The Burst of a Bubble

This has been a very odd season to be a sports fan.  Investing oneself in your favorite team is something normal to do.  But this time around it seemed so much more urgent.  Everything else, especially Covid and our national politics, but then all those other activities that have been influenced by those two, has made people either want to crawl into a hole or work themselves into a furious rage. Watching sports and rooting for your favorite team then took on an added burden for many fans.  It was more than just a source of entertainment.  It was salvation from everything else that seemed so dismal.  And it could be done safely, watching TV from your living room, then perhaps going on the Internet and gobbling up all the post game information and gossip. 

You have to wonder whether those who promote pro and college sports understood this enough to deliberately hype things, as a way of intensifying the fans emotions about their favorite team. Since I'm an economist by training as well as a long time Illinois fan, it occurred to me during the shellacking that Loyola gave to Illinois yesterday, which followed Ohio State and Purdue each losing in the round of 64, other Big Ten teams that were favored in their respective games, that the moniker - best conference in the country - which the Big Ten claimed and repeated over and over again, was just like an overinflated asset, which happens when there is a bubble.  Eventually the bubble bursts and the asset price falls dramatically thereafter. The NCAA Tournament games seemingly put the lie to the assertion that the Big Ten was the best conference.  This was especially true for Illinois, which many who filled out brackets had reaching the Championship game, and quite a few of them thought Illinois would win it all.  In retrospect, how could that be?

Ironically, in my previous post I wrote that once the conference season starts we no longer get performance comparisons of teams across conferences.  Those teams that improve a lot may then go under the radar. But I was mistakenly arrogant in writing that post.  I thought Illinois was such a team and I was making an argument for why it might be better than Gonzaga, the overall #1 seed. I didn't consider less hyped teams that might have improved in this way, or teams in a major conference that played their conference season like major league baseball teams play spring training, but then turn up the heat during the NCAA Tournament.  That too is possible.  Indeed, seeing the outcomes from yesterday, it appears more likely that is what happened.  But I should caution about something I learned from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  In small samples, outlier outcomes are not all that unlikely.  Since the NCAA Tournament is one and done, we don't see the repeat experiment of the same teams matched up, the way they are in the NBA playoffs.  I don't want to critique the one and done aspect.  It adds to the excitement for everyone.  But it does make for less confidence in the outcome as a determinant of the better team.  Everyone can have a bad day, even the best of teams. Best out of five does a better job in reducing the role of luck.  Best out of seven is even better that way.  

My previous post also talked about the issue of match ups.  Loyola plays Oregon State in the Sweet Sixteen.  It might be that Illinois is more likely to beat Oregon State than Loyola is, yet Loyola is more likely to beat Illinois.  I don't know this for a fact, but it is possible.  I'll have more to say about this particular issue below.  

For the rest of this post, I want to focus specifically on Illinois, partly because that's the team I've watched and so have a bunch of questions about them, and partly to illustrate how a bubble might form in evaluating a team (or a conference) well above its true ability.  

1.  Was Illinois exceedingly nervous before the game with Loyola began?

There was a camera shot of Kofi Cockburn during the warm up.  He looked grim.  He normally is smiling then and joking with his teammates.  This time around that wasn't happening.  I didn't see other players in the warmup regarding their facial expressions and/or I don't have a firm impression about how they normally would look.  But I did take note of Kofi.  Was it just him or the whole team?  And, if it was the whole time, why was that?  I read some newspaper pieces that suggested it was the whole team - Illinois had lost the game before it started and that was confirmed in the first 3 minutes.  

It may be difficult to learn about this soon.  I can imagine Brad Underwood and the rest of the coaching staff having a rule (for the entire season, not just this game) that what's said in the locker room stays in the locker room.  Yet for having a long term relationship with the fans that doesn't turn sour, something about this needs true comments from the coaches and maybe also from the players.  This doesn't have to happen immediately, but should not be too long in the offing after the Final Four. 

2.  Illinois is strictly a man to man team these days.  Why is that?

In particular, why not a 1-3-1 zone, so Kofi can stay near the basket always, even with a big man who is a good passer (Krutwig of Loyola) and/or a big man who can shoot the three (Garza of Iowa, Hunter Dickinson of Michigan, and perhaps others in the Big Ten).  Further, a zone makes it easier for there to be weak side help on a play in the paint.  Loyola repeatedly ran a curl around Krutwig.  The Illinois defender would be lagging on the play, giving an easy lane to the basket for what looked like a backdoor play.   Then too, for teams that space the floor offensively, a zone allows more opportunity to trap and double team.   There is the old idea that goes back to Vince Lombardi and maybe is even older than that, which is to have a basic mode of operation and then do that very very well through repeated practice.  It's one approach.  The team doesn't adjust to the situation.  The team imposes their will on the other team.  If you're the Green Bay Packers in the glory days, fine.  But if you're good yet not truly great, why not make situational adjustments, which require more than one defensive approach in the arsenal?

I know there are some arguments against a zone.  If the opponent has several good three-point shooters, the zone will likely give them better looks.  And it may be that the type of man to man that Brad Underwood teaches his players makes them more aggressive defensively, yet without fouling (so much).  But I felt in the Loyola game we should have played it, or at least have the weak side defenders help out on the curl so that the back door play wasn't there.  We never did that and as a viewer I found that disappointing.  

3. I'm a big fan of Ayo as all Illini fans are, yet he does have some weaknesses.  Those are never talked about.  Why is that?

Ayo is loosey-goosey on the dribble and sometimes turns it over as a consequence.  He has a well known predilection for going right.  When he's double teamed and one of the defenders block his path to the right, he is more vulnerable to turnovers.  We saw this earlier in the season when we lost to Ohio State.  Ayo made some adjustments after that, to dribble left before going right or to dribble left down the lane.  It seemed that Loyola modified the defensive approach by having the double team start closer to mid court.  This gets to the next point.

Ayo is sometimes loosey-goosey on the pass as well. When he passes to the wing so a teammate can shoot a three-pointer, the passes are strong and hard.  But when he is setting up an alley-oop play, he floats the ball very softly and is sometimes off the mark.  I didn't chart this precisely, but when Loyola trapped Ayo, he tried to get out of it with the dribble, not with a pass.  That Loyola trapped Ayo meant that some other Illinois player was open.  But Ayo didn't find the open man.  I conjecture that he is very good at passing to wing players when he is driving the lane, familiar territory for him, but he is much less comfortable making such a long pass from elsewhere on the court, or so it seemed. 

Ayo has taken the team on his back and won ballgames for Illinois by doing that.  His level of play would rise near the end of the game.  Then he'd go into superhero mode.  In the Loyola game, it seemed he was trying to take the team on his back after only a few minutes, when Illinois had fallen behind by a score of 9 to 2.  It may have been better for him to share this burden with some of his teammates rather than assume it all himself.  Did he understand that himself?

I thought Adam Miller seemed comfortable and relaxed, especially after he made a couple of three pointers.  He was the only Illinois guard who seemed that way. Maybe he should have gotten more responsibility with the ball, rather than always setting up on the wing.  As it was, Ayo would walk the ball up the court - Illinois couldn't fast break - and that looked grim.  Sometimes grim determination is needed to get beyond an obstacle.  In this case, however, I'd have liked Illinois to try something else.  Punching Adam Miller's ticket in this game made sense to me, either by him bringing up the ball or by Ayo passing to him after Ayo could see the trap coming.  I believe this even if in previous games in the Big Ten Tournament Adam Miller seemed somewhat out of control at times. 

Let me speculate a moment about Ayo's future. There has been a lot of hype about him being ready for the NBA.  Does a player's stock in the draft drop based on one poor performance?  If it turned out that the injury he suffered was still bothering him more than anyone outside of the team knew, that all the hype about the mask would have been a useful diversion, and that given some rest Ayo can return to full health, then I think Ayo's performance against Loyola can be disregarded.   But if Ayo was in near full health in that game, the mask notwithstanding, then the NBA teams might be wary of drafting him, for fear that his weaknesses would get even more exploited in the NBA.   

On the other hand, since I'm a big adherent of learning via deliberate practice, can Ayo get the right sort of practice that he needs to improve on these weaknesses by staying in college?  I doubt it.  There aren't enough other teams that can trap effectively and/or pick up the Illini at mid court.  There is something called the NBA G League, which is the NBA's minor league for player development.  I would think that might be where Ayo ends up next.   An alternative is to play overseas.  But he'd be away from his family then and with Covid, that might seem too much of discontinuity now.  I'll add one last thing here.  ESPN had a column where several commentators wrote about the Big Ten's poor performance in the Tournament, after the fact.  One of them explained that the talent level overall is really not that high.  Big Ten schools don't recruit players for just one year of play and then off to the NBA.  Many of the very top players want to go that route.   If the conference overall has been overrated, that factor may be missed.  It's something to consider.

4. The role of the media.  Do they simply report the sports news or are they "experts" whose opinion tends to be spot on?  If they are experts, how did they miss this one?

Before getting to TV, let me make a quick mention about the News-Gazette, the local newspaper in Champaign-Urbana. Simply measured by number of pages devoted to the Illini basketball team and featuring individual player pages with huge photos of them, the News-Gazette has really hyped the team, well beyond their normal coverage.  And, since the team itself set its goal to win the NCAA Championship, the paper plugged that as well.  

As to TV, last week before the tournament started, MSNBC had a segment of their Morning Joe show where the guest was Jay Bilas, the college basketball guru.  He appeared along with their regular news commentators.  In talking about Illinois, while there had already been a lot of hype about Ayo's mask, and what it should be called, Bilas pulled a new one (at least for me). He referred to Ayo as Batman (DC Comics), others had also done that, and to Kofi as the Incredible Hulk (Marvel Comics), I hadn't heard that one before.  With both Batman and the Incredible Hulk, how could Illinois lose?

Ditto all the commentators who along with the play by play guy call the games.  Everyone I've listened to all season long (please retire Dick Vitale, you too Dan Dakich, since both of you give more parenthetic remarks than provide insights into what is happening in the game) have been extremely high on Illinois.  There has not been an inkling from them about weaknesses the Illini have, until yesterday.  Does this sort of thing expose them as mouth pieces only, not real experts?  

A more cynical view would take account of sports betting, which has been in the news a lot recently in regard to college basketball.  Do those who bet seriously listen to the commentators?  Do the commentators themselves bet on games, including games they call.  The ultimate cynicism would be about the possibility where the commentator bets one way and yet on TV influences the fans to take the opposite position, so the commentator can get better odds.  I hope that's not happening.  I prefer them being somewhat clueless to being very savvy while highly manipulative. 

Wrap Up

Was Illinois a really good team that just had a bad day yesterday? Or did all the Illini fans get caught up in the confirmation bias about how great the team was, so simply weren't prepared that they were good but not great and might lose to other teams aside from the #1 seeds?  I don't know.  I hope at some point in the not too distant future we learn which of those is right.

In the meantime, I've now got to decide whether I'll watch more of the Tournament.  There are still 3 Big Ten teams left.  Let's see if any of them can stick around for a while longer.

College Basketball - Rankings, Brackets, Subjective Probabilities and Not Enough Data

Like many fans of Illinois, including some non-true ones like me who haven't watched for many years, I've become taken with this year's team.  Not only would I watch the game, but during the Big Ten Tournament I'd go online and look for what is made available about the game once it was over.  I discovered after game press conferences held in Zoom, with coaches and players from each team.  I actually found that listening to the opposing coach was more informative - I already knew a lot about the Illini without hearing it from the players and coaches, though that was entertaining too.  The bit from the coaches of the other team that caught my attention was how much they talked about the players learning, even at this late stage of the season, so that their performance would improve and their team would get better.  The expectation of such learning seemed paramount.  And this was from coaches of teams that would make the NCAA tournament.  Indeed, Iowa and Ohio State were each given a 2 seed in their respective brackets.  How much better can they get?

Unlike just about every other fan, I engage in math modeling of social/political/economic situations.  It's what I learned to do in graduate school and later as a faculty member, when my research was in economic theory. Somewhat surprising to me at the time, I continued to do this when I switched careers and became an administrator in educational technology.  There were some obvious changes with the career switch.  I no longer tried to publish these models.  And for the most part they were remarkably simple, much more so than the models I did try to publish earlier in my career.  The simplicity helped in communicating the ideas to others who weren't versed in modeling of this sort.  And they helped me enormously in supporting my thinking.  Indeed, often I would generate such a model with no apparent effort whatsoever.  

I'm going to do something similar here - no math, just a talkie discussion of the modeling issues.  I hope that anybody else who reads this gets the gist of what I'm saying, which is based on listening to those coaches talking about player and team learning.

Let's talk a little about inference via chains of connection. A plays B (and some outcome is determined).  Then B plays C (another outcome).   And C plays D (still another outcome).  At this point some inference can be made between A and D, which of them is better or are they approximately equal.  This happens even though A never played D.   Chain inferences of this sort underlie the ratings. 

The regular season is broken up into two main components.  The first is the preseason, with about 1/3 of the total number of regular season games.  Preseason games form chains among all the teams within Division 1. (With Google I learned that there are 350 teams in Division 1 and 7 more that are transitioning from Division 2.)  The remaining 2/3 of the games are played within a Conference in which the school is a member.  (There are 7 Independents.  I believe there used to be many more, but it then became difficult to schedule games with other schools in a Conference during the Conference season.)  There are roughly 30 games in the entire season and then the postseason begins with the Conference Tournament.  Once the Conference Season starts, we get a lot of information about how Conference teams compare with one another, but we no longer get fresh information about how they compare with out of Conference teams, until the NCAA Tournament is played. 

Regarding the outcome of any particular game, apart from which team wins, I would break the outcomes into three categories: 1) nail-biter,  2) convincing win, and 3) blowout.   I'm not going to try to come up with formal ways to differentiate these but among the things I look at instinctively are: a) score at the 2:00 minute mark compared with final score, b) when the subs who otherwise don't play much get put into the game, and c) body language of the opposing team late in the game.  My view is that these categories serve as a useful summary of the outcome. 

With this background, let's get to the model.  Every team is characterized by its quality, q, a vertical parameter.  When two teams play, the one with the higher value of q is more likely to win.  It's the difference in the quality parameters across the teams that determines the distribution over outcomes.  This is an abstract characterization.  Let's consider what it rules out.  For one, home team advantage is not considered.  In a non-Covid season, home team advantage clearly matters, the fans spur the players on and the refs sometimes get caught up in that. I don't disagree but it's not in the model, because if it were that would complicate things and we want to keep things simple.  Another factor that is sometimes mentioned is matchup - a team plays well against man-to-man defense but struggles against the zone, then the type of defense the opponent plays matters for the outcome. That too is not included, again to keep things simple.  

One other point to consider is to translate the rankings into the quality of teams.   The rankings are ordinal.  Number 1 is the best, but might number 2 be very close or not?  The rankings would be the same either way.  So these quality parameters have more information in them than the rankings do.  The quality parameters give a cardinal ranking in that differences in quality do matter. 

Returning to the model, the quality parameter evolves over the course of the season.  Teams get better via the learning the coaches describe.  There may be reasons for quality to drop, which we should consider as well. One obvious reason is for there to be a significant injury to a key player on the team.  Another might be attitudinal.  If a team is on a losing streak because of the luck of a the draw in the scheduling as well as other random factors, it might lose some if its competitive edge.  (I'm writing this after reading about Indiana and Minnesota in the Big Ten firing their coaches.  For players who are not graduating this year, the prospect of a new coach may be daunting.  While the firings happened after the end of the season for those teams, if the players anticipate that possibility earlier it could impact their play.)

Now the key point.  The learning effect which says that quality will grow may be different from team to team.  To make progress here, let's focus on the conference season.  Then we might might break the overall learning effect for a team into a conference growth component, common to all teams in the same conference and a team idiosyncratic effect.  The latter average out to zero so that in aggregate the learning of the teams in the conference happens at the conference rate.  Those rates may differ from one conference to another. 

Now we'll take another step back.  If one team has very high quality and it is playing another team of mediocre quality,  the first team might learn a lot from a loss or a nail-biter win, the proverbial wake up call, but there is little to no learning from a convincing win or a blowout of the other team.  So at the team level, growth will be higher on average when even the weaker teams in the conference have a decent chance at winning and where most games are reasonably close.  

Now let's consider individual player growth.  Much of this happens from one season to the next, where the player works on his game during the off season.  This sort of thing happens at any level.  But for a freshman who gets a fair amount of playing time, the adjustment from high school basketball to college basketball is huge.  Such players might grow the most during their first season, although not all of them will rise to the occasion.  Transfer students might be next on the list.  They played under one system at their old school and then have to adjust to the new system and their role on it.  Then there is the situation where a key player goes down with a severe injury and the roles of others on the team must change as a consequence. This can produce a lot of learning, both by the players and by the coaching staff, which hasn't seen the players perform in their new roles.  This gives some reason why the rate of team learning may depart from the average for the conference. 

Of course there is another reason this year.  Covid has knocked many teams off their ordinary rhythms.  With some players testing positive and teams having to quarantine, so unable to practice and engage in ordinary team camaraderie outside of practice, that surely made for a setback for those teams who have gone through it.  Afterwards, could they eventually return to the level of play they had achieved before?  Who knows?

I'm going to try to wrap up now with two observations about this year's tournament.  What quality does Gonzaga have? It is undefeated and the number 1 seed overall.  That is agreed upon.  But does it have the highest quality? Or might Illinois, which was good but not great last December, have passed Gonzaga in quality because the Big Ten Conference produced a lot more team learning, and Illinois had the right mix of freshman, transfers and upperclassman to have a very high learning rate.  In particular, the blowout loss to Michigan State, where Ayo Dosunmu had a concussion and his nose was broken, might have jump started team learning for all the other Illini players regarding all in effort on defense and a raised efficacy on offense.  As an enthusiastic fan, I watched this performance.  I want it to be true that Illinois now has the highest q, no doubt. But on what evidence could I make that determination?  Indeed, I just looked through Gonzaga's season record.  While they had some good early wins, many of their preseason games were cancelled due to Covid, including a game against Baylor.  They did have a close win against West Virginia in December, where in the first half they fell behind. And West Virginia played Baylor in the the Big 12, losing a hear breaker.  The Illini lost to Baylor in a game that was close in the first half but then Baylor took control.  On this chain connection, one might infer that Gonzaga is the best team, so has the highest q.  But the Illini in early December are nowhere near as good as the Illini who just won the Big Ten Tournament.  What about a chain connection now to make a proper comparison?  Alas, there isn't one. 

Now let me turn to the brackets.  The NCAA Committee that determines each bracket and the seedings within doesn't go full seedings of all the teams in the tournament.  When there was a real pod system, particularly for the round of 64 and round of 32 games, with those sites distributed geographically around the country, it made sense for teams to play within driving distance of their home campus, if at all possible.  This would encourage fans of the team to attend the Tournament.  That is but one factor where the brackets would be jiggled to accommodate fan interest.  It also seems that the committee would encourage possible matchups that the fans seem to want but the schools are reluctant to schedule.  In the Tournament that starts this week, it is possible for Illinois to meet Loyola of Chicago in the round of 32.  That's one such example of such a fan interest game.  

A different one is in the top seeds.  The Big Ten has four teams in the top eight.  Illinois and Michigan are #1 seeds in their respective brackets.  Iowa and Ohio State are #2 in their brackets.  None of these teams are in the same bracket.  So it is possible, if incredibly unlikely, for all of them to make the Elite Eight and, if each of them wins there, for the Final Four to be an all Big Ten affair. As I said, this took some jiggling of the overall seeds.  The Big Ten already has an advantage with the location of the Tournament this year.  Indianapolis is approximately at the geographic center of the entire Big Ten.  More broadly the state of Indiana plays that role. And the Big Ten Tournament was played in the same venue where they'll host the Final Four.  Why do this other thing as well?  I can only guess that the Committee wanted to give fans something else to think about.  If all the top seeds make it through to the Sweet Sixteen, I'm sure it will get more than a mention. 

I do not bet on the games.  I think if I did it would detract from my own interest as a fan.  But it's clear that many other people do bet.  Based on the betting, Gonzaga is the overwhelming favorite.  Do those people who are betting on Gonzaga know something about what's going on that I don't?  Or are they caught up in the undefeated season narrative, which might not have in itself much to bear as to how the Tournament turns out.  I do recall back in 2005 that the Illinois team was undefeated till the last game of the regular season, where it lost to Ohio State.  As a fan, that was disheartening.  But it might very well have been a blessing in disguise, with the unbeaten streak something of a burden to maintain.  That team did make it to the NCAA Championship game.  I surely don't know how Gonzaga is handling things now.  After the Tournament is over I'd be interested in reading stories about that, but until then it's just another thing to speculate about.

That's why they play the games.  I'm chomping at the bit for the tournament to start.