Heaps to get his shot?

Tequilla said:

What I was getting at with that was that Baylor plays a high possession/play game. By doing so, the scores often get big and rarely do they play close games because their whole goal over the long haul is to have their better athletes have more opportunities to create differences during the game. It's why they rack up high scores offensively and some putrid looking defensive stats at times. They don't care if they give up 40 points as long as they score 60. What they care about is the 20 point delta.

From time to time, what happened against TCU (where they came back) or the manner that they lost to Sparty (blowing a big lead) will happen. They are perfectly ok with short-term variance over the long-haul.

Perhaps a better way to think of what they are doing is using probabilities and poker. If you look at a hand like AK suited versus a non AK pocket pair of different suits, the probability is that the pocket pair will win in the 52-54% range. If you played 10,000 hands, you'd be more than welcome to take the wins and suffer the loss. However, depending on the situation, you may not be willing to take those odds in a 1 off situation because you think you can find a better situation where you can win 60-70% of the time.

To me, this is the analogy for teams like Baylor, Oregon, etc. The more possessions and plays in a game, the more they are trying to eliminate the amount of random chance in the game. Since only a handful of teams are as talented as they are, they will often over the course of 60 minutes and 150-175 plays in a game separate themselves. Likewise, when you catch them on a day where they either aren't playing well or are playing a comparable (or better) team, the high frequency of events leads to them getting essentially "exposed" and getting blown out (the Ohio State game vs Oregon being a great example of this).

This is also why you always hear about how teams controlling time of possession can be so important (particularly for the underdog) or in basketball how the 3 point line can be the great equalizer for smaller teams due to the higher value of the long distance shot negating some of the advantage that a bigger team experiences by shooting shots closer to the basket.

It's absolutely the influence of statistics and more important game theory into sports where what was once intuitively known is now run through so many computer simulations that this information becomes used as a strategy. Of course, what many forget or don't seem to adequately measure is that you still need players to play the game and how a player performs on any given day, develops, etc. isn't at all tied to a computer simulation.