need to do it now.

What is the cost to England of what's going on over there right now? The tangible monetary costs are going to end up being very large - the intangible costs are incalculable. And it's a populace that is unable to protect itself. How is that a good thing?

Obviously, the story he was reacting to in the Pittsburgh paper was horrendous, and no one wants to see it. But the question is, how do you avoid it? Banning guns may make people feel like they've done something, but the evidence that it's a practical and productive activity is non-existent. It's not the guns that are a problem, it's the culture in which the use of guns to harm innocents is accepted and/or glorified. If you look at an inner city culture of drugs and guns and blame the guns, you're missing the point. It's not the guns - it's the culture.

And the beatdown continues...

I love Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback column. It's one of the things that I look forward to every week. Peter has great sources, lots of interesting material and he writes well. And he has, at his fingertips, all of the conventional wisdom of life in the NFL, even the conventional wisdom that contradicts the other conventional wisdom. I know that this reeks of damning with faint praise, but it is not intended that way. Even when I don't agree with him, I always learn something, and he's a very good writer, producing a long and interesting column first thing Monday morning, every week, which I know from experience is not an easy thing to do.

And Peter didn't like Belichick's decision. Well, that's fine. He's certainly not alone. The usual suspects and quoters of conventional wisdom seem to be nearly unanimous here. But Peter doesn't want to be seen as merely parroting conventional wisdom (even as he does so) so he gives us some numbers and analysis to demonstrate that it was a horrible decision.

Let's place the odds of Brady getting two yards at 60, 65 percent. The odds of Manning going 72 yards to score a touchdown in less than two minutes ... that's maybe 35 percent...Even it you think you've got a two-out-of-three chance to make two yards deep in your own territory, the cost of missing it is too great. The difference between Manning driving 29 yards for the winning touchdown and 72 is too great. Too many chances for him to err in 72 yards, as he'd been doing occasionally during the night.

OK, Peter, let's do that. We'll use your numbers. We'll use the conservative side of the numbers, too, so we assume that the Patriots had a 60% change of converting. According to your analysis, the Patriots have got a 35% chance of losing the game if they punt. If they go for it on fourth down, on the other hand, they've got a 40% chance of giving the Colts the ball on the 29. Surely, the odds of the Colts scoring from the 29 were something less than 100%. And the odds of the Colts scoring with enough time for the Patriots to get into field goal range were non-zero. If we assume that the probability of scoring a touchdown decreases linearly as yards from the end zone increase¹, then Peter's 35% at 72 yards becomes 87% at 29 yards. So the Patriots have a 65% chance of winning the game if they punt, and a (conservatively, using Peter's numbers) 1 - (.4*.87) = 65.2% chance of winning the game if they go for it.

So according to Peter King's own probability assumptions, going for it on fourth down gave the Patriots a better chance to win the game!

And Peter doesn't even see it.

All in all, I hated the call. It smacked of I'm-smarter-than-they-are hubris. Let Manning, with the weight of the world on his shoulders and no timeouts under his belt, drive 72 yards in two minutes, with his mistake-prone (on this night) young receivers and the clock working against him. Sure he could do it. But let him earn it. This felt too cheap. It was too cheap. Belichick's too smart to have something so Grady-Littlish on his career resume, but there it is, and it can never be erased.

Here's the thing that people are not understanding. It isn't arrogance, or hubris, or ego, that would have a coach make that decision. The risk of taking exactly the kind of roasting in the press that Belichick is taking now is too high to make that move for any reason like that. There's one reason, and only one reason, that a coach would make that move - the honest belief that it gives his team the best opportunity to win the game. And part of what makes Belichick great is that he's willing to put his team in the best position to win regardless of the "heat" that follows.

Belichick's an economist. He understands cost-benefit analysis. He knows the benefit of going for it there, and understands the costs. He understands the benefit of punting and understands the cost. There's far, far too much of the analysis of this move that is based on nonsensical assumptions to the effect that the Colts couldn't possibly fail to score a touchdown from the 29, but there's no way on God's earth that they could have moved 40 yards to get there on their own.

If the Patriots punt, they've got one chance to win the game - they need to stop the Colts from going 75 yards for a touchdown in 2 minutes. If they go for it, they've got three chances to win the game

1. They make the first down.


2. They stop the Colts from going 29 yards for a touchdown.


3. The all the Colts to score quickly enough to get the ball back for a field goal attempt.

Belichick made the right choice. The fact that he's the only coach in the NFL that would have done this is a testament to his decision-making process, not an indictment of it.

BTW, the best columnist currently working in the mainstream sports press, Joe Posnanski, gets it exactly right."

The conventional choice there is to punt. In fact, "conventional choice" does not begin to describe it. It was the obvious choice. The incontestable choice. I suspect 31 other NFL coaches would have punted there without even thinking twice about it. I suspect that had Belichick decided to punt there, nobody -- not one interviewer, not one talk show host, not even one radio caller -- would have second-guessed him there (and anyone who would second-guess him there would have been mocked and told to learn about football). I simply cannot remember any team going for it in a similar situation. You punt the ball and make Peyton Manning and the Colts go 70 yards to try to score the game-winning touchdown. It's as obvious as bringing Mariano Rivera in the game in the 9th.

But ... Belichick went for it. And here's the reason: He doesn't care about any of that stuff. He doesn't care about sentiment or history or what every other coach would do. He doesn't care about anything at all except winning the game.

Amen, Joe. Amen.



¹ - This actually isn't a great assumption. Probability of scoring increases with proximity to the end zone, but not linearly. The last 20 yards tend to be the hardest to get, as the field shrinks, and it becomes impossible to extend a defense. The back of the end zone makes a lot of stops on red zone plays. So really, that 87% is probably more like 75-80%.

Should the NFL do away with its blackout rules?

I want to address something that's printed in Peter King's mail bag this week. A reader writes to comment about the blackout in Detrot, how most Lions fans didn't see the game, and there's been no media comment on this.

There's one problem with your case, which I agree is compelling and I have much empathy with: Once you let the genie out of the bottle, how are you going to put it back in?

Don't. Just don't.

If unemployment in Detroit is 29 percent this year and you show the games locally, there are two problems. If it's still 29 percent next year, how do you black out the games again, and how do you sell tickets to a struggling fan base when the fans know the games are going to be on local TV?

How do you sell them when the fans know the games aren't going to be on local TV? How do you sell tickets to an NFL game, period? You sell the experience. Watching a football game from the comfort of your den is a substantially different experience from sitting in the crowd, sitting within earshot of the action of the field. They are different enough experiences as to hardly qualify, from an economic standpoint, as substitute products.

And let's look at it one different way. Let's say you're an NFL fan in Detroit, but you can't justify spending money on tickets. If the NFL is blacking out home games, you're going to see eight Lions games, tops. You might see ten or eleven games of the Vikings or the Giants or the Cowboys. Why wouldn't you be a fan of one of those teams instead of the Lions? A significant percentage of a fan-base develops affection for a team because that's the team they get to see. Don't the blackout rules result in a "lost generation" for a team that needs support?

According to the box score, there were 40,896 fans in attendance at the Lions game in week 3. How many fewer would have had to attend for the loss in game-day revenue to exceed the loss from a decline in long-term fan interest resulting from inability to consistently see the games? More importantly, how many fewer would have attended if the game were available on local television? Again, while the product - a Detroit Lions National Football League game - is the same, the experiences are completely different.

I don't know what the ticket prices are in Detroit, but it seems to me that one of two things must be true - either they're low enough so that the impact on revenues of a local broadcast of a non-sold out game wouldn't be a significant percentage of revenues, or they're high enough so that relatively few would opt to spend the money just because of the absence of a local broadcast. People who feel that the game experience justify the cost are going to go, whether it's on locally or not. And people who don't feel that way but want to watch the NFL will stay home and watch the game that's on instead of ponying up for the tickets, parking, concessions, etc.

I'm sure that the NFL has analyses on this issue that justify their position. And I can understand the owner's fear of broadcasts killing the live gate (though Major League Baseball, the NFL and NBA all seem to survive without sellout-blackout rules). But I'm skeptical that the blackout rules are actually benefitting the teams.

And then what do you do in Jacksonville if unemployment continues to creep up? How does Wayne Weaver feel -- or understand -- when the league is allowing one franchise to show the games locally when you can't? It's a tremendously difficult problem with no easy solution.

Sure there is - get rid of the blackout rule. Take the long-term view and sell the product rather than preventing those most interested in seeing it from being able to.

NFL week 5 wrapup

• I didn't see a lot of football this weekend, so I didn't know what people were talking about with the Trent Green play. Now, I've seen it. Don't bother telling me that's a legal play (I'm talking to you, Peter King) - it may well be, but it shouldn't be, and Travis Johnson has every right to be extremely ticked off at Trent Green. Not only did Green go at his knees, he went at his knees from the blind side. Green didn't walk off the field, but it was his own fault. Johnson was lucky to walk off the field.



• Coach "throwing up in [his] mouth" last night - Dick Jauron. The Bills led the Cowboys all the way, despite scoring a grand total of 3 points with their offense on the field. After stopping the 2-point conversion with 20 seconds left, all they had to do was cover the onside kick. They failed to do so. The Cowboys, with no timeouts left, hit a pass and stopped the clock on a spike with 1 second left in field goal range. Buffalo caught another break, when replay revealed that TO had dropped the ball (AGAIN!) and Dallas was down to 13 seconds. One play went out of bounds with 7 seconds left at the 43. Here's the part that kills the coach. With seven seconds left, the Cowboys have to get another 7 or 8 yards. There are two ways for Buffalo to lose - the Cowboys scoring on a 43 yard touchdown, or hitting a 7 yard out and getting out of bounds before the clock runs out. That's it. They want the Cowboys to throw the ball to the middle of the field. Bunch the corners on the outside, don't let anyone catch the ball and get out of bounds. Three step drop, Crayton catches the ball, steps out of bounds with NO BUFFALO PLAYER NEAR HIM. It's like they didn't understand the situation. Very frustrating to watch, and I didn't really care who won.



• Evidence that you should be listening carefully to what I say (and the pickin's are slim this week):
  
  NY Jets at NY Giants - "The Giants can be beaten deep, but not by the Jets. Chad Pennington may be one of the smartest and most accurate quarterbacks in the NFL, but he can't throw the ball more than 20 yards without it floating. The Jets have got to have perfect drives that take lots of plays to score. They won't have enough of them."
  
  Seattle at Pittsburgh - "Both of these teams have lost to the Cardinals, in Arizona, by similar margins. Seattle actually was closer to winning in the desert than Pittsburgh was. The Seahawks are also nursing a grudge, operating under the delusion that the officiating cost them the game the last time these two teams met, in Super Bowl XL. Regardless (and I'd love to be wrong) the Steelers win pretty easily."
  





• Evidence that you should be listening carefully to what I say (and betting the opposite [and this evidence continues to pile up]):
  
  San Diego at Denver - "As unimpressive as the Broncos have been thus far, if the Chargers can't beat the Chiefs at home, what reason is to expect them to go in to Denver and win? I can't see one."
  
  Dallas at Buffalo - "[The Bills will] play tough again, but not tough enough to stay within two touchdowns of a Dallas team that looks like a real team and not an NFC pretender."



• For the week:
  Winners: 11-3
  ATS: 6-7-1




• For the Season:
  Winners: 49-27
  ATS: 39-32-5

Patriots cheating, #12887 - Beating a dead horse

I am a big Peter King fan. One of the things that I look forward to every week is his Monday Morning Quarterback column. But I think that he (as well as most of the national media) have overstated the impact and "nefariousness" of the Patriots playing candid camera. A piece written yesterday includes the statement that:

It's widely believed that New England has stolen signals in this manner for years, but officials from various clubs acknowledge that the Pats are not the only team that does it. Last week's revelation doesn't mean the New England dynasty is a fraud, but it does take some shine off those three Super Bowl wins.

In the first place, of course New England has "stolen signals" in this manner for years. It should be obvious to the meannest intelligence that recording the defensive signal-calling has been standard operating procedure. It's part of their game-day activity. They've got video of all of the opposing coaches signals for the last 8 years - at least.

But leaving that alone for a minute, how can say simultaneously that "the Pats are not the only team that does it" and "it does take some shine off those three Super Bowl wins?" If they are breaking a rule which others are also breaking, and doing it to assist in an activity - "stealing" signals - that EVERYBODY else does, how does that taint the Super Bowl wins even a little bit? And if it does, how tainted are they, exactly? Are they more or less tainted than the Super Bowls that San Francisco and Denver won by cheating on the salary cap (which no one ever talks about as being tainted)? Are they more or less tainted than the Super Bowls of any teams (late 70s Steelers) who may have had players using illegal performance-enhancing drugs?

The Patriots won those Super Bowls. They earned them. To paraphrase their coach, they did business the way business was being done.

Period. End of discussion.

Patriots have to turn over tapes? Uh, OK...

From Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback column (of which I am, as a general rule, a big fan):

If he thinks the Patriots are pulling some sort of Rose Mary Woods and erasing video or withholding the video he's asked New England to provide, he could easily increase the penalty on the hooded one. Goodell wants all coaching video made available to him, and if the Pats don't cooperate, he'll increase the penalty...This week, the Patriots will have to make available all the tape the NFL demands to see. How much tape is that? It could be boxes and boxes. I have no idea how Goodell can be sure he's getting it all, and I have no idea how he can figure out whether Belichick is hiding any illicit tape he's had his video guys shoot over the past seven years, if indeed there is some. I'm dubious about the chances of Goodell finding anything else wrong, but we'll see.

Let's get real for a minute. The Patriots may have "boxes and boxes" of tape, but that's not where their video is. (This is something that I know a little bit about.) They've got, somewhere on their premises, a video capture/editing/playback system. When their video comes in on Sunday, Monday, whenever, it is immediately loaded into the system. The files are chopped up, tagged with keywords, players, teams, coaches, down and distance, and the tape is maybe archived, and maybe used again. But the data is stored as computer files, in a system with a big database that allows them to pull out whatever they want based on specific criteria. Want to see every third down play that the Colts have run in the last five years from between their own 30 yard line and midfield? No problem.

And those files aren't just in the massive storage system on-site. They're certainly archived and backed up off-site, as well, with Iron Mountain or someone. In other words, all of that sideline footage (and it certainly exists, probably for every game that they've played since Belichick arrived) is going to be very hard to purge. This isn't a case of pulling the cardboard box out of the closet and hauling it away. This stuff is integrated, and if/when they delete it from the database, it will still exist in the archives.

In other words, erasing video is exactly what the NFL is going to want them to do. And it won't be easy, or quick. As to "withholding," what would they withhold? There's no question that they've been recording sideline signals, the NFL knows it, the Patriots know that the NFL knows it, hell, Belichick tried to justify it (reportedly) to the commissioner last week. What could possibly be gained by not just showing them all of the sideline video that everyone already knows they have?

Patriots "cheating" - punishment meted out, lynch mob dissatisfied

Full disclosure up front:
- I am a big fan of the New England Patriots.
- I am a big fan of Bill Belichick, as a coach.

That out of the way, my last comments on the mountain-out-of-molehill story of the week:

• The Patriots broke an NFL rule. They should be punished.


• The Patriots did not "cheat." At least, not that we know of. Had Matt Estrella been in the twelfth row, or the press box, or a private box with his video camera, it would not have violated the rules. There is no rule against looking at the opposing coaches signalling in plays, watching them with binoculars, having observers write them down. There is no expectation of privacy when signalling plays in, in full view of tens of thousands of people. Given that, I say again, the Patriots did not "cheat." They broke the rules. There's a difference.


• Would I feel the same way if the story were about, say, the Colts? Well, I'd have preferred that, obviously. This is not fun for a Patriots fan. But I don't think I'd be in the lynch mob in that case, either. They have violated a rule that I think is, frankly, silly. It's a rule for the sake of having a rule. I think that, to the extent that signs are stolen, everyone is doing it. I don't believe that I'd feel significantly different if it had been someone else caught with the camera.


• I do think, though, that the story, and probably the punishment, would have been significantly different. Bill Belichick is a person with tremendous skills, intelligence, and he's fascinating to listen to when talking football. He's well-read and interesting. He's also, apparently, a jerk, or has been on many occasions. There are a lot of people who are thrilled to have an opportunity to play whack-a-mole with him. So we are treated to the "Beli-cheat" headlines, and all of the people that he's beaten over the years revelling in the "well, of course he beat us - he was cheating!" after-the-fact rationalizations. This story is very different if it's the Houston Texans or Minnesota Vikings. And the punishment is, too.


• Why is the punishment different? Because you don't have the punishment issued by the commissioner after a week of every media member hammering on how tough the commissioner is, and how hard he's going to be on this transgression. The media spent the week ensuring that Goodell had to either hammer the Patriots or get hammered himself.


• One of the facts of life is that the media operates in both build-them-up and tear-them-down modes. Those are great storylines, and the media is all about the storyline. Starting in 2001, the Patriots were a classic build-them-up story. There was an absolute feeding-frenzy this week, as everyone who had (very understandably) gotten sick of the Patriots jumped on the bandwagon. There was a spiral of competition to see who could come up with the most vitriol, the highest state of moral dudgeon. It was more than a little bit sickening.


• Some of the people resenting that on WEEI have spent much of the last two years doing exactly the same thing with Barry Bonds. I'm not one of them, and have criticized that behavior. It was no more appropriate or enjoyable when aimed at Bonds than it is aimed at Belichick and the Patriots.

The football pundits are, as a group, enjoying their dudgeon, competing to see who can, most quickly and firmly bemoan the unbelievable leniency of the commissioner in this case.
SI's Don Banks:

...it sounds a little strange to claim that Bill Belichick got off lightly, in terms of the penalty he received from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for his role in the Patriots' videotaping incident Sunday at Giants Stadium. And yet, I'm still left with the feeling Belichick dodged the worst-case scenario...

SI's Peter King:

I think the Patriots and Bill Belichick got off lucky.

ESPN.com's John Clayton:

The penalty was too light.

Pete Prisco:

This is the integrity of the game we're talking about. Goodell should have come down harder on the coach.

Mike Freeman:

Somewhere Bill Belichick is feeling a stinging sensation near his hand. It's due to the slap on the wrist.

USAToday's Jon Saraceno:

I would have preferred to see Belichick suspended for multiple games, without pay, and banned from headquarters, and for the team to lose a first-round pick

Poppycock. The Denver Broncos cheated when the went over the salary cap to sign John Elway's last contract. They gained an actual competitive advantage and won two Super Bowls. They lost one (1) second (2nd) round draft pick. The idea that what the Patriots have done warrants a worse punishment completely escapes me. This punishment is all out of proportion to the crime.

Rich Hofmann, of the Philadelphia News, on the other hand, gets it:

The embarrassment for Belichick and his owner, Robert Kraft, was already enormous. This set of punishments - especially the forfeiture of the first-round draft choice, just a gigantic penalty, way more than anyone had a right to expect - will assure that no one will ever use a camera again to do what an observant 12-year-old can do almost as well.