When A Tie Isn't a Tie

We've come to the end of the regular season for soccer and field hockey (one step closer to basketball!) and we've got a tie!

Ties are pretty rare, especially when teams don't beat the same teams, but we've got one. Marc Calnan from Eastern Maine Sports alerted me to this and it checks out. So we nearly got a bonus play-in game in 8-Man North, but Ashland went 1-0-1 against Van Buren in the regular season, which is the first tiebreaker, so they get the final playoff spot and a date with a Calais team that's +44 on the season.

Anyway, I tweeted that I was checking this by hand and got this message from Erik Atwell from the Penobscot Bay Press, which I do read. Erik does nice work up there.

I don't cover volleyball, but heal points are heal points.

Anyway, I get into this some on the podcast. It's weird.

Let's break it down. Here's the final standings in Class C Volleyball.

That's really, really close. There's not a lot of ways to get that little amount of separation.

Both teams played 14 games and a full C schedule. And both teams beat opponents that won a combined 39 games, so that isn't it.

If you throw out shared wins (they both beat Calais, for example), the combined Preliminary Index points were 252 for each team. So it should be a tie.

But it isn't.

Enter the MPA.

From the MPA website:

Back in the olden times, the Heal Points were calculated by hand, much like my first fantasy baseball league. Back in those dark days, we had to wait for the standings to come in the mail before we knew whether or not we won. It sucked. But that's where I taught myself Excel, because I had to know. Anyway, if you're doing it by hand, you obviously can't take this out to infinite decimal places. There's a limit in what you can ask a person to do. Also: imagine doing heal points by hand for 130 schools. Yikes.

Here's the wins for each team with the Preliminary Index taken out to 11 places. As you can see, the 11th spot is lower than 5, so you round down. Except for Jonesport-Beals, which is equally divisible by 14.

If you do a normal function of SUM(), the GSA total is 36.0, but if you round it at 10 places--that's ROUND(n,10)--you get a total of 35.999999999, which is less than 36. Hence, the tie is broken.

I've been waiting for this situation for a while. It almost happened several years ago in girls basketball, but Cony screwed it up and won on the final night of the season. At first glance, I kind of suspected that was what what going on--again, not a lot of things can cause that little amount of seperation--but I was surprised that the MPA's website was on top of this. It's the sort of archaic thing that you usually don't think to program in. But they did! So credit where credit is due.

But maybe we don't need to do it like this anymore? We have computers, after all. It seems like we can just do it the normal way?

With the regular season over, here's how the Model did.

Boys Soccer: 671-151 (81.63%)
Girls Soccer: 652-141 (82.22%)
Field Hockey: 414-75 (84.66%)

Not bad!

You can see how your team finished the regular season in the rankings.

And I've got the odds that your team will be taking home a Gold Ball in soccer or field hockey (football's coming).

Are they a contender? Or is it time to start focusing on more important things like basketball?

Speaking of football, I went down to South Portland to watch the Red Riots host Noble and it did not disappoint. I'd never been to SoPo before and it was a great atmosphere and a really nice night for October football.

Noble had a lead late and SoPo twice drove down with a chance to tie, only for Jamier Rose to do this (twice):

He's pretty good.

The win gets Noble into the Top 10.

Speaking of Portland, people are saying it's the best minor league sports city in the country.

We have some basketball coaching news.

Regan is going to York, which I'm hearing might be a top 4 seed in B South.

A good friend of mine who coaches youth soccer in the Midwest sent me this and I said I'd share it, as someone will surely have some experience with this.

If you have any advice on this, please put it in the comments.

The NBA is testing out a rule chance in the G League.

I love this.

BUT, did you know that in high school basketball, a heave is not a shot attempt?

It's true!

You get the idea. Anyway, no need to hold back and protect your FG%. Let it rip!

Lisbon has (finally) called their season.

This should have happened 2 weeks ago. I'm not sure what the delay was. I get that it's sensitive information and the police are involved, but it was clear their season was over a long time ago. To string people along like this is kind of a dick move.

Finally, there's some tragic news in college basketball.

The Model's picks for the Week 8 football games are after the jump.

I'm hoping to come back with prelim picks, assuming I can wrangle all the dates.