They Play Football at Duke?

A couple of quick-shots as you watch your favorite baseball team fall further and further from contention. (So this is what it feels like, Joe?)

• Today’s post at the Duke Chronicle’s sports blog asks the age old sabermetric question: should you go for it on fourth down?

• The pre-season coaches’ poll is out, and for the first time, Steve Spurrier did not vote for Duke. Allegedly, it’s because he was asked not to do so in order to protect the almighty integrity of the poll. I’ll pause and wait for you to stop laughing.
• The Cutcliffe era started yesterday.

Football in April

The blog has been quiet lately… too quiet.

It’s understandable. There are exams to be graded, weddings to be planned, and research papers to be written. I just realized I have seven different papers in various stages of completion (six of them are thankfully nearly done). I’ve been pretty stressed and the EPA is about the nicest, lowest stress research environment I can imagine. All the same, it’s time for distraction. Thus, I present the April football round-up:

First off, offensive lineman Justin Boren — whose right to do as he saw fit I defended not long ago — has indeed decided to transfer from Michigan to “the” Ohio State to play with his brother. I wish him well, but if he’s playing offensive line for this year’s match-up, I think we may see the OSU quarterback sacked a dozen times. A cocaine-fueled Jeff Smoker (who to his great credit has recovered) took that many sacks and still won the second-most-recent “Greatest Michigan-Michigan state game ever”

A Post by John About Baseball

I meant to do this yesterday, when it would have been more believable, but here I am on a regular old day writing about baseball. In case you missed it, non-linear dynamics guru Steven Strogatz and graduate student Samuel Arbesman had a paper in the New York Times on using a game simulator to simulate every at bat for all of baseball 10,000 times. They then used this artificial data set to look for trends, including a really cool distribution of hitting streak records (the real record of 56 games is held by Joe DiMaggio). Apparently DiMaggio’s record — according to Wikipedia, “the top American sports feat of all time” — was actually to be expected. In the 10,000 samples the median record was 53 games.

Sports Puppets

One of the many reasons I miss the Triangle area is the quality of the local media (although the TV doesn’t hold a candle to my beloved Upstate). So it is with envy that I watch this video of the NBC 17 late night news on YouTube several days later.

The Return of the Joe

Fellow Duke physics graduate Joe has now started blogging from his current residence in icy Arizona. Check out Handbasket Travel Ventures for the latest and greatest. Also, check out this picture of Jesus riding a dinosaur that I found when I looked under “j” in the My Pictures folder. I’m sure that it’s featured prominently at the Creationist museum:

Xing Zong elected Young Trustee

Duke physics Ph.D. student and writer of manifestos Xing Zong (”Michael”) has been elected Young Trustee at Duke. He follows in the footsteps of Rob Saunders in reaching the highest possible office for a graduate student.

For the uninitiated, Michael was a go-getter from the start of graduate school and, via a manifesto outlining improvements he wanted to see made to the department, he quickly began the glacial process of bridging the gap between Asian and non-Asian graduate students. I recall the biggest insight being that he felt that many students from China did not read e-mails, but typically looked to message boards for information. Though we didn’t end up implementing a physics message board, we did start placing more content on-line instead of just distributing it via e-mail lists.

Another point of concern for him then that he still works on today was international recruiting. According to the article he is interested in “attracting the most talented students to Duke from around the world through innovative recruitment strategies.” I believe that he already has helped organize communication between Chinese physics students at Duke and potential recruits in China.

Best of luck to Duke’s new “iPhone” trustee.

The Rivarly!

Tonight the talented and handsome Duke Blue Devils take on the thuggish and not-good-looking Tar Heels from the school down the road. ESPN is hyping the game even more than usual for the #2 vs. #3 matchup. Though historically these teams haven’t needed top rankings to play amazing games against each other, I got to wondering how often they have faced off with such lofty admirations from the press.

In the last 30 years, Duke-UNC have played 30 games with both teams in the AP top 10, 9 with both teams in the top 5, and 4 with higher rankings than today (twice 1 vs. 3 and twice 1 vs. 2). Anyone who has taken part in attending these games can attest to the fact that you might as well throw the rankings out, but it’s remarkable how often this rivalry game has also been a big part of the national picture.

This is the only game I ever painted any part of myself for. I’m sure my fellow bloggers have similar fond memories.

Hard to Resist…

No, not Riley Skinner, but rather I have had trouble resisting posting about this Forbe’s piece ranking college “champion factories.”  While I don’t think that anyone wants their alma mater to be considered a factory of any sort, since they decided to rank Michigan number one I simply can’t resist.

Michigan comes in #1 overall, but Miami is #1 in football. Not surprisingly, dear old Duke is #1 in basketball.  My guess is that the list’s inclusion of ice hockey greatly helped Michigan and its exclusion of baseball hurt (though Michigan allegedly had some Major Leaguers).

Donald L. Tucker Civic Center (Duke 70 - FSU 57)

I am just home from the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center, home of the FSU Seminoles basketball team, at least on game days. Free throws at the end of the game hide how close it really was, but this post isn’t about the game. The D-Tuck (nobody calls it this) is my 6th college b-ball arena (if W&M Hall counts) so you all get a full report on how much worse it is than the Sistine Chapel of college hoops (Cameron Indoor for the slow).

The D-Tuck is a multi-purpose civic center and not strictly a basketball arena, so you can’t expect it to provide the college experience that students deserve. There is a small student section, about 4 rows, behind the press tables, but other than that the ‘Noles have decided to go the route of the NBA style arena. It’s not their fault there are luxury boxes, those just come with building, but they also decided to go with obnoxiously loud music (perhaps I was sitting too close to the ceiling speakers), a light show at player introductions, and better looking cheerleaders (hey, CIS ain’t perfect).

I can shrug and just say that’s all just the FSU way, that’s how they do it. But there was one crime against sports that hurts me deep. Right at the beginning of player introductions the announcer does his best to pump of the fans (”Give a welcome to yourrrrrr Florida State Seminoooooooles!!” etc.), the lights go out and the stadium shakes. If you’ve ever felt Cameron Indoor shake, you know what this feels like and you’ve probably noticed it corresponds to 2500 crazy students jumping up and down and screaming in the bleachers. At the D-Tuck it corresponds to nothing. They’ve actually faked fan enthusiasm by vibrating the building. I was shocked, I was saddened, I began to wonder if they’d use a round ball to play the game.

Thankfully, a round ball was used and Duke put it through the hoop more often than FSU.

Duke’s New Coach

ESPN has a cool article on David Cutcliffe, Duke’s new head football coach.  The more interesting details include that he resigned from assistant head coach at Notre Dame in 2005 after a triple-bypass surgery (I wonder if Duke’s hospitals helped in getting him here) and that Duke is spending mondo cash on their coaching staff