Tableau and Football Dynasties

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I have been working on two of the things that I like at once, football and spiffy graphics.

The above graph is made from Tableau, a free data visualization program. The data is my NFL Dynasty data (more about it here from last year). From the graph we see that the Colts, even though they lost the Super Bowl, are now the "biggest" team in the NFL beating out the plummeting Steelers.

Click around on the graphic it should have interactive filters.

The Internets Are Alive

With the sounds of awesome.

It seems that with increasing frequency there are neat things being made on the internet. One of the latest things to catch my eye is a site called animoto.com that takes images, videos, and a soundtrack and turns them automatically into a pretty good slide show.

Here is the one that I made as a promo for the two fantasy football leagues that I am running this year (my teams are the Tea Republic ones):



Not too bad, the only trick is that the timing of the images are preset so I had to edit the music some to fit the amount of images that I had. In the end I am happy with the video it made though.

In other news work is keeping me busy, so I haven't had the time lately to post. I am working on things though that should give me more stuff to post about, so stay tuned for that.

Building a Better Football Poll

One of the things I have been thinking about lately is a way to build a completely objective football ranking system that accounts for the quality of play on the field and can not be "gamed" by coaches.

The original idea of a way to include quality of win was by looking at the win margin. It is obvious that a team that won by a large margin is much better than a team that won by only a small margin against the same team. However football coaches knew that this was a factor so when they played easy teams the would pile on the points to help out their rankings. I believe now the computer components of the BCS are not allowed to take the margin of victory in to account when they make their rankings. So this lead me on to think about ways we can measure how good a team is, more than by just who they beat.

The first measurement I want to propose is to look at the "Time of Win". That is, how much time was left on the game clock when the eventual score that won the game was made. So if a team runs back the opening kickoff and then holds their opponents to less than a touchdown for the whole game, their Time of Win would be essentially 60 minutes, where as a hail marry at then end of the game would result in a Time of Win of a couple of seconds. This measurement would allow polls to take into consideration how much one team dominated another without encouraging the scoring to spiral out of hand. It would, however, make the teams play defense throughout the game.

I thought of a second good measurement last night while laying in bed: Offensive Yards per Point. This number would incorporate a few aspects of a teams performance into one figure. It would measure how well a team can finish off long drives, reward teams for creating turnovers, and also give a bonus for a team that has a good kick return game. It also would be somewhat difficult to game because scoring as many points with the fewest amounts of yards obtained is already a primary goal for coaches, so they can't really make much of a game plan change to reflect this being measured.

Other factors that I would consider would be power rankings, like the Massey rankings, which looks at who beats who. Also if the game was home or away. I would also like to include a couple of other measurements but it is kind of hard to think about relevant ones that can't be taken advantage of. Anyone else have any good ideas for ways to build a better football polling system?

Why the Bears are not a dynasty

Here are my thoughts on the questions that I posed before. Looking at the data three teams bring up question marks about their place as a dynasty in the NFL. The Bears of 84-88 who were not classified as a dynasty the first time I looked at the data. The Bills of 88-93 who were counted as a dynasty, yet never won a Super Bowl during this time. And the Rams of 99-01, whose rise to power was dramatic however their team was quickly eclipsed by the Patriots. The Rams also never reached the height that other teams that are considered a dynasty did. Below is a plot of those teams with other relevant teams plotted around them. Each point on the plot is the teams' five year average of playoff performance, with a weighting further rounds more heavily.
1. Can there be more than one dynasty at a time?
I do not think so. I think that there can be two really good teams at the same time, but I don't think that the second best team over a span of time can be called a dynasty. This leads me down a path that I don't particularly like though, since I do not like having two dynasties at the same time I must ignore a team that is building until it is the best team, this means that when I look back at when a team is a dynasty I can not include the previous years that it was building up to be the dynasty team.
The larger implication of one dynasty team at a time has is that it is possible that there could be two teams that trade off Super Bowl wins over a couple of years but only one team can be named the dynasty for that time. This is my main argument against the Bears being a dynasty team. It turns out that during the same years that they were good the 49ers were even better. You can see in the chart above that for every spot along the graph the 49ers were still averaging a better playoff performance for the same time. More about this in question three.

2. How important is the regular season, how important is the playoffs?
I agree with most people here. The regular season is important but performance in the playoffs is what makes the team a legend. Lance made a good point of the 15-1 Vikings from 1998, they had an awesome regular season but history generally pushes that off to the side when talking about the 98 season, we know the Falcons went to the Super Bowl that year, we don't all know the Vikings great regular season.
I have though about adding a small component of the analysis that takes into account how well a team did over their regular season, but since I don't have the data already typed up I believe that it isn’t that important.

3. You can't just look at one year at a time, so how many years do we look at?
This is probably the trickiest question here. First because the span of years to look at changes which teams are considered the best, for example for we look at a four year average the Bears do become the best team for two years. Secondly it really seems like there should be a mathematical way to define how long of a span than we should look at, however I can't think of a way that satisfies me completely.
First let me explain the way which I decided upon 5 years. The initial thoughts were because it just seemed like a good round number to deal with; however hunches are not good since we are trying to let the data do the talking for us. So the idea that I came up with is to look at the length of playoff streaks (years in a row that teams went to the playoffs). Below I made a chart of the length of all the playoff streaks.
This seems to suggest that we should look at 4 or more years since a playoff streak of that length is better than the average streak. However if we look at playoff streaks that allow one year skips (so over four years a team goes to the playoffs 3 times, it still would count as a three year streak), we see that 5 or more years is above the ordinary length of a streak.
I will argue that the "One Skip" is a reasonable way to look at this problem, since we agree that missing the playoffs one year during a dominant stretch should not disqualify a team for being considered a dynasty.
Now if we look at a chart of 5,6 and 7 years we find that there isn't too much change among the three graphs, however the longer the span the smoother the ride at the top seems to be. Also with the 7 year average we see then the Bills and Rams are knocked out of being the top team. Does this give credit to the idea of a 7 year span?



4. Is winning the championship the only quality that makes a dynasty?
When I looked at this data I used a scoring system that favored winning in the playoffs. A team got 1 point for losing the Wildcard game, 2 points for losing the Divisional game, 3 points for losing the Conference Championship game, 5 points for losing the Super Bowl and 7 points for winning the Super Bowl. This was my way to weight the teams performance where getting to the Super Bowl was more important than just getting to the playoffs.
Earl suggested that winning the Super Bowl is the only thing that defines a dynasty team, he suggested that if a team wins it 3 times out of 6 years then that would be grounds for declaring a dynasty. Let's see how a chart of winning the Super Bowl looks (over 6 years):

Using this criterion we find three dynasties, the 49ers the Cowboys and the Patriots. I don't think that anyone would argue that these three teams are dynasties, so this method does work. However I believe that it is just a bit too conservative when looking for the good teams (also it is so straight-forward that it isn't much fun to talk about ^_^).

5. Can a dynasty last for only one season?
Take a look at the Steelers and the Raiders here. Both teams are the best team only one year, the Raiders in 1983 and the Steelers in 2008.

My initial thought was to disallow these two teams from being considered a dynasty because they were on the top for only one year. However, I have thought about this a bit more and I think that they are OK. Each point on the plot is actually 5 years of data combined, so that means that over the last 5 years that team was the best, not just that one year. Even if a team later eclipses the teams performance that should not take away the accomplishments made for those five years. Say the Steelers get overtaken next year by the Colts. That still means that for the last 5 years the Steelers have been the best team. (I have run the numbers and basically the only way the Steelers to lose their top spot is for the Colts to make it to the Super Bowl next year.)

That settles it right? :)

Ponderables

Currently I am working on a follow up to the last post I made about dynasties in the NFL, addressing questions like how long of a time span should we look at at one time, can there be two dynasties at the same time, does more than playoff performance matter, and other ponderables. If you have any thoughts about what defines a dynasty, and it doesn't just have to be in the NFL, I would like to hear them.

Know Thy Football History (Part II)

First I should congratulate the Cardinals and Steelers on a well played, very entertaining Super Bowl. The Cards weren't given much of a chance going into the game, but I think next year people will take the more seriously. As always we had a good time at the Super Bowl party which was held at Nicole's mom's house this year. You can find out more about our party here and here.

OK, now for the football history. Leading up to the Super Bowl I was thinking about how to define and mathematically find NFL "Dynasties". My first thought would be just to look at overall records for each year including playoffs. However, when I thought about qualities of a successful team in the NFL their regular season record has little consequence in the long run. I don't think anyone would classify Patriot's season this year as successful even though they went 11-5 in the regular season. History really only remembers the teams that make it to the playoffs, so I know that I needed to look solely at the playoffs to find which teams were dominate throughout the recent history of the NFL.

What we decided upon was to give points to each team for how far they made it in the playoffs each year. Then I looked at the 5 year moving average of each teams success in the playoffs. After all the data was compiled I got the following graph. (Note: I removed any team that was not the best team at any point, the lower part of the graph was pretty crowded.)


From this graph we see that the Cowboys have been the most dominate team at any one point, with their height at 1993. (93 Dyn5 means that I am looking at 1991-1995, 93 is the center point of the average.) Also, recently the Patriots have been the team to beat although with the Steelers win in Super Bowl XLIII they are now the team. It is interesting to see that besides the 49ers most teams have a pretty regular peaking cycle that has their rise to power about as swift as their fall.

According to my analysis, these are the football NFL Dynasties for the "modern" era of football (1978 on). I am shifting my years, so that each year listed is at the end of the average, so 1982 means I am looking at playoff performance from 1978 to 1982.

1982: Cowboys
1983: Raiders
1984-85: 49ers
1986-87: Redskins
1988-92: 49ers
1993-94: Bills
1995-96: Cowboys
1997-99: Packers
1999-2001: Broncos
2002-03: Rams
2004-07: Patriots
2008: Steelers
*Both the Packers and the Broncos had the same rating in 1999.

So what does this mean for current football history? It looks like the Patriots are on their way out, it is hard for me to think that this is possible since their team still has a good core but they are heading downwards. Also it looks like the Steelers are on their way to being the dominate team for a couple of years. Looking at the full graph the only other teams that are tracking significantly up are the Giants, Chargers and Cardinals, so they are the teams to watch for the next couple of years.

Know Thy Football History Part I

BCS all up in here

Earl talks about the problems that the BCS faces this year, and me being the expert on everything has weighed in on the subject, but since I also am lazy (and I know a good post when I see one) I will just repost my comment about his post here.

***

Here are my two cents on the subject of the BCS.

When we talk about the BCS we need to realize two things:

1. The BCS was a huge improvement over using polls at the end of the season to figure the number one team in the nation. Besides different polls crowning teams national champions there was no guarantee that the number one and two teams in the nation leading up to the bowl games would even play each other. The championship game that we get now at least gets the top two teams to play against each other.

2. The BCS was devised to make the hard decision about what the top two teams are. In the case that there is a clear cut number one and number two all the polls and the BCS will agree and all is good in the land. However the BCS was made so that when there isn't an obvious matchup for the championship game. This means that when the BCS is most needed is when it has to make the tough decision about who are the best teams. So when the BCS is the most useful it will be criticized the most because it is there to pick only two teams. There really is no "win" situation for the BCS because somebody will always feel like they are getting left out.

Now I would much rather have a playoff system, as would much of the civilized world, however I doubt it will happen since there is just too much money tied up right now. Even an act of God (or Obama, whichever comes first) will probably not break the BCS logjam.

However if we do go to an 8 team playoff system we need to keep one thing in mind to keep it from becoming a pissing match. The point of the playoffs is to crown a single champion. And the point of the regular season is to be number one going into the playoffs. If we get to thinking that all our team needs to do is get into the playoff so that they can get a shot at the championship we will just fall down the slope of "well we are ranked 9 but are better then #8, we should get in too!" We can not, no, must not, think this way. We should think that the top 4 teams deserve to get into the playoffs, and the next for teams taken are there just in case there is some dispute about the top 4 teams. So the #8 team that got into the playoffs doesn't deserve to be there, it just got lucky.

If you liked this comment check out my blog. (Translation, I'm just gonna repost this comment over on my blog.)

Wanna Bet?

Lately I have been working on various ways to predict scores in football for my fantasy football league. But since I am trying to predict something that doesn't really happen (i.e. fantasy football games) I can always claim that the models that I predict are right. So I decided to give a whirl at predicting some NFL football games versus the spread. So lets see how this goes.

Game    M1  Conf. M2 Conf.
SD@Buf  Buf .36   Buf .73
NO@Car  NO  .25   NO  .66
Min@Chi Min .28   Min .52
Pit@Cin Cin .78   Pit .09
Ten@KC  KC  .20   KC  .75
Bal@Mia Mia .12   Mia .95
SF@NYG  SF  .44   SF  1.00
Dal@StL Dal 1.00  Dal .30
Det@Hou Det .31   Det .32
Ind@GB  Ind .45   GB  .45
NYJ@Oak Oak .47   NYJ .39
Cle@Was Was .74   Cle .09
Sea@TB  TB  .89   Sea .70
Den@NE  NE  .79   NE  .20

M1 and M2 are based on the same model, one just includes blocking on team defense. Conf. is the scaled confidence each pick has for the method.

I wonder if I can pick better than chance doing this.

Update: If I was going to bet $100 multiplied by my confidence, I would have ended up this week with the totals of: -$322 from the M1 system, and -$199 from the M2 system. No so good. I'll give it another try this week.

The Central American Super Conference

Like a soap opera there is constant talk about what colleges are thinking about leaving their conference to join another. For a couple of years there has been talk of Mizzu getting picked off to join the Big Ten, or Colorado State jumping the Mountain West ship to join their Colorado rivals in the Big XII. I have been thinking about possible solutions to the big TV contract that the Big 10 has and that the Big 12 would like to have, and here is my solution: merge the Big Ten and Big 12 into one super conference, with a big TV contract and many powerhouse teams.
I would break the Central American Super Conference into four divisions of 6 teams each, based on location. Here are the alignments:

CASC North (Prev. Conf.):
Illinois (Big Ten)
Iowa (Big Ten)
Iowa St (Big 12)
Minnesota (Big Ten)
Northwestern (Big Ten) *Notre Dame?*
Wisconsin (Big Ten)

CASC East:
Indiana (Big Ten)
Michigan (Big Ten)
Michigan St. (Big Ten)
Ohio State (Big Ten)
Penn (Big Ten)
Purdue (Big Ten)

CASC South:
Arkansas (SEC)
Texas (Big 12)
Texas A&M (Big 12)
Texas Tech (Big 12)
Oklahoma (Big 12)
Oklahoma St (Big 12)

CASC West:
Colorado (Big 12)
Colorado St (Mt. West)
Kansas (Big 12)
Kansas St. (Big 12)
Mizzu (Big 12)
Nebraska (Big 12)

The structure for a football season of a member of the Central American Super Conference would be:
3 games out of Conference
5 games inside division
3 games in other divisions (one in each other division, based on a rotating schedule)
1 floating game

The extra floating game would be used to seed the championship game, where each of the top teams in each division would play each other, the winner of which would play in the CASC Championship game (for example the North Division winner plays the East Division winner as a play in to the CASC championship game). All of the other teams in the CASC will choose who they play on the last week by draft. So the best CASC team that does not lead it's division can pick any other available CASC teams to play at home, then the next best remaining team can pick, until the final week of the season is set. This will allow teams decide what they need to get accomplished in their last week of the season, do they need to rest their players, or do they need to make a statement win? It will allow the better teams to get home field advantage and make the last week of CASC play very interesting.

Since the Big Ten and Big 12 are merging I would hope that the BCS would grant 2 BCS bowl bids to the Super Conference, so both teams that play in the CASC Championship game get into BCS bowls. The winner of the CASC Championship would almost be a shoo-in for the NCAA Championship.

Just imagine the power that the Central American Super Conference would have in sports. Especially if they could swing some sort of revenue sharing deal including TV coverage and Bowl games. The SEC would tremble in their swamping boots (and then quickly eat the ACC. Also the Pac-10 and Mountain West would merge.)

Bet we see this happen before we see NCAA football go to a playoff system.

Edit: Switched the North and East division teams to match geography, added Norte Dame as a replacement for Northwestern. There is possibly a better spot for Notre Dame in the East, but that would take a bit of team shuffling.

Thoughts on running a fantasy football league.

The skies are overcast, the weather is cold, and there is a familiar tune in the air. Tonight the football season starts in full swing.

With NFL football comes fantasy football, and since my job leaves me with some down time while at work I have been looking at how other people run their fantasy football leagues, I am surprised by what I had learned. So I thought that I would share with you my thoughts on fantasy football.

This year will be the sixth year for the Pirate Islands Fantasy Football (PIFF). The league is a "keeper" league that has 14 teams, and I know personally each of the coaches. The league averages about one new coach a year, which is a nice low turnover rate. Even though I had been playing fantasy football for a couple years p

rior to PIFF the origins of the league actually started when my friend 

Newgen invited all of us Garden City buds to play in a league. After that first year I stole the idea and set up the PIFF.

Currently I only play fantasy football in PIFF. For a couple of years I played in a couple of other leagues as well, but having so many players to track was not fun. It wasn't that there was just too many players- at times I would want a player to do good for one league and then also hope he doesn't do good for another. That just isn't fun.

I think my overall philosophy with running the PIFF is to try to make it as close to real football as possible. The biggest departure from traditional fantasy football leagues is the scoring system that we use. I won't get into the details here but I did my master thesis on finding a good scoring system, keeping in mind that fantasy football should be as close to real football as possible. Using a modified version of the scoring system devised in my paper we end up with game score totals usually ranging from 20-40 points.

Another rule that keeps the "realism" up in PIFF is to require all the teams to have names that follow the standard NFL convention, i.e. Place Name, Team Name. So my team is the Tea Republic Steepers, and the newest team in the league is the Berry Isle Rum Runners. I have been poking around on some other leagues and found the team names to be similar to: "Urine Trouble!" or "Messin' With Sasquatch" (true story). I just don't get why people would play in a league (and some even pay money) when the team names are just throwaway phrases.

The most time consuming thing that I do to try to increase the realism of the league is to make helmets for each of the teams. This takes awhile to do on my part, but I think that it is always worth the effort.

PIFF seems to have a good since of involvement with the coaches. All the teams are up kept and everyone tries to win, but no one is a jerk about it. I think that the main reason that the league rums so smoothly is that we all know each other, well I know everyone, some coaches don't personally know all the other coaches. But having a relationship with the coaches of the league outside of fantasy football makes everything run better in the league.

Another thing that makes the league run smoothly is that there is no money involved. We play for free on Yahoo, and I do not require an entry fee. Generally an entry fee is collected to ensure that there will be no dud coaches, and to add a bit of "excitement". Since the league is invite only we don't have a problem with deadbeat coaches, however I have pondered different ways to reward the championship team, so that there is some extra incentive to win the league. Sometimes I make a championship T-shirt or a trophy, but it seems that just the fact of being the league champion is enough to make the playoff exciting.

Speaking of playoffs that is the area in which PIFF has had the most disagreement. We have always had the last week of the NFL regular season be the championship game, however there has been some objections about this since many all-star players sit out the last week. I can see why this is a concern, however I believe that making the championship game on the last week of the regular season rewards the teams that have depth, and don't just rely on one or two key players to push them through the season. After scoring changes the decision to keep the last week as the championship week is issue that I think about the hardest each year when I set up the league.

Another playoff topic is how many teams to include. In the past Yahoo allowed 4 or 8 teams to get in. The first year of PIFF the playoff field was 8 teams. I found that allowing this many teams to get in the playoffs diminishes the importance in the regular season, so from year two on PIFF has a 4 team Championship Playoff (and 4 team consolation playoff). I believe that Yahoo now offers a 6 team playoff option that mimics how the NFL handles its playoffs. I would like to move to that format, however it eats up one more week of the regular season. But if the NFL axes some pre-season games in favor of more regular season games I will strongly consider moving to a 6 team playoff structure.

After each season each team is allowed to keep any number of players on his team, as long as they have room under the imposed salary cap. The value for the salary cap for each team is found by taking the current NFL cap value and removing some zeros from the number. Also money that was not spent from the previous years is added to this figure. The cost to keep each player is based on well the player performed in PIFF as well as how much the player cost his NFL team. The reason that I chose to use the salary cap as a method to keep players is to allow teams to keep some of their good players while allowing weaker teams to pick up some of the trimmings from the roster cuts. It seems that this has worked so far and some of the crafty coaches have been able to stay on top of the league by keeping key players while dropping expensive players that underperform. But also there is always at least one different team each year that makes a run of the championship. Helping the weak teams is also addressed by having the draft for new players run in reversed finish order, without snaking.

I won't talk too much about the scoring system that we use, you can read my paper for my ideas on that. But one big change for this year is that defensive teams will score negative points based on how many points they allow. I think that this is the best way to represent how actual NFL defenses work. The down side to this is that nobody wants to play a team defense since it will only hurt the total score. So have to impose a rule that each team must play an active team defense each week or face a hefty 20 point fine. I picked 20 points because it is more than what a team defense can lose in a game if they were played, so you can't gain any bonus by not playing one, however there is still a slim chance that you can win your game if you do happen to forget... and by slim I mean I doubt anyone could ever win a game if they don't play a team defense, but there is a chance.

I have many more thoughts on the minor parts of running a fantasy football league, but I will stop here with just some of the major topics. But enough talk, it is time to sit down watch a good game of football and hope Eli Manning doesn’t have a good game but Plaxico Burress does. Yaaarg!

Bowl Game for K-State? Mayhap.

This weekend I caught a K-State football game on accident. Well, I had gone to Manhattan on purpose, but not with the intent of seeing a game, but when the opportunity arose I couldn't pass it up. So here are my thoughts on how the team looks:

Offense: Freeman is holding up well. He definitely has learned to stay in the pocket, but still has the ability to make a run for it if he needed to. I don't think that he made too many bad passes, and none of them were horrible, so that is a plus. Our running back situation is a bit shakier. Leon Patton is suspended indefinitely, which left the running game to fall on Valentine's shoulders. Although Valentine is a bit slow, he seems to be able to pick a good line when running. I was really impressed with him last year when he got a shot and I think he will be an adequate back, however he is not a show stopper. Overall K-State was able to put together sustained drives that resulted in points, this is a change from the past where K-State relied on big gains to move the chains.

Defense: I am a bit more worried about us in this category. The 6 points North Texas scored was off of a turnover while the second team was in. However the lack of scoring was more of an indication of a lack of offense for North Texas than a good defense by K-State. The defensive line had problems wrapping up running backs. Play fakes worked a bit too well. And the big thing I am worried about is that our defensive backs gave way too much of a cushion. If our guys are worried about getting burned against the North Texas wide receivers we are going to have huge problems against better teams. Back in the day of Dylan Meier I used to be relieved when our defense was on the field, this year I will not be.

Special Teams: Ah, K-State's unrecognized bread and butter. For some reason we have always been able to crank out the good special teams players, and recently there has been 4 NFL teams using K-State players for kick and punt returns at the same time. So you know we are all set in the special team’s area right? Yup you guessed it; we were unimpressive in the first game of the season. Besides Deon Murphy's first good punt return it seemed like he was much more interested in running parallel to the lines instead of perpendicular. I don't mind trying to get a bit of running room, but always ditching your blockers so that you can run 40 yards back and forth to net a minus two yard return is not a sound plan to keep the spot. After awhile Murphy was replaced by a different returner that didn't have the charisma of Deon, but also would safely get a 10 yard return. We are going to have to work on this.

So how do I think we will do? Well let's look at the games:

North Texas... W 45-6
Montana St... Win
at Louisville... Loss
Louisiana-Laf... Win
Texas Tech... Loss
at Texas A&M... Win
at Colorado... Loss
Oklahoma... Loss
at Kansas... Win
at Missouri... Loss
Nebraska... Loss
Iowa State... Win

So it looks like it will be 6-6, with an iffy win at KU, and a chance to grab a couple of more wins from Colorado, Nebraska, and Louisville. Not too bad considering that our schedule is pretty harsh this year. Texas Bowl here we come!

Post Auburn

In the back of my mind I keep telling myself that we weren't even suppose to have a shot at winning the game, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about how close K-State came to beating Auburn. If we just didn't get as many penalties and we made one or two more plays we would be 1-0 right now and still be unbeaten in the last 18 opening games. But it was not to be.

However that is not what I want to talk about, the real story of K-State football this season (and last) is new coach Ron Prince. He steeped into one of the worst situations possible -Snyder is a living god in Manhattan, the starters for the team mostly sucked, and unlike our basketball team we didn't just want to win, we wanted to win while retaining integrity.

I don't know how they found the guy but Prince is the perfect fit for the Wildcats. He is a nice guy that knows how to get ready for and beat good teams. It was possible that K-State would have looked for some high profile coach to take over, or a two year 'hold over' guy that would be discarded after they found someone else. But it really looks like Prince is here to stay and that he has already turned K-State back in to a Big XII North contender (although those standards are quite low recently).

It would have been all to easy for Coach Prince to fold under the pressure of Snyder, but he seems know how to respond to the high demands of his job. And so far he has performed better than we could have hope for here in Manhattan. Here's looking to a promising 2007 football season.

Bring on the Cats.

K-State Football and Chipotle

Today I attended a focus group meeting on K-State Football. I didn't mind spending an hour telling them what I thought about our football program, but getting free Chipotle burritos made it awesome (they didn't tell us there was going to be food.)

It was very interesting to hear what other K-State football fans thought about our traditions and game day events. We talked about jumbotron stuff, what Willie does, things that the band does and stuff like that. For the most part everyone agreed with each other that we like how K-State runs the show. It was also interesting to see how much these marketing and promotion guys revere some other programs. It was very evident that they think that Texas A&M has the best football program in respect to the fans and they are trying to get K-State's program to that level. I would have to agree with them. (Obviously we can not, and will not, admire anything about Nebraska.)

Nothing too drastic will change for next year from what I hear, maybe a little more 'hip hop' and a little less band at the beginning of the game. Also they are going to try to get some activities to do for the fans that show up a couple of hours early to the game. That would be nice.

I am really looking forward to football season already.