Start of the NCAA Football Season
To the surprise of a a lot of people, I tend to be knowledgeable in the realm of sports. Now mind you I don't know a lot of the particulars or the records that are set, but I do know enough of about each of the sports to hold my own. Problems arise that I have a hard time following most team sports because the number of games played in a single season exceeds my artificial limit of interest.
Take baseball, the season starts in April and ends in October. Baseball isn't interesting until September because you start 'weeding' out historically the best teams. I will admit I will watch the All Star game in July just because it has merit for the World Series, but otherwise all of the information that can be provided by playing so many games is not very interesting. I guess the same can be true for basketball.
I am partially biased due to hearing announcers come up with random facts, pass them off as a statistic and talk about nothing really. I am not really interested in hearing about batting percentage of a left handed hitter against a right handed pitcher during a night game on Tuesdays. It seems useless.
Now I will follow football. I follow football religiously. It may have something to do with the place I was raised. [Football is a religion in Texas...it just is...] But it is one of those things that you start in September by December the season is over. You know things. Football over the last 10 years has extended the bowl games for college into the second week of January and the NFL goes until the first of February. 19 games is the most I have to follow.
Interesting things come into play. Looking at a stochastic decision model, it is important to look at what you have available to you, where you are on the field and what down it is. A decision becomes interesting if you know that going into the wind your quarterback can make a 15 yard pass, your opponent is gonna blitz on the down because you are on the 30 yard line, so the question is the best play to call. [If anyone is wondering stochastic models are interesting to me...stochastic is a form of random...]
So this week marks the beginning of a 17 week enjoyable time, with college games on every Saturday, and an opportunity to be armchair coaches come Monday to discuss what teams should have done, and what the outcome of the upcoming week will be...