Category: Sports

World Cup 2010 Preview and Predictions

I’m on my way to South Africa for the World Cup right now with my friends Andy and Katie.  This morning, we flew out of Milwaukee to New York and will be exploring the city for the day.  Late tonight, we fly out of NYC and head to Dubai, where we catch a plane to South Africa.  We’ve got tickets for USA vs. England, USA vs. Slovenia, USA vs. Algeria and Spain vs. Switzerland and we hope to be able to catch Brazil vs. Ivory Coast and Cameroon vs. Netherlands.

We’re going to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Rustanberg, Durban and hopefully Kruger National Park for a safari and we’re all excited.  It’s my first trip to Africa and I’m hoping its as amazing as World Cup 2006 in Germany was.  I’m confident that the South Africans will pull off a great tournament, just like the Germans did in 2006.

I’m not really sure what to expect out of the US squad.  I think the US got a fairly easy group compared to what they could have gotten, but there are not easy teams in this tournament, save North Korea.  I’m thinking the US will advance and most likely lose to Germany in the round of 16.  I’m looking for Landon Donovan to continue to build on his breakout performance in the 2009 Confederations Cup and his loan stint at Everton and really show that he is a world class player.  Clint Dempsey will continue to shine out on the left flank like he has for Fulham.

With Charlie Davies not fully recovering from a deadly car crash, the US is really thin at forwards.  Luckily, three previously unheralded forwards seem to be hitting their stride right at the right time.  Look for big things from Hurcluez Gomez and Jozy Altidore.  The most improved player from qualifying til now seems to be Jose Francisco Torres.  I think he can have a breakout performance at the World Cup, attracting attention from clubs in the best leagues in Europe.

The biggest problem for the US is at the back.  Tim Howard is a world class goal keeper, but the defense in front of him looks shaky.  Oguchi Onyewu looks amazing in 2009, but suffered a knee injury in qualifying.  He doesn’t seem fully recovered.  Green Bay’s own Jay Demerit looks solid as the other center back, but the outside backs will have trouble with fast players like England’s Aaron Lennon and Wayne Rooney.

The African sides look to be really strong this year.  Ivory Coast looks really good, but they have a really hard group.  Cameroon and Ghana looked solid, but both are suffering from injuries and the hosts, South Africa have a decent squad that will be boosted by the home support.

So who’s going to win it all?  I’d love to see Spain win it all, but I don’t see it happening.  I think they’ll make a deep run, only to come up short.  Argentina is an easy pick since they have arguably the best player in the world in Lionel Messi.  As Arsenal’s coach said after getting lit up for 4 goals, Messi is “like a video game player.”  Ultimately I can’t see Argentina taking it because they have a moron for a coach in Diego Maradona.  England, Germany, Portugal, France and other traditional powers look to be weak, but you never know when a team will catch fire, like Germany and France in 2006.  I’m going to go with the safe pick and choose Brazil, even though they left Ronaldhino at home.

I can’t wait to be in South Africa and hope to write a few posts during my down time, but I can’t guarantee anything.  I have 2 posts scheduled to post while I’m gone, but any new posts I write in South Africa will be about South Africa.  I’ll be back on June 30th!

More Practice, Less Theory

“What do we need to know this for?” I asked as my K5 teacher tried to tell me how to write more clearly.

My penmanship was pretty bad and the teacher realized that I was writing my letters backward.  Instead of writing some of my letters from bottom to top, I wrote from bottom to top.  I remember being annoyed and asking “what do we need to know this for?”  I could read my writing and so could the teacher, but I wasn’t following the rules.  In 3rd grade, I pretty much refused to learn cursive because I could print really fast and hated the new rules, again asking “what do we need to know this for?”  I continued this (probably incredibly annoying) refrain all the way through middle school: manually calculating slope instead of using a graphic calculator, diagramming sentences, specific types of bibliographies.  Even gym class wasn’t safe from my middle school ire.

Somewhere along the line, probably around freshman year of high school, I kept the questions to myself, but decided to tune out anything that I thought wasn’t going to help me later in life.  I loved reading about interesting things that had happened in real life and writing about current events, but hated theoretical or outdated lessons.  My favorite class in high school was consumer economics, an entire class devoted to balancing your checkbook, investing in stocks and personal economics.  It was real and I still use many of those skills I learned sophomore year.

I hated geometry because of the rigidity of proofs, hated calculus because I couldn’t understand why we had to do it by hand when we had graphing calculators to do it for us.  I hated memorizing the parts of a cell in freshman biology and reading about the Greek Gods.  It was boring and I couldn’t see the benefit later in life.  I haven’t used any of those “skills” since. This choice was the main reason why I got waitlisted at UW and almost didn’t get in, but I don’t regret it one bit.

When I got to college, I was expecting a change.  I thought we would learn how to succeed in the real world, but I quickly realized it was going to be more of the same inside the classroom.  I realized that if I was going to learn, I would have to do it myself.  After I bought ExchangeHut, I thought I’d try the business school.

After about half of a semester, I realized it wasn’t right for me.  Accounting 100 was rule driven and required you to do problems by hand.  After managing ExchangeHut’s accounting in Quickbooks for a few months, I couldn’t understand why we would figure out any of that stuff by hand.  Why not just use Quickbooks and save all of the trouble?  After the first four weeks, we started to learn about how Wal-Mart manages its inventory and how other large corporations prepare financial statements.  While I understand accountants need to know this stuff, I realized it was worthless to me.  I could use quickbooks for my accounting and if I ever got really successful, I’d hire an accountant.  Why bother?  I found the over reliance on theory to be extremely prevalent in business school classes.

I had a simple accounting question for ExchangeHut and asked four different friends who were Accounting majors with good GPAs.  None of them knew the answer, but they could sure solve the question on the exam about WalMart’s inventory system.  It happened again this year with an intern for Entrustet.  We have a finance major who earned a 4.0 from UW and is graduating in the spring.  He is clearly smart and learns quickly.  We have him doing some balance sheet work and other finance related tasks and he’s good at it.  He was working on our balance sheet and ran into a somewhat complex issue, so he went to his finance professor and asked for help.  The professor said “just use quickbooks, it’ll know where to put everything in the right place.”

At first I just laughed, but then I realized this was a microcosm of why students are having trouble adjusting the the real world.  I don’t think its our intern’s fault.  He just was never taught how to use quickbooks and as soon as he got to the real world, his professor says “use quickbooks.”  That’s what happens to graduates all over the country.  Rebecca Thorman’s post addresses how colleges are failing students, but I really think the over reliance on theory in the place of practice is what is hurting students.  Ellen Nordahl looks at the problem from the other side in her post about how students are unengaged.  Universities need to teach students more skills they will use in the workplace or they will not be prepared.  I bet if students weren’t asking themselves “what do we need to know this for” in their heads, they would be more engaged in their school work.

I am not saying that we should throw out all theory.  It is clear that you need to understand the basic theory in order to implement them in practice, but universities have swung way to far to toward the theory end of the continuum.

Schools are not the only place where the balance is out of whack. I ref a bunch of soccer each year and see the same basic problem.  I ref everything from U-11 to high school to semi-pro adults and I really enjoy it.  Each year, all refs have to take a recertification course that is supposed to refresh refs on the laws of the game and let us know about any rule changes.  It also gives instructors a chance to stress certain aspects of the game and teach better game management.  At the end of the class, everyone has to take a 100 question test and get at least a 75% in order to retain their badge. All USSF refs have to take this class each year, so attendees range from 12 year old first year refs to 70 year old guys who have been reffing for 35 years.  Sounds like a good system, right?

Wrong.  The test focuses on incredibly abstract game situations that would never happen, even to a World Cup level referee.  Here’s some actual questions from the test:

Q: An offensive player is dribbling toward goal, standing outside the penalty area.  A defender who is standing in the penalty area takes off his shoe and throws it at the ball, knocking it away.

Q: A player takes his shin guard off and slaps the ball with the shin guard in his hand.

There are a ton more, but you get the idea.  You have to know the rules to get these questions right, but they cause everyone’s eyes to glaze over.  It would be a test that would be great to do as trivia, but doesn’t really help a 12 year old new referee manage a game.

Because the test is so skewed toward situations that will never happen to you, the instructors have to teach to the test, just like teachers in middle and high schools do for state tests.  To make matter worse, the instructors use jargon heavy language instead of using concrete examples.  For example, at my most recent clinic, a kid of about 13 was confused about offside.  The instructor had said “as the assistant referee, make sure you stay with the second to last defender.”  The kid raised his hand and said “I thought it was the last defender.”  It was clear that the kid forgot that the goalkeeper counts as a defender, but instead of explaining it with an example, the instructor just repeated his sentence again, but more slowly and with more emphasis.  The kid didn’t understand until another ref at my table explained it to him with a diagram and an example.  There were so many other examples like this during the 8 hour course, my head started to hurt.

A huge percentage of kids quit refereeing each year because they get screamed at by coaches and parents.  The recertification classes should teach foul recognition (ie, when to blow the whistle and when not to), how to kick a coach out, how to deal with parents and the basic rules of the game, not what to do if someone throws a shoe at the ball or whether the correct restart after a chicken walks onto the field and knocks the ball over the end-line is a drop ball or a goal kick.  They should be showing videos of fouls from youth and adult games to keep people engaged.  A quick search of YouTube for “soccer violence” or “youth soccer red cards” brings up tons of teaching moments.  Additionally, FIFA makes rule changes each year, usually as a result of something that happened in an important game.  We could have watched videos of each situation to explain why FIFA decided to make the change, but instead we just read it from the book. Just like you learn how to succeed in the real world by doing things and learning practical things like Quickbooks, soccer referees learn from watching other successful referees work and learning from real life situations.

It is harder to come up with engaging, real life lesson plans than it is to teach theory.  Its also riskier.  I think educators are less likely to try to teach real life situations because it takes time to come up with more in depth lesson plans and it’s not the safe choice.  In The Wire (my favorite tv show ever), a teacher realizes that he can teach probability to his inner city students via dice.  The kids love it and learn because they can see how they will use this skill in real life.  I think everyone agrees that the US has to do a better job of preparing students for the future.  The first step is to stop teaching so much theory and start teaching things that students will use in real life.

How NFL Coaches are like Midlevel Workers in Corporate America

Bill Belichick is widely thought of as the smartest coach in the NFL.  He has been hugely successful, coaching the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl four times in his 9 years of coaching, winning three.  Like many successful people, Belichick rubs many NFL fans the wrong way, leading many to revel in his failures.  Part of the schadenfreude can be explained by his somewhat abrasive personality and win at all costs mentality.  He was caught up in the NFL cheating scandal a few years ago where he was accused of ordering Patriots employees to tape opponents practices before important games.

It was no wonder that Belichick was universally slammed by pretty much everyone after his decision to go for it from his own 30 yard line in the 4th quarter last night’s Sunday night game against the Indianapolis Colts.  Here’s the situation.  The Patriots were winning by six points with a little over two minutes to go.  The Patriots faced 3rd and 2 from their own 28.  A first down in this situation wins the game.  The Colts defense stopped the Patriots on 3rd down, forcing a 4th and 2.  Instead of punting, Belichick ordered his offense back out onto the field to go for it.  They didn’t get it and Peyton Manning drove the Colts 28 yards for the game winning touchdown.

It’s obvious that the Patriots should have punted and forced the Colts to go 70 yards to try to win the game, right?  To steal a line from Lee Corso, not so fast my friend.  Belichick is way ahead of the curve.  According to research by David Romer at UC-Berkely, NFL teams punt way too often.

The Patriots convert first down from 2 yards out 76% of the time (ESPN’s stat from Sportscenter).  This stat means that by going for it, the Patriots had a 76% chance of winning the game.  Belichick only had to think that his defense would give up a touchdown to Peyton Manning and the Colts offense at a lower rate for it to be a good decision.  Manning had already driven the Colts to three 75+ yard touchdown drives in under two minutes in the game.  Belichick made the decision to go for it and this time it did not pay off, which brings me to why I love watching him coach a game.

Coaches in all sports, but especially football, almost always play it safe and go with conventional wisdom.  I’ve written about the lack of innovation in football before, mostly relating to play calling.  Last season I came up with a hypothesis:

I think it is because coaches fear being fired for not just doing poorly, but doing poorly a different way.  If coaches go with the conventional wisdom and fail, they will not be criticized as harshly as if they experiment and find new ways to fail.  If they succeed, like Mike Martz’s high-flying pass offense for the Rams called “The Greatest Show on Turf,” they are given some credit, but when the same coach experiences a minimal decline, he is criticized more harshly than a conventional coach.  For example, when Martz decided to pass in a late game situation, just like he had during other times in the game and failed, he was roundly criticized.  If he had run and failed, the players would have been criticized for not executing.   There is no upside for innovation here.

Today, I found out that this hypothesis has a name, via the Freakonomics blog:

If his team had gotten the first down and the Patriots won, he would have gotten far less credit than he got blame for failing. This introduces what economists call a “principal-agent problem.” Even though going for it increases his team’s chance of winning, a coach who cares about his reputation will want to do the wrong thing. He will punt, just because he doesn’t want to be the goat. (I’ve seen the same thing in my research on penalty kicks in soccer; it looks like kicking it right down the middle is the best strategy, but it is so embarrassing when it fails that players don’t do it often enough.) What Belichick proved by going for it last night is that 1) he understands the data, and 2) he cares more about winning than anything else.

It takes a leader to be willing to go against the grain, even when he knows that he will be excoriated by his peers.  He could have taken the easy way out.  If he did, today’s headlines would most likely read “Patriots defense no match for Peyton Manning and the Colts.”  Instead, we have “Colts make Pats pay for Bill’s unusually dumb decision.”

I think that this problem helps explain why big companies are slow to innovate.  They face the same problem.  Mid-level employees face the same problem as NFL coaches.  If they simply keep their heads down and do what 99% of the other workers would do, they will get credit if they succeed, but face much less criticism if they fail.  Most corporate cultures punish failing in a new way much more than failing the same old way.  If a mid-level employees actually do something innovative and it works, many times they are given less credit than they deserve.

I think this problem helps explain why startups are able to innovate much faster than big companies.  If big companies want to innovate faster, they need to empower their employees to go against the grain and make tough decision.  They need to actually mean it.  Companies need to view a failure for what it is, a failure, rather than get caught up in how the person failed.  This is not to say that someone who decides to pull the corporate equivalent of going for it on 4th and 20 from their own 5 yard line shouldn’t be criticized.  As long as the decision has a reasonable chance of success, they should be applauded for their innovation, rather than criticized for thinking outside the box.

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Soccer, Politics and the World Cup

Yesterday, I made the trip down to Chicago to see the US soccer team take on Honduras in a World Cup Qualifier at Soldier Field.  It was the first time the US had played a qualifier in Chicago, mostly because the US Soccer Federation is worried that Chicago would not give the US a home field advantage, as there are many immigrants in the Chicago area.   It turns out that they were right, but the US still was able scratch out a 2-1 come from behind win, just about guaranteeing the US a spot in South Africa 2010 with five more qualifying matches to go.  I would guess that at least 35,000 of the 55,000 fans in attendance were sporting el bicolor (white and blue stripes), and it seemed like even more, as the Hondurans knew how to cheer and make noise. There is nothing more intense than attending a well played international soccer game.  

I went to the 2006 World Cup in Germany and have yet to find another sporting event that matched the passion, enthusiasm and national pride of the fans.  I’ve been to some great Badger football, basketball and hockey games, Packer games and Brewer games, but none matched the intensity of even the Costa Rica vs. Ecuador game in the group stage of the World Cup.  The feeling that I had singing the National Anthem in Nuremberg 2,000 or so other Americans was electric and unforgettable.

If you are a soccer fan, or even if you only casually follow the sport, make a point of going to a World Cup Qualifier or Gold Cup Match if there is a game in your area.  The fans are into the game, Sam’s Army is singing and chanting and the opposing fans are playing drums and blowing horns.  It’s an amazing atmosphere and mostly friendly, but I was disappointed by some Americans, mostly drunk college kids, in the crowd who yelled things like “go jump back across the border” or “go back to mexico” at Honduran families.  Its unoriginal and dumb and I wish more people would have told them to stop. In the US, sports and politics don’t usually mix.  

To me, the coolest part of the game  was that most of the Honduran fans were clearly immigrants to the US, spoke English, and were still proud of where they were born.  Many of the  Honduran fans sang the US National Anthem and joined in the cheers of USA, USA, USA after the game, but wore Honduras shirts and cheered intensely for Honduras during the game.  The woman in front of me made it very clear that while she was cheering for Honduras, she “loved the USA” and “cheered for the US” whenever they weren’t “playing Honduras.”  One of the most amazing parts our country is that immigrants assimilate into society and love the country, unlike many European countries where immigrants are shuttered in slums by de facto segregation.  It was also cool to see most Hondurans telling their own fans to stop throwing empty cups over the second deck in the second half when they were upset with a call.

In other parts of the world, soccer and politics mix all the time.  Ivory Coast’s qualification to the 2006 World Cup stopped their civil war.  Iran’s qualification to the 1998 World Cup caused massive celebrations, alcohol fueled parties and women throwing off their veils, that some thought might be the spark that overthrew the government.  When Iran beat the US in France ’98, the entire country rushed into the streets to celebrate.   A 1969  riot during an El Salvador and Honduras World Cup Qualifier caused la guerra del fútbol, the soccer war, that claimed over 2000 lives.

Iran is back in the news as it tries to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.  On Friday, the Financial Times featured an article ahead of Iran’s must win Qualifier against North Korea that claimed the Soccer Result Could Affect the Iranian Election.

Some argue that failure to qualify – Iran needs to win its remaining three fixtures over the next 11 days to be guaranteed a place at next year’s World Cup finals in South Africa – could damage the re-election hopes of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president. “The government of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has shown it would like to make the best use of sports in politics and failure in football will surely have negative impacts on his votes,” said a senior reformist politician. The comment might be seen as wishful thinking by a government opponent but it is echoed by a fundamentalist politician, sympathetic to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad: “The results of these football matches might shift a significant number of votes from one candidate to another.” In an election expected to be close – and where Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the rival reformist candidate, is said to be gaining support – that could be significant.

Iran was banned by FIFA from international competition for a few weeks back in 2008 because the President fired the head of the Football Association and appointed a political hack.  After Ahmadinejad backed down and brought the old FA head back, Iran were allowed to continue to compete. This story put me in the awkward position of rooting for North Korea to do something good for a change, in hopes that Iran miss out on the world cup and throw the horrible Ahmadinejad out of office in favor of a more reform-minded alternative.

In Saturday’s qualifier in Pyongyang, Iran and North Korea played to a 0-0 draw, leaving Iran on the outside looking in.  Iran need to win both of their next two games in order to qualify and hope that North Korea and Saudi Arabia do not do well.  It will be interesting to see how the next few weeks shape up in Iranian soccer, as well as politics.