Randomness In Sports...A Completely Random Thought
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by user Footballprofessor
One of my biggest frustrations sometimes is when I get caught up in the whole "are sports random" problem. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wonders about that. There has to be maybe one other person in this universe.
I had a bit of a revelation tonight at work. When you think about randomness in sports, isn't the first thing you think of the bounce of a fumble? Maybe that's just me. Either way, it's a good example. Now, we know that the way the ball bounces is random, per se, because we don't control it. God does. Or nature. Or martians. Regardless, we don't. Some would conjecture that it's things like that fumble that make sports random. But do they?
Here's my little theory: even though there are acts in sports over which we have no control, aren't our reactions to those events predictable? If there is a fumble, there are certain actions taken by players of each team to recover that fumble. If human behavior is predictable, which I believe it to be, then wouldn't that take the randomness out of the game?
An even bigger theory: when you were a kid, didn't your friends ever try to get you to do something totally spontaneous and random? Like screech, or flap your arms, or something crazy? In order to do something randomly, we actually have to try to be random. We have to make a concerted, conscious effort to do something out of the ordinary, because our lives are based on patterns.
So, are sports really random? As far as I know, none of the players go out on the field and try to be random about things. In today's sports world, stress is put on not being random. Players are trained to act in certain ways in certain situations in order to be more efficient. That really takes the randomness out of the game, as far as the players are concerned. There will always be random things, like fumbles, but the way the players react to these random things is absolutely predictable. And that makes the game predictable. And cyclical.
And that, my friends, is the basis of trend analysis in sports, which I feel I have pioneered. Check out my work (here's the shameless plug) at http://footballprofessor.blogspot.com.
Thanks for sharing that completely random (or was it?) thought.
