Vent Day, Part II: On Giffin and CIS stats

“Once blood is shed in a national quarrel, reason and right are swept aside by the rage of angry men."
- David Lloyd George

"It's true, I'm a Rageaholic.....I just can't live without Rageahol!" - Homer Simpson

[Satirical letter: please don't think this is real!]

Dear Mike Giffin,

I'm sorry to inform you that the single-game rushing record [myself, "The GBU: Queen's football versus Toronto", Sporting Madness] you set Saturday [myself, "Football: U of T - Queen's live blog", Sporting Madness] has been retroactively removed by the CIS bean-counting machine.

In our infinite wisdom, we've decided that the initial game stats were wrong, and you actually only earned 212 net yards rushing, instead of 215.
Now, we could have informed you earlier, maybe even during the game so that head coach Pat Sheahan could have left you in for another play or two to clinch the record. After all, he did say [myself, "Campus Corner: Preview of Queen's - U of T football game", Sporting Madness] that the reason he pulled Rob Bagg last year before he could break the record was because he didn't know how many yards Bagg had.

We also could have informed the media of the accurate stats right after the game, but we decided it would be more fun to let such outlets as The Canadian Press [via The Globe and Mail], the Kingston Whig-Standard and Out of Left Field let you think that you'd actually broken the record and keep the issue muddy until Monday night, over 48 hours after the game and long after everyone's deadlines.

Better luck next time,

[signed] The Evil CIS Stats Machine [/signed]

[/satirical letter]

Yes, it's three yards, and the above may be overstating the case a little: this is a vent, after all. The problem is that those three yards make the difference between a record-breaking effort and a good game. I don't claim to know better than the official statisticians, and the total of 212 is probably right. I have no problem writing articles with the 212 total either, as I don't have any vested interest in Giffin breaking a record on not.

The issue is the delay until the stats were clarified. In the NFL or the NCAA, the current stats are available instantly, so coaches, reporters and everyone else knows exactly how far someone has to go for a record. Not so much at the CIS level, which is understandable given the resources available. That's fine, and I get that: I'm not expecting professional quality.

The problem is when there are conflicting sources giving different statistical information, which happens far too often at the CIS level in a variety of sports. Those of us who cover the games are usually working on tight deadlines: I filed my Out of Left Field report the instant the game ended, even though I didn't have the full statistics yet. The CP story was filed later that day, the Whig game report Monday and my story came out Tuesday (but the paper was already at the presses when I found out the stat line had changed, so I couldn't alter it). That's three reliable sources that all had the wrong information due to a delay in clarification, and there are now massive omelettes all over all of our faces.

The other problem is that this wasn't avoidable. Each of our media outlets had to go with the best information we had at the time. I made the call that the 215 yards was better supported based on the sources I had it from, and I don't regret that: as shown above, I was in decent company. At the time we went to press, the CIS box score was the sole site giving 212: all the press releases, news articles and game recaps I saw had 215, and I figured it was safer to go with that than what could have been just a missed keystroke in the box score (and what my sources told me until last night was just an error on the CIS end). Also, I'd rather accidentally give a record than take one away, so 215 made more sense from that point of view as well.

Writing the article without Giffin's stats was unthinkable. Writing "Giffin had a good game" without supporting data is not only incredibly vague and useless, but also blatant editorializing. He was the key offensive player of that game, and he certainly deserved to be mentioned. It's awfully fraking* difficult to write about a running back in any meaningful way without including his stats.

*For those of you who don't watch Battlestar Galactica, check out this great AP article by Chris Talbott [via Yahoo! News] on the genesis and the genius of the word "frak" and its related forms.

In my mind, immediately available and accurate stats are the biggest barrier to expanded CIS media coverage. Sportswriting (and broadcasting) has to include a quantitative element as well as a qualitative one these days, and football stats in particular are incredibly important: look at how the popularity of fantasy football has stimulated interest in the NFL.

I've written about the problems with the league's stats before, as have plenty of others with more credibility, including Greg Layson of the Guelph Mercury, Rob Pettapiece of The CIS Blog and James Mirtle of The Globe and Mail.

CIS sports have a lot going for them, as I wrote about here in a news story and here in a column. The problem is that they're underexposed. In order to gain exposure, they need to be more professional with stats, interviews, highlight packages and the rest. I doubt you'd see stats screwups like the ones mentioned above in the NCAA, and I think that's part of the reason it gets more coverage: there's a professional feel, and you know that your stats are going to be reliable.

I'm not trying to bash the SIDs or the athletic departments here: most of them are underpaid and overworked, and many of them have managed to improve the professionalism around CIS sports considerably. The Toronto host crew last week did a terrific job, and I don't blame them for possibly forgetting to include a three-yard loss in Giffin's stats, if that's how it happened.

What should have happened, though, was an instant clarification to all involved SIDs as soon as the stats were changed. The SIDs could have then passed that on to the reporters, and at worst, we maybe get one or two articles that have to be corrected, instead of every article about the game. Instead, we wound up with a muddled situation where no one knew what was really going on until late Monday night, over 48 hours after the game. That needs to improve. I'm fine with making a change in the interests of accuracy, but CIS needs to make sure that everyone involved knows of the change, everyone knows it was intentional and knows the reasoning for it and everyone gets the information as soon as possible. I don't think that happened in this case.

(Note: Vent Day, Part III is postponed until tomorrow later today... the first two took longer than I thought to write. Feel free to vent about my poor scheduling in the comments!)

The new kids on the block

Ben Knight has a great post on his globesports.com blog today about the creation of a Canadian Soccer Federation as perhaps the first step in the drastic overhaul or replacement of the troubled Canadian Soccer Association. I've written pretty extensively on the problems affecting the CSA before, so there's no real point in rehashing that.

As Knight points out, probably the major issue at the root of these troublesome symptoms is the unnecessarily factionalized nature of the decision-makers, particularly on a board where provincial representatives looking out for their own organizations' interests make decisions affecting Canada at a national level. It's as ludicrous as those "Team Canada" missions where the premiers conduct international talks: you can't have provincial officials making decisions that affect an entire country, as they will always be looking after their own constituencies before the good of the entire populace.

Knight also points out that the CSA can't really take too much credit for the various successes Canadian soccer has enjoyed recently: they didn't have much to do with BMO Field or Toronto FC, they mismanaged the wildly successful U-20 World Cup and lost millions despite setting attendance records, and they switched the organizational structure of the men's national team immediately after their Gold Cup success. Thus, any counterpoints they raise about good things they've done need to be looked at through a skeptical lens.


I'm not one to condemn people unilaterally for past mistakes: if the CSA is willing to admit they've screwed up, drastically overhaul their structure and move on to what's best for the national game instead of what's best for their members, I don't mind if they keep the reins of Canadian soccer. Otherwise though, the government needs to wake up to the mismanagement under this regime, kick it out and allow some more capable organization to step into their place. Toronto FC, the Montreal Impact and the Vancouver Whitecaps have already partially stepped into the void with their own talks about growing the game and improving player development: this new CSF sounds like a potential candidate for other roles of the CSA.

Most importantly, the function of managing the national team system needs to be sharply separated from the regulation of the amateur game, and incompetent amateur officials concerned with the preservation of their own fiefdoms should be kept away from the national program with as long a stick as possible. Hopefully, the formation of the CSF will draw more attention to the plight of the CSA and will raise national awareness of the aforementioned issues. Whether this results in the dissolution of the CSA or merely its drastic retooling, this is a positive first step.

Links of the Day:
- Roy MacGregor of the Globe and Mail has one of the best sports features I've read in a long time, looking back at the lessons of the tragic Swift Current bus crash. A great piece of writing overall, and especially relevant given the Bathurst tragedy.
- Sticking with the Globe for the moment, James Mirtle has a nice piece up on the introduction of CIS women's hockey at UQAM.
- Neate Sager on the Jays' decision to offer tickets to Boston and Detroit fans before local ones. I tend to agree with the guys from All Your Base Are Belong To Rios (greatest blog title ever, by the way) on this one: I don't mind them selling tickets that wouldn't normally be sold to fans hungry for the game, but the problem is when these fans get greater privileges than your own supporters.
- Neate has another post over at The CIS Blog (great resource for university sport stuff, by the way) on more statistical incompetence by the OUA (see my volleyball post from last weekend for another example).
- Greg Layson of the Guelph Mercury talks about how exactly Ontario University Athletics screwed up the score (which could be important) on his Big Man on Campus blog. It would be nice if this was a one-off, but my experience with OUA statistics indicates it isn't. Greg has more in a follow-up post, and should have a story on this in Wednesday's Mercury. It's nice that someone with a slightly bigger platform is taking the league to task on getting these things right, as it needs to be done: as James Mirtle wrote in the Globe a little while ago, we don't even know if Andrew Spagrud's going to break the CIS basketball scoring record, as no one knows what it is. That's a bit of a problem for a league's credibility.
- Speaking of campus stuff, Mike has a nice post up on everything from Richard Zednik to Gaels' hockey. A pretty amazing choke-job by Toronto leaves Queen's with a nice first-round bye, even after it looked like they'd blown the division with the Ryerson loss.
- And one final one: a tongue-in-cheek humour piece I put up on my Journal blog about possible reasons the Giants beat the Patriots last Sunday.

Campus Corner: Men's volleyball wins in straight sets

Well, that was a surprise and a half: in what I had expected to be a protracted and hard-fought five-set duel between two 13-5 teams, the Gaels instead beat the Guelph Gryphons in straight sets Friday. The Gaels looked quite dominant at times, but I think it was more due to poor play from the Gryphons than a truly outstanding match on their part, as they never seemed to quite hit that top level they're very
capable of.

The first set was actually very close, but didn't produce a great clash due to sloppy play from both sides. By my count, Queen's committed five service errors in the set, while Guelph added six more: there were also far too many net violations, passing mistakes and hits out of bounds for both sides. The Gryphons took a 20-17 lead, but then let Queen's come back to tie, and the Gaels eventually claimed the set
27-25 off an odd play: outside hitter Joren Zeeman went up for a kill (at the middle position, of all places), and slammed the ball right into the Gryphon block, but it came off the block, bounced off his head, recrossed the net and fell for the crucial set-clinching point. He could be a soccer player with moves like that.

The second and third sets were a different story, though. Queen's play improved, while Guelph's dropped even lower. The teams were tied at 8 early on in the second frame, but Queen's went on a run and never looked back, winning 25-17 and 25-18 in the last two sets.

As an aside: OUA needs to work on their statistics and scores, as Neate discussed on The CIS Blog a while back. In the third set, one of Guelph's points wasn't counted on either the official flip chart or the big scoreboard, and the final score was given as 25-18. It's not like it was a reversed ruling or something that I didn't notice, either: one of the points in my (detailed) notes simply was not counted. Thus, I'm pretty confident the real score should have been 25-19, but I'll have to report 25-18 in my Journal piece on Tuesday, which grinds my gears a bit. In this case, it doesn't matter, as Queen's already wins the
tie-breaker against Guelph for playoff seeding (the teams split their head-to-head games, the first tie-breaker, so OUA turns to sets for and against between the teams, where the Gaels triumph 5-3). As far as I understand, the next tie-breaker would have been points for and against between the teams, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that a silly error like this could hurt a team's playoff seeding, which is all the more reason to get it right.

There were some interesting moments during the match, but one of the best came when a honest-to-goodness bat came out of the rafters and started buzzing the players. The bat then proceeded to circle the court and the gym for the next two minutes, which forced the referee to put the game on hold and also led to some hilarious scenes of the Gaels trying to shoo the bat away by waving sweatshirts and such. It reminded me of last year's fake Journal published by Golden Words which included a great send-up of our sports coverage entitled "Gaels Smoke Out Ravens at Jock Harty". In a normal issue, that would be the headline for a story about a Queen's hockey victory over Carleton: there, it was instead a fake story about a group of orientation week leaders ("Gaels") helping University personnel clear out some ravens that were roosting in the rafters.

According to libero Stu Hamilton (who's still recovering from a flu which later developed into pneumonia, and thus saw limited court time tonight), bats have buzzed the Gaels at practice before, but never during a game. Head coach Brenda Willis also said she's seen the bat before during an international volleyball competition at Queen's, where it apparently forced a similar stoppage in play. This new athletic centre is sounding better and better all the time...

The play of the game goes to the Gaels' fifth-year All-Canadian setter Devon Miller (who, by the way, was facing a vastly less experienced counterpart, Guelph rookie starting setter Jon Waito). Queen's was pretty much running away with the second set, and held a 23-15 lead when Miller made an all-out dive and just snuck his palm under a hit from Guelph, popping the ball up in the air. Zeeman delivered a capable set, and Niko Rukavina smacked down a left-side kill to give the Gaels the point. The play didn't mean a great deal in the long run, as the Gaels would almost assuredly have won the set and the match even if they'd conceded that point. What it did show, though, was Miller's hustle and determination: a good reason why an undersized guy like him has consistently been an All-Canadian. He's not only one of the best pure setters in Canada, but also brings a strong defensive and blocking game largely due to his fantastic work ethic and never-say-die attitude. That attitude translates as well, especially when it's one of the team's stars who holds it, and in my mind at least, it's a good reason the Gaels have last year's OUA Championship banner on the wall.

This was a nice turnaround for the Gaels after a disturbing weekend loss to Laurier in just four sets (which perhaps can be blamed on my unfortunately predictive blog post last Saturday night, which said "Queen's should have a pretty easy time of it against 4-14 Laurier ... but you never know when an upset will strike"). Hopefully, tonight's win will give the team some momentum to take into tonight's clash with the 19-0 McMaster Marauders. As Hamilton also pointed out, it's not just Mac that's vying for a perfect record: the Gaels are 9-0 at home this year, so one stretch of perfection is about to end tomorrow: all that remains to be determined is which one it will be.