Today’s not-so-bold prediction: US soccer doesn’t make it out of the group of death stage. It will be more fun to watch if I’m wrong, but seems unlikely.

US plays Ghana at 6pm on Monday 6/16, Portugal at 6pm on Sunday 6/22, and Germany at noon on Thursday 6/26.

Any good standings page has a wealth of objective team information. Season wins/losses. Points scored for/against. Record in the last 10 games. Games behind first place. Etc.

What purpose do “Power Rankings” serve on top of objective standings? Some experts watched the sport and decided that a team was perhaps outperforming its record? They had some witty comment to make for a few teams and decided to go ahead and try to right something down for all the teams?

Experts aren’t very accurate in their predictions. Power rankings are no exception to this rule. I choose not to read power rankings any more. The very occasional witty comment is overwhelmed by the mass of obvious/rehashed observations that make up the power rankings commentary. This is part of a general trend in me listening to ESPN less and less and looking at actual performance data more and more.

Interesting post on Grantland about how Alex Rodriguez’s career could be remembered so differently if certain small things had turned out differently. He was a rookie during the ’94 strike season, and that year ended up counting toward his major league experience, so he hit the free agency market a year early. Later with the Rangers, he was almost traded to the Red Sox for Manny Ramirez and Jon Lester, but MLBPA nixed the deal because Rodriguez was taking a pay cut on his historically high contract with the Yankees. Just imagine how differently Rodriguez would be perceived if he had been a Red Sock the last ten years (2+ championships) instead of a Yankee (1 championship and tons of controversy).

5 Other “what-ifs” that I thought of in sports:
1. What if grass had grown in Houston’s spiffy new Astro Dome in 1965? Would so many teams have suffered the realities of Astroturf and other artificial turfs?
2. What if Kentucky had better shut down Dwayne Wade in the 2003 Elite Eight? Wade’s triple-double and the publicity it brought him propelled him to enter the draft after his junior year and he was taken 5th overall by the Heat. If Wade goes 15/5/5 instead of 29/11/11 and UK wins, does Wade enter the draft? Does The Decision happen in 2010 so Lebron and Wade can be buddy-buddy?
3. What if Hayward’s shot goes in? Does Butler get to a 2nd straight final the next year? Does Brad Stevens leave for Boston?
4. What if Bob Knight doesn’t choke Neil Reed in practice? Does he do something else stupid that gets him fired? Is he still coaching IU today (he’s 73)? Would we be spared the misery of listening him try to announce games?
5. What if the Colts and Rams’ owners never swapped teams? Do the Colts end up moving to Indy? If they never leave Baltimore, what does Art Modell do to the Browns? The Rams were in Los Angeles at the time of the swap; does Los Angeles have a football team today?

The Olympics kicked off yesterday. Whoever approves competitions for inclusion in the Olympics does not share my view of what constitutes a sport. Here is their list of Olympic Sports.

In my opinion, sports are athletic events that have an offense and a defense.

My definition limits “sports” to athletic events where you “score” a point/goal/run/etc on your opponent and the winner of the contest is defined in some way by who scores the most. Additionally, there must be some aspect of defense whereby each team is trying to keep the other team from scoring.

Let’s examine some of the events on the Olympic list to see if they are really sports.
Archery/Shooting/Bobsled/Skating/Skiing/Diving/Weightlifting: Not sports. You don’t even compete at the same time as your opponents, so there’s no defense.
Trampoline: Please. Kid’s backyard event. Not a sport.
Tennis/Badminton: Sports. You’re constantly trying to score points while keeping your opponent from scoring.
Table Tennis: The way they play, I guess these are athletic events. Maybe. Sport.
Swimming/Rowing: You compete at the same time as your opponents, but you have to stay in your lane and cannot affect their performance. Not sports. This goes for any “stay in your lane” track and field events too.
Boxing/Judo/Taekwondo: Offense-Hit opponent. Defense-Avoid opponent’s attack. Sports.
Volleyball/Soccer/Basketball/Hockey: Classic team sports.
Winter biathlon: Ski. Shoot. Ski. Shoot. Unless you can shoot your opponent to slow them down, not a sport.
Golf: There is some strategy involved in how you play which depends on how well your opponent(s) are doing, but you cannot really stop your opponent from doing well in any way. Not a sport.

Tougher calls:
Racing events (cycling/sailing/long-distance running/skating/skiing) where you don’t have to stay in your lane: You can sometimes interact with your opponent by blocking their path. But that’s not really the point of the event. The point is to get the finish line the fastest. Maybe some strategy involved in the pace that you set, but no real offense or defense. Not sports.
Curling: There is definitely “scoring” based on where the stones end up. And you can prevent the opponent from scoring by knocking out their stones. And it’s fairly athletic, so I’m going to say it’s a sport.

By my count, the only two real sports in the Winter Olympics are hockey and curling. The rest can be “athletic events”, but they’re not sports.

Additionally, watching athletic events with cryptic subjective scoring is annoying. Figure skating, “style” skiing events, gymnastics, and diving, I’m looking at you. Figure out a real way to decide the winner.

It’s a travesty that baseball/softball are not in the Olympics when trampoline is. The ancient Greeks would be ashamed.

Curling is pretty awesome.

I took some time yesterday morning to scour the internet for prop bets related to the Super Bowl. Here are the bets I designed and the payouts I set:
 

Super Bowl Prop Bets

If you watched the Super Bowl, you know that it was one of the worst games ever. The Broncos did everything they could to lose and the Seahawks were fairly flawless. If you didn’t watch the Super Bowl, what’s wrong with you?

We had a Super Bowl party at our condo, and charged $2 to enter our betting game. I was obviously not expecting the outcome of the game that happened, because I set “Seahawks win by 29.5 or more” as 100-1 odds. That came true and made calculating the winner pretty easy. Ryan and Nicole Van Klompenburg take home the winnings with their long-shot bet.