The Hard Math of the Cinderella Story

http://www.theplayerstribune.com/john-urschel-nfl-training-camp-cuts/

by bootload • 11 years ago

30 34 11 years ago

koliber• 11 years ago

As an aside, has anyone noticed the distracting flickering of the background in the animated infographic? It looks like it is glitching, and I am assuming it is not intentional? Is it an effect of viewing it on an LCD screen?

rendall• 11 years ago

I noticed it too, on an LCD screen.

Jack000• 11 years ago

it's gif dithering. The source is probably a video file and whatever graphics package they exported the gif from couldn't generate the exact shade from the given palette.

archimedespi• 11 years ago

I noticed it as well. LVDS laptop LCD, Firefox/Xubuntu 15.04.

pawn• 11 years ago

I remember once thinking as a pretty young kid that the statistics for making it in sports vs how many kids would surely be trying didn't add up to something favorable. I reasoned then that it would make more sense to go for something else.

balabaster4• 11 years ago

Statistics have little bearing on one's dedication, perspiration and determination. Talent is only about 10% of any equation. Sure - there are a thousand kids in a village all have dreams of making it to the NFL, NBA, MLB, Premier League, Bundesleague or wherever else their favourite sporting stars live... and probably 1% of them make it. Statistics say it's a fool's errand.

Something that 25 years of my professional career in software has taught me... those at the top of the game got there because of grit determination and little to do with talent. The talent pool at your level shrinks every time you up your game to the next level until you see the same faces showing up time and again at every new gig.

Statistically, what's the chance you'll become one of the very best programmers in the world? It's about the same as becoming a professional footballer.

Becoming the very best at something just means you have to put that bit more in than those that didn't make it. The harder you work and the more effort you put in, the more the statistics skew in your favour.

If making money is something you want to do until you make it to the premier league, then you've gotta be willing to go where the money is until you make it. Go live in a country where you are perhaps not the best, but among the good enough to get paid for what you currently have to offer while you continue to improve your skills. Work harder than those around you, learn from those around you, when you become the best in the pack, move on to another pack where you can learn more, improve your skills and get paid more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

EvanKelly• 11 years ago

"those at the top of the game got there because of grit determination and little to do with talent. "

I think I agree with your sentiment here but want to clarify and see if you agree. There's still an EXTREMELY high talent bar to be a professional athlete, but talent, in itself, isn't enough (unless you're one of the truly rare lazy star athletes). Those who are blessed to have the talent and an above average work-ethic/determination are the ones with a good chance of making it.

onion2k• 11 years ago

Statistically, what's the chance you'll become one of the very best programmers in the world? It's about the same as becoming a professional footballer.

That's the wrong question. The right question is "What are the chances that you'll make a good living in your chosen field?"

As a programmer the chances are relatively high. Even an average developer makes a decent living, and a good one can make a lot of money.

As a footballer the chance of even getting to be a professional where you're paid to do it are very low. If you get to the top you'll be making a very good living, but probably not as much as a early employee at Facebook/Google/etc if you include stock (although that has little to do with programming really).

That doesn't mean everyone should become developers though. People should have careers they enjoy. But if you're looking at statistics, even considering everything other than talent, trying to become a sports star is still a stupid idea.

cafard• 11 years ago

Somebody in the NBA or NCAA coaching ranks used to say "You can't coach height." You can have grit by the ton, but at 5'9" you won't be playing in the paint in the big leagues of basketball.

meatysnapper• 11 years ago

Physical durability is an undervalued trait. Lots of very gifted people flame out from accumulated injuries in all sports.

Retric• 11 years ago

When it comes to sports 'talent' is 99% of the equation. The problem is being in the top 1% is still a long way from success. When you might get 1 success per 100,000 that try, we just don't have words to describe how hard that is.

ska• 11 years ago

While there is a lot of truth in this, there is also a common flaw in this presentation:

Every success has a significant element of luck involved. While nearly everyone at the top of their game has worked harder than many of their peers, it's not true that everyone who worked as hard as they did has "made it".

In a (particularly) full contact sport, part of this comes from injury, obviously - and it is a very real possibility for anyone trying to get there.

srtjstjsj2• 11 years ago

I can't find the link now, but someone (This American Life or somesuch) published a great analysis of how the top people in every sport have inherent (non-controllable) physical characteristics that give them an edge in their sport.

Michael Phelps has a bizarre chest-to-leg ratio, which is excellent for swimming. He could never be a top tennis player even if he dedicated his life to it. Serena Williams would never be a top swimmer.

Splines• 11 years ago

Why not both?

One piece of analysis missing here is the opportunity cost of trying to get into professional sports. Is there not enough time off the field to learn skills that can be used for a successful career? Possibly.

If an athlete "throws in the towel" and decides to go back to school, what kind of roadblocks are there in front of him/her that make it difficult to transition?

moron4hire• 11 years ago

Disappointed this had nothing to do with the classic children's tale. Was hoping this was going to be something about the impossibility of one person cleaning an entire mansion in a day, or spooky quantum effects that would allow for transmogrification, or the relative densities of pumpkins and stage coaches and how one might be able to pack a stage coach into a suitably large pumpkins' shape. IDK, something a little more interesting than a game of "let me hit you with my fat guy".

doodpants• 11 years ago

Yeah, I clicked the link because I was wondering what math has to do with Cinderella. Upon seeing the article, I'm now left wondering what Cinderella has to do with football.

Malician• 11 years ago

It's an idiom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_(sports)

larrydag• 11 years ago

Seems to me that the NFL needs a good minor league system. It would help teams evaluate potential performers and help players meet an adequate standard of living. I know it was tried with the XFL but that was a PR mess.

slindz• 11 years ago

Many would argue that is exactly what the NCAA is.

Consultant32452• 11 years ago

I prefer arena football over the NFL and it's basically the people who couldn't make it into the NFL.

srtjstjsj2• 11 years ago

NCAA would never admit that their "scholar athletes" are a minor league!

cortesoft• 11 years ago

The problem with a minor league for the NFL versus other sports is that an American football career is so short. You only have a few years of that level of physical abuse before you are done. By the time you spent a few years in the minor leagues, your career is almost over. This isn't like baseball, where a player peaks around 29 and you need more time for getting experience.

exelius2• 11 years ago

The NFL has that. It's called the NCAA; that way they don't have to pay the players.

Now that the NFL is essentially a front for gambling in the form of "daily fantasy sports" (DFS), I'm curious if they'll set up a development league so they can monetize that aspect of it as well.

For those who don't know, the NFL, MLB and NBA are all heavily in bed with DFS from an ownership perspective. The leagues either directly or indirectly (through investments by team owners) hold large investments all the major DFS providers. That's why you see DFS promotions in pre-game, on major sports sites, etc. That's also why the major sports leagues, after decades of fighting against sports gambling, have gone all-in the other direction.

russnewcomer• 11 years ago

A good minor league for football would be pretty expensive, just considering travel. If you're traveling with 40 guys (the realistic minimum that you could take to field a team), that gets expensive pretty fast. A true minor league could probably work if the NFL teams agreed to subsidize it, and they put it in a single major metro area. Like, the NFL has a 4 team minor league in Dallas, and did a lot of community marketing, played on high school fields, etc. You could build a single gym/practice facility, and the teams could rotate around in it. The problems are that you start to get into affiliation issues (what major teams are affiliated with what minor teams, and what does a major team do when it wants to send down a CB, but there are no teams that play man press with open slots for a CB?) and the fact that football is much, much more a team game than baseball or basketball, and most players need a couple weeks in the system to really make an impact, whereas a baseball player can get traded from one team to another with minimal adjustment, and a skilled basketball player won't need much more time.

The other issue is that there already is a sort of minor league, it's called the practice squad. And if you have minor leagues, the practice squad guys are in a weird limbo, because they are not getting game reps like they would in a minor league, yet they are the guys just good enough to almost be NFL players who would benefit the least from game reps, because of the work they are putting in with the full team. There are actually many minor football leagues, most playing indoor football, and those guys almost never make it to the NFL.

For the NFL, the real solution isn't a minor league, it's doubling the practice squad. That could cost each team about... (using numbers from the article) $1.5 million, and that's probably the best solution if the powers-that-be really feel there is a talent gap.

dandare• 11 years ago

I highly appreciate the "I don't know" ending and the polemic on the deservedness. From a scientific (economist?) point of view there is no clear answer but our society is based on everyone having a strong stand on this (usually in line with his personal interests).

pitt1980• 11 years ago

What percentage of these guys are taking PEDs anyways?

How many PED suspensions should there be if 1% of NCAA football player are taking them?

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128 teams x 85 scholarship players a team = 10,880 total players

x .01 = 108 guys on PEDs

lets say the test can catch 5% of users

that should be something like 5 or 6 guys a year getting busted

something like every other week you should hear another blurb about so and so get suspended for testing positive, or at least once a month, or at least a couple times a year

I feel like I follow this pretty closely, the positive NCAA tests I can think of off the top of my head: Brian Bosworth prior to the 1987 Orange Bowl, I thought Ryan Dinwiddie got suspended for some sort of PED as the QB at Boise, but that appears lost to the internet, and now Will Grier

its possible other people have been suspended, but none come to my mind

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this basic math seems to lead to 1 of 2 conclusions, either far less than 1% of college players use steroids, or testing catches far less than 5% of PED users, to the point of functionally catching no one

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if the second of those is the right conclusion, and its hard (at least for me) not to think that it is

its strikes me that that leads to some pretty stark implications

namely that you have 128 schools with different degrees of taboo against PED usage, and whoever sets the laxest taboo is at the biggest advantage

that everything you hear about so and so being great at spotting talent, or developing talent is a bunch of BS, and that the real key is that those are just the places that wink wink the hardest at PED users

if I was going to guess which places have the biggest PED cultures, http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/after-signing-day-wiscons... its hard for me to think that that doesn't chart it pretty well

that if you really want to win, find an assistant strength coach form one of the top 5 or so teams on that list, then basically body shame all your players until they figure out how to put two and two together

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/12/20/report-s...

The report points out that the NCAA conducts random drug testing and the penalties for failure are severe. Players lose an entire year of eligibility after a first positive test. A second offense means permanent ineligibility from sports.

But when you dig into the numbers, the NCAA’s roughly 11,000 annual tests amount to just a fraction of all athletes in Division I and II schools. Exactly how many tests are conducted each year on football players is unclear because the NCAA hasn’t published its data for two years, according to the AP, and when it did, it periodically changed the formats, making it impossible to compare one year of football to the next.

More confounding is that NCAA rules say players can be notified up to two days in advance of a test, which experts say is plenty of time to beat a test. By comparison, Olympic athletes are given no notice.

The top steroid investigator at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Joe Rannazzisi, told the AP that he doesn’t understand why schools don’t invest in the same kind of testing, with the same penalties, as the NFL.

“Is it expensive? Of course, but college football makes a lot of money,” he said. “Invest in the integrity of your program.”

For a school to test all 85 scholarship football players for steroids twice a season would cost up to $34,000, said Don Catlin, an anti-doping pioneer who spent years conducting the NCAA’s laboratory tests at UCLA. The total costs would be about 0.2 percent of the average big-time school football budget of about $14 million.

Caitlin told the AP he became so frustrated with the college system that it drove him in part to leave the testing industry to focus on anti-doping research.

The investigation also found that penalties vary widely from school to school. Here are a few examples:

•At Notre Dame and Alabama, the teams that will soon compete for the national championship, players don’t automatically miss games for testing positive for steroids. At Alabama, coaches have wide discretion. Notre Dame’s student-athlete handbook says a player who fails a test can return to the field once the steroids are out of his system.

•The University of North Carolina kicks players off the team after a single positive test for steroids.

•At UCLA, home of the laboratory that for years set the standard for cutting-edge steroid testing, athletes can fail three drug tests before being suspended.

•At the University of Maryland, students must get counseling after testing positive, but school officials are prohibited from disciplining first-time steroid users.

lazyant• 11 years ago

I did some back-of-the-envelope math for soccer and both for Canada and England, given the number of kids playing and the number of professionals, the odds of going pro is about 1 in 10,000.

exelius2• 11 years ago

And by far the most important factor in making a professional league is genetics. Height is the biggest X factor in sports, and nearly every position in sports favors players who are taller and have longer limbs (yeah, yeah, strikers in soccer and NFL running backs can be short as long as they're incredibly quick). At the pro level, every player is coached to play as close to their maximum potential as is physically possible. All things held equal, a taller player simply has a greater maximum potential.

Colt McCoy is one of my favorite examples. Coming out of college, he was a prototypical NFL pocket passer: he made smart decisions, had a quick release, was incredibly accurate, had great presence in the pocket and was deceptively fast when he had to pull it down and run. But he's been a career backup because he's only 6'1", and for various reasons, it's hard to be a franchise NFL quarterback under 6'4". If you look at all the best quarterbacks in the last 20 years, nearly every one is 6'4" or taller [1]. While there are a couple exceptions (namely, Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees) nearly every single "marquee" quarterback still playing today is 6'4" or taller. If Colt McCoy were 3 inches taller, he would almost certainly be a starter in the NFL today. Imagine how much better Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees would have been if they were 3 inches taller.

6'4" is really tall. In the US, that puts you into the top 1% of height for males. [2] So not only do you have to be really good at the sport, but being really good at the sport essentially requires you to be in the top 1% of the country in physical size before you even pick up a ball. I knew a kid in middle school who was 6'4" and everyone knew he was going to end up in the NBA. And he did -- for like 4 seasons before his knees gave out. But those are the kids who go pro -- everyone they've known since the age of 12 or so has been telling them they'll go pro because they were always the biggest, best player on every team they ever played on.

The odds for any given kid playing pro sports are probably much closer to zero than anyone wants to admit. Those odds only improve if the kid's parents are tall -- and even then only if the kid ends up being tall, in shape, with no genetic weaknesses in connective tissue that would cause too many injuries before they hit the pro level.

[1] http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/content/tall-task-does-... [2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf, page 16

Domenic_S2• 11 years ago

I like all that except for the odds part. If the odds are calculated across the whole population of (say) high school athletes, the odds are pretty meaningless. As you say above, you have to select for height, so calculating the odds of playing in the NBA professionally for a population where 95% of the people are 5'10" or below is just silly. The odds are going to be astronomically low because of height alone.

The Hard Math of the Cinderella Story

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