Time Out? No!

All the chatter on the radio this morning, specifically on Mike & Mike in the Morning on ESPNRadio, has been about the last 10 seconds of last night's Memphis vs Kansas NCAA basketball championship game.  Should Coach Calipari have called time out after the made free throw that put his Memphis team up by three points with 10 seconds left?  Should Memphis have fouled the Kansas player as he entered the front court with the ball and his team trailing by three points?

In listening to the arguments, it appears to me that the correct answer to both questions is yes, Calipari should have called time out to make sure that his players knew their roles and that the goal was to foul the Kansas player who had the ball once he crossed the half court line, provided that the player was not in the act of shooting.

That, however, is not the point of this post.  The point of this post is that I fundamentally agree with Digger Phelps on this.  Digger said that he, Digger, worked on this in practice at Notre Dame all the time and that the players should know what to do in this situation having practiced it over and over.  Provided that the goal was indeed to foul (as I believe Coach Calipari said in his post-game interview), then either Memphis failed to practice this scenario or the practice failed to carry over into the situation in which it was to be used.  This latter concern is a big one in coaching.  How do you train people for stressful situations?  It can be done, but it's not easy and the process does not guarantee successful execution at the moment of truth.

A timeout call very well may have changed the outcome of the game.  However, I think we as sports fans, players, and even coaches lose something very important when we call timeouts in those situations.  As fans we lose the excitement of the moment, the intensity of the nonstop action.  As players, we lose the autonomy to make or break the game through our actions.  As both players and coaches we lose the chance to see if our training paid off. 

Therefore, I propose a rule change for basketball.  No  timeouts.  By banning the timeout we would force coaches to do their coaching before games, during the now ubiquitous "media" timeouts, and during normal stoppages in play.  Coaches are too big a part of the drama of the games as it is, in my opinion, and removing one of the big in-game coaching tools, the timeout, would reduce that heavy presence.

Should Calipari have called timeout.  Yes.  So let's change the rules so he can't.  We'd have more entertaining games like the one last night, and less second guessing of at least one aspect of that great game.

Feynman Diagram

At BRG we can't resist leaving Feynman Diagrams everywhere we go. So to not have a Feynman Diagram on the BRG Blog was an enormous oversight. Now corrected.

Are You Prejudiced?

Are you biased against people who play tennis a certain way? It’s my experience that tennis players respect and emulate players who are “left and right” oriented and that they dismiss tennis players who are “up and back” oriented. Let me explain.

If a certain player hits the ball hard and hits the ball to the deep corners, we call him a good player. People admire that style. Other players respect the skill it takes to hit the ball hard and to direct it successfully to the corners of the court. That’s the style of play seen most often on TV nowadays. That style of play is based upon a left to right orientation--opening up the court and hitting winners to the left or the right of your opponent.

I like to joke that I rarely hear people come to me complaining that “So and So hits the ball really hard to the corners. Why do I always lose to So and So?” That’s no mystery. Everyone recognizes that So and So is a good player.

Instead I hear questions like, “Why do I lose to crappy players who just dink, lob, and spin the ball? That’s not even tennis.” In my opinion, this attitude betrays a prejudice, a bias against players who use the up and back dimensions of the court instead of the left and right dimensions of the court.

It just so happens that up-and-back players succeed at every level. I think there are several reasons for that, among them that people may not be very good at recognizing and adjusting quickly to balls hit short or with varying spins. It may be easier to see that a ball is heading to your left or to your right than to see that the ball is coming slower (short), or spinning more than you expected. Baseball batters face similar troubles with pitchers. Pitchers largely (though not exclusively) fool hitters with changes in the height, speed and spin of their pitches. I think tennis players are similarly fooled.

Ultimately whether it’s prejudice or simply a preference for a certain style of tennis, I think I’ve identified an all too common mindset. I think it’s a mindset that prevents people from achieving their potential as tennis players. If you find yourself falling into this trap, snap out of it. Recognize the nuances of all the different styles of play you will encounter. You may learn something about this wonderfully complex game. And you just might win more matches as a result.

Forget Perfection, Just Practice

You've probably heard the old adage "practice makes perfect" or its seemingly more enlightened correction "perfect practice makes perfect." When it comes to tennis, both of these do more harm than good.

Perfection is not the goal, not in practice nor in play. The goal is to improve. The only way to improve is to practice. If you buy into the first adage and think that practice will make you perfect, you will surely be frustrated. There’s never been a perfect tennis player and you’re not likely to become the first. If you buy into the updated adage and think you need to practice perfectly, after a few imperfect practices you’ll abandon practice altogether. I can assure you that zero practice will be worse for your game than imperfect practice.

Nope, the only adage that makes sense is "practice makes better." To which I think it's fair to say, "better practice makes even better." By all means get together with a coach who can help you make your practices better, but don’t let all this nonsense about perfection get in your way. Forget perfection. Just practice. You will improve.

Where Should I Have Been That Time?

Maximization in Tennis

After a point ends poorly for one of my students, I'm frequently asked, "Where should I have been that time?" Sometimes the inquiring player was out of position, but frequently the player was in what I would consider good position. Unfortunately the ball still got past the player resulting in a winner for the opposition. So why did I judge the position to have been good?

Let's say I'm playing a doubles match and I get beat by a shot down my alley. It's not rocket science to say that to defend that particular shot I should have been closer to the alley than I was. If I get beat with a short angle, I should have been closer to the net to cut off the sharply angled shot. But before my opponent's shot has been hit I can say no such thing. If I position myself in the alley I will have prevented my opponent from passing me in that direction, but I am almost certainly out of position. Similarly if I play one foot from the net, nobody will beat me with a sharp angle to my side of the court, but by positioning myself so close to the net I make a lob over my head very easy to hit and nearly impossible for me to defend. Again, this is not a wise tradeoff most of the time.

So with those examples in mind, how do I define good court position? Simple. Good court position is the place on the court where I maximize my chances of getting to a ball and hitting an effective reply. There is no "good court position" that guarantees I'll get to all balls. If I'm playing the net and I position myself a few steps inside the service line, I am in a position where I am able to cut off most of the left/right angle and contact most volleys above the net. This allows me to hit effective volleys off most, though by no means all, shots. This position also allows me to back up and make a reasonable play on most, though by no means all, lobs.

The best way to assure good court positioning is to first learn why you take certain positions to begin with. These positions generally reflect the geometry of the court and the offensive or defensive position of your team. From these basic starting positions it is necessary to make adjustments based upon how the point evolves and based upon what you learn about the skills and tendencies of your opponents.

Remember, the goal of proper court position is not that you will be in position to return every ball. Instead proper court position puts you in position to return the most likely balls, and it forces your opponents to beat you with more difficult shots (sharp angles and balls near the sidelines) rather than easier shots (in doubles those down the middle).

So get familiar with proper court positioning, accept that you won't be able to get to every shot, and maximize your chances of winning your next big match.

Who's Better?

David Berri posted a very brief and insightful piece on The Sports Economist blog titled "The 'I Don't Know' Argument". Professor Berri addresses the now hot issue of which team is better and how we address such questions. Is Michigan better than Florida? Unfortunately the answer is "we don't know." That answer is both correct and unsatisfying.

Sporting contests are about determining winners, not about determining who's the better team or player. Given enough contests over time you can be pretty confident that the winners are the better players. The adjusted stroke average that the PGA Tour uses is a very good measure of skill since it takes into account an entire year of play between players at the highest level of the game. Bowling averages over the course of a season are probably of similar quality in determining the most skilled bowlers. Determining the best quarterbacks, pitchers, hockey players, basketball players or even tennis players is much more difficult.

You would think determining the best tennis players would be straightforward since it's a one versus one game. However, the players do not play against each other often enough, and their is no simple measurement like score in golf or bowling, to accumulate objective data. The rating system that is used in chess, about which I must confess I'm relatively ignorant, seems like a pretty good way to assess skill in a game like tennis.

The important message, though, is that we should all be careful about calling one team or player better than another without a lot more evidence than a couple of wins and losses.

Intercollegiate Athletics

Two brief, interesting posts on the scam that is big-time intercollegiate athletics at The Sports Economist blog. The first is a response to the second.

As Herb Stein said, "Something that can't last forever will end." A system where athletic directors and big name head coaches in football, and men's and women's basketball get very rich, and where athletes in the non-revenue sports get athletic scholarships all thanks almost entirely to the below market pay earned by college football players cannot endure. When and how the system will end is anybody's guess.