Scorecasting: A Guest Post

Steven D. Levitt

When my wife saw the cover of the new book Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, which was sitting on my bedside table, all she could do was shake her head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Your arrogance knows no limits.” she said, exasperated.
I looked at the cover to try to figure out what had set her off.? It was the blurb I gave for the book that they put on the front cover: “The closest thing to Freakonomics I’ve seen since the original.” – Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics.
“I don’t see what the problem is with that quote,” I said.? “Scorecasting is more like Freakonomics than any other book I have seen in the last six years.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said.? “So you wrote the best book ever, and this is the second best book.”
That’s not what I said, or what I meant, by the blurb.? (And if it was what I had meant, Scorecasting would, of course, have to be the third best book … don’t forget Superfreakonomics.)? There are lots of books far better than Freakonomics, both before it was written and since.
What is unique about Scorecasting is that it has the unusual mix of hard-nosed data analysis, unconventional wisdom and breezy storytelling that characterizes my books with Dubner.? None of the other books written by economists have had the same sort of feel.? It is not surprising, consequently, that I loved the book.
But it doesn’t really matter what I think.? You can judge for yourself because the authors were kind enough to present, here on the blog, an adaptation of their discussion of black coaches in the NFL from the book.
Why Black NFL Coaches Are Doing Worse Than Ever, and Why This Is a Good Thing.
By Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim
Two days after the Tampa Bay Bucs ended their 2001 season, ownership fired the team’s coach, Tony Dungy. This firing left the NFL with just two African-American head coaches, roughly six percent. On its face, it was a dismal record, especially when you considered that African-Americans made up nearly three-quarters of the league’s players. And this wasn’t just an “off year.” In 1990 and 1991, there was just one African-American head coach in the NFL. From 1992 to 1995, there were two. There were three between 1996 and 1999. And there were two in 2002. This struck many as wrong, but statistics alone weren’t enough to show bias. One could just as easily claim the disproportionately small pool of white players was, statistically anyway, more anomalous.

Yet Johnnie Cochran, Jr. joined forces with another activist attorney, Cyrus Mehri,?and decided to challenge the NFL’s hiring practices. At the time, Cochran and Mehri had been working on a case targeting what they saw as biased hiring practices at Coca-Cola. In the course of the Coke case, they had crossed paths with Janice Madden, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in labor economics. Madden was in Atlanta, also working on the same case, using a statistical model to prove that women were not, as the company alleged, inferior salespeople. A thought occurred to Cochran and Mehri: Maybe Madden could initiate a similar study with respect to NFL coaches.

Although Madden shared a surname with the former NFL coach, popular NFL announcer and video game impresario, the football similarities ended there. She was not much of a fan. Her husband was a Philadelphia Eagles season ticket-holder, but she preferred to spend her Sundays at home. Still, she made Cochran and Mehri an offer:? “If you can put the data together for me, I’ll do this pro bono.” They did, and she did.

Madden found that, between 1990 and 2002, the African-American coaches in the NFL were statistically far more successful than the white coaches, averaging nine-plus wins a season, versus eight for their white counterparts. Sixty-nine percent of the time, the black coaches took their teams to the playoffs, versus only 39 percent for the others.? In their first season on the job, black coaches took their teams to the postseason 71 percent of the time; rookie white coaches did so just 23 percent of the time. Clearly, black coaches had to be exceptional to win a job in the first place.
Perhaps, one could argue, black coaches ended up being offered jobs by the better teams, i.e. the franchises that could afford to pursue talent more aggressively? Madden reran her study, controlling for team quality. Still, African-American coaches clearly outperformed their colleagues. If this wasn’t a smoking gun, to Madden’s thinking, this sure carried the strong whiff of bias. If African-American football coaches were being hired fairly, shouldn’t they be performing comparably to white coaches? Given that the win-loss records of African-American coaches were substantially better, it suggested that the bar was being set much higher for them.
When Madden went public with her findings, she was blind-sided by the criticism. The NFL made the argument that Madden’s sample size — in many seasons there were just two African-American coaches — was too small to be statistically significant. “Whose fault is that?” Madden wondered. At the national conference for sports lawyers, an NFL executive dismissed Madden’s work, suggesting that Madden could have run the numbers for “coaches named Mike” and for “coaches not named Mike” and come up with similar results. (Curious, Madden ran the numbers and found this wasn’t the case.)
Still, due in no small part to the work of a female sociologist whose football knowledge was admittedly modest, the NFL changed its ways. In 2003, the league implemented the so-called Rooney Rule, named for Dan Rooney, the progressive Steelers owner who chaired the committee looking into the issue. The rule decreed that teams interview at least one minority applicant to fill coaching vacancies. Otherwise, the franchise would face a stiff fine. The league achieved its aim. By 2005, there were six African-American coaches in the NFL, including Dungy, who had been hired by the Indianapolis Colts.
And how has this new brigade of black coaches done?? Worse than their predecessors. Much worse, in fact. From 2003 to the present, African-American coaches have averaged the same number of wins each season — eight — as white coaches. They are now slightly less likely to lead their teams to the playoffs. Their rookie seasons are particularly shaky: they lose slightly more games than white coaches do in their first season. In 2008, for instance, Marvin Lewis coached the Cincinnati Bengals to a 4-11-1 record, which was only slightly better than the job Romeo Crennel did, a few hours drive away in Cleveland, where the Browns stumbled through a 4-12 season. Lewis and Crennel still fared better than yet another African-American coach in the Midwest, Herman Edwards, who oversaw the misbegotten Kansas City Chiefs team that went 2-14.

But, as black coaches lose more games, Madden and other supporters nod with satisfaction. This “drop-off” is the ultimate validation of the Rooney Rule, an indication that black coaches are being held to the same standards as their white counterparts. “If African-American coaches don’t fail, it means that those with equal talents to the failing white coaches are not even getting the chance to be a coach,” Madden explains.?”Seeing African American coaches fail means that they, like white coaches, no longer have to be superstars to get coaching jobs.” This is not unlike the average SAT scores of Jewish students declining once elite school dropped their quotas on Jewish matriculates. The diminishing numbers were, perhaps perversely, a sign of progress.

The Tampa Bay franchise that fired Dungy and replaced him with Jon Gruden? When the team let go of Gruden in 2009, management replaced him with Raheem Morris, then a 32-year-old African-American who was the team’s defensive coach and had never before been a head coach on any level. While no one admitted as much, Morris was precisely the type of candidate unlikely to have been taken seriously prior to the Rooney Rule. In Morris’ first two seasons, the Bucs have gone 13-19.
Amid the surge in losing, there have been triumphs. Dungy would finally get his Super Bowl ring with the Colts. Lovie Smith coached the Chicago Bears to Super Bowl XLIII in 2007 and to the NFC Championship game this season.
It’s fitting that Pittsburgh has perhaps benefitted most from the Rooney Rule. On Sunday night, The Steelers beat the Jets to win the AFC Championship, and Mike Tomlin became the first man under 40 years old to coach two teams to the Super Bowl. Yes, he is “a coach named Mike.” He also is an African-American.

书评：
Game Theory        by Bruce Weber
Defense doesn’t win championships. Teamwork isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Momentum is a myth. And the Chicago Cubs aren’t cursed; they just stink.

Conventional wisdom, sports division, takes a beating in “Scorecasting,” a book aimed at unsettling serious fans with essays that debunk ingrained strategy (punting on fourth down is largely a waste); malign the approach of champion athletes (Tiger Woods is foolishly less aggressive when he’s putting for birdie than for par); and offer a number of otherwise eye-opening assertions (officials in all sports are biased). For their arguments, the authors, Tobias J. Moskowitz, a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, and L. Jon Wertheim, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, have whipped up a recipe that includes statistical analysis, psychological theory, creative sociology and a brash confidence in circumstantial evidence. If that sounds a little familiar, well, they owe a debt to Malcolm Gladwell and the “Freakonomics” boys.
In any case, the results are alternately irritating, vexing, provocative and entertaining — and convincing more often than not. Indeed, for most readers the fun will involve sputtering “But, but, but . . .” and mustering counterarguments.
For example, in a chapter titled “The Myth of the Hot Hand,” the authors declare that in sports, momentum, a k a “Old Mo,” doesn’t really exist, that no matter how many home runs a slugger belts in a week, no matter how many games in a row a team wins, the likelihood of success in the next at-bat or the next game is no different than it is when no hot streak exists. Statistics prove this is so; the numbers say that a streak of any sort is simply an expected variation in an extended, observable pattern of events, the way a coin is likely to come up heads 10 times in a row at some point if you toss it 10,000 times.
For this reason and a few others, the authors say, the basketball strategy of passing to a shooter on a hot streak is more often than not a loser. They argue interestingly (and sensibly) that one thing that happens to shooters on a streak is that they succumb to hubris and begin taking more difficult shots. Fair enough. Still, even if a streak is not a predictor of future success, does that mean that no momentum existed while the streak was going on? That for a period of time whose length was unforeseeable, a player saw the basket with enhanced clarity or a team played with special cohesion and confidence? Doesn’t that constitute momentum? And for coaches, who are supposed to be experienced observers of their players, isn’t it a reasonable gamble to play a hunch from time to time and feed the hot hand?
Some of the subjects taken up in “Scorecasting” are less worthwhile than others. That a blocked shot in basketball that goes out of bounds is less valuable to the team on defense than a blocked shot that lands in the hands of a teammate strikes me as self-evident. And that defense wins championships, or that, in any sport, defense is more important than offense, is the sort of nonsensical tenet that doesn’t need disproving any more than, say, “Life is like a box of chocolates.” The authors spend several pages disproving it nonetheless. Anyway, the issue was better and more succinctly settled in a quip often (though perhaps not accurately) attributed to Casey Stengel: “Good pitching will always stop good hitting — and vice versa.”
The authors are at their most titillating — and, unfortunately, their most smug — when they’re playing shrink, attributing quite a number of statistically quantifiable sports phenomena to certain psychological concepts.
One says that humans are more likely to judge an act of commission — for instance, a referee’s calling a penalty — to be intrusive or consequential than they are an act of restraint. So even though the ref who doesn’t throw a flag can be just as wrong as the ref who does, and even though his nonact can put an equivalent skew on the game, we judge him — and he judges himself — less harshly. This so-called omission bias is borne out statistically in several sports, the authors demonstrate, citing umpires who call fewer strikes when the hitter already has two and basketball referees who call fewer loose-ball fouls on star players than on nonstars.
The authors also place great stock in what psychologists call risk aversion, or loss aversion, which states that humans are motivated more forcefully by a fear of losing than by a desire for winning. When a coach always employs well-worn strategies on the field; when an owner declines to hire a successful but unconventional coach; when a golfer takes a firmer stroke on a par putt to fight off a bogey than he does on a birdie putt because he is still safely under par, he is being risk averse, often to his detriment. Statistics (and one brave high school coach in Arkansas) show, for example, that over the long haul, punting on fourth down is a fool’s errand; as for golf, a putt is a stroke, no matter what the circumstances.
By far the most startling and resonant chapters in the book deal with the authors’ search for the reasons behind home-field advantage, which the numbers prove exists across all sports. Using clever techniques to isolate elements of the game that can be accurately measured, they manage to dismiss some conventional explanations — that players respond to the cheers and jeers of the crowd, for one.
In the end, they determine, stunningly, that home-field advantage in virtually all sports is largely due to the bias of  officials toward the home team. Soccer referees call more penalties against the visitors and allow more injury time when the home team is behind. In baseball, though the authors are a little naïve about the art of calling balls and strikes (no one, not even the players, wants or expects the umpires to call a strict rule-book strike), their numbers are, well, striking: fewer called strikes, especially in crucial situations, against the home team. In basketball, the authors write, “the chance of a visiting player getting called for traveling is 15 percent higher than it is for a home-team player.”
The authors attribute this not to a widespread conspiracy but to a common psychological trope: people want to be liked and to be confirmed in their judgments. Maybe so. I do wish the authors had been less rhetorically presumptuous in attributing behavioral predilections to groups of people and even individuals on circumstantial grounds. Most of their conclusions are, after all, subject to debate.
To wit: Moskowitz and Wertheim’s study of icing the place-kicker — that is, calling timeout to ratchet up the pressure on him — concluded that the strategy is ineffectual; kickers kick successfully to virtually the same percentage whether iced or not. In December, however, The New York Times reported on a different study that had found otherwise, that iced kickers are less successful than room- temperature ones.
Bruce Weber, a reporter at The Times, is the author of “As They See ’Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires.”

我想要 快给我（不要想歪）

是挺新鲜的啊