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Browsing All Posts filed under »strategic rationality«
More on “Why no gatherer-sports?”
[This post picks up where the previous one left off. Both are jumping off from a question posed on the blog Overcoming Bias. Somehow two weeks elapsed since that last post — coincidentally the onset of my fall teaching term at Duke.] It seems to make sense to enquire about the “primordial” roots of either […]
When is a Sport not a Sport?
July 28, 2010
Do we need to answer the question “What is a sport?” in order to address questions about which sports are better than others, or how to improve any given sport or spectator’s experience? I suspect not. But reflecting for a moment on the different fundamental features of various sports does help us to explain why […]
Soccer vs American Sports, Part 3: Going with the flow
July 20, 2010
Dazzling offensive plays are the pop music of sports. Like catchy tunes, they are hard not to love. Even more, they are like the vocals and the melody of pop-music hooks. (You can sing these yourself in the shower or on the school bus, without realizing that the song was a hit because of the […]
Why is hockey analysis always so lame? Part 3: It’s hard
May 10, 2010
I’m obviously making this up as I go along; but if you’ve read Why is hockey analysis (almost) always so lame? Part 1 and Part 2, thanks for bearing with me. So far I have talked mostly about the ways in which hockey analysis (on TV, in the daily press) is so frustratingly superficial. I […]
Why is hockey analysis always so lame? Part 2: The Broadcasters
May 7, 2010
I don’t remember a world without instant replay; although I was born into such a world. After clever but misbegotten attempts to use instant replay from the mid-1950s on, it is generally conceded that the first “modern” use — and not yet slow-motion — was in the broadcast of the Army-Navy football game in December […]
Does watching the NFL draft qualify as watching sports?
April 26, 2010
3.7 million people tuned into live coverage of the NFL draft this past weekend. And that figure surely doesn’t include my father, since he was watching in Mexico. My dad never really stops following the NFL during the calendar year. The official end of the season with the Super Bowl just slightly alters his ratio […]
More on what makes golf great. And not so great.
April 11, 2010
In the last post I sketched out some of the reasons why Tiger fans (and some Tiger haters) like golf. And by “like” in sports I don’t mean merely “enjoy” it or have a “revealed preference” for it. A true sports aficionado likes sports in the way an art-lover or wine-lover likes their thing. As […]
Why the new NFL overtime rule is an improvement
March 26, 2010
Real NFL fans should like the new overtime rule — especially once it gets applied to the regular season — for the same reason that most of the real NFL coaches hate it. It holds out the promise of more high drama of the kind the NFL does best: where the coaching staff have to make […]
The old NFL overtime rule was not unfair
March 23, 2010
On Tuesday the owners of the NFL franchises agreed to change to the rules for how to deal with playoff games that end in a tie after “regulation” time. (On average, about one of the 11 games each post-season is tied after 60 minutes.) The old rule was simple: a coin toss gave one team […]
Chess on Ice; Chess Board on Pants
February 28, 2010
There’s an irresistible cliché for broadcasters of many sports: the “chess match.” Often an announcer is simply pointing out that there’s a tight back-and-forth battle going on. But to make sense of the metaphor there has to be some strategic rationality, where player A tries to predict what B will do before A makes her […]
Wayne Norman
This Sporting Life 
September 18, 2010
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