Scorecasting (31 page)

It’s one of the great ironies in sports. For 60 minutes, the gladiators in the NFL risk life and head trauma, bouncing off one another, driving opponents into the ground, and generally purveying violence and mayhem. They’re caked in blood and sweat and dirt and grass. It’s all part of the spectacle that makes professional football so indefensible to some and so compulsively watchable to the rest of us.

And then, if the two teams are tied after regulation, these fierce and brutal struggles are decided largely by … the flip of a coin. After that gamelong physical exertion, the outcome ultimately comes down to dumb luck. Sure, the winning team has to kick the ball through the uprights or, in rare cases, march into the end zone, but that’s mostly a formality. Win that arbitrary coin toss at midfield and earn first possession of the ball in overtime, and victory is usually yours. As the broadcaster
Joe Buck once quipped before the Oakland Raiders and San Francisco 49ers were about to begin overtime: “[Here comes] one of the biggest plays of the day, the coin flip!”

Credit
Brian Burke, an aerospace engineer, a former F/A-18 carrier pilot in the U.S. Navy, and the current overlord of the website
advancednflstats.com
, for logging the hard miles here. Burke determined that between 2000 and 2009, 158 NFL games, including the playoffs, went to overtime. Two of those games ended in a tie. In one game, the Detroit Lions won the coin flip and chose neither to kick nor to receive but rather what side of the field they preferred to defend. (Not surprisingly, they lost.) In the other 155 games, the team that won the coin flip won the game 96 times, a 61 percent clip. As Burke correctly pointed out on his website, “Don’t be tricked by people that say ‘only 61 percent.’ If we agree 50 percent would be the fairest rate, you might think 61 isn’t very far from 50. But that’s not the right way to look at it. The appropriate comparison is 61 percent versus 39 percent, the respective winning percentages of the coin flip winners and losers. That’s a big advantage—over 3:2 odds.”

What’s more, in 58 of the 158 games, or 37 percent of the time, the team that won the coin flip won the game in its first possession. Think about this for a second: Teams battled their guts out for 60 minutes over four quarters and were tied with their opponents. Then, 37 percent of the time, one team lost in overtime
without even touching
the ball. Is it any wonder that of the 460 coin toss winners in NFL history, only 7 of them have elected to kick off and play defense first in overtime play?

David Romer, the Berkeley economist who encouraged more teams to go for it on fourth down, has a way to make NFL overtimes fairer: Change the spot for the initial kickoff. As it stands now, the kicking team boots from the 30-yard line. At this distance, it’s difficult to kick the ball into the end zone for a touchback, so the receiving team often gets the chance for a strong return. Romer claims that moving the kickoff up just five yards to the 35 would trigger a significant increase in touchbacks so that the receiving team would begin at the 20-yard line, the “break-even point” where the team on offense and the team on defense are equally likely to score next.

Chris Quanbeck, an electrical engineer and rabid Packers fan, offers a more radical, and intriguing, suggestion: Auction off the first possession of overtime, using field position as currency. Want
the ball first? How far back are you willing to start your first drive? If we accept Romer’s premise that the 20-yard line is the break-even point, if Team A is willing to start on its own 15-yard line, Team B might happily agree to start out on defense. Writing in
Slate
,
Tim Harford, a columnist for the
Financial Times
, noted this additional benefit: “Imagine the possibilities for stagecraft.… The two head coaches could come to midfield with sealed bids, with the envelopes to be opened by a cheerleader representing each team—a gridiron version of
Deal or No Deal.
”

Others have suggested eliminating field goals in overtime and mandating that the winning team must score a touchdown. As kickers have improved their accuracy and leg strength, it’s become increasingly easy for the team that wins the coin toss to reach field goal range. What’s more, eliminating the field goal would encourage the kicking team to inaugurate the overtime by attempting an onside kick. (As it stands, it’s a foolish play. If the receiving team recovers, they’re likely to be only 10 or 15 yards away from being in position for a game-winning field goal.)

The other obvious solution would be to adopt some variation of the “Kansas Plan” in college football, whereby each team receives a first-and-ten possession at the opponent’s 25-yard line. Here, at least the team unlucky on the coin toss gets the equivalent of “last licks”—it can’t lose without touching the football on offense.

In response to an Internet discussion, one reader suggested simply letting the fans vote for the winner, in the manner of
American Idol
. The poster was being facetious, of course. But is it that much more ridiculous than deciding a game—a tightly contested game at that—largely on the basis of heads or tails?

There are other sports that employ the flip of a coin, if not to such dramatic effect. In professional
tennis, the winners of the pre-match coin flip have four choices: They can serve, return, choose one side of the court, or forgo the choice entirely. The overwhelming majority of players opt to serve first, and this makes sense. In ATP matches in 2009, servers won 78.4 percent of the time.

At the 2010 NFL owners’ meetings, the league passed a change to the overtime rule in playoff situations. The team losing the coin
toss will have a chance to score if the opposing team kicks a field goal. But if the team that wins the coin toss scores a touchdown on its first possession, the game will be over. If both teams exchange field goals, sudden death commences, with the first team to score again (even if it’s just a field goal) winning. Teams voted the modification in by a margin of 28–4, in part because of the data showing how often the initial random overtime coin flip determines the game’s outcome. “Plenty of people on the committee, myself included, are so-called traditionalists,”
Bill Polian, the Indianapolis Colts’ president, told reporters. “I am proud to be one. But once you saw the statistics, it became obvious we had to do something.”

At this writing, the change will be implemented only for playoff games, when a winner
must
be determined. During the regular season, teams that are tied at the end of regulation time will continue to toss a coin to see who receives the ball in overtime, and the team that is luckier probably will walk off the field victorious.

WHAT
ISN’T
IN THE MITCHELL REPORT?
 

On January 11, 2010,
Mark McGwire, the former St. Louis Cardinals slugger, attended confession. He sat across from
Bob Costas on an MLB Network set made to look like a cozy living room—replete with lamps, urns, and a faux fireplace—to talk, finally, about the past. He looked noticeably less bulked up than the behemoth who’d captivated the country during his 1998 pursuit of Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. His familiar red hair now salted with gray, McGwire stifled tears and looked shamefaced as he confirmed what most baseball fans had long suspected. Yes, he admitted, he had used performance-enhancing drugs, or PEDs. He then asked for forgiveness.

As apologies go, McGwire’s did not exactly set a new benchmark for sackcloth-and-ashes contrition. His mea culpa had been orchestrated by
Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s first White House press secretary, now a sports consultant and crisis manager. In the weeks leading up to the interview, Fleischer prepped McGwire on
every conceivable question he might face. “It was just like batting practice,” explained McGwire. “[The] attitude was: You’re not going to get blindsided.”

McGwire’s confession coincided with an offer to become the St. Louis Cardinals’ hitting coach. (Was his admission a crisis of conscience or a condition for a new job?) Interspersed among the pleas of penance, McGwire lamented, “I wish I had never played in the steroid era,” as if he’d had no say in the decision to juice up and had simply, by accident of birth, had the misfortune of playing at the wrong time. He also echoed the increasingly familiar explanation of countless other athletes caught in the steroids web: “The only reason that I took steroids was for my health purposes. I did not take steroids to get any gain for any strength purposes.”

Although McGwire later reflected that his confession “went wonderfully,” public opinion was split. In the minds of most fans, there is enough circumstantial evidence to convict
Roger Clemens,
Barry Bonds, and
Sammy Sosa of steroid use, too. McGwire was the first from that group to come forward voluntarily and make an outright admission of guilt. Good for him. But McGwire’s insistence that he’d used the drugs only for recovery from an injury rang hollow. Steroids are a performance-enhancing drug, and it is no coincidence that McGwire’s biggest years in terms of home run production coincided with the period in which he now admits he juiced up. If McGwire had used the drugs only for convalescence and not for strength, why had he felt compelled to apologize to the Maris family? McGwire’s critics, unmoved by his apology, contended that he’d become the face of the steroids era in baseball.

For most baseball fans, steroids are commonly associated with Major League stars like McGwire,
José Canseco, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, and
Manny Ramirez: sluggers with chests and arms as disproportionately large as their home run totals, ageless pitchers throwing heat into their forties, and utility infielders
suddenly jacking 30 home runs in a season. Those were the cheaters who distorted the competition and tainted baseball’s hallowed statistics, who made it into former U.S. senator
George Mitchell’s report.
^*
Those were the players who made steroids such a cause célèbre.

But that picture is inaccurate. Most of the steroids in baseball were purchased and consumed by players whose names won’t be familiar to even the most die-hard fans and who are not listed in the Mitchell Report. Among the 274 professional players who tested positive for steroids and other banned performance-enhancing drugs between 2005 and the fall of 2010, 249, the overwhelming majority, were
minor league
players whose faces never made it onto the front of a baseball card.

The true face of the steroid era? It might look a lot like the smiling mug of
Welington Dotel. An irrepressible outfielder with a lively bat and an arm so powerful that it should require a license, Dotel grew up in Neiba, Dominican Republic, a fairly nondescript town in the southwestern quadrant of the island, not far from the border of Haiti. Welington was the oldest of five children born to parents who kept the family afloat by doing a series of odd jobs: working in restaurants, working on roads, teaching. According to Welington, “It changed with the season, but they did many things.”

The family struggled in a region where average annual household income was less than $9,000. “We were not rich,” Welington says, laughing. Yet he was better off than some of his friends and neighbors, who played baseball with milk cartons for gloves and sticks for bats. As with so many boys on the island, he fell hard for baseball. The game fed something inside him. But it was also a way, he dreamed, to deliver his family from poverty.

Genial and outgoing, Welington makes friends easily. His formal
education ended before high school, when, like most Dominican prospects, he dropped out to pursue a career on the ball field. Asked what he’d be doing were it not for baseball, he pauses. “Maybe teaching baseball,” he says. “Something with baseball because it’s my passion. Maybe even more than my passion. It’s everything to me.”

A late bloomer, Welington was 18 when he was signed as a free agent by the
Seattle Mariners organization. His signing bonus, he says, was $160,000. “It was unbelievable,” he says. “They told me and I was like, ‘Sure, I sign that!’ ” He bought his mom a new home, financed a new car, and acquired some of the other material possessions no one in his family had ever owned.