Nebraska in the Big 10 (12)

So my wife was confused about why Nebraska playing Wisconsin on Saturday night in football is such a big deal.

I had to explain to her that this is Nebraska's first game playing in the Big 10 conference, which kind of felt like to her, "you mean I have to memorize another team in the Big 10?"

Camp Randall in Madison, WI at night
photo credit to ESPN

She knows the irony of the Big 10 having 11 teams prior to the arrival of Nebraska, and yes, after about 5 minutes, she was able to successfully name all 12 teams.

Nebraska is more less in the Big 10 because of a public spat that many teams in the Big 12 conference are having with the University of Texas.  Nebraska left the Big 12 earlier this year because of the development of the Longhorn Television Network, which will reward Texas with revenue that they will not share with other teams in the Big 12.

In the Big 10, all television revenue is shared equally between all 12 teams, which makes everyone rich, even if you are the University of Minnesota, which embarrassingly lost a football game to North Dakota State on Saturday.

Later on, I had the nerve to tell her that the conference known as the Big 12 has 10 teams, which prompted an eyeroll.

My Moneyball Thoughts

Went to see the Moneyball movie with my wife this weekend.  I thought it was an absolutely fabulous movie about how baseball's Oakland A's figured out a way to compete successfully against teams with large payrolls in the early 2000s.

the movie Moneyball is adopted from a book of the same name

The basis of Moneyball was to find a new way to figure out what makes a player valuable, rather than how baseball traditionally valued a player.  The Oakland A's used new computer generated statistics to measure the value of a player.  Other teams were caught using the same archaic statistics baseball had used for the previous 100 years to value and pay players.  Oakland saved money because they saw value in a player where the other teams did not.

The movie is a success because of what Oakland did on the field in 2002.  The ragtag team that Oakland had put together won a major league record 20 games in a row.

However, the movie does have its flaws as it didn't recognize the fact that Oakland had 3 tremendous starting pitchers in the prime of their careers: Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, and Tim Hudson.  Pitchers who have each made over $100 million in career salary, and now are obviously not playing in Oakland.

Another big miss is the fact that steroid usage among baseball players in the San Francisco Bay Area was incredibly rampant in the early 2000s.  In 2003, the federal government raided the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) on suspicion of steroid distribution to world class athletes, many of which played baseball in Oakland and San Francisco.

My thoughts are that the movie was terrific, and opened up a new statistical analysis of baseball that many teams have adopted in some way or another.  However, steroids and the omission of Mulder, Zito, and Hudson, had a lot to do with the success of the 2002 Oakland A's.