why me betting on sports would be a bad idea

This year I've been participating in a Yahoo! contest to pick college football games against the spread. Each week you pick every game with a top-25 team, with the Vegas point spread factored in. Until I was away from my computer and didn't get my picks in two weeks ago, I was doing pretty well - I'd been consistently in the top 5 percent of everyone participating (I believe there's a few hundred thousand picking).

Not counting the week I missed, I've been able to pick the correct winner 50.1 percent of the time. And that puts me in the top 5 percent in the country. That would be a money-losing rate if I was betting these games, especially since the number is slightly inflated - Yahoo! has you pick games between I-A and I-AA schools that Vegas doesn't set lines for, so it's just a straight-up pick (and outside Michigan, a guaranteed correct one). According to an article in the Wall Street Journal a while back, you need to win 53.5 percent of the time to make money in Vegas, because they take a cut of each bet.

Of course, if I was betting, I wouldn't be betting on every game. I'd only bet the ones I felt confident about. And I'd probably end up worse off than if I'd bet every game.

I do miss the New Zealand sports books in every bar. You could even bet on American sports. There, it wasn't even against a spread - instead, you won more money for betting on an underdog than a favorite. I didn't bet a lot, but I did every so often. It was kind of like a lottery with a smaller payout and a few more payouts.

my take on a nationally-obscure sports story

Jeff Bower is out at Southern Miss. Just barely enough of a story to crack the national radar, but the only story that matters this week to a lot of folks I knew in the four years I spent in Hattiesburg covering Southern Miss.

On the face of it, Bower’s departure (termed a resignation, but definitely a forced one) is problematic. He’d been with the school for 17 years as head coach, and a few more as assistant and player. The team had winning seasons something like the past 14 seasons, as well as bowl trips in just about all of those.

Normally, this would be the sort of move I critize whole-heartedly, proof the college atmosphere has become so charged coaches aren’t allowed any breathing room and schools looking for a short-term fix often end up in long-term problems. Coaching changes are generally a crap-shoot; ask Nebraska, Notre Dame, Alabama, Texas A&M, etc., how well their last few changes have gone. And those are programs with a lot more tradition and money than Southern Miss.

There is a bit more to the story, of course. The program has more or less reached equilibrium since 2000, by which I mean Southern Miss is in the top four teams in Conference USA but not the dominant team fans believe it should be. The Eagles haven't been one of those outside-the-BCS teams who've had a major run and garnered notice, like TCU did a few years ago, or Boise State did last year, or Hawaii is doing this year. Southern Miss has had a few decent wins, but generally they get beat when they go and play their one or two SEC opponents each year. Fans don't like this sort of equilibrium. They complain about the lack of offense year in and year out. They worry because the defense hasn't been as good as its reputation. The school just built an addition to the stadium, despite the fact they never sold out the previous 33,000 seats. In the final game this season, announced attendance was 17,000. A few big-money folks have been working behind the scenes for a while agitating for a change, and as far as I can tell from the reports, they seem to have forced the school's hand.

Here’s the thing, though. Who better are you going to get? This isn’t a program most coaches, outside of Bower, are looking to make a career stop. There are positives: Southern Miss is sitting in the midst of fertile recruiting ground, although its competing with the SEC schools for the top-notch area recruits. There’s a decent national reputation and the possibility of making a run through Conference USA and making a Boise State-like splash with a possible BCS ranking. There’s a three-year old new lockerroom and weight room complex, as well as a brand-new addition to the stadium.
What there isn’t, though, is money or a fan base. The 15,000 people who follow the team like to believe they are as rabid as any SEC fan base, and they are convinced there are tens of thousands more who will join them as soon as the team turns some sort of corner. Outside of the impossible, getting an invite to a BCS conference, I'm not sure there's any corner to turn. More people would show up if the team was undefeated late in the year and knocked off a big-name team somewhere along the line, but as soon as the team lost again, most of those would go back to watching Ole Miss, Miss. State or another SEC team on TV.

And if they do luck out and get a coach who can bring them some sort of wild success, they'll be going through this search again as soon as that coach gets hired away by a bigger program. Once you're in the cycle, it's not easy to keep it going - see above and the crap-shoot nature of new coaches.

The basketball team managed to luck out and pick up a big-name coach with some black marks in Larry Eustachy a few years ago. He's helped the team out and picked up some recruits, but the fan base has come along slowly. And I don't see why he'd stay if he wins and shows his personal life is redeemed. Even if he doesn't, basketball is a different beast - if Southern Miss somehow became No. 2 in the conference behind Memphis and earned NCAA tournament bids regularly, he would be lauded as the best thing to ever happen to program.

If a football coach wins the conference and gets to the Liberty Bowl, the fans will see it as a failure because it's not a BCS bowl.

I just don't see this as being a positive for the school. An inevitability, maybe, if enough money was threatened to disappear from the donation pool. But I don't think the fans who have been calling for a new coach for at least the past five years are going to feel any better after the new guy has been there for a few seasons.

Mizzou. Rah?

Missouri actually won a big game. Missouri is actually No. 1 in the country and is the most obvious National Championship contender in the country. Except as far as I can tell, no one expects them to beat Oklahoma.

They opened as an underdog in Vegas. And as this post at the Washington Post's Sports Bog point out, the odds makers say the Tigers are the sixth-best team in the country. (I didn't know how he picked those rankings, so I went through the archives - turns out a firm's oddsmakers actually do conduct a poll out in Vegas.) They also say Oklahoma is the third-best.

I give the Sooners two advantages: 1) they already beat Missouri, although it was at home and the game was competitive; 2) as I stated last week, I don't trust Missouri's sports teams in any context. Actually, I'd be fairly confident in the matchup against West Virginia, so the Tigers might wait until then to dash their fan-base's hopes.

No one is more surprised than I am that this weekend's Kansas-Missouri game is actually meaningful. If my years at Missouri taught me one thing about Tiger athletics, it's that Missouri always found a way to underachieve.
Missouri in my experience is not a team contending for a national title. Missouri is a team that brings out the weirdness in other eventual National Champions - this is the team that brought you Colorado's fifth down, Nebraska's kick, UCLA's 4.8 second drive by Tyus Edney.
This is not a team that brought you any meaningful wins. In 1996, Missouri fans celebrated a season-ending win against Kansas by tearing down the goal posts. Missouri finished the year 5-6, Kansas 4-7.
The next year, Missouri fans tore down the goal posts when they beat Baylor to become bowl-eligible.
Nothing since then has made Missouri fans any more accustomed to success.

Attending Missouri games from 1996-2001 did not teach me what to think about a team two wins away from the national championship game. It taught me to be a little nervous whenever the team was on the field, and especially if they seemed to be about to pull out a win against a highly-ranked opponent.

In celebration of this weekend's border clash, a few other things being a Missouri fan taught me:

* You should not bring beer into the stadium in one of those old sport bottles with a giant plastic straw. It does not lead to a pleasant drinking experience.

* The crowd should not throw empty glass liquor bottles at the opposing band. Even if it is Kansas.

* Goal posts are hard to tear down at first, then suddenly very easy.

* Schools get annoyed when three goal posts are torn down in a season, especially when the wins are over schools like Baylor.

* When a school gets annoyed at having to repeatedly replace the same piece of property, it is likely to defend its property with tear gas.

* Campus rules like no alcohol never apply to alumni who have paid money to the school for a ticket and parking spot.

* When a team goes 30 years without a bowl game, crowds will double when they finally have a winning season.

* It's easy to hate Nebraska and its fans, even though it might have the least hostile visiting fans in the conference. I don't know why. Even now that Nebraska is horrible on the field, this hasn't changed.

* Watching your team get beat badly in a sleet storm is not the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

* I fully expect both Missouri and Kansas to lose, leaving both out of the top bowls. That's just the way it always works.

Too much chunky?

On a grocery run the other day, I stopped to pick up some Peanut Butter.

In front of the many options, I was hit by a semantic inconsistency. I was looking for crunchy peanut butter. However, of the two brands taking up the vast majority of the shelf space in Safeway's peanut butter section, one brand offered smooth or Super Chunky, the other smooth or Extra Chunky. Neither, it seemed, offered an option in between.

Do we need the extra adjective? Does the Super or Extra mean anything when there isn't a non-Super or non-Extra option? I suppose it is Extra Chunky, compared to smooth, but anything would be.

I supposed I'm more troubled by the verbal inconsistencies from those marketing to me than most. But when did the adjectives take over my peanut butter?

don't mention it

I find it hard to believe more people aren't upset at the calls to give Telco firms immunity from lawsuits over giving the NSA access to communications without a warrant. This drives me absolutely nuts. I haven't heard any credible evidence that getting warrants is really that hard, and I see no reason why the companies should be let off the hook for feeling it was in their best interests to let the government in. Hell, Qwest didn't buy it, despite apparently losing government contracts as a result.

Today the guy who brought some of this to light was making the rounds around Washington. I don't think an immunity bill will be passed while this is in the news, but I totally expect a provision to be tucked into some massive budget legislation sometime when attention is elsewhere.

NY Times story

this isn't good

I just saw this on my Yahoo Fantasy Football page:

Bill Williamson, of The Denver Post, reports Denver Broncos QB Jay Cutler did not throw an interception in Week 8. It is the first time in his 12 career starts that he has not thrown an interception.

As a Broncos fan, I can say that's not a good way to start a career.