Free Rise

In his latest Comedy Central special, Patton Oswalt ponders going back 10 years in time to tell his past self about the wonders of 2009. I’m paraphrasing here:

“What’s that you’re listening to? Oh yeah, our old Walkman. What’s in it?”

“Oh you know, a mix tape with our 25 favorite songs.”

“That was a great tape. I’ll tell you what. Pull out that tape. Break it in half. That’s how big your Walkman is going to be in 2009.”

“Wow. How many songs can that hold?”

“Every song you’ve ever heard, or ever will hear, or will ever be written.”

“What’s that cost? Like a million dollars?”

“No, no, no. They’ll be everywhere. You’ll get them in gift bags and try to re-gift them to your nephew, and even he will be like, ‘Thanks a lot, [expletive].’”

This is more or less how I feel about EA’s TeamBuilder application for NCAA Football 10. I don’t know if I could even describe it to my past-version without him having a full mental breakdown.

When I was a kid, I was a huge football nerd. (OK, I’ve steadfastly failed to mature on this front.) My nerdy pastime was creating fake teams, complete with rosters, stats, uniforms, histories, and mascots. You may ask, “For what purpose, Eric?” And then I would pity you for not have a childhood passion of your own.

Anyway, fast forward 20 years. EA Sports has released NCAA Football 10, which is the first version of the game I’ve bought in years. You’ve always been able to create teams in the game (as well as in the Madden NFL series), but with the TeamBuilder web app, you can now create whole teams from scratch, including uploading custom logos for the helmets.

And I’m majorly geeking out.

While the product itself bears some of the flaws you’d expect for a 1.0 release, TeamBuilder works on many levels for the gamer:

• It creates an emotional attachment to the game. You can put your little Division III art school in the Rose Bowl. You can re-create a historical team (’85 Hurricanes!) you cheered for and play them against the current edition. You can even make yourself (or an idealized, 19-year-old version of yourself) the QB if you want.
• It integrates what the web does best (data manipulation and communication) with what the console does best (game play).
• It socializes the experience. You can make your teams available for anyone to download onto their console, and you can download others’ creations seamlessly. If some other NCAA fan has already done the work for you, you can play with his team, and even tweak it to make it your own.

NCAA 10 is also loaded with other shiny things, including deep integration with ESPN and a mode that ties the game to the real-world NCAA football season. This integration isn’t a gimmick; it’s a key value of the game. And my inner 12-year-old couldn’t be more excited about it.

I’m no statistician, but I love data. And while I spend a little too much of my day with economic and marketing charts, I occasionally enjoy geeking out with other fun data.

And so when the NFL announced that my beloved Miami Dolphins would have the league’s toughest 2009 schedule, I sought reassurance in the numbers.

The NFL is notoriously topsy-turvy. Due to the high turnover of players, coaches, and team surgeons, about half of playoff teams this decade failed to return to the playoffs the following year. Given that, what exactly is a measure of “strength of schedule” as defined by opponents’ prior year won/loss records really worth?

Quite a lot, actually. I looked back at 2008’s strength of schedule rankings, as defined by opponents’ 2007 W/L percentages. Then I compared against how tough those 2008 opponents turned out to be, as defined by Football Outsiders’ amazing DVOA metric of team efficiency.

The sad-sack Browns, Bengals, and Lions ranked 1-2-3 in opponents’ DOA (partially because they never got to play themselves), but the Super Bowl champion Steelers were right there at #4. The Titans and 49ers’ schedules were significantly easier than projected, while the awful Raiders and Chiefs’ schedules were projected to be terrible and turned out average.

Overall, though, the correlation was uncanny.

That, my friends, is an r-squared of .534.

This season, the AFC’s best division in 2008 (the East) is scheduled to play the NFC’s best division in 2008 (the South), so the top eight slots for strength of schedule are held by those eight teams. Unmeasured in this metric are the details of the schedule. In addition to the #1 ranking of opponents’ 2008 W/L record, the Dolphins must play a Sunday west coast road following a Monday night home game (both against 2008 playoff teams), a Thursday night road game (against a 2008 playoff team) following a Sunday home game, a stretch of four road games in five weeks, and two outdoor cold-weather games.

And then there’s that r-squared.

Ah, who cares? This season is going to fun. Bring ‘em on.