Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve watched a lot of NFL games in my life, but I still don’t understand when the clock keeps running and when it stops, especially related to players going out of bounds. I finally remembered to look up the answer:

The game clock stops when a ball carrier goes out of bounds maintaining forward momentum. The game clock continues if the ball carrier’s forward momentum is stopped in bounds before he goes out of bounds. For most of the game, the clock is restarted when the line judge resets the ball and whistles play to continue. The exception is in the last 2 minutes of the first half or the last 5 minutes of the second half. In those cases, the clock does not start again until the offense snaps the ball.

Ok, maybe that wasn’t as complicated as I thought it was, but while I was reading through the rule book, I came across this rule:

When, in the judgment of the Referee, the level of crowd noise prevents the offense from hearing its signals, he can institute a series of procedures which can result in a loss of team time outs or a five-yard penalty against the defensive team.

Huh? How are the Seahawks not hit with that at every home game? It turns out that the rule is officially not enforced as of 2007. I don’t understand why there is such a thing as official rules that officially aren’t enforced but I’ll save that internet rat hole for another day.

What an incredible game 7! That game had everything. They put on a good show and in the end, the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years. Watching these Cubs games brings back a flood of great memories. Go Cubs go! Fly the W!

Various NFL players have been protesting police brutality against minorities and it’s getting a lot of press. It seems reasonable that we should take an objective look at the situation and determine if and where it needs adjusting. That’s something we should always be willing to do.

If they would rephrase it slightly, I’d be more on board. Instead of just investigating situations where cops are acting incorrectly, let’s also look how we can keep cops safe. Cops should be able to do their jobs without getting shot and minorities should be able to live their lives without getting harassed (or worse.) Focusing on one side or the other is going to escalate the violence, not reduce it. Maybe it really is a case where only one side is to blame, but that seems pretty unlikely to me. Let’s take a holistic approach to the problem and figure out what really needs to change so we can fix this situation. Even one more body bag is too much regardless of who is inside it.

Congratulations are in store for Andy Campbell who was recently inducted into his college’s hall of fame! He holds the career record for hits and runs, but if you look at the career leaders page, you’ll see his name in the top 10 for all of the offensive stats except sacrifices.

It made me wonder who was in the Purdue Hall of Fame so I checked it out and discovered that Travis Dorsch was inducted this year. He was the kicker on our football team while I was there and we had a German class together. I will always remember him for one thing… My Junior year was the year that Brees led Purdue to the Rose Bowl. There was one game that season that ended with Dorsch walking off the field over to the front of the student section and flipping us all off for giving him so much flak about his critical misses in previous games. Classy. Around that same time, someone made a huge chalk sign in the Engineering mall that said “Dorsch is German for wide right.”

I was initially surprised to not see Ryan Newman in the Purdue Hall of Fame, but I guess it’s because racing wasn’t an intercollegiate sport. He was an up and coming ARCA and Busch series racer while I was there and I remember him being on campus at least once with his race car.

But anyway, back to the main point, kudos to Andy! I hope that the induction ceremony is a lot of fun!

Andy, Tim and I went to a Mariners game this week. It was nice to have a guy’s night out. The end of the game was fantastic. Down by one run in the bottom of the night with a man on second, two outs and a 1-2 count, Martin hit a walk-off home run to win it. Too bad the stadium was almost empty. Part of our conversation was around why the Mariners don’t lower their ticket prices enough to fill the stadium.

Many clubs are doing some kind of dynamic pricing, but it mostly seems like a way to charge more money for in-demand games. That makes sense if you’re regularly selling out your stadium. The law of supply and demand says that you should increase prices if demand outpaces supply. But why not follow that same logic when the reverse is true?

I couldn’t find any satisfactory reason for why teams wouldn’t charge the amount that would fill the stadium for each game. In this world of big data, they should be able to set that price per game very accurately based on day of the week, opponent, number of wins in the season, weather, etc. How would they not benefit from having the stadium full even if they were giving away some tickets for free? The incremental cost of having another fan in the stadium is almost nothing, but there’s a good change they’ll end up buying a $9 Coors Light.

The only sticky point I can think of is that you have season ticket holders that prepay a set price for their seats. To get around that you can either provide them additional value (discounted merchandise, free parking, etc) that makes it worth their while to pay more for the seats than the person next to them or you can give them vouchers at the end of the year for discounts on next year’s season tickets.

Fill the stadium Mariners! I bet you can even find some data that shows a team plays better when the stadium is full so maybe it’s an easy way to get a few more wins each season.

There has to be some legal/contract reason why they can’t do this because there’s no way that the current system is generating the maximum amount of revenue.

P.S. This isn’t directly related to the topic, but I did run across an interesting paper about ticket pricing per team.

The 2016 NFL draft is over and the Seahawks have made their picks. Which of these names will hit it big?

I don’t know much about any of these players, but the Seahawks have a history of some pretty excellent performances in the draft. Here are some examples:

2015 Round 3: Tyler Lockett
2014 Round 2: Justin Britt
2014 Round 4: Kevin Norwood
2014 Round 4: Kevin Pierre-Louis
2013 Round 5: Luke Wilson
2012 Round 1: Bruce Irvin
2012 Round 2: Bobby Wagner
2012 Round 3: Russell Wilson
2012 Round 6: Jeremy Lane
2012 Round 7: J.R. Sweezy
2011 Round 5: Richard Sherman
2010 Round 1: Russell Okung
2010 Round 1: Earl Thomas
2010 Round 2: Golden Tate
2010 Round 5: Kam Chancellor

2010 and 2012 were pretty incredible draft years. The Seahawks generally seem to play it smart by avoiding the early first round picks. They regularly trade away their first round picks for multiple later picks. If you’ve read Scorecasting, you know that not only is it not as great as it seems to get one of the first half dozen picks of the draft, you should AVOID having one of those picks. You are forced to pay this random person a ton of money and more often than not, they don’t live up to the hype.

It sounds like the Seahawks are focusing a lot on their offensive line which is a no-brainer. We’ll see what next season brings!