The article basically says "A football match is now like a complicated, high-level chess match. It takes deep understanding to know what's going on, so only those parts of the match that most viewers can understand ought to be screened". This is not sound. By extension one could argue that complicated games should not be screened at all.
NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
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Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#92The argument in this article is just ridiculous. Handwringing about giving fans more information because they might not interpret it correctly? Breaking news: A lot of people are already plenty wrong with the current amount of information. They'll be wrong with less, they'll be wrong with more, they'll be wrong if the info level stays the same. This is therefore a null argument.
The argument in this article is just ridiculous It's on the NFL site. It's advertorial, marketing disguised as journalism. It's not making an argument, it's just stirring one up to get attention.
I'd probably be less offended if I didn't see this argument so often. As Evbn points out, it's not the first time I've heard it. I find the premise deeply insulting.
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#93This is very exciting, as there's a lot of strategy to American football that isn't plainly visible when the camera just follows the ball as it does on television. It's not going to showcase technique very well, but it'll go a long way towards explaining e.g. why some wide receivers are always open, why some players always seem to be in the right position to interrupt a pass, etc. I'd actually find it very interestin…
> However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.
I'm sure there are plenty of HN readers who are football fans, you just don't see many sports stories because they're generally considered off-topic. From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This all-22 discussion is probably on-topic for HN because it has more to do with the pros and cons of exerting control over exactly how people consume your product than with the specifics of the sport.
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#94The argument in this article is just ridiculous. Handwringing about giving fans more information because they might not interpret it correctly? Breaking news: A lot of people are already plenty wrong with the current amount of information. They'll be wrong with less, they'll be wrong with more, they'll be wrong if the info level stays the same. This is therefore a null argument.
Clearly there are varying gradations of being wrong and just because they're wrong doesn't mean they're as completely wrong, or as frequently wrong; the article only claims that they will be more wrong. See the http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/.
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#95This is very exciting, as there's a lot of strategy to American football that isn't plainly visible when the camera just follows the ball as it does on television. It's not going to showcase technique very well, but it'll go a long way towards explaining e.g. why some wide receivers are always open, why some players always seem to be in the right position to interrupt a pass, etc. I'd actually find it very interestin…
Are there many sports based startups? I'd love to learn more about some.
Hudl.
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#96This is very exciting, as there's a lot of strategy to American football that isn't plainly visible when the camera just follows the ball as it does on television. It's not going to showcase technique very well, but it'll go a long way towards explaining e.g. why some wide receivers are always open, why some players always seem to be in the right position to interrupt a pass, etc. I'd actually find it very interestin…
Are there many sports based startups? I'd love to learn more about some.
I do biomechanical research and train baseball pitchers. I have a big blog post coming up about machine learning using PITCHf/x data to see if you can predict injuries with publicly available data from MLBAM (hint: future is promising!).
My company is Driveline Baseball / Driveline Biomechanics Research. We also develop wearable computing technology to capture kinematics of the movie arm (you know this as "pitching mechanics").
Check us out!
http://www.drivelinebaseball.com (Seattle, WA)
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#97It's incredible that they're offering this tape--especially from a computer vision perspective. With enough data, one could conceivably write a program that predicts a team's next play based on the players' pre-snap formation and the previous plays.
Actually, this kind of thing has been around for a long time. Football Outsiders does game charting and "advanced NFL statistics". People have published papers on using artificial neural networks to predict play calling, success rates, even injuries and stuff like that. But this does give us the ability to enrich the data quite a bit. When you watch the live film you really can't see who blew a coverage where or why…
Football Outsiders abuses the use of statistics and engages in data snooping (the "study" on running backs comes to mind) to make their points. They're far, far behind organizations and people who have lent credence to sports analytics, like Baseball Prospectus, Tom Tango, Pete Palmer, Bill James, etc.
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the biggest difference between "normal" football fans and the football enthusiasts like me and the ones I met in my engineering classes boils down to what reasons you enjoy watching the game and, perhaps with overlap between the groups, what level you're paying attention to the actual plays being called and run. Most people love football because they identify with a team, and almost exclusively watch games in…
I have enjoyed Football for a while -- good sport, fun to watch. I REALLY got into Football a few years back when I hopped on the fantasy football bandwagon -- a lot of strategy (projections, history, weekly match up, e.g., do I start Tom Brady against Baltimore or RG3 against StL?), statistics, a random element (injuries, x-factor players breaking out, coaches benching people), etc. There is quite a bit of crossover…
You should try Fantasy Baseball. The stats go so much deeper and there is so much more data to process than with football. The strategy involved for informed players can be quite incredible.
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#99This is very exciting, as there's a lot of strategy to American football that isn't plainly visible when the camera just follows the ball as it does on television. It's not going to showcase technique very well, but it'll go a long way towards explaining e.g. why some wide receivers are always open, why some players always seem to be in the right position to interrupt a pass, etc. I'd actually find it very interestin…
However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football. Nah, there's at least two of us. #GODOLPHINS
Fins up! Gotta love being a dolphins fan, nothing like year after year of disappointment. At least we're not the cubs.
Re: NFL opens Pandora's Box by offering All-22 tape to public
#100The argument in this article is just ridiculous. Handwringing about giving fans more information because they might not interpret it correctly? Breaking news: A lot of people are already plenty wrong with the current amount of information. They'll be wrong with less, they'll be wrong with more, they'll be wrong if the info level stays the same. This is therefore a null argument.
I think they are just using this as a way to advertise the NFL video product (which seems like it is not selling very well). When you tell a bunch of armchair football experts "This is for experts only. You may not be able to handle it.", many people immediately look to prove them wrong. This article reminds me of the time I went car shopping and wanted to test drive a 6 cylinder version of a car after driving the 4…
I don't think this is the case necessarily. People have been asking for all-22 footage for a long time and this is the answer they've always given before this season. The fact that they continue to parrot this line makes me believe that's how most nfl executives feel about it