Friday, November 25, 2005

Commentary 1

Anonymous said...

Why do you guys have the hardest schedule in the whoooooole world!

Anonymous may have been asking a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer anyways because it's not often that I get to write commentary in this fashion.
The schedule is made up mostly of teams that signed up to play in the same time slot as us. In other words, it's basically arbitrary. And even more so in our case because unlike every other team, we didn't get to choose our time slot; we were placed in a time slot by the league.
Within each time slot there are more teams than there are games. So we don't play every team in our time slot. Which teams you play and which teams you don't is also determined pretty much at random.
The only games that aren't scheduled incidentally, for the most part, are those that the league schedules because they are high-interest matchups. For example, in Week 2 a game featured a rematch of last year's Holyland Bowl.
So the answer to your question is that there is no answer. The sensible follow-up question to that is, "Why us?" There are 52 teams in the league, and somehow Derech Etz Chaim gets the hardest schedule.
The standings go by points. A win is worth three points; one point for a tie; and no points for a loss. I determine a team's Strength of Schedule Number(SOS#) by dividing the sum of all their opponents' points by the sum of all their opponents' games played(their average points per game).
The league has revealed the identity of four of DEC's opponents: Norman's has 6 points after 2 games; Tov Pizza has 9 points after 3 games; Pizzeria Efrat has 9 points after 3 games; and Ner Yaakov has 3 points after 2 games. The equation then is (6+9+9+3)/(2+3+3+2). That comes out to be a league leading SOS# of 2.7!
This is one of the reasons why we are so upset about the referees not giving us a safety against Pizzeria Efrat. The league has already given us the hardest schedule. We don't need the referees to make it even harder for us to win by taking points away from us. What's next? Three-down-sets for DEC?
The good news though, is that we may have a way of removing the randomness of the schedule. News about this development will hopefully be announced in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

If you have any more questions for us at DEC Football, we'd be more than glad to answer.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It wasn't so much rhetorical as it was acknowledging the fact that you guys are playing great and its too bad the random schedule fell out this way. It'll even itself out though so don't get down on yourselves just yet.