It's an early Christmas Present

I arrived at work today to have an invite sitting in my inbox.

A very, very special sort of invite.

Our work had a contract with SPARC earlier this year to monitor the media coverage of their Olympic athletes, with the information being compiled to track positive/negative coverage, as well as when an athlete was mentioned for quantitative measures.

As the resident sports-nut, I was delegated the role of tracking the television coverage of the Olympics [I may have been hired with this in mind, it appears to be a subject of conjecture]. This literally meant I was being paid to watch 8 hours of Olympics coverage - It wasn't all like that though, it had been recorded from the night before and I had to get through it in 2 hours.

Anyway, our report to SPARC has been completed and will be presented on Friday... And I was invited... Can't wait!

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Don't cap my Celery

Well, analytic company Offlode has come up with a novel idea and reviewed 23 competitions in terms of closeness and whether the salary caps work. I've posted the full list, as well as my comments, after the jump.



Where I think this list is flawed is in that the top half of the list has much, much longer seasons than the bottom half, so random fluctuations where a bottom team beats a top team are going to occur more often [though in saying that, I do agree that the American draft system (where the team which finishes last in a season gets to have the first pick of a rookie player in the next season and has to play for that team for a certain length of time, I think 2 years is the norm) is very effective in creating a level playing field, while the Super 14 'draft' system (where a team can 'protect' 22 players from their region from being picked up by other teams) is a joke.]

Taking Major League Baseball as an example, eventual winners the Philidelphia Phillies played a total of 162 matches in the 2008 regular season. Makes our 16-match Super 14 look a bit naff. Or the beautiful Boston Celtics, who played 82 matches throughout the entire [including playoffs] season. There is definately a lot more room in those matches for a team to field a weak lineup, knowing they're in the playoffs, and get done by a weaker team.

The list itself:

Major League (Baseball)
French Ligue 1 (Football)
Magners League (Rugby)
Primera Argentina (Football)
MLS *(Football)
Spanish La Liga (Football)
Primera Mexico (Football)
German Bundesliga (Football)
ANBL *(Basketball) NBA *(Basketball)
NFL *(Gridiron)
Dutch Eredivisie (Football)
Italian Serie A (Football)
AFL *(Aussie Rules)
NRL *(League)
Scottish Premier League (Football)
NHL *(Ice Hockey)
English Premier League (Football)
Guinness Premiership *(Rugby)
Air New Zealand Cup *(Rugby)
Super 14 (Rugby)
Currie Cup (Rugby)
National Bank Cup (Netball)

* denotes competitions which use a salary cap.

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