In Praise of Heel Eaters

 

My mother is the most self-less person I know. She has, throughout her life, been a model for me, demonstrating the priceless quality of putting others first. By her example, I saw how such servant leadership enriches her own life, and how it makes others feel about her. Selflessness, if we were to think of it as an investment, would be a true blue-chipper, without the need for fine-print disclaimers that "returns are not guaranteed".

Consider… my mom would always eat the heel pieces of the bread loaves for her last-made sandwiches. No one else wanted to eat the heels, but mom always did. She claimed to prefer the heels, and although I never knew her to lie or even truth-shade, I always wondered if that wasn't just a don't-you-worry-about-it suage for a concerned son. Even as a kid, I wondered why mom always had to be the one to eat the heels, but I wasn't sufficiently caring (or brave or sacrificial or what-have-you) to take her place and eat them myself. That's just one small example from a lifetime ago, but it has stuck with me.

Who are the heel eaters in your life? In your home, at church, at the office? (Perhaps it's you – God bless you!) Seek them out, and at least tell them thank you. Better yet, find a way to honor, reward, recognize them. Heel-eaters tend not to seek their own rewards, not to self-promote. And while they may protest any ray of a spotlight, shine on.

Credit Crisis Cartoon

If my previous post about the housing bubble was too esoteric for your taste, or if you'd just like to see a clearer explanation of the whole mess, here is a short (10 minutes) video that gives a simplified take on things. He even uses my hot potato metaphor.



The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

All-ACC Awards

The ACC finished its regular season yesterday, capping a season with great depth, loaded with all-conference caliber players. Here are my picks. (The # in parenthesis is the score from my statistical model. See the Methodology section at the bottom.)

All-ACC First Team

1. Toney Douglas – FSU (67)
   
2. Ty Lawson – UNC (58)
   
3. Jeff Teague – Wake Forest (58)
   
4. Trevor Booker – Clemson (56)
   
5. Gerald Henderson – Duke (54)
   

I tried to base this on conference games only. What I like most about this list is that it honors the best player from each of the conference's top 5 teams. The first 4 were stellar all season long – in fact, the model picks Jeff Teague as the best player when we look at all games. Henderson really came on for Duke

All-ACC Second Team

1. Malcolm Delaney – Va Tech (54)
   
2. James Johnson – Wake Forest (53)
   
3. Tyrese Rice – BC (51)
   
4. Kyle Singler – Duke (48)
   
5. Tyler Hansbrough – UNC (47)
   

Hansbrough is the surprise here, as I'm sure he'll make the first team for the 4^th time. But his play, at least as measured by the stats, fell off enough in conference games to drop him. He gets hardly any blocks, especially for a big man. And his steals are way off from last year. I actually dropped a higher-ranked player to get TH on the 2^nd team, because I do feel he deserves at least that, and because there's not much statistically significance in scores just a few points apart.

All-ACC Third Team

1. Danny Green – UNC (50)
   
2. Jeff Allen – Va Tech (43)
   
3. Gani Lawal – Ga Tech (42)
   
4. AD Vassallo – Va Tech (41)
   
5. Jack McClinton – Miami (40)
   

McClinton is easily the most over-rated (by the media) player in the ACC. He scores in bunches, but doesn't contribute anywhere else, at least anywhere that we measure. If he makes the 1^st Team again, it will be an injustice, though not as ridiculous as last year's selection. The next 5 are: Greivis Vasquez, Wayne Ellington, Al-Farouq Aminu, Jon Scheyer, and Rakim Sanders.

The scores from the model really show how deep the ACC is this season. In most years, you'd only need to get into the mid-to-high 40s to make 1^st team, mid-to-high 30s for 2^nd team, and high 20s for 3^rd team.

Rookie of the Year

The media will probably select Sylven Landesberg of Virginia, since he is the high scorer among freshmen. But Al-Farouq Aminu of Wake Forest has had the better season. Pretty clearly, in my view. Aminu may have scored less, but he was a materially more efficient scorer, averaging 1.45 points-per-shot attempt, compared to Landesberg's 1.29 PPS. Even in Steals. Rebounds and Assists offsetting each other. Landesberg has a knack for getting to the FT line, a harbinger of an excellent career, but his team was the worst in the conference. Aminu, meanwhile, was a full-year starter for the #2 team in the conference, and one ranked in the top 10 nationally.

Coach of the Year

I expect Leonard Hamilton of FSU to win, and Al Skinner's BC team has had the biggest jump in conference wins (from 4 to 9), but I would vote for Dino Gaudio of Wake Forest. Gaudio should have won it last season (over Seth Greenberg of Virginia Tech). I really like what he has done with the Deacons in the aftermath of the death of Skip Prosser. After only 5 conference wins two seasons ago, Gaudio led the Deacons to 7-9 in 2008, and up to 11-5 this season.

Player of the Year

You might guess from the lists above that I'm selecting Toney Douglas of FSU as the ACC Player of the Year. And I am. Not only was he #1 in my model, but he was the conference's leading scorer, and was widely hailed as the best defender in the conference. Duke's Coach K called Douglas the best perimeter defender in the country. Ty Lawson has been awesome offensively for the Tar Heels, but his defense is not good. Douglas is the most complete player in the conference, and he deserves to be POY.

___________________________

Methodology

My statistical model looks at 8 categories: Points Scored, FG %, 3-pointers Made, Free Throws Made, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, and Blocks. Each player's result in each category is compared to the average of the league's top ~70 players. I do some math, and end up with a scoring scale that runs roughly from 0 (technically, several players are below zero, but that's not important) to 100. The best season I've recorded is Tim Duncan's senior year, when he pegged a 90.

On Steroids, Bubbles, and Bailouts

There is much brouhaha in major-league baseball about a critical mass of star players who have admitted or accused of taking steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. The leading icons like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, just to name a few. Part of the consternation stems from baseball's fondness for statistics, and steroided outcomes have skewed those numbers such that some fans just dismiss them altogether. That may help their cognitive dissonance, but it doesn't solve anything officially. We are still left to ponder the validity of home run totals from modern boppers, and the trophy mantles of modern hurlers. Were these guys really this good? Do their stats truly reflect their value to the game?

In some sense, the steroid era could be thought of as a bubble in the baseball system, generating numbers far beyond historical norms. Unsustainable numbers, perhaps, once the depravity (if that is too strong a judgment for you taste, how about "shenanigans"?) is reined in by competent testing. As this bubble pops, measurements like the number of Home Runs hit, the league average Slugging %, and the # of players with 40+ HR will decrease to historical MLB norms.

Should we bailout the sluggers then?

For that is the government's approach to the steroid equivalents in the housing bubble. Those who dabbled in exotic mortgages – Interest Only, Neg-Ams, and the like – and leveraged to beyond-the-hilt, lured first by look-at-me-lust and later by keep-up-with-the-Jones-lust. And those who institutionally fomented the bubble, by using discredited, exotic risk formulas to securitize mortgage bundles in a high-stakes game of greedy-hot-potato, or by using political favoritism and out-of-their-depth Fannie Maes to pretend that the potato isn't really hot and that no one will really get hurt.

So many parties injected this poison into our housing market. Their metrics soared beyond reason and they got rich. When it all comes crashing down, shouldn't we let them lay in their own foreclosed made-beds, and let the market flush all this crap out? Let dumbly-run (really not so much dumbness, but as normalcy paved over by greediness) companies go out of business or scramble to reconstitute as something worthwhile. Let overextended homeowners scale-back, retrench, and bring some sanity to their budgets, with a multi-year scar on their credit scores.

p.s. I understand the differences between the two situations, one of which is that PED usage is more of a dichotomous variable, whereas overheating housing is more of a continuous variable.