Last year I saw six regional games and four were absolute barn burners. This year of six games seen, one went to the final seconds, one other was close in the fourth quarter, the other four ranged from clear wins to routs. In all, girls regional games reverted to their 2016 form: only 5 games decided by 5 or fewer points (16 last year), only 13 by less than 10. So I didn’t get unlucky in choosing my games.
One other thing. I’ve probably seen between 1000 and 1500 games over the last 23 years. A Garfield girls free throw shooter was called for exceeding 10 seconds before taking a shot. That’s the first time I’d ever seen that called. Justified? I dunno. The referee was likely the only one in the building counting.
Check out the WIAA Regional program cards. The picture: La Center girls (check: in 1A), White Swan girls (check: in 2B), Federal Way boys (check: in 4A), Anacortes boys. What happened to them? Program cards were free at Tumwater and Auburn Mountainview. They cost $1 at Bellevue College. Is that another case of getting rich people in blue areas to subsidize the rest of the state? Of the six program cards, three have good quality pictures of the teams. The ones that don’t were the ones that cost a buck. Horribly pixilated grainy photographs. And howcum a dollar anyway? For District 1/2 2A tournament, each team got a full page, often in color, and these were free. Game prices were lower also.
Bellevue College charged $5 for a hot dog and $2 for a very small bag of popcorn. When last I was there it was $3 and $1 for a bigger bag: same as the standard prices for booster club concessions at high school sites. Maybe price gouging for concessions is just to get us warmed up for the Tacoma Dome. At least the police at Bellevue College weren’t taking on the job of confiscating food coming into the venue. Seems that Tacoma’s Finest consider the duty of safeguarding exorbitant prices charged by T-Dome vendors for sub-standard food to be their primary job. Wouldn’t want to patrol the hilltop now, would we? OK, that was during the Goodwill games, snatching sandwiches from the mouths of four year olds in 1990. Nowadays Tacoma Dome food-Nazis work for an outsourced security firm. Today protecting $9 hot dogs in Tacoma—tomorrow getting billion dollar contracts to kill Iraqis waiting in gasoline lines.
Ranking comparison update
After 96 regional games, LM-pts (aka TeamBrunnhilde points, MY ranking) has 80 correct. Next is MaxPreps 73, Composite 70, LM-wl (see below) at 69, Evans Ranking at 68, WIAA RPI and Won-Loss at 67, Captured W-L at 64. Of the 57 games which all rankers agreed, 51 were picked correctly, nearly 90%. Overall, rankers did better this year than last at regionals, were the top ranker had only 73 right and WIAA RPI had 60 right. Do bad games make for better rankings?
Linear Model using win-loss, while coming up with reasonable answers (4th place so far), is upon further review not the using an optimum regression technique for binary win-loss kind of data. I’ll have to revisit my binary data texts from 35 years ago—a task for this coming off-season.
Contentious matchups for Wednesday, judging by the disagreements among the rankers, are Taholah v Almira Coulee Hartline (1B Boys), Prairie v Wilson (3A Boys), Lewis and Clark v Sunnyside (4A Boys), Entiat v Mount Rainier Lutheran (1B Girls), Seattle Christian v Lakeside (Nine Mile Falls) (1A Girls), East Valley (Yakima) v Port Angeles (2A Girls), Black Hills v White River (2A Girls). Thirty of 48 games on Wednesday are unanimous choices.