Ran across a couple of interesting sports geek posts this week. The first has to do with MLB's blackout policy. Baseball has awarded territories to each team. Within those territories the teams have blackout rights. This comes into play with nationwide baseball broadcasts. When someone subscribes to Extra Innings or MLBTV.com they are limited by the whims of the local teams. In Minneapolis, that only means that I can't get Twins broadcasts through it. Through regular cable, no problem. But some of these territories are vast. For instance, Iowa is a shared territory of six different teams. I can only imagine how frustrating that must be. MLB needs to update it's methods and understand that fan bases are truly mobile.
The second article (actually a series of them), are based on answering the question 'how often does the best team win it all?'. The author simulated 10,000 seasons of football. Well 40,000 actually, but groups of 10,000. He preset the team strength so that he knew what team was the strongest and then let loose. What's the answer? Roughly 24% of the time. The top three teams together win almost 50%. I find that very interesting.
BTW, that doesn't mean that the other teams aren't worthy champions. The Colts were probably the best team of this past year. The Steelers beat them fair and square. They also beat the Seahawks. They (mostly) earned their Superbowl title.
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