Tuesday, May 15, 2012

That Napoli Fan


I keep seeing this same Napoli fan almost every time I see them play, anyone else notice this dude?

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Appendix to A Radical Proposal

Previously, I posted an outline of my proposal to fix college football, here is what it looks like (don't pay attention to the teams, they can be moved around and could finish anywhere within the tier, I only payed attention to wether a team was tier 1, 2, or 3 (and that was done a few years ago), and then to what region they would fit in):




Tier 1 A (South)Tier 1 B (East)Tier 1 C (Midwest)Tier 1 D (West)
FloridaPenn StateOklahomaTexasAutomatic Bid to Round Robin Championship
GeorgiaBoston CollegeMinnesotaUSCPlay in to Roud Robin Losers join Blue teams in 16 team playoff
LSUOhio StateNorth WesternTexas TechPlayoff Teams - Championship game is a "major" bowl
AlabamaUconnMichigan StateBoise State
South CarolinaVA techNebraskaCal
South FloridaWVUKansasOregon StatePlay-in to playoffs, Losers go to minor bowl games
Florida StateUNCTulsaUtahRelegation groups with 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place of middle teir
MiamiPittMissouriOregon
GA TechWake ForestWestern MichiganBYU
Ole MissCinciOklahoma StateTCUAutomatic Relegation




Tier 2 A (South)Tier 2 B (East)Tier 2 C (Midwest)Tier 2 D (West)
VandyRutgersBall StateFresno StateAutomatic Promotion
ClemsonWisconsinTexas A & MArizona StatePromotion Groups
East CarolinaBuffaloHoustonColorado
AuburnMichiganRiceNew Mexico
VirginiaNotre DameLouisiana-LafayetteHawaii
KentuckyIllinoisAir ForceSan Jose State
TroyMarylandIowaArizonaOne game survial match
Miss StateNavyKansas StateUCLAOne game survial match
MemphisLouisvilleArkansasNevadaOne game survial match
TennesseCentral MichiganLA TechStanfordAutomatic Relegation




Tier 3 A (South)Tier 3 B (East)Tier 3 C (Mid West)Tier 3 D (West)
Florida InternationalArmy North TexasWashingtonAutomatic Promotion
UABSyracuseBaylorUTEPOne game promotion match
TulaneKent StateNorthern IllinoisIdahoOne game promotion match
Louisiana-MonroeAkronIowa StateNew Mexico StateOne game promotion match
Florida AtlanticToledoSMUUNLV
Midd Tennessee StateTempleArkansas StateSan Diego State
DukeMiami OHWestern KentuckyWyoming
NC StateEastern MichiganBowling GreenUtah State
Southern MissOhioIndianaColorado State
UCFMarshallPurdueWashington State

After the 9 game regular season taking place over 10 weeks, here is what week 11 would look like:






Play-in for Championship DivisionPlayoff play-inMiddle to Bottom pro/rel
Georgiavs.Boston CollegeSouth Floridavs.WVUTroyvs.Louisiana-Monroe
Minnesotavs.USCKansasvs.Oregon StateMarylandvs.Akron
Iowavs.Iowa State
Arizonavs.New Mexico State
Miss Statevs.Tulane
Navyvs.Kent State
Kansas Statevs.Northern Illinois
UCLAvs.Idaho
UABvs.Memphis
Syracusevs.Louisville
Baylorvs.Arkansas
UTEPvs.Nevada

Week 11 would also include the first of the three games in top to middle pro/rel groups.  Based on the above regular season, this is how those groups would look:


Group AGroup BGroup CGroup DGroup EGroup F
Florida StateUNCTulsaUtahMiamiPitt
MizzouOregonGA TechWakeWestern MichiganBYU
ClemsonWisconsinTexas A&MArizona StateEast CarolinaBuffalo
HoustonColoradoAuburnMichiganRiceNew Mexico

Week 11 would feature a total of 28 games.


Week 12 would start the Championship Division round robin, as well as the first round of the Bowl Qualifying Playoffs.  It would also feature the 2nd group play game of the battle for the top tier. (23 games)




Round RobinBowl Qualifying PlayoffsLosers play in minor bowls
Florida(1)Boston Collegevs.(16)Cal
Penn state(2)Minnesotavs.(15) Nebraska
Oklahoma(3)LSUvs.(14)Va Tech
Texas(4)Ohio Statevs.(13)South Carolina
Georgia(5)Northwesternvs.(12)Boise State
USC(6)Texas Techvs.(11)Michigan State
(7)Alabamavs.(10)South Florida
(8)Uconnvs.(9)West Virginia

Week 13: 2nd round of the Championship Division (CD) round robin, and the 1/4 finals of the Bowl Qualifying Playoffs. (7 games)

Week 14: 3rd round of the CD and the Semi finals of the BQP (5 games)

Week 15: 4th round of the CD (3 games)

Week 16: Minor Bowls (5 games). Tier 2 and tier 3 winners. Tier 1 play-in losers.

Week 17: Bowl games of top/middle pro/rel groups (12 games)

Week 18: BQP round of 16 losers bowl games (4 games)

Pre Jan 1: BQP 1/4 final losers bowl games (2)

January 1: BQP 3rd place game, BQP final, final round of CD (3 games). Total of 5 games.


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Here is a table of the total number of games played:



Games played
All teamsMin 9
Tier 1 champs14
Tier 1 2nd place winner15
Tier 1 2nd place loser12,13,14
Tier 1 3rd to 5th place11,12,13
Tier 1 6th place winner12,13,14
Tier 1 6th place loser11
Tier 1 7th to 9th place12
Tier 1 10th place9
Tier 2 champs10
Tier 2 2nd to 4th place12
Tier 2 5th and 6th place9
Tier 2 7th to 9th place10
Tier 2 10th place9
Tier 3 champs10
Tier 3 2nd to 4th place10
Tier 3 5th to 10th place9

A Radical Proposal for Change in the American College Football Landscape

**If you want a view of what this system looks like click on this link to see my Appendix to this post**


I have had this idea for a while, but with all the conference realignment of the past few years, I have never felt this strongly about the system that will be described below.  Its roots come from European and Brazilian association football structures, which I find fitting, because the current college football landscape is the American sporting culture that most closely resembles that of Europe; they are both very regional with a very heavy emphasis on entrenched powers, that really only rise and fall relative to the other entrenched powers of other regions.  This proposal is not meant to be realistic, it starts from a position of everything being on the table, while taking into account the history and tradition of the Bowl System.


The Proposal:
At the time I first came up with the idea, there were exactly 120 teams participating in College football, and the proposal works best for 120, but could also fit 124, 128, etc.  For the purposes of simplicity, this proposal will work with a 120 team FBS (aka DI-A) structure.  The proposal is also dependent on the NCAA (or some other body) assuming total control of football.


Step 1: Rank Order all 120 teams (using an average BCS score over a weighed 5 year period with the most emphasis going on the most recent season)


Step 2: Split them into 3 groups of 40 (1-40, 41-80, 81-120).  (for the initial split, I would be fine with


Step 3: Within each tier of 40 teams, split up into 4 divisions of 10 teams each by geography.


Step 4: Each team plays the other 9 teams in its division*.  This is the entire regular season. There are no non-conference games.
---------------------------------------------


In the top tier (1-40), the 4 division advance to a Championship Division.  They are joined by the 2 winners of play in games contested between the 2nd place finishers.  The 6 teams in the Championship Division play a 5 game round robin schedule consisting of 2 home, 2 away, and a final neutral site Bowl Game (which is chosen first).  The team with the best record after the 5 games is the Undisputed National Champion. A tie is broken by the head to head match between the two teams in the Championship Division round, and three way ties are broken by point differential within Championship Division round games only (for the purposes of point differential, all OT games are counted as +1 for the winner and -1 for the loser, regardless of actual final score)


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The losers of the play-in game join the 3rd, 4th, and 5th place teams, plus 2 winners from play in games contested between 6th place teams, in a 16 team knockout tournament.  The Championship game of this tournament is a Bowl game, and bowl placement for the other teams is dependent on how far the teams advance in the tournament.


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The losers of the 6th place play-in game play in a minor bowl game. In same bowl pool as winners of the middle tier divisions.


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7th, 8th, and 9th place teams in the top tier join 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, place teams from the middle tier in 6 groups of 4 teams.  The teams in these groups each play 1 home, 1 away, and one neutral bowl game.  The teams that finish in 1st and 2nd place in the group play the next season in the top tier, the 3rd and 4th place teams in the group play the next season in the middle tier.


The groups are formed at random with the following rules in mind:
Each group has 2 tier one teams and 2 tier two teams
No group can have 2 7th place teams
No group can have 2 4th place teams
No group can have teams from the same division (i.e. no rematches)


After the groups are picked, the mid level bowls choose their matchups first, and the other two games are scheduled.
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Last place teams in the top tier are automatically relegated to the middle tier, and all first place teams in the middle tier are automatically promoted to the top tier. First place teams are in same bowl pool as top tier 6th place play-in losers.


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5th and 6th place teams in the middle tier have no post-season


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7th place teams in the middle tier host 4th place teams in the bottom tier. 8th place teams in middle tier host 3rd place teams in bottom tier, and 9th place teams in middle tier play AT 2nd place teams in bottom tier.  The winners of these games play the next season in the middle tier and the losers play the next season in the bottom tier


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Last place teams in the middle tier are automatically relegated to the bottom tier, and champions of bottom tier divisions are automatically promoted to the middle tier, and play against a fellow bottom tier champion in a bowl game


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There is no post-season for teams finishing 5th or worse in the bottom tier.


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*The 9 game regular season could be done in two ways, either half the teams play 4 home games and the other half play 5 (in which case the next season would have to flip, and if the numbers didn't work out that that was possible, a running tally would be kept from the start of the system and schedule makers would try to always get teams closest to playing a net of 0, with the guarantee of the split always being 4/5 or 5/4 in any one year.  OR a split of 4, 4, and 1.  It most likely that the 4/4/1 split would only work at the top tier level if it was to work at all, and that the middle and bottom tier teams would simply do a 4/5 and 5/4.  In a 4/4/1 system, after the divisions were set at the end of the previous year, teams would be required to find a partner and pair up their one neutral site game.




The system is run entirely on merit.  There are no voters, no polls (apart from the initial rankings in the first year of the proposal).  EVERY single week of the regular season there are TWENTY games played between teams that are in top 40.  I can't stress that point enough about how exciting that would be. Round Robins >>>>>  play-offs, where one bad game can cost you everything, but the people who need playoffs are appeased some as well, because this system has a playoff.


Teams would know every week that they had a chance of beating the team that they were playing.  No more cupcake games!  No more free wins for big time programs, every win must be earned.  Because the system is fluid, no team is locked in to its place.  If your programmed gets turned around into a winning machine, no amount of politics is going to keep you from proving just how good you are.


In the top and middle tiers, every game matters to every team.  There is a difference between each finishing position and that difference cannot be made mute because a bowl selection committee thinks the lower placed team will travel better.




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I would also propose as an addition to these changes to have a spring playoff in April and May, consisting of 128 teams (with the DIII and DII champions plus the top 6 from DI-AA also participating). Teams would be allowed to schedule whoever they wanted in the first round (i.e. a rivalry game that was not played the previous fall) and all other rounds would be subject to a random draw, FA Cup style, with the championship game being played in a northern city.







Saturday, August 6, 2011

Liverpool 2011/2012 squad

The state of the squad as it stands today.  Suspect there will be a few comings and goings.  Currently we could fit everybody on the books into the Premier League squad list barring two senior players.  To be honest there are a couple of players in this category that would not be missed to much by the fans if they were left off. In the example, El Zhar and Insua are the odd men out.



Current homegrown senior players:
1. Steven Gerrard
2. Jaime Carragher
3. Glen Johnson
4. Joe Cole
5. Stuart Downing
6. Jay Spearing
7. Brad Jones
8. Andy Carroll

Emiliano Insua


Current senior non home grown (max of 17)
1. Pepe Reina
2. Doni
3. Daniel Agger
4. Philipp Degen
5. Martin Škrtel
6. Sotirios Kyrgiakos
7. Fabio Aurelio
8. Maxi Rodríguez
9. Alberto Aquilani
10. Charlie Adam
11. Lucas
12. Christian Poulsen
13. Raul Meireles
14. Dirk Kuyt
15. Luis Suarez
16. David N'gog
17. Jose Enrique


Nabil El Zhar

On Loan:
       Homegrown:
Peter Gulacsi (loan to Hull City)
Stephen Darby (loan to Rochdale)
Martin Hansen (loan to Bradford City)

        Non-Homegrown:
Villiyan Bijev (loan to Genk) - 1993


1990 2011/12:
Martin Kelly
Jordan Henderson
Nathan Eccleston
Emmanuel Mendy

1991 12/13:
Dani Pacheco
David Amoo
Michael Roberts
Danny Wilson

1992 13/14:
Jonjo Shelvy
Matthew McGiveron
Michael Ngoo

1993 14/15:
Nikolaj Køhlert
Krisztián Adorján
John Flanagan
Conor Coady
Andre Wisdom
Stephen Sama
Kristjan Gauti Emilsson
Jakub Sokolik
Jamie Stephens
Craig Roddan
Adam Hajdu
--------------2011/12 Youth Cup---------------------------------
Jack Robinson
Lewis Hatch
Joe Rafferty
Toni Silva
Henoc John Mukendi
Patrik Poór
Suso

1994 15/16:
Peter Aylmer
Josh Sumner
Matthew Regan
Tyrell Belford
Adam Morgan
Brad Smith
Tom King
Tom Walsh
-----------2012/13  Youth Cup------------------------
Raheem Sterling
Jordan Lussey
Jack Dunn
Kristoffer Petersson
Ryan McLaughlin
Yusuf Mersin


 1995 16/17:
Yalany Baio
Sam Gainford
Nathan Quirk
Michael Wilson
Connor Wearing

-----------2013/14 Youth Cup--------------------- 
David Moli


Players in italics are on loan/likely to go out on loan

Consult wikipedia if you want to go further down the rabbit hole of U16s that would technically be eligible, the ones I hear the most hype about are the new signings O'Hanlon and Jones as well as Sinclair and Williams.  On a further youth note, I couldn't find birthdays for Baio, Gainford, Quirk, Wearing, and Wilson so I just threw them all in as 1995, I'm sure some of them are 1994, but their listed youth cup eiligibility dates should be more or less correct.  It was difficult finding confirming info on the status of Nacho, Marco Bueno, Marc Pelosi, and Villiyan Bijev.  Since his trial ended I have seen Nacho play for the U18s so the reports of him signing are likely to be true (still would like some D.O.B. info).  Haven't seen Pelosi or Bueno in a youth kit yet, so I will hold off in putting them on.  Bijev is reportedly on loan to Racing Genk for a year until his Bulgarian passport is good enough to get him a work permit in the UK, that means that he is likely to never actually play in an academy league match for Liverpool, maybe he will feature in next years, NextGen U19 if LFC participate again.

An explanation of the color coding if you couldn't figure it out:
Not going to make it
Small Chance of making it
Decent Chance of making it
Good Chance to make it
Currently proving that they can make it/have made it

Just because I colored someone yellow doesn't mean I don't rate them, its just a simple fact that not everybody can make it

Thursday, July 21, 2011

How Exactly is a Rainbow Made?

In order to clear up the name of the blog to any possible Philistines who happen to come across this corner of the internet, it's a reference to the great cinematic masterpiece of the 21st Century, Joe Dirt, and the scene in which the title character first meets Kicking Wing:

A little about me:
I was born in DC and raised in its Maryland suburbs, but recently moved to Boston.  I'm a somewhat recent college graduate.  And I haven't decided how personal I want this thing to get.  I see it mostly as a place to put down my crazy ideas in a more permanent fashion and if necessary I would be able to just send links to people instead of having to dig up some document on my computer or write something all over again.


The blog will likely cover sports as that is something I know a bit about, as well as economics and libertarian political theory.  It's possible some stuff on comedy, food, pop culture, film, and other things could find their way in here too; certainly wouldn't rule it out.  Things will not be kept short, the jokes will be taken too far.


Lots of dudes my age claim to be sports fans, and I'm sure they are, many of them probably know more about baseball or the NBA than I do, but as a general sports fan, I'm tough to beat.  And by general, I do not mean the main American sports, I mean all sports. Especially football in ALL of its codes.  But also golf, tennis (only for the slams), lacrosse, hockey, moto GP, biathlon, MMA, and boxing.  Sports were a much bigger part of my life back in my college and especially during my unemployed periods shortly after college, when I had access to all kinds of sports cable channels. My teams:  Redskins, Liverpool FC, Terps (football, bball, lax), Caps, Nats, Zards, Brisbane Broncos, Geelong Cats, and then there are too many individuals that I root for or against to list.  I would have to say that College Football is the closest thing I have to any religious beliefs at the moment, but I spend most of my sports time educating myself more about association football (not only do I follow LFC's 1st team very closely, but I watch their youth and reserve games regularly as well, plus I like to keep up with the latest goings on in the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, various youth international tournaments, Ligue 1*, Russian Premier League*,  Brasileirão*, Campeonato Paulista* Argentine Primera* (* indicating that I was only able to follow these leagues during the above mentioned period of unemployment and cable sports pack subscription)).




I also dabble in Austrian Economics, although I have dedicated a pretty serious amount of time to this subject, I still would feel like such a n00b if I said too much.  Posts in this arena will probably only criticize very basic arguments made by other laymen, regardless of wether or not I agree with their conclusions.  Although I feel that the average libertarian is probably more informed than the average dem or republican, most are still susceptible to internet pwnage from the right or the left if they aren't studied up.


Posts that are in the pipeline:
How to fix College Football
How to fix soccer in America
Appealing to 'non-libertarians' on libertarian grounds






It just does.