The Hard Math of the Cinderella Story
theplayerstribune.com
theplayerstribune.com
Something that 25 years of my professional career in software has taught me... those at the top of the game got there because of grit determination and little to do with talent. The talent pool at your level shrinks every time you up your game to the next level until you see the same faces showing up time and again at every new gig.
Statistically, what's the chance you'll become one of the very best programmers in the world? It's about the same as becoming a professional footballer.
Becoming the very best at something just means you have to put that bit more in than those that didn't make it. The harder you work and the more effort you put in, the more the statistics skew in your favour.
If making money is something you want to do until you make it to the premier league, then you've gotta be willing to go where the money is until you make it. Go live in a country where you are perhaps not the best, but among the good enough to get paid for what you currently have to offer while you continue to improve your skills. Work harder than those around you, learn from those around you, when you become the best in the pack, move on to another pack where you can learn more, improve your skills and get paid more. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I think I agree with your sentiment here but want to clarify and see if you agree. There's still an EXTREMELY high talent bar to be a professional athlete, but talent, in itself, isn't enough (unless you're one of the truly rare lazy star athletes). Those who are blessed to have the talent and an above average work-ethic/determination are the ones with a good chance of making it.
How many people have talents that they are totally aware they have, but aren't doing, yet are making a decent living doing something they have much less talent for?
I can speak from personal experience for this one: My high school I.T. teacher said I'll never make it in technology and I should avoid it and do something else. My music teacher from high school and university poured every ounce of effort into my talents for music, but despite what they vocalized was a bottomless pit of talent, I can barely complete a Beethoven Piano Sonata or improvise a Saxophone Jazz standard, not because of a lack of talent or understanding, but because I didn't put in the miles to make it to the top. I poured all my effort into programming because I have an endless curiosity about how things work and programming is a bottomless pit of intrigue...
Could I have become the greatest pianist or saxophonist in the world? We'll never know. As soon as I figured out how to put notes together on a musical instrument, I was bored with it, the mystery was gone and now I just play for my own amusement or the amusement of my kids.
I'll be the first to admit, I'm far from the best programmer in the world, but I've managed somehow to be classified as a senior developer & architect by a jury of my peers. I've struggled every day to learn and master what it took to come this far and here I am. I will continue to struggle every day to learn and move forward to become the best that I can be.
Did it take talent for me to get here? Ha! I have zero talent at programming compared to those who graduated top of their class from MIT or their computer science class. I took a software engineering course that barely covered the basics and taught myself everything useful that I know. Sheer will and determination and it satiates my curiosity. So for me to say that work ethic and determination are the only useful factors worth considering, I'm not speaking without some experience on this topic.
People say it takes a lot of luck. In my experience, the harder you work and the more you put yourself out there, the more 'luck' seems to find you. In addition to this, there is always a door open somewhere - people claim it was luck that that door opened when it did. But more often than not, from the inside, it's not luck at all. You were looking at all the options in front of you and what seems like luck to an onlooker was not luck at all - the 'lucky door' was just the best option available to you at the time. You walked through the open door and stayed there until the next door opened, which once again to an outside viewer looks like luck, but really if another door had opened first, you'd have taken that one and that would have been considered the 'lucky' door - at which time you walked through that one and the cycle continues. It wasn't luck that got you got to the top - it was a million little decisions that picked one of a million routes that will get you to the top if you stick at it. It may have been appeared like luck that you got to the top, but really, it was the product of those million little decisions that marched you forward to reach your goal. But at the end of the day, it was the destination you kept your eye on, not the luck it would take to get you there. You take whatever route you have to achieve your objective and reach your goal.
If anyone successful thought they would only reach success by chance and luck, they'd never have set out on that path. They set out on a path because something about it calls to them, like sailors to the sea. They stuck with the path because they believed in their ability to do what they want to do, they made it because they were willing to do whatever it took to get there and it never occurred to them that they wouldn't be able to do it - while everyone else sat on the sidelines worrying about what would happen if they failed and saying "I could do that too if I had their kind of luck."
That's the wrong question. The right question is "What are the chances that you'll make a good living in your chosen field?"
As a programmer the chances are relatively high. Even an average developer makes a decent living, and a good one can make a lot of money.
As a footballer the chance of even getting to be a professional where you're paid to do it are very low. If you get to the top you'll be making a very good living, but probably not as much as a early employee at Facebook/Google/etc if you include stock (although that has little to do with programming really).
That doesn't mean everyone should become developers though. People should have careers they enjoy. But if you're looking at statistics, even considering everything other than talent, trying to become a sports star is still a stupid idea.
Fields like sports seem to compensate on an exponential function -- the top 1% make stupid sums of money, and even people on the same professional team can make very small sums compared to the top earner.
Programming in comparison is compensated on a more linear function. What that means practically is that you don't have to be the top 1% of programmers to make a good salary.
This list of shortest players in the NBA would disagree with you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shortest_players_in_Na...
Every success has a significant element of luck involved. While nearly everyone at the top of their game has worked harder than many of their peers, it's not true that everyone who worked as hard as they did has "made it".
In a (particularly) full contact sport, part of this comes from injury, obviously - and it is a very real possibility for anyone trying to get there.
Michael Phelps has a bizarre chest-to-leg ratio, which is excellent for swimming. He could never be a top tennis player even if he dedicated his life to it. Serena Williams would never be a top swimmer.
There are many great examples of people doing the improbable [often mischaracterized as the impossible] because they put in more effort than anyone else deemed worthwhile, because they had a vision that nobody else could see... because they had a dream - and changed the entire landscape in front of our eyes, despite nobody else dreaming that was possible.
You can't say for sure that Phelps could never have been a top tennis player if that had been his passion.
One piece of analysis missing here is the opportunity cost of trying to get into professional sports. Is there not enough time off the field to learn skills that can be used for a successful career? Possibly.
If an athlete "throws in the towel" and decides to go back to school, what kind of roadblocks are there in front of him/her that make it difficult to transition?
Now that the NFL is essentially a front for gambling in the form of "daily fantasy sports" (DFS), I'm curious if they'll set up a development league so they can monetize that aspect of it as well.
For those who don't know, the NFL, MLB and NBA are all heavily in bed with DFS from an ownership perspective. The leagues either directly or indirectly (through investments by team owners) hold large investments all the major DFS providers. That's why you see DFS promotions in pre-game, on major sports sites, etc. That's also why the major sports leagues, after decades of fighting against sports gambling, have gone all-in the other direction.
The other issue is that there already is a sort of minor league, it's called the practice squad. And if you have minor leagues, the practice squad guys are in a weird limbo, because they are not getting game reps like they would in a minor league, yet they are the guys just good enough to almost be NFL players who would benefit the least from game reps, because of the work they are putting in with the full team. There are actually many minor football leagues, most playing indoor football, and those guys almost never make it to the NFL.
For the NFL, the real solution isn't a minor league, it's doubling the practice squad. That could cost each team about... (using numbers from the article) $1.5 million, and that's probably the best solution if the powers-that-be really feel there is a talent gap.
Colt McCoy is one of my favorite examples. Coming out of college, he was a prototypical NFL pocket passer: he made smart decisions, had a quick release, was incredibly accurate, had great presence in the pocket and was deceptively fast when he had to pull it down and run. But he's been a career backup because he's only 6'1", and for various reasons, it's hard to be a franchise NFL quarterback under 6'4". If you look at all the best quarterbacks in the last 20 years, nearly every one is 6'4" or taller [1]. While there are a couple exceptions (namely, Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees) nearly every single "marquee" quarterback still playing today is 6'4" or taller. If Colt McCoy were 3 inches taller, he would almost certainly be a starter in the NFL today. Imagine how much better Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees would have been if they were 3 inches taller.
6'4" is really tall. In the US, that puts you into the top 1% of height for males. [2] So not only do you have to be really good at the sport, but being really good at the sport essentially requires you to be in the top 1% of the country in physical size before you even pick up a ball. I knew a kid in middle school who was 6'4" and everyone knew he was going to end up in the NBA. And he did -- for like 4 seasons before his knees gave out. But those are the kids who go pro -- everyone they've known since the age of 12 or so has been telling them they'll go pro because they were always the biggest, best player on every team they ever played on.
The odds for any given kid playing pro sports are probably much closer to zero than anyone wants to admit. Those odds only improve if the kid's parents are tall -- and even then only if the kid ends up being tall, in shape, with no genetic weaknesses in connective tissue that would cause too many injuries before they hit the pro level.
[1] http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/content/tall-task-does-... [2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf, page 16
How many PED suspensions should there be if 1% of NCAA football player are taking them?
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128 teams x 85 scholarship players a team = 10,880 total players
x .01 = 108 guys on PEDs
lets say the test can catch 5% of users
that should be something like 5 or 6 guys a year getting busted
something like every other week you should hear another blurb about so and so get suspended for testing positive, or at least once a month, or at least a couple times a year
I feel like I follow this pretty closely, the positive NCAA tests I can think of off the top of my head: Brian Bosworth prior to the 1987 Orange Bowl, I thought Ryan Dinwiddie got suspended for some sort of PED as the QB at Boise, but that appears lost to the internet, and now Will Grier
its possible other people have been suspended, but none come to my mind
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this basic math seems to lead to 1 of 2 conclusions, either far less than 1% of college players use steroids, or testing catches far less than 5% of PED users, to the point of functionally catching no one
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if the second of those is the right conclusion, and its hard (at least for me) not to think that it is
its strikes me that that leads to some pretty stark implications
namely that you have 128 schools with different degrees of taboo against PED usage, and whoever sets the laxest taboo is at the biggest advantage
that everything you hear about so and so being great at spotting talent, or developing talent is a bunch of BS, and that the real key is that those are just the places that wink wink the hardest at PED users
if I was going to guess which places have the biggest PED cultures, http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/after-signing-day-wiscons... its hard for me to think that that doesn't chart it pretty well
that if you really want to win, find an assistant strength coach form one of the top 5 or so teams on that list, then basically body shame all your players until they figure out how to put two and two together
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related article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/12/20/report-s...
The report points out that the NCAA conducts random drug testing and the penalties for failure are severe. Players lose an entire year of eligibility after a first positive test. A second offense means permanent ineligibility from sports.
But when you dig into the numbers, the NCAA’s roughly 11,000 annual tests amount to just a fraction of all athletes in Division I and II schools. Exactly how many tests are conducted each year on football players is unclear because the NCAA hasn’t published its data for two years, according to the AP, and when it did, it periodically changed the formats, making it impossible to compare one year of football to the next.
More confounding is that NCAA rules say players can be notified up to two days in advance of a test, which experts say is plenty of time to beat a test. By comparison, Olympic athletes are given no notice.
The top steroid investigator at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Joe Rannazzisi, told the AP that he doesn’t understand why schools don’t invest in the same kind of testing, with the same penalties, as the NFL.
“Is it expensive? Of course, but college football makes a lot of money,” he said. “Invest in the integrity of your program.”
For a school to test all 85 scholarship football players for steroids twice a season would cost up to $34,000, said Don Catlin, an anti-doping pioneer who spent years conducting the NCAA’s laboratory tests at UCLA. The total costs would be about 0.2 percent of the average big-time school football budget of about $14 million.
Caitlin told the AP he became so frustrated with the college system that it drove him in part to leave the testing industry to focus on anti-doping research.
The investigation also found that penalties vary widely from school to school. Here are a few examples:
•At Notre Dame and Alabama, the teams that will soon compete for the national championship, players don’t automatically miss games for testing positive for steroids. At Alabama, coaches have wide discretion. Notre Dame’s student-athlete handbook says a player who fails a test can return to the field once the steroids are out of his system.
•The University of North Carolina kicks players off the team after a single positive test for steroids.
•At UCLA, home of the laboratory that for years set the standard for cutting-edge steroid testing, athletes can fail three drug tests before being suspended.
•At the University of Maryland, students must get counseling after testing positive, but school officials are prohibited from disciplining first-time steroid users.