That was a great column, Savage, thank you for sharing it. The explosion of information in the computer age has been staggering, particularly for those of us who still remember what life was like before the computer age, which seems like the dark ages by comparison, just in terms of information and how accessible it is to, well, everyone. This type of analysis, for example, was non-existent prior to the computer age, or if it did happen at this level, probably the only people who ever saw it were elite insiders in the sport and the oddsmakers, there was no way this stuff was trickling down to the average fan, and thats if it existed at all with this level of sophistication, and I doubt that it did. Its like saber-metrics in baseball or its PFF equivalent in football, nowadays you can get a statistical analysis that would make your head spin, on just about every facet of the game including who plays better on grass and artificial turf.
Back in the day I used to run with a lot of gamblers, pretty hardcore (not me, I was never more than a casual gambler fascinated by trends and trying to beat the odds, so I was always into the psychology of sports betting so to speak, like the proverbial
"trap game, illegal lines and betting against the obvious", the stuff real gamblers talk about, and those guys would have killed for the kind of information that is so accessible today. They understood, as I understood, that simply saying TEAM A is better than TEAM B so take TEAM A, or TEAM A is not 7 Points better than TEAM B so take the dog, was a recipe for failure. It didn't take a genius to figure that out. Simple observation would suffice. If it was that easy, why aren't Casino's closing their doors and why is your bookmaker driving a new Cadillac?
But I digress, point being, gamblers back then would have killed for the kind of information they can easily access today. Basically anything you want to know from a statistical POV or regarding trends is just a goggle search/mouse click away. Its amazing. Kids today have no idea how far we have come in the lifetime of their parents and grandparents. Heck, I remember thinking the pocket calculator was revolutionary and we didn't even have that when I was in school in the 70's. If we had that, JUST THAT, I never would have failed math.
But now, with home computers, thats true of every topic. Homework that used to take kids hours of having to rely solely on their own brainpower and tediously paging through textbooks, can now be accessed in mere minutes and explained in precise detail, to the point where they can teach the teacher!
Its incredible, just incredible, not unlike those who lived through the industrial revolution. At some point they had to look back at their youth, in the agrarian age, and feel like they were in a completely different world.
As for the column itself, my fear of trap games was not totally assuaged cause even losing 20% of the games you should win, where you are a big favorite and viewed as a lock to at least win the game if not cover, is a little disconcerting. I would have felt better about it if it was at least 90%. Basically good teams are losing two out of every ten games verses bad teams sandwiched between some kind of trap, which doesn't seem like a lot, but considering the odds in these games, its still a pretty high number for the bad teams that are
winning these games outright and not just covering the spread.
Am I misreading it?
