His Hall of Fame

After the death of coach Morgan Wootten, his family submitted a death notice that appeared in The Washington Post.  In addition to the names of those who survive him and the details of the services, the notice included the following: "The family is consoled knowing that Morgan is now in God's Hall of Fame."  And that is followed by this poem:

This crowd on earth they soon forget
The heroes of the past.
They cheer like mad until you fall,
And that's how long you last.
But God He never does forget,
And, in His Hall of Fame,
By just believing in his Son,
Inscribed you'll find your name.

Georgia Tech bought by Adidas

Yesterday's issue of The Washington Post included an article explaining that two Adidas officials (and an aspiring NBA agent) are on trial in a federal court in New York.  The men broke NCAA recruiting rules and allegedly defrauded the colleges recruiting a high school basketball player from Michigan (Will Hobson, "Any probes by NCAA will wait till trials end," Page D1, October 6, 2018).

The same day, I received the Fall 2018 issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine.  Its cover included the teaser: "Inside the deal with Adidas." An article by Tony Rehagen provided the following details: over six years, Adidas will provide a total of $17.46 million worth of apparel and $1.2 million cash.  (Adidas will give bonuses if the football team or men's basketball team appears in a championship game.)  According to the article, "college athletics is big business."

And that includes branding.  As part of the deal, Tech revamped the teams' uniforms (all featuring the Adidas logo), with a new color and new wordmark (here).  The football helmet has a new version of the GT logo.  The football team also got a renovated locker room that cost $4.5 million; of course, it features the Adidas logo also.

The men and women who play on these teams will also get workout gear to wear around campus.  But they won't be compensated when Adidas or Georgia Tech sells replicas of their uniforms to students and fans, because of NCAA rules.  The athletes' compensation is restricted by the NCAA, a cartel that exploits them and refuses to share the millions that it receives in various media and marketing deals (including deals for video games featuring players' likenesses, an issue in the O'Bannon lawsuit).  The players have no association to represent them; they have no power except the power to opt out (which some do, working in professional leagues without playing for college teams).  

Because of the NCAA, Adidas supposedly commits a crime when it gives money to high school athletes, but it is acceptable to give gear and money to the athletic departments who are recruiting and exploiting these athletes.  The trial in New York is about people who broke NCAA rules, but the NCAA is the guilty party. 

Georgia Tech's Official Colors

Although "Up with the White and Gold" is the best fight song ever, Tech's official colors are not white and gold. According to the Official Colors page:

Authorized colors are gold (PMS 124), navy (PMS 539), metallic gold (PMS 874), and black.

Modeling the ski rental problem

In the ski rental problem, the decision-maker (let’s call him Joe) is going to spend multiple days skiing. He can purchase a pair of skis for a price of $K and use them one or more days (including the day on which he purchases the skis). He can also rent a pair of skis for one day for $1. (He won't rent skis if he has purchased some.) He can rent skis as many times as he wants. The critical assumption is that Joe has no idea how many days he will go skiing; he will ski until something stops him – an injury, bad weather, a loss of interest, or something urgent at home or work, for example – but he does not put a probability distribution on the number of days that he will ski.

What is interesting is that there are two ways to model the problem. The first model assumes that, before day 1, Joe will select a day (D) on which he will purchase skis if he is still skiing that day, but he will rent skis every day until then. Thus, if he skis a total of N days, then his total cost for skis equals N if N < D, and D – 1 + K if N >= D. This version seems to capture the risky nature of the decision. Selecting a small value of D is bad if N is only slightly larger than D; selecting a large value of D is bad if N is close to but not greater than D. (Small and large are relative to K.)

The second model considers the sequential nature of the problem: if Joe rented skis on the one day, then he has a decision to make the next day (rent again or purchase). Interestingly, there seems to be a memoryless property here: because Joe has no idea how many days he will ski, then he has no idea how many more days he will ski, so the decision on every day is the same. If he decides to rent a pair of skis on Day 1, he should rent a pair of skis every day, for there is no reason to change his choice. If, on any day, he would decide to purchase a pair of skis, then he should do that on Day 1. This would imply that Joe’s only reasonable choices are to purchase a pair of skis on Day 1 or never.

I suspect that I’ve run into a situation that occurs in other infinite-horizon sequential decisions. If so, I’d love to know which model is more reasonable and why.

Bryce Harper's swing

In The Washington Post, Adam Kilgore lauds Bryce Harper's "swing of beauty."

Sports and the Meaning of Life

Came across these two articles about two people in big-time college sports who found (are trying to find) the meaning of life somewhere else: a woman soccer player at LSU and Urban Meyer.

A Perfect Game

David B. Hart's article, A Perfect Game (First Things, August, 2010) is an ode to baseball and an effort to describe why it is perfect.

[Baseball] requires a whole constellation of seemingly bizarre physical and mental skills that, through countless barren millennia, were not only unrealized but also unsuspected potencies of human nature, silently awaiting the formal cause from beyond that would make them actual. So much of what a batter, pitcher, or fielder does is astonishingly improbable, and yet—it turns out—entirely natural. Clearly, baseball was always intended in our very essence; without it, our humanity was incomplete. Willie Mays was an avatar of the divine capacities that lie within our animal frames. Bob Feller’s fastball was Jovian lightning at the command of mortal clay.

He also compares it to the oblong game (football, soccer, basketball, etc.): "a contest played out on a rectangle between two sides, each attempting to penetrate the other’s territory to deposit some small object in the other’s goal or end zone."

Comparing baseball to even the most complex versions of the oblong game is like comparing chess to tiddlywinks.

The soccer player who wants to be a priest

Chase Hilgenbrinck left behind a pro soccer career to be a priest. He is now a seminarian at Mount St. Mary's.

2011 Baseball predictions

Bruce Bukiet used a mathematical model to predict the number of wins of every team in the major leagues.

Scrabble Baseball Team

A team of professional baseball players whose first and last names are acceptable Scrabble words (via The Washington Post).

A memorable game

On April 9, 1994, we saw the Baltimore Orioles defeat the Texas Rangers at Camden Yards. Here is the box score.

Monster Mini Golf

Mike and I played a round at Monster Mini Golf in Jessup (sorry, COLUMBIA), Maryland.

One of the holes had a spinner that randomly assigned you a handicap or advantage - I got "Tee off using the handle of the golf club," and Mike got "If you make a hole-in-one, score it as 0." The holes were generally easy (except the awful #17!), but I would have preferred more of the random penalties/awards to add some interest.

Hint: on Saturday get there early enough so that you start play before the birthday party groups do.

How to reform college football

Sally Jenkins suggests six easy steps (The Washington Post, January 10, 2011).

Why does it need reform? Because it is "an illegitimate system in which nearly the half the top-level college football teams in the country were excluded before the first kickoff ever went up," she goes on to explain in another column today.

The Bucs were rolling in 1979

While I was waiting in the dentist's office yesterday, I flipped through the current issue of Sports Illustrated, which had a "Vault" piece on the Buccaneers first taste of success in 1979.
Ah, Ricky Bell, Doug Williams, and the Selmon brothers...
Check out the cover or read an HTML version of the article.

The original article is on page 30 of the magazine (click on "View this issue").

Labor Day

Had a beautiful Labor Day today and enjoyed it by going into the city. Stopped at Georgetown Cupcake's store on M Street to pick up our order, met my aunt Mary Sue and cousin Jonathan (a medical student at the GWU medical school), and had brunch at Peacock Cafe (they have great Eggs Benedict and French toast). Later, we saw the the Madeleine Albright Collection of pins at the Smithsonian Institution Building (the Castle).

Listened to part of the Nationals' 13-3 victory over the Mets on the way home.

Curling and operations research

We've watched a good bit of curling during the Winter Olympics, and I keep thinking that one could apply operations research to make better decisions in a game.

Apparently I'm not the first: see the article by Kostuk and Willoughby on a long-running dispute in curling.

Bobby Cremins

Column by John Feinstein about Bobby Cremins.

"Bobby Cremins is still doing his thing at College of Charleston," The Washington Post, Sunday, February 21, 2010.

Seed Performance

Yesterday's Washington Post had an interesting graphic on the performance of the teams in each seed in the NCAA men's basketball tournament. So, for instance, out of the 96 teams who have received a #1 seed, 14 of them have won the championship.

Great Day. Tech Wins. UGA gets crushed.

From the TechBlog at http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/tech/entries/2008/11/01/_everyone_got_i.html:
Great Day. Tech Wins. UGA gets crushed.

There's not much more to say!

Inspirational Pregame Speeches

The blog the Art of Manliness has a post about Inspirational Football Locker Room Speeches. It includes two videos from Georgia Tech: the 2007 games against Notre Dame and Clemson.