|
|
The Fan's Cornerwith Greg Duff: 1/4/00Predicting games and fantasy jobs |
|
|
|
|
I believe that people go through a majority of their lives observing how cool it would be to have certain jobs. Kids believe early on that they were meant to be firemen or lawyers or professional athletes. My daughter stated at age 4 that she is going to be a doctor and has begun her preparation by watching reruns of "ER" several times over.
This predisposition to fantasize about certain professions does not end with childhood. My friends thought I had the greatest gig in the world when I worked in athletics. They thought that all I did was watch sporting events all day. I was sorry to hit them with a dose of reality when I informed them I worked twice as much as they did and was forced to watch many bad sporting events. My first dream job was that of a sports statistician. A family friend with good connections took me to an Arizona State basketball game where I was able to sit on press row with the real stat people. Only then did I learn that these people had day jobs and they only kept stats a couple nights each week during basketball season. I was able to keep myself focused on a few dozen respectable vocations during high school and most of college until I saw in a magazine how much money a person could earn managing a sports book in Nevada or on some offshore island. With this realization, I immediately set out to create a mathematical formula that would predict the outcome of football games. I figured that once I had that it would only take a little tinkering to make it work for all types of sports. One only needs to glance at my college calculus grades to see how that venture turned out. Still I spent many evenings coming up with "foolproof formulas" only to see them trashed come Saturday and Sunday. This failure did not dissuade my belief that I could predict the outcome of games. I set out to prove my ability in weekly office pools, The Sylva Herald's weekly football contest (until my marriage to Lisa disqualified me from winning), and various games played in conjunction with the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. If my memory serves me correctly, I have won a total of $21 - a return slightly worse than the NASDAQ this year. Of course, if I were a Major League Baseball player, my success-to-failure ratio would entitle me to a $12 million contract over four years, guaranteed. Leaving the world of athletics has taken me away from many opportunities to show my prognosticating ability. The only other option lies in the nether world of sports gambling. Fortunately, I have no desire to attend Gamblers Anonymous in the future. Still, when I began writing this column I felt that I should impart some of my knowledge by forecasting the winner of this year's college football national championship. The first draft of my second column predicted that the University of Wisconsin would take it all in Miami on Jan. 3. In it I said, "the Big Ten champs won't play in Pasadena this year." I was half right. The Badgers didn't even make it to the Rose Bowl. I could not get the rest of the column to work, so I decided to go with something else. On the night of this year's national championship game, I am left with one consolation: While I did not pick Oklahoma to be here, neither did anyone else. I guess the job of predicting outcomes should be left to the experts. Whoever they are. |
Back to Sports: 01/04/01. |