The Queue

So I logged in to March Madness On Demand right at noon, only to find 47,254 people already waiting in line. They have a little timer labeled "Next Admission." It counts down from twenty seconds and then resets.

Not knowing how many users are admitted to the live games area each "admission" period, let's assume the worst: only one person leaves the waiting room each time. So that's 1/3 minute * 47,253 people ahead of me = 15,751 minutes until I get to watch a live game.

In other words, 262.5 hours or nearly eleven days until I get to watch the live video.

Update: 14 minutes have passed and I am now number 39,111 in the queue. So it seems 200 people get in every twenty seconds. That means only 79 minutes until I get to watch me some NCAA basketball!

Update #2: I waited only 23 minutes total (plus a 15-second commercial). Perhaps they only let in relatively few people at a time in the beginning, but opened up the floodgates later on. The picture quality is decent in the half-court set, though during fast breaks it's pixelated like vintage 1997 broadcast.com. The picture also keeps blacking out. You need to minimize the window and then bring it back up to get the picture back.

Update #3: Every so often, the audio feed switches from the game announcers to the commercials that CBS is broadcasting, maybe for some other game. This is much more annoying than the occassional blackout.

Still, you can't beat free.

The Sports Alphabet

Too often I've had to spell out a word to a customer service agent over the phone. Because it's hard to differentiate between sounds like D and T, the military named the letters Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. I can't remember past Delta and Echo. (Okay, I looked it up - it's Foxtrot. Tell me you know what G is.) That means I'm stuck thinking of words on the fly, which is time-consuming and potentially embarassing if one is not careful. P used indiscriminately is an especially dangerous letter.

To save Get Untracked readers this hassle, I've put together the Sports Alphabet as a public service, providing the most memorable representation for each letter.

A: Aaron

B: Bird

C: Charles (Sir Charles to you)

D: Deion (Perhaps Daisuke in a few years)

E: Eli (Excluding the eminently eligible Eckersley, Erving and Ewing, as none of them are excellent E sounds)

F: Federer
G: Gretzky
H: Hakeem Holyfield (In deference to those who remember Olajuwon before he added the H to his first name)
I: Isiah
J: Jordan
K: Kobe (Because most CSR's don't know who Koufax is, and because Kareem is overrated)
L: Lemieux
M: Magic
N: Nicklaus
O: Ozzie (Smith, not Canseco)
P: Payton/Peyton (Edging out Pelé, Pujols, Pedro and Papi)
Q: Quisenberry
R: Reggie (Hall of fame first name of Jackson, Miller, White)
S: Strawberry (Schmidt doesn't work for this purpose)
T: Tiger
U: Urlacher
V: Valenzuela
W: Willie (Mays, Stargell, McCovey and Keeler - also Lanier and Brown)
X: Xavier (The 9-seed, X-man and Professor)
Y: Yastrzemski
Z: Zimmer

Got a more memorable name for a letter? Put it in the comments.

Sandy Alomar Jr. > Brandon Webb?

Here at Get Untracked, we're big believers in The Wisdom of Crowds, a theory described by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki in his 1994 book of that name. The author wrote that when a large decisionmaking body meets four criteria: (a) variety of opinions, (b) independence of members, (c) decentralization, and (d) an effective means of collecting opinions, the resulting choices will produce better results than those obtained by following the suggestions of the smartest people in the group.

In preparing for my fantasy baseball draft, I use ESPN's live draft results as one of many references. The list "displays the average position players were selected by team owners in ESPN Fantasy Baseball live drafts. Only players that have been drafted in a significant number of leagues will show up on this list." I believed that the thousands of people drafting teams would collectively provide a better ranking of players than any single projection system like PECOTA, CHONE, ZiPS or MARCEL. I was wrong.

The list starts out just fine, ranking Albert Pujols first, followed by Soriano, A-Rod, Reyes, Johan and Ryan Howard. But when you get to picks 51-100 (click screen capture to your right), things get a little screwy. Pick 52? Sandy Alomar, Jr. Pick 56? Eli Marrero. Pick 64? Pedro Feliciano. It's like Omar Minaya was choosing guys for his "all-Latin Early-90's" themed fantasy team.

It's clear that ESPN's fantasy draft results page doesn't meet Surowiecki's conditions to be a "wise crowd." Perhaps there is not sufficient variety of opinion, independence or decentralization. All the players listed above have Mets connections so perhaps only Mets crazies have held their drafts. (Or one Mets crazy has drafted 13,248 times.)

What's more likely, however, is that this ESPN page is not a good method for aggregating opinions. The far right column of the list shows what percentage of fantasy leagues each player is owned in. For the top MLB players, this should be virtually 100%. Sandy Alomar Jr. was selected with the average 51st pick, but he is owned in only 0.5% of leagues. This contradicts ESPN's promise only to list players drafted in enough leagues to make the list helpful.

Somebody needs to tell the WWL about the technical glitch on their fantasy site. (Dare I say ESPN is having a Sportsline Moment?) Too bad their hallowed ombudsman is leaving...

The Rain In Seattle Falls Mainly On The Visitors

Fascinating article by Russell Adams at the WSJ describing teams' concerted efforts to make stadiums more hostile to visiting players. Qwest Field is notorious for elevated levels of crowd noise. But I had no idea that the Seahawks got a weather advantage too:

In addition to contracting engineers to make sure that the wind and rain would disproportionately hit the visitors' sideline, [the stadium's architect] placed the cheapest endzone seats (where, he says, the "crazies" sit) atop steel risers that send thundering noise to the hard surfaces on the overhangs and roof, redirecting it back to the field.

I remember a few years back when an employee of the Metrodome turned on vents to help Twins' fly balls become home runs. And in recent years college football's SEC conference and the NFL have both legislated against artificial noisemakers. The NFL's rulebook even has a section devoted to phrases that may not appear on jumbotrons: "Pump it up" and Let's go crazy" are both prohibited.

We've witnessed an arms race with respect to new football stadium construction. The pink taco has a roll-out natural grass field. The Cowboys' new venue will have a 60-yard-long HD scoreboard. But after the Seahawks' success in their new super-loud digs (29-11 since moving to Qwest Field!), you can expect other teams building new homes to ratchet up the acoustics - and especially the weather - to extend their own home-field advantage to Seattle-like levels.

What can the NFL do about this? Seems like the seahawk has flown the coop.

Sportsline Moment

I'm not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories. They usually presume too much competence. But yesterday's post on the Knicks' pathetic lack of assists combined with this morning's box score could be a diabolical statistical inflation situation. Somebody at the NBA could be going through box scores and giving extra assists though a game's official scorer decided none were deserved. According to the box score for last night's game, the Knicks finished with 22 assists as a team. But the play-by-play information at CBS Sportsline shows the Knicks only had seven, including zero in the first half.

A conspiracy theorist would say this is like the Yankees deciding after a game that when Derek Jeter kicked a grounder then bounced his throw, that was really a hit not an error. But my story is more likely to result from human operator error.

You've heard the phrase "senior moment" used to describe the failing memory of old people? Well, at Get Untracked we coined the phrase "Sportsline Moment" for those times my buddy and I would follow out-of-town NFL games on Sportsline and see them report the impossible. The GameCenter might tell us a negative-65 yard pass was just completed, then a minute later realize the mistake and fix it.

More often, Sportsline would stop updating a game for indeterminate periods because something strange happened and they needed time to explain it (e.g., T.Jones right tackle to CHI 28 for 17 yards (A.Dyson, V.Hobson). FUMBLES (A.Dyson), RECOVERED by NYJ-K.Rhodes at CHI 35. K.Rhodes to CHI 35 for no gain (T.Jones). Play Challenged by CHI and REVERSED. T.Jones right tackle to CHI 28 for 17 yards (A.Dyson, V.Hobson).) The most blatant Sportsline Moment last season was when Sportsline told us a game was FINAL with Team A having won, while we watched live bonus coverage on TV of Team B kicking a game-winning field goal with one second left.

Because Sportsline's "GameCenters" simply pick up the feed from NFL.com, Sportsline Moments ensure that the play-by-play we read on the screen is the official account from the NFL. My mistake in last night's post was failing to realize that Sportsline has no special agreement with the NBA. I do, however, stand by the spirit of my post: Marbury is an awful point guard, Frye and Curry never pass the ball, and Isiah Thomas should be fired. Who can argue with that? If I had been following the game at NBA.com, I would have seen play-by-play giving the Knicks nine assists in the first half, not zero.

(Why, you ask, am I following an NBA game online when I could be watching my hometown Knicks on TV? Because I work 14-hour days and am still at the office at 10:00 at night, that's why. I'm a little bitter.)

In any event, now I know that Sportsline is useless for tracking stats of individual players during a live NBA game, and that I should use NBA.com for that purpose. And knowing is half the battle!