The Genius of MIT's Football Team | Hacker News Reader

The Genius of MIT's Football Team

online.wsj.com

22 pointsanishkothari21 comments

The team is in a great superposition to collapse into a winning eigenstate. Its interference pattern is constructive. The phase they're in is totally coherent. Their offense has got this great duality going, that you simply can't measure without screwing up. They've got this non-classical strategy that I don't understand. However I'm not going to comment on their position at this time; I don't want to alter the team's momentum going into the game.

I was expecting to read about a "genius" plan they had for winning games, like moneyball or something.

Me too. Maybe they try sqrt(-1) percent.

Maybe it's because i'm not american, but that article is completely and utterly nonsensical to me. Is there some kind of injoke going on i don't understand?

No, it's just utterly nonsensical.

It's not nonsensical, but it is a random collection of facts with no explanation. The article doesn't even attempt to answer the obvious question: what changed? Why are they successful now?

Unless something changed with regard to the crew (rowing) program (which historically had more mindshare amongst MIT students), it's likely largely random. In Division III sports, you tend to have high variance in performance, since athletics are seldom the top priority of any of the students. It's probably a combination of solid coaching with luck off the field (which athletes the team was able to recruit) and luck on the field.

Next year, the football team will have a recruiting advantage over the crew (rowing) team, and you may see a long-term shift in football performance relative to crew performance. On the other hand, most US high schools have football teams but no crew teams. Incoming MIT students who didn't play on their HS football teams (most of them) perceive they're at less of a disadvantage competing in crew vs. competing in football. At least, these were my perceptions as an MIT freshman almost 2 decades ago.

Does it help to imagine it's being read by John Oliver? There's a heavy dose of self-deprecating humor about Americans prizing university athletic performance over academics. "Yes, yes, 80 Nobel Prizes, blah blah, but congratulations to MIT on doing something that's finally important: winning at American football."

School: Chicago; year: 1939; achievement: eliminated program.

We do take it as a point of pride. We also had the first Heisman winner ever.

Is it just me or does it seem like there's an outlier in the table that accompanies the article?

Eh, "Rose Bowl prank" and "eliminated program" seem to be on about the same level, with "Beat UCLA" perhaps a trifle more impressive?

Just a note for those who don't know;

The NACDA Learfield Sports Directors' Cup is an award given annually by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics to the colleges and universities in the United States with the most success in collegiate athletics.

So Stanford has been the successful collegiate sports program across all sports. Its also held that title for 20 years.

Just what college athletics needs, more fake awards designed to only be winnable by a few parties.

From the chart, Stanford and Duke looks like they're in a class of their own..

A bit of an ominous sign, isn't it?

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