Sometimes your best isn't enough (sports voodoo edition)

My in-laws are from the Pittsburgh area and, therefore, Steelers fans.  The Steelers have been terrible this year, but found themselves at the beginning of this week 5-6 and facing the 5-6 Ravens in Baltimore.  If the Steelers could win this game, the rest of their schedule was relatively easy (compared to that of the Ravens and the 5-6 Titans) and they would have a good chance to go to the playoffs.

So, like any good son-in-law, I wrote to Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy), who does weekly football picks against the spread, and who is having a terrible year**, to pick against the Steelers.  The stars aligned, and he incorporated reader e-mails into his picks this week (scroll down to Ravens (-3) over Steelers), and it seemed like happiness would reign in Pittsburgh***.

So, of course what happened is that the Steelers covered the spread, but lost the game.  I am truly in awe of Billy Zima's stink this year.  

Well... for the sake of my in-laws, at least the Penguins lead their division in the NHL.


** As of this writing, Simmons is 75-97-6; just how bad is this?  Well, if you were to flip a coin to make your decision for all 172 games that weren't a push, you would expect to do better than 75-97 about 94.6% of the time.  That's not "statistically significantly worse than a coin flip at the 0.05 alpha level" bad, but close.

*** Well, until being bounced out of the first round of the playoffs, because they're really not very good.  The fact that the Steelers could even sniff the playoffs this late this year says more about the wacky state of the NFL than the quality of the Steelers.

Completely missing the point on Tiger vs. Federer

In a June 16 article for ESPN the Magazine, Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy) lays out his theories on why tennis lags behind golf in popularity and what can be done to bring the sport back from the dead. Unfortunately, he completely misses the single most important reason why the casual American fan won't be watching Wimbledon (or any other major tennis tournament) this year is that Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic -- the only players with legitimate shots to win a major -- aren't American. I guarantee that:

• if Tiger and Mediate met in the (tennis) U.S. Open finals while Federer and Nadal meet in a playoff to decide the (golf) U.S. Open, most Americans would watch Tiger and Mediate, not because Tiger is a "better personality" than Federer (they have roughly the same personality, to poke at another of his theories), but because Tiger and Mediate are Americans and Federer and Nadal are Euros.
  
• if no American had won a golf major since 2003 (the year Roddick won the U.S. Open), while Americans had dominated major tennis tournaments during that time period, Simmons would be writing about why golf was "once a successful mainstream sport"

It's really as simple as that. That's really the only substantive point I have to make, but just to rub it in, SG also makes the "the game of tennis has gotten too fast for the equipment" argument, saying

When John McEnroe and Björn Borg had their "Battle of 18-16" at Wimbledon, it wasn't serve-and-volley, serve-and-volley, serve-and-volley

...which was a valid concern 10 years ago when "Pistol Pete", Patrick Rafter, and their ilk were on top of the tennis world, with Agassi as "the counterpuncher", but the top players have largely not been serve-and-volley players for several years, so the points are lasting longer (than 10 years ago; with today's conditioning, I don't think we can go back to the pace of the Wilander-Lendl Finals).

As far as the claim that

succeeding at tennis lends itself to being an exceedingly boring person. You need to be calm, focused and diligent, 24 hours a day

...apparently, he's never seen Djokovic doing imitations. Next!

Out of the playoffs

I've read the Sports Guy's articles since he was picked up by ESPN.com and greatly enjoyed them. Recently, he updated his "Levels of Losing" in honor of the Mets' collapse and falling out of the postseason.

Too bad they didn't wait until Monday night's game was resolved to finish the article. Don't you think that the career saves leading blowing two critical games in a three-day span to drop his team out of the playoffs (hell, not to mention that the first blown save occurred on a triple given up to the son of Mr. Padre, and the second blown save came in a game where a. the starters were Peavy vs. Fogg and should never have come down to being decided by a shaky Hoffman in the first place, and b. the hit by Holliday handed him the batting crown and likely the MVP award, despite being a product of Coors) deserves to be categorized? Gaaaaack.

Here's the final cumulative games over .500 by division. Can all 17 Padres fans take solace in knowing that their division was really tough this year? Given that Norv Turner is coaching the Chargers... no.

Week ALE ALC ALW NLE NLC NLW
2007-09-30 6 -2 18 0 -54 32