The East Coast Scheduling Bias

Transcription

1 The East Coast Scheduling Bias By Brian Stonelake It took hundreds of man-hours over three grueling months, 136 computers working in tandem, and the careful consideration of numerous highly-paid senior executives. Hundreds of variables were carefully considered, then reconsidered. Today we celebrate the completion of this remarkable process. So what are we celebrating? An advance in medical technology? New insights on climate change? No, today is the NFL schedule release date. And despite the abundance of resources invested in the process, the NFL again made a huge mistake that is remarkably unfair to a handful of NFL franchises. Think of your favorite team. Other than your quarterback, name the player who most influences your team s success. What if I told you that the NFL created a rule that for 3 or 4 road games per year, this player would be arbitrarily suspended. Houston fans - No JJ Watt. Patriot Fans, prepare to be Gronkless. Worse yet, this rule only applies to a handful of teams. Of course, the NFL didn t do this unfortunately they did quantifiably worse. To understand the NFL s inexcusable error, allow me to provide a crash course on chronobiology. To oversimplify: the human body doesn t work well in the morning. I don t mean the morning after a night with a teething toddler, or following a superbowl party with too much whiskey, I mean when fully awake and well rested. Many aspects of exercise performance follow the core body temperature cycle, which is at its lowest early in the morning, and highest in the early evening. This circadian rhythm does not adjust quickly, so while a 1pm (EST) kickoff feels like 1pm for Eagles players, it feels much earlier for the visiting Raiders Core Body Temperature (F) Time of Day (hours)

2 whose body clocks are still synchronized with west coast time. During such games, dubbed morning body clock games, the west coast visitors circadian rhythms yield a biological disadvantage. Do not confuse this with being tired ; this is a physiologically determined handicap directly affecting many aspects of exercise performance. One might assume that at worst this provides a marginal advantage for the east coast home team, an impact that would have little practical implication. In fact, the opposite is true. 66% 65% 64% 63% 62% 61% 60% 59% 58% 57% 56% 55% 54% Home Team Win Rate West & Central & East & West & Early Visitor Time Zone & Body Clock Start From , there were 374 NFL games where the road team faced a morning body clock start time 1. All 374 involved a central or east coast team hosting a team from the west or mountain time zones 2. The home team won 64.4% of these games; far in excess of the 57.2% win rate for home teams in general. Teams playing a morning body clock start also showed statistically significant increases in penalty and turnover prevalence relative to other visiting teams, and exhibited higher pass drop rates This didn t happen by accident, and is not seen in otherwise comparable situations like east coast teams playing late west coast games. You can cut the data however you want, controlling for opponent or any other factor that you wish, and still come to the same indisputable conclusion teams playing at a morning body clock start time face a significant disadvantage. This shocking result makes more sense when you consider the numerous aspects of performance that oscillate daily with core body temperature. An incomplete list includes respiratory efficiency, blood flow, joint flexibility, reaction time and muscle strength. Further, at suboptimal body clock times, athletes record lower mean and peak power outputs, lesser peaks of lactate production, decreased high intensity work rates and lessened stamina. Conversely in the late afternoon / early evening hours, 1 body clock time at kickoff is 11:30 am or earlier; excludes games without a standard home team, like the international series in London, for example 2 aggregated and collectively referred to as west due to the scarcity of mountain teams

3 not only are athletes self-chosen work rates higher, these efforts are not accompanied by an increase in perceived exertion. Given the above, it s not surprising that nearly every Olympic world record was set in the late afternoon or early evening. While scheduling considerations may explain some of this, tests isolating body clock time reveal up to a 10% decrease in aspects of athletic performance in the morning. For comparison, a 10% decrement in performance is also seen when consuming the legal limit of alcohol, or after three consecutive nights of only three hours of sleep. Do the Niners look horribly sleep deprived? Do the Chargers look drunk out there? Essentially they are. Looking at every game for the past 15 years, we see that on average scheduling a morning body clock game costs the visitor slightly over 3 points. Not surprisingly, these results are anticipated by bookmakers who show similar shifts in point spreads for such games. When the league decided to schedule the (REFERNCE 2106 SCHEUDLE HERE) game at 1:05 (EST) instead of say 4:05 (EST), they handed the (INSERT TEAM) 3 points in addition to the normal home field advantage. The magnitude of this advantage can not be overstated. In August 2013, RJ Bell wrote an informative piece for Grantland where he found a Las Vegas consensus for the value of NFL players (as measured by a hypothetical point spread change if they were hurt). The highest non QB was Adrian Peterson, who was coming off a 2000 yard, MVP season where he averaged an astounding 6 yards per carry. He was estimated to be worth 2.5 points. In other words, Las Vegas measures the competitive disadvantage faced by morning body clock teams to be slightly greater than that associated with losing one of the most dominant offensive players in NFL history. The next highest valued player in 2013 was Calvin Johnson, who led the league in receptions and yards the year prior, and was valued at 1.5 points. The only defensive player worth more than half of a point was JJ Watt, estimated to be worth one point. Quarterbacks were worth as much as seven points (Peyton Manning), with Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, Tony Romo and Sam Bradford all being worth three points. In other words, when the Seahawks played at Indianapolis in week 5 that year 3, they should have been indifferent between playing the game at 1pm (EST) as scheduled, and agreeing to play Tavaris Jackson instead of Russell Wilson behind center in exchange for moving the game to 4pm (EST). With all due respect to the former Alabama State QB, that is astounding. 3 a game in which Seattle suffered its first loss of the year

4 Conveniently, last year s playoffs provide a wonderful application of Bell s piece. Two days prior to the Seahawks wild card playoff game in Minnesota, Seattle announced that star tailback Marshawn Lynch, who was deemed by Coach Carroll to be ready to rock on Monday and a full go at practice Wednesday, would not play Sunday at Minnesota. This news sent shockwaves around the football universe and was a top story on many sports news outlets. The unexpected nature of the Lynch announcement made it easy to quantify, as the betting line quickly adjusted 1.5 points. Losing their pro bowl tailback, in frigid conditions where a running game is paramount, with his backup being a practice squad player 4 already cut once this year by Seattle, was roughly half as important as the largely overlooked morning body clock start time. But wait, you counter, didn t Seattle win that game? Yes, they did. The chronobiological disadvantage, like any disadvantage, is not impossible to overcome. A far superior team (as Seattle was) with a little bit of luck (like Blair Walsh missing a 27-yard field goal to take the lead with less than a minute to go) can overcome this disadvantage. But that does not change the fact that it is a completely unfair disadvantage in the first place. Well okay, you admit, but maybe Seattle should have gotten a higher seed to avoid playoff road games all together. Yes, a higher seed would have prevented the unfair situation from occurring in this instance, but why should certain teams have to overcome a systematic disadvantage exclusive to them in the regular season just to avoid possibly facing that same disadvantage in the playoffs? Fortunately for proponents of changing this unfair scheduling practice (and Seahawk haters like myself), the very next week Seattle was scheduled to play another morning body clock game, this time in Carolina. In the first half of this game, when the Seahawks were at their largest chronobiological disadvantage, they were outscored They eventually they lost The staggering effect of the morning body clock disadvantage is nothing new to Seattle. In the Pete Carroll era, they have outscored their opponents in the first half of non morning body clock playoff games, while they have been outscored 91-0 in the first half of morning body clock playoff 4 that replacement being Christine Michael, as capable backup running back Thomas Rawls was out for the season with a broken ankle

5 games. In these games they re 1-6, with the lone win coming in the aforementioned case of Blair Walsh s missed chip shot FG. Inexplicably, despite being made aware of this competitive disadvantage, the NFL still schedules morning body clock games with high frequency. I am shocked that west coast fans, especially those as obnoxiously loud as Seattle s, allow their teams to be so severely handicapped. Some foolishly hide behind anecdotal evidence pointing to games where morning body clock teams win. Yeah, the claim is not that playing in the morning is an insurmountable detriment, but rather that it is a significant detriment. I ve seen teams block punts with only ten men on the field. Would that make a new rule limiting west coast teams to ten payers in punt return situations any less fair? While total eradication of morning body clock games would be difficult given the complexity of the NFL schedule, it seems as though such occurrences should be greatly reduced (and playoff occurrences eradicated). This topic was brought to the attention of Commissioner Goodell prior to the 2009 season, at which point he was quoted as saying that he had not seen specific information suggesting early starts [for west coast teams traveling east] could create a competitive disadvantage for visiting teams. To Commissioner Goodell s credit, he revisited the subject in October 2012 with a much more sympathetic view of the situation, saying that "Several of our teams on the West Coast have raised that [issue of morning body clock games] and we have been studying it. We have tried to put as many of those games on the East Coast at 4 pm. You can imagine the thousands of different issues you have to put into the schedule. But the 10 o'clock starts are pretty tough." Despite this statement, little has actually been done in terms of scheduling. Since 2001, there have been an average of 25 morning body clock start time games per year. This accounts for more than half of all road games for the affected west coast teams. Today after months of consideration and millions of dollars dedicated to creating the schedule, the NFL announced (INSERT NUMBER OF 2016 MBC GAMES) more. Note: A more detailed examination of this matter can be found in Managing the Body Clock published in the February 2016 issue of the American Society of Exercise Physiologists Journal of Exercise Physiology.