Sports Discussion

[Mike Bentley]

Discuss the sports from this tournament in this thread.

[Camelopardalis]

So I guess I missed the mark a bit with the hockey I wrote for CULT. Honestly, I'm really sorry; I shouldn't have overestimated the amount of coverage hockey gets. That said, this was my first stab at a tournament like this, so it would be awesome to hear some question-specific feedback. I'd be happy to post the text of specific questions if you'd like.

Hockey
Washington Capitals
Finland
Mike Vernon
Ryan Miller
Mike Richards
Alex Kovalev

USSR/Vladislav Tretiak/Valeri Kharlamov
Carolina Hurricanes/Cam Ward/Jussi Markannen
Toronto Maple Leafs/Conn Smythe/Max Bentley
New York Rangers/Marc Staal/Vinny Prospal

Other Sports
Lacrosse
Fernando Torres
Usain Bolt
1992 Summer Olympics
Mexico
Andy Murray
Padraig Harrington

Manchester/Adebayor/Robinho
Netherlands/PSV/Bayeern Munich
International League/Mexican League/Durham Bulls
Mexico/Webb/Whitworth
Australian Open/Henin/Goolagong
De La Hoya/Pacquiao/Chavez

[Jamnman23]

Although these questions are not necessarily all areas of strength for me, I thought they were mostly pretty good. I am not a great judge of hockey tossup difficulty, but I thought that the Ryan Miller tossup was well done. The hockey bonuses did skew a little hard. For example, despite the greatness of Vladislav Tretiak, I would say that is fairly difficult for a middle part. I only really know Tretiak from watching the movie Miracle and Kharlamov is really hard. I also think you may have slightly overestimated the fame of the 1950s Toronto Maple Leafs. I would have to look at it more closely, but I thought that the Usain Bolt tossup cliffed a little bit. It did a great job of not being transparent early on, but unfortunately that resulted in few buzzable clues, and then Asafa Powell was mentioned, which pretty much gives it away. I thought the tossups on the 1992 Summer Olympics and Padraig Harrington were good, but I am not sure about Andy Murray as a tossup choice, even if the question was well-written. Andy Murray is certainly famous, but it is problematic for question-writing purposes that he has never won a Grand Slam. In a sport like tennis, Grand Slam titles are really all people know or care about, so this led the question to have few buzzable clues and to be less pyramidal. I will not comment on soccer, but I think the Australian Open bonus and the De La Hoya bonus were very fair in their difficulty. Overall, these minor sports questions were pretty good, but they were somewhat inconsistent in difficulty and a couple of answer choices were a little questionable.

[DumbJaques]

I was not such a fan of the football in this tournament (the only sport I'm really qualified to comment on in detail). Like many of the sports, it seemed to skew old - as in, really old. There seemed like there was nearly as much pre-1970 football at this event than there was post-1970 football, and that seems. . . ill-advised. There was certainly plenty of stuff from very recently, but having half of the questions on things that happened before anyone playing the tournament was alive is not mitigated by stacking the remaining distribution toward the last few years. Really, a problematic lack of material from this decade but not necessarily from the last year or two was a tournament-wide issue, but I saw it particularly manifest in football.

Perhaps more problematically, a lot of the football answer selections - especially the bonus third parts - were really kind of terrible. I'm talking about questions on Brian Leonard, who has been tearing it up as number 4 on Cincinatti's RB depth chart after being unable to keep a job with the St. Louis Rams. I think another bonus asked for the Pottstown Firebirds, some kind of bizarre protoplasmic mass of a football organization that has ill-defined ties to the origins of the Philadelphia Eagles. Or had such ties, maybe, for its two years of existence in the 1960s. I'm actually not positive the question was even on this, because it seems like such a violently bad idea that I'm hoping I've confused it with another early football organization from some town whose name begins with "pott-," but frankly I'm not optimistic.

The football at this tournament just didn't feel all that important. A tossup on Chris Simms? Questions on Alex van Pelt, Craig Morton without what team he played for, or Alex Brown (one of the 5 or 6failed attempts by Chicago to draft a long-term solution at DE in the past 10 years)? I'm not even necessarily talking about difficulty here (well, not with Brown anyway. . .), though I think that was even the middle part of that bonus. I'm really talking about asking about important and memorable stuff from football, and I do not believe this stuff qualifies. I watched the most notable performance by Chris Simms, that game against the Redskins in the playoffs where he hit a wide open Lavar Arrington in reverse-stride. He sucked in that game. A lot, for sure, but not memorably - in fact, it was a pretty monotonous suckage, as suckage goes. The most notable thing about him at all probably the business that went down with the spleen-n-spite thing between him and Gruden, and even that's pretty minor and poorly documented (and I don't even remember hearing about significantly in the question).

I could list more of this stuff, but the general point is that you can find better hard parts than asking for what team Tony Fiammetta plays for with little other information. Tony Fiamaetta is a fullback - a backup fullback! It just makes me feel sad, on the inside.



A separate note - what was the specific distribution in regards to football? It seemed like there was an awful lot of college at the expense of the professional distribution. I'd personally like to see arguments for treating the distribution this way - it seems like it makes more sense to view the 1/1 baseball, 1/1 basketball, and 1/1 football as professional big 3, and consider college sports separately. I mean, professional football is, at minimum, just as widely followed and important as professional baseball, so I don't think it makes sense when we're carving out distributions to functionally give a much smaller allotment to pro football just because nobody knows remotely anything at all about college baseball. But, that's pretty much the situation you're left with when you treat your distribution this way.

[Mike Bentley]

Here are the football answers from the tournament:
2007 Fiesta Bowl / A Few Seconds of Panic, etc.
Jerry Jones / Stuff that gets rubbed during college football games
Auburn / Types of Offenses
Purple People Eaters / Pottsville Maroons
Lane Kiffin / NFL Fullbacks
Andy Reid / People who played for the Cornhuskers
Clinton Portis / Northwestern
Roger Staubach / Stuff about Jay Cutler
Bart Starr / Mike Bellotti and Oregon
Vikings Sex Cruise / 1989 College All-Americans
John Elway / Jake Delhomme
Mountain West Conference / Monday Night Football stuff
Brett Favre / The AFL
Georgia Bulldogs / Don Shula
Army/Navy Game / No Huddle Offense
Marcus Allen / Indianapolis Colts
Notre Dame and USC / 2002 NFL Playoffs
Chris Simms / Ray Rice
Fifth Down Games / Poor QB Superbowl Performances
49ers and Chargers / North Colorado

I think it's an extreme exaggeration to characterize this set as having "nearly as much pre-1970 football ... than there was post-1970 football". Bart Starr, Roger Staubach and the Maroons bonus were the only questions to directly have an answer on someone or something most famous for playing before 1970. The Army/Navy game and the Fifth Down Games (whether this particular tossup or not was a great idea is another story--it's probably not notable enough to warrant being a tossup) might fall into this category as well, although there were certainly post-1970 clues in those question. There were probably some other tossups that used a clue or two from this time period (e.g. Auburn, Georgia, Fifth Down Games) but overall I don't see how you can conclude from those list of topics that this tournament had a huge problem with the football skewing old.

Regarding the Brian Leonard bonus, this was primarily a college bonus. Brian Leonard seemed like a reasonably important college running back to me (albeit like 2-3 years ago), which is his reason for his inclusion in the bonus. There are plenty of other people who were notable players in college but are washouts or maybe don't even make the pros. I don't think that automatically disqualifies them from being asked about, although it's possible that in this case this answer was too hard.

I also don't see why it's inherently bad to ask about Chris Simms. He did some notable things in college, he played as a starting quarterback recently on several NFL teams, and he has a famous father. How is this not a legitimate thing to ask about? I agree that it's not the world's easiest subject, which is one of the reasons why it was pretty late in the playoffs (although the format the tournament had to take due to us not getting over 10 teams meant that in effect everything but the finals was a "prelim").

I didn't write the part on the Pottsville Maroons (rather than the no-name Pottstown team you refer to), but it strikes me as something reasonably important to know. Someone who knows football better than I do can probably comment on this.

In terms of the college/pro distribution, it was pretty much divided into half college and half pro for football and basketball. From my understanding this is a relatively common division. Maybe in the future I'll lean more towards professional sports. College basketball in particular was hard to find clues that weren't "in this year they went this far in the NCAA Tournament, in this year they went even further". Conversely, there are often better sources for collegiate sports (especially college football) than professional sports for whatever reason.

Regarding the bonus part on Tony Fiammetta, that also mentioned the 3rd round pick from this year, quarterback Armanti Edwards. From all the attention the draft gets, especially in regards to quarterbacks, I didn't think it was unreasonable to use this clue as a hard part, although maybe I was mistaken.

[stevebahnaman]

I am not particularly good on past-5-years football since I've started caring about other sports, but I would put Chris Simms as a borderline tossup answer. It's fine to have him in there and I don't think he's too hard, but it seems more interesting to have a tossup on someone more notable. I wouldn't have dragged it out for criticism though.

Since this was listed as being nationals-level trash, I definitely don't think 3rd round QBs in the 2010 or 2009 draft are unaskable as hard parts of bonuses.

[MicroEStudent]

I have to say that the Pottsville Maroons is fine as a third part of a bonus. There have been a couple of books written on them and the "curse" regarding the Cardinals was brought up when they made the Super Bowl.

The sports questions which I wrote where the majority of the clues are mine are listed below. I appreciate Mike dialing down the difficulty on some of my other submissions that essentially became answer selections by me. Compared to the rest of the tournament, they were too hard as written.

Tossups:

Florida Basketball
Brett Favre

Bonuses:

Big West/Summit League/Butler
Little League World Series
Larry Johnson/Charlotte Hornets/Dell Curry
AFL
Post Season Walkoff HRs
No Huddle Offense
Trading Cards
Bud Selig
Dolphins/Packers/William Green
France/Lezak/Texas
British Open/Glover/Mickelson

Up front, William Green was too hard. I could have made that into a Cleveland Browns answer part mentioning Holcomb and Green and it would have been better.

[Demonic Leftovers]

Although Mike posted about this in the Trash Sources thread I thought it would be better to talk about writing questions on players here. The Matt Kemp tossup that Mike mentions was definitely one that stood out for the wrong reasons. The stats clues that were used weren't helpful at all really and it was pretty much only convertible because of the clue about dating Rihanna (at least it seemed that way to me). I sympathize with Mike's problem here, often times I have started to write a tossup on a player and realized I couldn't find many good clues about them. This is probably because a player can become famous without having done anything unique, a problem that is exacerbated when writing on younger players like Kemp. Ultimately I think with player tossups care is needed. Some players are just impossible to write a good tossup on. A good player tossup will usually require a mix of off-field and on-field anecdotes, transactions and stats. I believe that on-field incidents are the most important. If you don't have good clues about that I don't think you can write a good tossup on a player. I think that off field anecdotes are good clues but only when used in moderation. It would be possible to write a tossup on Ron Artest using only off-field anecdotes but I don't think it would be a good tossup. At the same time I don't think it would be a good tossup if you relied almost entirely on stats to write that same tossup. I do think its ok if you rely only on on-field clues, as long as some of them are notable, like a tossup on Kevin Durant that mentions that he is the reigning NBA scoring champ. Thus before writing a tossup on a player, make sure that there is a decent balance of clues. I don't think this applies to other sports questions, such as team or event questions, which frankly I think are usually easier to write well (unless the answer choice is poorly chosen, like a tossup on a minor league hockey team or minor bowl game from 5 years ago).