Two good football links today via The Sports Economist.
Craig Depken analyzes the number of cards being given at the World Cup and compares it to what we saw in 2002. He assumes that red cards depend on the number of yellow cards in a game, which is a generous assumption to make as red cards are also used to punish individual egregious fouls (handballs in the box, elbows) that don’t correlate to the overall physicality of the game. His analysis does lead to an interesting conclusion about the number of cards the US should have received.
Over on SI, Bill Syken thinks the NFL should copy soccer by going to a continuous clock. I’m all for more US sports going to continuous clocks or at least dramatically reducing time outs. Its a pipe dream given how much television networks pay for broadcasts rights that they have to recover via advertising. But one of the things that turned me off to other sports were the constant stoppages and breaks that disrupt the action.
It’s kind of neat. And totally different from what we are used to in
the U.S., where we see 11:00 on the clock and calculate we have 45
minutes to an hour left, depending on how many timeouts, penalties and
commercial interruptions we have to endure.