i know i am an outlier here, but i would never consider running uptempo press against a crap sim in round 1 unless i was an even 12 man rotation. and even then, i very rarely do it. its just such a low chance of losing on normal. you have to consider, what is that sim's odds of winning against a good team? for my best teams, there wasn't even a human team who could hit 10%, so the sim was some small fraction of 1%. even for a top 5ish team, what is it like 1%? even if its 1%, the main road that sim has is crippling foul trouble and the associated fatigue problems.
as shoe points out (re: some other thread), if you are sufficiently deep and don't foul a ton, its unlikely a garbage sim is going to push you into these problems. but if that is essentially their only road to a victory - why widen it? if they have a 0.4% chance of beating you on insane foul trouble, and a 0.2% chance of beating you otherwise (going back to my base case teams), its not worth reducing that 0.2% to 0.15%, because you increase that 0.4% to 0.6%, or something like that.
for the best press teams - there is no doubt - even 12 deep, i don't uptempo there. there's this nebulous middle where it might be advantageous, like a team who is pretty good, a top 5-10ish team or even up to an average #1 team, but not better. like if the sim has a 1% to beat you without foul trouble and 1% to beat you with major foul trouble, maybe the trade off is worth it. again, you'd have to be even 12 deep though IMO. for teams who are decently but not that much better than the sim, is where uptempo actually makes the most sense. chap and i almost lost to a sim last night with our 1 seed delaware state team in d1, but its fb/fcp 11 deep, running normal. press foul trouble and fatigue are no joke (it was the combination that almost sank us, as it almost always is). when you get into the game of building really good press teams, the foul/fatigue issues are major part of the odds of an upset, not just against the sims, but against the best human teams, too. this is why i am so uptempo adverse - my base case is teams who are significant title favorites, running a guard driven press scheme. everyone needs their own base case, the game is too complex not to narrow the battlefield. your base case should evolve as you do, but also, people should reach different conclusions based on their base cases. this is why i don't push the uptempo thing as much as i used to - but i will say - its very rarely a bad thing to adopt the practices that make the most sense when you are good, when you are still learning. its hard to break those bad habits later!
shoe likes to say FUWIS when this happens - i like to assume it was me and go from there. i have to make this point again, for this thread but also for toppdogg and whoever else (also re: a different thread). there are simply too many runs of too many NT wins to think the opposite. when i came up i assumed this game was like real life - the best team rarely won, and that was just how it was. it was rail's 8/9 that proved to me i was wrong (and a couple others) - if he was even 25% to win each of those years, that run would be ridiculous unlikely. even at 50% to win each year, his run is a little under 2% odds, if my mental math is right (1/(2^9/9)?). you don't need luck to win with ridiculous frequency. you can use cjwalden's ozarks run or my kansas run and/or other random selections from the top dozen of the game's all time great runs, it doesn't matter. the conclusion is the same. and to my friend dogg - i don't agree i give the community too little credit. you give them too much. 95% of NT teams, as a floor, are not within 2-3 points of their optimal setup. there may not be a single team in all the worlds that is within 1 point. even almost all NC winning teams aren't even close to optimized, when i was really active, almost every NC winning team i saw, i could rip to shreds in 10 minutes. it would take 5 pages just to touch on all the mistakes.
that's not intended to be harsh or degrading, my teams aren't perfect either. i have gotten them closer than just about anyone - but i still am clear eyed that i can't take them all the way there. as i pointed out in that 'term paper' - this game is a large, complex optimization problem. we cannot solve those, even with all the computers and mathematical geniuses in the world. we (humanity) can only approximate solutions. there is no shame in admitting you have no chance of getting it all right, as a mere one person who probably doesn't have access to all the math geniuses and computers in the world. frankly, understanding and accepting that is the first step to learning how to approximate better (the second step being identifying a base case and spawning the requisite cycle of experimentation and observation to find ways to improve your performance).
that said... sports... there is nothing you could reasonably do here to worsen your odds that significantly, where anything but a really high odds of winning was the final conclusion. so don't beat yourself up too much!! you definitely got very unlucky. its just that, that isn't the whole story. when you start optimizing for the NT where its a game of 6 series, every little thing matters so much more, and you have to consider a 1% difference in your odds of winning to be significant.
6/21/2020 11:16 AM (edited)