stevesbets

I love Bill Simmons. He plays poker, he loves Vegas, he loves sports, he has my dream job. His sports columns on espn.com are consistently funny, well thought out and uniquely knowledgeable. I would love to be half the writer he is. His NBA knowledge is superb and I consistently agree with most of what he says. I tore through his book of basketball (~750 pages) in 2 days because Simmons on the NBA is a must read for someone as in love with basketball as I am. The only way he could be a more perfect sports writer for me is if he were from Philly rather than (sigh) Boston. With all of that said, his recent column on the Belichick decision makes some downright silly statements that I would like to address. You can read his column here

Firstly, I wanna say that I find his column far less objectionable than most of the arguments that Belichick made a poor decision. Simmons shows an understanding of statistical arguments (for the most part) and acknowledges their place in sports. I agree with his main point which is that in football, you can’t really know the EXACT %’s for specific situations so any statistical argument can be manipulated when it is a close call. My problem is that he refuses to acknowledge that 4th and 2 was a close call. Before I get into specifics I want to commend him for getting a nice little tilt on Andy Reid in there:

“The good news? I finally understood how Eagles fans felt rooting for a team helmed by Andy Reid. When your coach lets you down with a decision that makes no sense, it’s like riding in the passenger seat of a friend’s car and helplessly watching as he plows over a pedestrian in a crosswalk.”

So true.

Now onto the negatives. The most ridiculous line in the column is:

“by Monday night, based on various columns and message boards (as well as e-mails to my reader mailbox), you would have thought Belichick was a genius for blowing the game. He played the percentages! It wasn’t as crazy as it looked! By this logic, Belichick also should have held a loaded pistol to his head on the sideline, spun the chamber and tried to shoot himself like Chris Walken in “The Deer Hunter.” If those 1-in-6 odds came through and he succeeded, we could have said, ‘Hey, he played the percentages: 83.6666 percent of the time, you don’t die in that situation! You can’t blame him for what happened!’”

This analogy is simply ludicrous. Having a 84% chance of not dying in an instant when playing Russian roulette ignores that in the alternative, you have a (near) 100% chance of not dying by not doing so. In fact,  playing Russian roulette is clearly NOT playing the odds (100% vs 84%) so you COULD blame him.

Next Simmons goes off on some statistician that made a statistical model that came to the conclusion that Tim Thomas is an underrated NBA player. This can’t really be so. I agree with him. Thomas played for my beloved Sixers for a few years and he defined wasted talent. He was not a player you could build around or win around. With that said, The qualm is not with statistics themselves, its with someone misinterpreting statistics to mean something that clearly is not the case (that Thomas is underrated).

The rest of the article goes into arguments about why the statisticians simply misapplied statistics to the 4th and 2 decision and why in fact, if you look at the stats his (Simmons’) way, the Pats should have punted. I have no qualm with these arguments, I agree with many if not all of them. Maybe Belichick should have punted, I don’t quite know what the statistics are in that exact situation, what I do know is that most coaches totally ignore the chance of winning based on the different decisions they make and just follow conventional wisdom. That brings me to one other line I hated before I get to my final analysis:

“In the biggest game of the regular season, when a football coach tries something that — and this is coming from someone who watches 12 hours of football every Sunday dating back to elementary school — I cannot remember another team doing on the road in the last three minutes of a close game, that’s not “gutsy.” It’s not a “gamble.” It’s not “believing we can get that two yards.” It’s not “revolutionary.” It’s not “statistically smart.” It’s reckless.”

Just because no one has ever done it before doesn’t make it dumb or reckless. There would never be innovation if that were the case and Simmons knows that better than anyone. This is one of the reasons I like him so much, his Book of Basketball is filled with off the cuff comments and unusual suggestions to improve the NBA that no one has ever considered but I absolutely loved.  This line made me believe he was writing out of anger that his team lost rather than conscious, rational thought since it is so decidedly unlike him.

In the end, he basically makes two seperate arguments in the column.

1) There is more to the decision than just statistics. The gun analogy, the Tim Thomas thing, and his general tone suggests this dumb point of view that most of the other pundits have taken. This is totally ridiculous. As Simmons quotes in his column, “you play to win the game.” Whatever decision makes you most likely to win IS the decision you go with. There is no debating this.  If by going for it on 4th and 2 there, you have a better chance to win in that spot then the fact that no one has done it in your history of watching football is 100% irrelevant.

2) That the statistics in fact say that the Pats would have had a better chance to win the game by punting. I have no argument with this. I do not know enough (nor does anyone really) to say exactly the chance of winning the game in that exact situation by punting or not punting. I accept Simmons’ sports expertise so I like the points he makes.

I simply find it objectionable to say that there is more to football coaching decisions than statistics. No. If you have the correct statistics on what decisions will let you win more, you make those decisions. There are no ifs ands or buts. Even worse is the idea that you shouldn’t do something because nobody has ever done it. I hope Simmons never writes anything that silly again. Just as I swear by Bill Maher for politics and religion, I swear by Simmons for sports and it hurts me when he says something that i strongly disagree with.