Two weeks ago, the entire country knew Memphis couldn't hit a free throw for its life or, as it turned out, for the national championship. Baseball is starting to run out of catchy acronyms and is resorting to terms like VORP and WARP-3, which sound more like Star Trek characters than ways to track star players.
Even soccer, which to the untrained eye seems like an elaborate excuse for heavy drinking and gang violence -- amazing this hasn't caught on in the States -- has teams hiring consulting companies to break down match film into over 2,500 distinct events and analyze players' individual performances.
While some old-timers decry the use of Ti-83s to hijack "pure" sport and long for the days when the only things worth counting were wins and losses, most fans not named Joe Morgan or Tim McCarver realize that some quality number-crunching can actually add to the enjoyment of the game.
All of this got me thinking: For all the pong that we play, how much do we really know about it? What makes a player "good?" How important are saves? And, of course, which is it better to defend: one full or two halves? Even with a war going on and a recession underway, pressing questions like these just can't be ignored.
So, intrepid researcher that I am, I ventured into basements all across campus over the past two weeks, entering data on over 125 games of pong into Intercooled Stata 10, a.k.a. "The Cool." Games were then classified by cup formation and house rules prior to analysis, which produced some absolutely shocking findings.
Wait, you don't think I'm being serious, do you? I know The D is a real hotbed of investigative journalism, but I wasn't about to go that far. One, they don't pay me, and two, I wouldn't want to spill a frat soda on my Dell. All I'm really basing this on is four years of experience, a career .500 record, and three cover-to-cover readings of "Moneyball." Nonetheless, here are my initial findings in the field of "pongmetrics."
Sinks are
uncontrollable.
Sure, good players hit more balls at the cups, but sinks are basically just hits that happen to reach splashdown.
Now, I know what you're thinking: Saying this is about as ridiculous as claiming there's no difference between Kobe swishing a three-pointer and clanking it off the back iron, but cool your jets, frat star. When Kobe bricks it, he's still not going to miss by much -- rarely by more than the width of the rim.
You, on the other hand, start each game aiming for a tree but often don't even hit table, which makes it just a little bit harder to believe you meant to sink that particular three-inch-wide cup. In reality, pong is a lot like throwing hand grenades: Just lob it in the general direction and hope something good happens.
Saves are as good as hits.
It sounds so simple that it almost doesn't seem to be worth mentioning. But the fact is that while we have hit celebrations ranging from the pound to the paddle-slap, anything short of a ridiculous throw save may not even get noticed. And yet, both the hit and the save provide you with the same half-cup of 'Stone edge.
Of course, in order to win, you can't just save all night; at some point you've got to make your opponent knock back a few frothwagons as well. But that's not any reason to neglect the importance of solid defense. I guess the old adage holds true for pong as well: Offense gets the glory, but defense wins the game.
Two halves or one full?
Legend has it that several years ago, an inquisitive fraternity member carried a notepad throughout several terms of debauchery to record the results of pong games that came down to the pivotal confrontation -- one team defending two halves, the other guarding a solitary full.
According to the story, his quest for truth inadvertently led to him blacking out and losing his notes. As a result, we're still none the wiser as to which setup is preferable.
In my naivete, I thought that maybe the cup formation was the hidden variable. Perhaps, I conjectured, if the two half cups were spread apart and gave the shooter a bigger target, then attacking the halves would be preferable.
Not so, say two former Masters champions.
"You always want to be defending two halves," Tom Healy '08 claimed. "Otherwise, one lucky shot sinks you." Pun intended, presumably.
An '09 female who wished to remain anonymous due to uncertainty about H-Po's reading habits and the statute of limitations agreed. "I'd stick with the side with two halves," she said. "The more cups, the better. It sounds simple, but it's true."
Clutch doesn't exist.
Sorry. It's just statistically untrue. Yes, even for Derek Jeter.
I know you recall the time when you rallied back from a four-cup deficit to win with three straight sinks following a throw save. Your friends remember it, too, because you didn't stop talking about it for days and even referred to you and your partner as the "Team of Destiny."
But what about the marathon games you've played that dragged on for close to an hour as everyone futilely tries to hit the last cup? And what about the games when you've let your opponent, who was all but finished off, claw back into the game and win?
Whether you want to call it a selective memory or a blackout is your call. Either way, when you say "I'm really good at the end of games," all I hear is an excuse couched in a statistical fallacy.
An '08 brother at SigEp agreed. "I wouldn't say it's about clutch," he said, "just who wants it more. And I always want it more."
A pong statistic?
Is there such a thing as a comprehensive pong stat, one that takes into account all aspects of the game and, in one number, can paint a picture of a person's skill? Unlikely. But I've come up with something close, which I'll label PISS -- Partner Independent Skill Score. Much like its namesake, it can be tricky when you're drunk, so get a pledge to figure it out.
First, take the percentage of your shots that make the opponent drink. Then, subtract from that the percentage of opponents' shots directly after yours that hit or sink your cups, times the rate at which you personally miss saves. Numerically:
Now, I'm not a math major or anything, but this works out pretty solidly. The average player gets a rating of zero, better players get positive numbers, and freshmen get negative numbers. And your own rating can't be buoyed by a partner's solid play.
That's not to say that PISS is perfect. There's so much it doesn't account for -- home field advantage, crowd level, tolerance, partner chemistry. At the very least, though, I hope that PISS can jump start some intelligent basement conversation.
At the end of the day, though, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt. Not only because over-analyzing the game could take some of the fun out of it, but also because no matter how much we know, some opponents are just too tough to take down.
"I played pong against a wall late one night when there was nobody left," Frost Gay '10 reminisced. "The wall definitely won. But at least I had a sick throw save."
Brian is a writer for The Mirror. He's a math minor.
