Did a Timer Error Change the Outcome of a Division I College Basketball Game? 139
New submitter javakah writes: Controversy has erupted from the February 10th basketball game between Boise State and Colorado State, and speculation is that a timer may have made an incorrect assumption about the number of frames per second the game was recorded in, and ultimately lead to an erroneous result. With the game tied in overtime, Boise State had the ball out-of-bounds with 0.8 seconds left on the game clock. The ball was thrown in-bounds, the shot went in, and the game clock showed that the Boise State player got the shot off with 0.4 seconds left. However there was a problem: the game clock did not start until a fraction of a second after the in-bounds player touched the ball. Referees decided to use video replay to examine whether the player had gotten the shot off within 0.8 seconds or not. To do this, they used a timer embedded in the video replay system. This embedded timer indicated that 1.3 seconds had passed between the time that the in-bounds player touched the ball and when he got the shot off. (Read more, below.)
With the result of the timer, referees ruled that Boise State's shot was invalid, and the game went on to double overtime where Boise State lost. Afterwards, the Mountain West Conference organization, in which both teams play, defended the outcome based upon the embedded timer showing that 1.3 seconds passed and released video of the replay footage. That footage however, clearly displays the game clock. It shows that the game clock, which was counting down from 0.8, counted down to 0.7 seconds 0.7 seconds after the in-bounds player touched the ball. The game clock also shows that there were 0.4 seconds left when the shot was taken. The problem arises however, that the video also reveals that embedded timer counted 1.3 seconds between when the ball was touched and when the shot was taken, meaning that in the time in which .3 seconds passed on the game clock, the embedded timer had counted .6 seconds. Speculation has now arisen that the video footage may have been taken at 60 fps, but that the embedded timer may have calculated the time with an assumption that the video was taken at 30 fps. This closely matches ESPN's own timing, showing that only 0.63 passed.
human error wins again (Score:3)
Re:human error wins again (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't think it's just "random timers from a video camera"; The officials then utilized the digital stopwatch embedded within the video overlay in the instant replay system [...] sounds pretty much like a timer that is there for the exact purpose they used it for, i.e. for fraction-of-a-second situations where eyeballing the game clock may not be accurate enough.
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I'm not sure the officials did anything wrong, but these things are horribly inaccurate. Here's what Boise State's coach had to say about it [go.com]:
Boise State coach Leon Rice's frustration wasn't so much with the officials' decision as with the use of video to supersede the game clock.
"It opens a can of worms," Rice said Thursday in a phone interview with The Associated Press. "Why are those milliseconds [at the end] more important than any other time throughout the game?
"Because all my life, I've gone off the clock on the scoreboard -- and [Webb] got it off before that."
It's quite common to go to replay to see if a last second shot got off on time. This is also done with shot clock violations. There's a light on the backboard, an orange LED strip around the edge, that goes on when the shot clock or game clock is at zero. Officials simply look to see whether the player is still touching the ball when the light goes on. Of course, neith
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Just like the chains in football. We use a calibrated chain to be completely certain, down to the fraction of an inch, that the ball is exactly 10 yards or more from where the referee is more or less sure that he saw it hit the ground.
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Not to mention the chain placement, which is probably +/- 0.5yds itself.
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trump vs bernie for that.
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doesn't matter anyway (Score:4, Funny)
Good thing, being a basket ball game, it doesn't really matter.
Re:doesn't matter anyway (Score:4, Funny)
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Even if it's a game someone cares about, ultimately there's still one conclusion: It's just a game!
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until at least the next story...
Stacking errors (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kind of a silly discussion because the clock is started and stopped by humans throughout the game. So even if an error was made here by some fraction of a second, there have to be numerous other errors throughout the rest of the game which aren't being considered with equal scrutiny. So yeah a timing error probably did cost one team the game but unless you go back across the entire game you'll never know which team got screwed by the timer.
It's like in football where the referee rather arbitrarily places the ball but then they measure it to the inch to see if they got a first down. The problem is with the spot, not with the measurement.
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In the NFL the coaches can call for a video review of the spot but not the measurement. Of course the measurement is based off a previous spot...
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In the NFL the coaches can call for a video review of the spot but not the measurement.
Only the NFL and maybe a few big Division 1 conferences have the resources to make that feasible. And most of the time it doesn't really matter much to be honest. But the technology exists to make it very exact - they elect not to use it for practical an economic reasons.
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The NFL doesn't pay for that technology. They're not at all responsible for the first down line. The TV networks do that. Unless the game is on NFL Network, the NFL really has nothing to do with it at all.
The NFL really has no direct interest in improving the quality of TV broadcasts. The networks sign long contracts, around 10 years in length, where they guarantee they'll pay a certain amount of money to the NFL. That's a big part of the billions of dollars in revenue the NFL brings in each year. However,
Re:Stacking errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Real world versus models (Score:3)
The stacked errors should have impacted both teams equally (generally speaking) since it was a "constant" factor (same human performing the same error)
In theory you should be right provided there is a large enough sample size. In reality it is VERY unlikely that it would work out equally balanced at the end of the game. It's not going to be a perfect bell curve with both sides equal. I used to do a lot of statistical simulation and real world outcomes very rarely match perfectly with models.
I would put cash money on a bet that if you added up the over and under on the clock stoppages you wouldn't come out to zero at the end of the game. In fact I woul
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You're mostly right. However, in the NBA, the timekeeper doesn't have to react to the officials' whistles being blown. The whistles automatically stop the clock as soon as they're blown. Also, the clock is started when an on-court official presses a button on their belt. That's no longer done at the scorer's table. Generally an official on the court will have a better view of when the clock should start. I'm not certain if this is done for resetting the shot clock, though; I think that's still done at the s
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Human reaction times, just from the limited speeds at which neurons transmit signals, are already of the same magnitude as the times discussed here. And they get slower as we age, so the age and physical condition of the timekeeper/official can have a significant effect over the course of a game.
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When you say equally, do you mean it lands exactly on zero? I don't think anyone is claiming that. But if you have some reason why it would be wildly different, like outside of 2 SDs, I'd like to hear it.
Also, I suspect you missed the point. If the timekeeping guy is a little slow to respond (or if he jumps the gun) then he's slow to respond (or he jumps the gun) for both teams.
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Very likely the person doing the timing was either consistently late or consistently early and it was not an even distribution. Especially since they were getting no feedback on their accuracy.
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A bigger question is - why didn't they count frames?
We know there are two HD resolutions for OTA - 1080i60 (60 fields per second, or approximately 30 frames/sec), and 720p60 (60 frames per second). These two resolutions and framerates have the nice property that they have the same pixel clock and data rate, so you can choose between resolution and framerate - for traditional TV programming you often just want resolution, so you use 1080i, but for fast action, you want framerate, so you use 720p.
Now, it's ea
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A bigger question is - why didn't they count frames?
We know there are two HD resolutions for OTA - 1080i60 (60 fields per second, or approximately 30 frames/sec), and 720p60 (60 frames per second). These two resolutions and framerates have the nice property that they have the same pixel clock and data rate, so you can choose between resolution and framerate - for traditional TV programming you often just want resolution, so you use 1080i, but for fast action, you want framerate, so you use 720p.
Now, it's easy to see what framerate the camera runs at - take a spot in the game, and count frames while an onscreen timer (like say, the game clock!) ticks away. Then you move to the part of the video in question, then count frames. Since it's less than a second, it would be less than 60 frames in total, so it should be possible to manually hand count how many frames elapsed between the disputed times and then you can compute how much time has elapsed.
This way can also be used to verify that the camera timer is ticking away at the proper rate.
What I don't understand is how a digital timer would be affected by frame rates at all. It sounds to me like whoever came up with this particular timer solution was being a little too cute by coming up with some sort of algorithm rather than directly polling the clock.
Personally, I would have programmed it so that the recording system synched it's internal clock using GPS to atomic time servers and embedded the internal clock information directly into the video. If you do this, it doesn't matter how many
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To be fair, the decision of when to make the final throw in a game is based on reading the clock before the throw while for most of the game there's nothing particularly interesting happening when the clock runs out. The exact instant the clock is started generally has no bearing on win/loss or even goal/no goal.
That's why the one questionable accuracy instance weighs so much more than the others.
Early versus late (Score:2)
To be fair, the decision of when to make the final throw in a game is based on reading the clock before the throw while for most of the game there's nothing particularly interesting happening when the clock runs out.
Those earlier decisions matter just as much as the ones at the end. The fact that they are to some degree contingent decisions does not change the fact that early decisions have just as much impact as later ones. A basket scored 20 seconds into the game counts just the same as one scored at the end of the game.
The exact instant the clock is started generally has no bearing on win/loss or even goal/no goal.
The exact instance the clock is started has a VERY direct bearing on when it stops and as such it can have a bearing on the outcome in a close game.
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Not really. For example, if someone takes a shot in 10 seconds, the shot clock and it's accuracy has no impact on anything. If the clock started a half second late at the beginning of the game, it means nothing at all to the outcome.
If you see from the clock that you have 10 seconds to shoot, that's fine even if you should have had 10.2 seconds. If you see that you have 4 seconds, and it takes 2 to take the shot, perhaps you take 2 quick strides and shoot. It matters very much if someone retroactively decid
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It's kind of a silly discussion because the clock is started and stopped by humans throughout the game. So even if an error was made here by some fraction of a second, there have to be numerous other errors throughout the rest of the game which aren't being considered with equal scrutiny. So yeah a timing error probably did cost one team the game but unless you go back across the entire game you'll never know which team got screwed by the timer.
It's like in football where the referee rather arbitrarily places the ball but then they measure it to the inch to see if they got a first down. The problem is with the spot, not with the measurement.
A little secret from someone who has played football up through college and refereed middle school and high school football: in most cases the referees place the ball at the nearest yard marker, especially along the sidelines. The only times this doesn't really happen is if it is near the end zone, a first down marker, or it clearly and obviously fell on a spot between the yard markers.
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Not really much of a secret, I don't care much about football or sports in general, but I have noticed them placing the ball at the yard marker before. People only complain when their side is "hurt".
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I agree with you on the whole, but when it came down to what amounts to a set play, the defense, at that moment, might have been setup to defend for a shorter amount of time than what was played. That's why the last measurement is more important: the nomber of outcomes is much smaller.
my old high school basketball coach said (Score:2, Insightful)
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
(ok, I didn't actually play basketball in hs, but if I had, I think the old coach would have said this the players)
Be accountable (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time. If a bad call is made it is my job as the coach to try to get things set right but at the end of the day the goal is to leave no doubt as to the outcome even in the fact of bad calls.
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I can't mod. I would call this insightful and informative. +2
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If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you.
Doesn't always work. My freshman/sophomore year of HS our 215 won state both years and only lost 1 match each year. In both cases he lost by his opponent scoring quick then stalling out the rest of the match without the official calling it. This guy was a beast and actually got a full ride to UGA for football but got kicked out for drugs.
Another side note: my freshman year I weighed about 205. Our heavyweight tore his shoulder so our coach had me wrestle varsity heavyweight. During team matches a lot
You only can control what you do (Score:2)
Doesn't always work. My freshman/sophomore year of HS our 215 won state both years and only lost 1 match each year. In both cases he lost by his opponent scoring quick then stalling out the rest of the match without the official calling it.
You're missing the point. He didn't put enough points up so his opponent won. Whether or not the official called stalling is irrelevant. You can't depend on him doing that. You CAN depend on what you do and nothing else. Stalling in wrestling is almost entirely subjective so you cannot depend on it being called ever. Not for you or against you. It simply means your 215 didn't do enough to get the job done. Watch the wrestlers from the University of Iowa sometime, particularly Brent Metcalf. You wil
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If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time. If a bad call is made it is my job as the coach to try to get things set right but at the end of the day the goal is to leave no doubt as to the outcome even in the fact of bad calls.
I believe certain sports (tennis or soccer possibly, I don't follow sports) have rules in place that say that in order to win that you have to win by a certain margin (2 points or more) before you can be declared a winner. The Olympics has this problem where the "winner" of the race wins by a hundredth of a second which at that point it is basically a statistical fluke and within the margin of error of human reflexes and is basically luck of the draw not skill.
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I believe certain sports (tennis or soccer possibly, I don't follow sports) have rules in place that say that in order to win that you have to win by a certain margin (2 points or more) before you can be declared a winner.
In tennis, you have to win a game by two points, and you usually have to win a set by two games. Tennis is the only sport I can think of that has that kind of rule.
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This is probably because in tennis, having the serve is a major advantage. Requiring a player to win by two means that they have to be ahead at a point when the serve advantage evens out.
It's not uncommon for two players who are relatively evenly matched to play for a very long time because they keep winning points (during a tiebreak game) and games (during a set that has no tiebreak game) alternately. (If a set is tied 6-6 in games, and it isn't a deciding set (i.e. it's possible for a player to win the se
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In the Men's Singles tournament first round, the American 23rd seed John Isner defeated the French qualifier Nicolas Mahut after 11 hours, 5 minutes of play over three days, with a final score of 6–4, 3–6, 6–7(7–9), 7–6(7–3), 70–68 for a total of 183 games.
They had it called due to night the first day, then again on the second day after playing all day, and finished on a third day.
The next year at Wimbledon they met again in the firs
Sports are important (Score:2)
If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time.
This fellow nerds is why sports is *one* important part of growing up and education.
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If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you.
Same thing in fencing. If you don't like the way the ref calls priority, make sure you make touches on the other guy without getting touched, so there's no priority for the ref to call.
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Them's the breaks (Score:5, Informative)
Coming from a lifetime of bad calls in every sporting league ever, I'd encourage everyone to realize that the call made on the field of play is the only call that matters. It's a game, but not only that, it's a game you agreed to play under the appointed judges. Don't like the calls? Change the agreement you play under. Until then quit your whining and play ball.
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I knew we shouldn't have signed that contract that says we have to eat a dick during every TV break!
May I recommend the Bachelorette Party Weenie Bites [amazon.com] as a temporary work-around while you re-negotiate. :)
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If the game came down to
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It's a game, but not only that, it's a game you agreed to play under the appointed judges.
While I agree in this case I wonder if you would agree with decisive competition moments?
Shin A-lam in 2012 lost an olympic medal due to a timing error of 0.02 seconds left on the clock from a 1 second bout. The judge decided that the entire second needs to be played but the minimum time the clock could be set to was 1 second. Then he started it all again with the two competitors too close together. Shin A-lam got touched and lost an olympic medal as a result of not one but 2 screwed up calls by a judge, on
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Coming from a lifetime of bad calls in every sporting league ever, I'd encourage everyone to realize that the call made on the field of play is the only call that matters.
Well, it's not when the referees use video to determine the call, is is now? Like it or not, we now live in an era of Hawkeye and video reviews. It's altogether a different thing to using video to second guess what the umpire's decision should have been, which as you say, rather a pointless exercise.
Clearly (Score:3)
So how do we get the NSA to screw up March Madness?
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Precise or accurate?
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Actually, I'm fairly certain that the time is kept internally (precise) to better than 0.001 seconds, but it's not displayed to that decimal place at any point. When the timer stops, it does not continue to run until a second is completed, but stops mid-second. That's why the decimal was added - so that fractions of a second could be seen.
They had other chances (Score:1)
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I'd think the game clock's accuracy should take into account the scoring frequency. Thus a basketball clock would have to be more accurate than a soccer clock with football and hockey somewhere in between. If there's a human timekeeper than you should have an accuracy cutoff somewhere around 2x the increment it takes an average person to physically start/stop the timer.
Man vs Machine (Score:2)
This is pretty cool. The more we let technology automate the more mistakes can happen that we don't catch. Thankfully a bunch of people were there and figured out something was obviously wrong. The ball was released either Before or At the buzzer - all those present know that. But for the refs to have seen 1.3 seconds when there wasn't that much time on the buzzer should have thrown an internal "does not compute." The player would have had to release the ball "far" after the buzzer.
Checks and Double c
A timer error? No... (Score:4, Funny)
Link in the main story missing timothy (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't I just post that you should get a good night's sleep timothy? You're on a roll with dodgy posts today.
Maybe slashdot should implement a "preview" button for editors too!
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Maybe slashdot should implement a "preview" button for editors too!
They don't need one, they have an "edit" button.
Incidentally, if they ever add an "edit" button for comments, you can expect comments to deteriorate to the same lack of quality as stories.
It's never precise (Score:2)
There is human error in every part of the play. There's a delay between the time the ball is in-bounded and when the time keep starts the clock. There's also a delay when the ball is dead and the time keeper stops the clock.
Humans are trying to outsmart humans and usually fail in the process.
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I like that. I would add that the ones they're trying to outsmart usually fail too.
Such is life.
It's why we can't have nice things, and if we did we'd lose/break them.
Just ditch sub-second timing resolution (Score:2)
Make the clock only full second resolution AND make some kind of rule that says that inbounding the ball to a player is a full-second play. This way the only play allowed with 1 second on the clock would be a free throw, which is immune from the clock (I've seen free throws done with no time on the clock). Fouling the in-bounding team with 1 second on the clock would be pointless then.
This idea that you can stop the clock with a fraction of a second on the clock and actually execute a play is silly, and r
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Again, it's less about what's humanly possible or making the SportsCenter top 10 plays of the day.
It's about restoring some sanity to the last minutes of the game. End the ridiculous, drawn-out chess match over clock control. It's like games are two games in one -- one, a normal basketball game for 95% of the time and the rest this, weird, stop-and-go half-court set piece game which takes half an hour for 2 minutes of game clock.
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It's only a bad idea from the sense that *some* sub-second plays can be executed.
It's a good idea in that it dents some of the relentless dragging out of games at the end by imposing some reality on the nature of a timed competition.
The old saw about basketball is that the first 75% of the game doesn't matter and it's gotten increasingly like nothing but the last sixty seconds matter. Unless the point differential is 6+ points you end up with a completely different game played at the end being managed for
The problem with American sports (Score:2, Insightful)
That everything is so very precise with regards to timing and distance. 5 yards back. 0.4 seconds. It's a load of crap.
The game is over when the person in charge decides it's over and provides a signal that ends the game at that point and/or when the last point has been scored. Not when some arbitrary timer expires, and really annoyingly, not when the ball thrown before that arbitrary time is given any time it needs to land in the basket after that (because, if you are going to have a hard time limit,
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If you need 0.00001th of a second to determine the winner,
Time is irrelevant. It is the distance between cars that matters.
Similarly, "batting averages" - it's nonsense to state these to so many decimal places.
Three decimals have served us well in history, so we may compare Honus Wagner with Troy Tulowitzki.
Sport turned into commercial gain by the ever-shrinking boundary of error isn't actually fun, to play or to spectate.
Tell me that the 2015 Superbowl between the Patriots and Seahawks wasn't riveting. If you don't think so 1 billion people world wide would disagree.
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The other 6 billion of us apparently disagree with the 1 billion that think it was riveting.
1972 Olympics the clock was fixed to let the USSR (Score:2)
1972 Olympics the clock was fixed to let the USSR win
This is way more common than you think. (Score:5, Informative)
We, the people who work on the technical back-end to create the HD broadcasts you watch, are fighting a never-ending battle with crappy, hastily-written software that can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps.
Professional video gear that costs tens of thousands of dollars per unit still have software settings that assume the video coming into them is 29.97fps in both the settings and math calculations, which hasn't been used in broadcasting since the days of standard def. Even frame syncronizers - the workhorse devices that cross-convert and conform video feeds into whatever standards we need - still push out software that claims an output of 29.97fps when it's really pumping out 59.94fps. Not to mention, when the marketing staff puts together an on-air read to tell you how super-duper-awesome their new super-slow-mo cam-du-jour is, I can't tell you how many times I hear on-air talent still use the "regular cameras shoot in 30 frames a second but ours shoots 1,000!!@!" technical explanation, which just flat out isn't true anymore and hasn't been for nearly a decade.
If it's HD, you're more than likely staring at 59.94fps. In fact, any time you see an HD picture that is in 29.97fps, people immediately ask "Hey, why is that picture strobing?" This was a huge problem back when GoPros could only do 1080p at 30fps. Anyone who wasn't smart enough to set the cameras to 720p and upconvert them was met with very substandard results.
The only reason this hasn't come to a head sooner than this, is most of the time this poorly-written software and it's completely inaccurate timing isn't used as an official timing device to determine the outcome of a game. It was only a matter of time, pun not intended.
DVSport is not using real time code. (Score:5, Informative)
Professional broadcasts use something called "time code". Time Code Generators work along with a sync generator to make sure that every frame that a television truck creates gets created at precisely the same moment, and gets tagged with a unique and sequential timecode. The better ones sync with GPS or a modem to give precision time, the cheaper ones you have to manually set - usually with a cell call to the atomic clock. We embed that timecode signal into the ancillary data of each video frame, and produce a side-channel audio signal with the data embedded for devices that can't accurately read the timecode from within the video frames. We have to be incredibly accurate - as a video frame that is a fraction of a microsecond out of time can cause all sorts of issues. This used to be a huge deal in analog standard-def video - any frame that was out of time could cause the picture to shift horizontally or vertically (think of bad tracking on VHS tapes as a small example). Even sync was less accurate - sync was delivered through "black burst" which was literally just that - a burst of a black video signal, where you took the sync pulse and lined it up to ensure the timing of the frame was accurate or "close enough". Now with HD, we use tri-level sync which is way more accurate.
For the TL;DR crowd, in a production truck we can make precision measurements of time based on our sync and time code. The company that has created a good percentage of the official replay systems in the US - DVSport - has no access to our sync or time code. They also take our uncompressed frames and compress them into a video stream. They generate something loosely akin to our time code, but really it's just a reference point to where in the compressed stream you'd like to view.
Because of the inherent inaccuracies of how they time tag their compressed video and the inaccuracies of their internal clock itself, their time code - even when properly set - can "float". The longer you record, the more float you get - and it's not unusual to see minutes of float in a day. But if your internal source clock is inaccurate - and your math is trying to divide a second into the wrong number of frames - you get issues like this. You get severe time code float with 60fps vs 59.94fps alone, and that's BEFORE considering how accurate your reference clock is, and without any regard to how accurate your MPEG video encoder is. People are speculating that the software didn't know the video source was 59,94fps and was doing math based on 29.97fps or 30fps.
Even in the professional world we get tiny bits of "float", but ours is typically only a frame or two per day. We also issue what's called a "time code jam" - where we issue a uniform break in the time code stream to make sure every device is still synchronized to each other without falling too far behind actual time of day. These cheaper replay devices don't come anywhere near that level of accuracy.
Now imagine loosely time-tagging video into a compressed stream, and taking that wholly inaccurate time and reattaching it to video frames that are being uncompressed by an MPEG decoder on-the-fly. And now you can see how accurate relying on a replay system time overlay is. Prosumer video products like DVSport don't hold a candle to the timing standards we use in professional television production. Not that they can't - they just don't. More than likely because it's never become an issue up until now - or worked "well enough" for no one to notice. That is, until something as big as the outcome of a game relies on your kludge of a modestly-accurate timing reference.
This would all be moot if... (Score:2)
They had adopted my idea for packing the basketball with explosives that detonate when the game timer reached 0.
Doesn't Matter ... Game Outcome is Final. (Score:1)
You know, this is important and everybody wants any Sporting Contest to be fairly refereed, and that includes issues with the Game Clock.
However, the Referees made a decision. Regardless of whether they were technically correct or not, the mechanism for applying rules to a Game is unambiguous; whatever the Officials decide is final once the game is declared "over".
You can do things under an appeal like remove the result from standings, or even award a win, but all that depends on whatever rules the game was
"End of game" differs by sport (Score:2)
And I'm talking just about timed games. US Football: so long as the ball's in play, the play continues until it's over, even if the clock expired. NHL hockey: puck must cross the goal line before 0:00 . NBA hoops: ball must leave shooter's hand before 0:00.
I'd rather see (not that I watch hoops anyway) the NBA follow the NHL method. That way, you could have a red light mounted in the backboard. If the light's on before the ball goes thru the hoop, no basket. Gets rid of the absurd subjectiveness in de
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Actually, the NBA (and college basketball) definition of when the game ends makes more sense for basketball. The NHL's definition makes more sense for hockey.
In hockey, the definition of a goal is that the entire puck must cross the goal line. Requiring a game clock overlay isn't perfect, but it's almost never an issue because goals aren't that frequent and you don't usually have last second shots in a period. If the rule was like basketball, the puck would have to leave the shooter's stick before the end o
So isn't the clock going to be off anyway? (Score:2)
Blind and/or Stupid Refs... (Score:2)
Nerds Matter (Score:2)
News for *nerds* stuff that *matters*
How the hell did this get posted?!
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tl;dc (Score:1)
Shades of the old Montreal Forum (Score:1)
Symbiotic not parasitic relationship with sports (Score:2)
... the amount of money funneled from education and research to sports programmes in a couple of universities ...
Actually at many US universities the sports programs pay many non-sports bills for the university, sports being a revenue source for the university not an expense. Plus there is the dual use nature of fitness and sports physiology and medicine between athletics and medical science in general. Things are far more complicated than you suggest. The preceding is not meant to suggest that we do not overdue things with respect to college sports, just that the relationship is symbiotic not parasitic at many unive
Re:Symbiotic not parasitic relationship with sport (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Symbiotic not parasitic relationship with sport (Score:5, Interesting)
Coaches are going to get well paid, but some are probably worth it given how much money the football/basketball program can bring in for the athletics department. A good amount does go into scholarships for the athletes, a few of whom may not be able to otherwise afford to go to college. Some don't make the most of that opportunity, but that's not any less true of the general student population itself.
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If colleges limited themselves to football (or ice hockey for some universities) and whichever of men's or women's basketball was more popular, almost every athletics department would make money.
That assertion is questionable, when you look at the way athletic departments spend money. At most schools, revenue has gone up significantly in the past decade [washingtonpost.com], at many places even doubling or more. Yet schools aren't making larger profits -- instead, they just increase spending.
However, the more popular sports subsidize the less popular sports (Track & Field, Baseball / Softball, etc.) that don't make much or any revenue and then Title IX requirements mean that they have to offer funding for women's sports which typically make even less revenue.
Again, that's undoubtedly true, but that doesn't explain how doubling income (mostly without expanding those programs that didn't make money and already existed) doesn't result in increased profits.
If you read the link I gave a
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Baloney. The vast majority of sport programs are a net loss for the University. ESPN did a story on this. Even the powerhouses like Alabama (Football) lose massive amounts of money. People think the Universities are making massive money off of these teams, but reality it is just the coaches and Athletic Directors getting rich.
Did ESPN only look at ticket sales? Did they look at the increased sales of school merchandise? Did they look at the increased donations from alumni? Did they look at the increased student applications/enrollment? There is both direct and indirect income.
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If it'll help, the basket looks kind of like a depiction of a gravity well.
Also, the observers changed the outcome. The discussion of this game might very well spark insights that unify quantum mechanics with general relativity.
You can say you were there when the 21st century Newton got hit on the head by a basketball.
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That depends on how you define "see" in this context. For starters recording at 60 fps makes sense if you review at 5 fps to see what actually happened, which in itself is reason enough to record with high framerates. Secondly the bottleneck is in the visual "pipeline" from the eye to the brain. This mean the benefit of 100 Hz TVs is to provide a more stable image for the eyes, which do catch the high framerate and actually relaxes more with the more stable image. I'm not certain this goes for anything othe
Something will be gained ... (Score:2)
And, nothing of value was gained or lost...
Actually something could be gained. The problem will be studied, technical solutions considered, possibly developed and implemented, and such technical solution would probably have uses beyond sports.
My area of research in grad school was computer vision. I can easily envision a thesis project or two.
Re: Something will be gained ... (Score:2)
I'm sitting here thinking it wouldn't be hard to wire the clock to stop on whistle. Put a sensor in ball, ref pushes button after he hands ball to inbounding player, it detects acceleration of throw in then starts clock on next (capacitive?) touch. (Ok probably it only transmits acceleration/touch and score table receiver does logic on that). As always human standby, if they hit start after transmitter starts clock or stop after whistle stops ignore it, but if they start/stop when a sensor missed it it acce