Jet lag proved to impact games - MLB

The below is a link to a study that not only shows the impact jetlag has on sports teams but also shows that going east is worse than going west. Yes the study was done on MLB teams but there is no reason to believe it is different for NFL teams.

To continue to have West coast teams including Sehawks play in the early time-slot is directly impacting the results and we should keep lobbying the NFL to change this.

http://es.pn/2j6MZ5v

mikeak":2nplxne5 said:

The below is a link to a study that not only shows the impact jetlag has on sports teams but also shows that going east is worse than going west. Yes the study was done on MLB teams but there is no reason to believe it is different for NFL teams.

To continue to have West coast teams including Sehawks play in the early time-slot is directly impacting the results and we should keep lobbying the NFL to change this.

http://es.pn/2j6MZ5v

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Not to be Capt. Obvious.....but isn't this obvious and already known by every elite level sports federation in existence since at least 1950? The NFL doesn't care and it's just another reason among many that Mark Cuban is being proven to be correct.

Cue the "suck it up, real teams would fight through adversity and win anyway" comments.

Science isn't fashionable...

Yep - Cue the #alternativefacts

Not sure what a good solution is. Maybe instead of NFC vs AFC it should be organized more along the lines of EFC vs WFC? Would help both the time-travel and the regional/fan rivalry interest.

LeftHandSmoke":1gxxzmmq said:

Yep - Cue the #alternativefacts

Not sure what a good solution is. Maybe instead of NFC vs AFC it should be organized more along the lines of EFC vs WFC? Would help both the time-travel and the regional/fan rivalry interest.

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Three conferences would be fairest or an unbalanced schedule like every other league in the world. But fair and sensible isn't how the NFL rolls. Money is how they roll so real competitive advantage goes to the East. Hopefully they change but not likely there's no reason to.....yet.

The most logical solution would what they have currently with an unbalanced schedule followed by three conferences 10/10/12 with an unbalanced schedule. Either way an unbalanced schedule must happen or it's moot.

Where's Gaucho?

LeftHandSmoke":3uyn32yl said:

Yep - Cue the #alternativefacts

Not sure what a good solution is. Maybe instead of NFC vs AFC it should be organized more along the lines of EFC vs WFC? Would help both the time-travel and the regional/fan rivalry interest.

Click to expand...

I really like how Basketball does that with their leagues and I think it would be a great thing for the NFL to do. They've done a better job of getting the divisions at least aligned but I think they could benefit from doing it at the conference level. Imagine if teams in the west actually had 10 games a year played relatively close to home. Teams in the east get it all the time. Then set up the playoffs to be semi-regional so that, say, the winner of the NFC West would play the winner of the NFC Central in a late afternoon game and the winner of the NFC East would play the winner of the NFC South in an early game.

When it effects Advertising revenue and attendance and TV ratings then maybe the NFL will give a flying shit.

:greetingsearthling:

LeftHandSmoke":1k3mybww said:

Yep - Cue the #alternativefacts

Not sure what a good solution is. Maybe instead of NFC vs AFC it should be organized more along the lines of EFC vs WFC? Would help both the time-travel and the regional/fan rivalry interest.

Click to expand...

Well for starters west coast teams should not play in the early time slot. They have rules about east coast teams traveling west which is easier....

mikeak":lhpm1x8u said:

:greetingsearthling:

LeftHandSmoke":lhpm1x8u said:

Yep - Cue the #alternativefacts

Not sure what a good solution is. Maybe instead of NFC vs AFC it should be organized more along the lines of EFC vs WFC? Would help both the time-travel and the regional/fan rivalry interest.

Click to expand...

Well for starters west coast teams should not play in the early time slot. They have rules about east coast teams traveling west which is easier....

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Yup and....dude you are being logical and sensible. Really? I'm going middle ground yet both of you ignore me? I guess. That is typical and boring.

LeftHandSmoke":tjb2uboe said:

Yep - Cue the #alternativefacts

Not sure what a good solution is. Maybe instead of NFC vs AFC it should be organized more along the lines of EFC vs WFC? Would help both the time-travel and the regional/fan rivalry interest.

Click to expand...

LOL "Alternative Facts"

So I take it nobody has actually read the link yet?

The study found that there is a very slight decline in performance for east coast teams in their next home game after traveling back from the west coast, but found no effect for any other scenarios.

So, from the results of this study neither the Seahawks now any other west coast team has anything to worry about.

That's if you believe the study though, which I don't think we should.

What's happening here, I think, is what Andrew Gelman (a statistician at Harvard) refers to as "the garden of forking paths" which plagues statistical research. It's also referred to as p-hacking.

Basically, you take your data and keep slicing it up in different ways until you stumble across a publishable significant result.

Did these guys set out to test if East Coast teams traveling from the West Coast have a slight performance decline in their next home game on the east coast (with no effects for their travel to the west coast or for west coast teams traveling to the east coast or west coast teams in their next home game after traveling to the east coast)? That's INCREDIBLY unlikely.

Much more likely is that they ran a more straightforward and intuitive model, found no effect, and started slicing up their data in different ways until they found something that was significant at the .05 level that they could publish.

At this point it's not formally academic malfeasance, but there are big movements in the academy right now to make people register their hypotheses in a central clearing house before running their analyses in order to prevent what I strongly suspect is what's happening here.

Edit: this is all based on the article linked. I haven't read the actual PNAS article, so any errors in what I've said are dependent on what the article actually found having been accurately reported.

In any case the only #alternativefacts being circulated here is that this study supports the hypothesis that the Seahawks suffer a penalty from playing early games on the East Coast. Like all other alternative facts, that's just plain and simply not true (meaning, that the study supports that hypotheses -- it actually finds that comparative hypotheses is not true in the data they have)

You know how you fix that...you beat Arizona at home, perhaps not lose to Tampa Bay, make a field goal in OT in Arizona Or score even ONE touch down against the Rams, you know the same team the Niners beat 28-0 the week before. Any of those scenarios would basically have locked the #2 seed. So yeah I'm not pointing to jet lag as some unfair reason the Hawks couldn't get to the SB.

It seems to me that we haven't had all that many early EST starts the last two years.

The only one I can remember last year was the Jets and we won that game. Maybe they're working on it ?

I honestly can't understand whey they don't have West Coast teams play the afternoon game. 2/3's of the games are played early anyways, and the afternoon games are almost always west coast teams so it's not like it would hurt east coast ratings.

Some east coast teams barely travel 3000 miles total for the season. West coast teams can rack up more than that in a single trip.

SeaChickN":1m3ck3ut said:

Cue the "suck it up, real teams would fight through adversity and win anyway" comments.

Science isn't fashionable...

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Hard, accurate, unbiased science isn't fashionable. Even to those that think they love hard science.

Let's run a test...How many people think the primary cause of jet lag is flying across time zones?

I'm willing to bet virtually everyone. Problem is, it's the cabin pressure that does it; alters your circadian rhythm. They've reproduced jet lag in people just resting in hyperbaric chambers set to the same pressurization the average airplane is set to (8,000 feet on an average flight), and similarly, they tried giving people oxygen on an airplane so they were breathing the same pressurization as they are at sea level, and voila! Jet lag largely disappeared. (The link only covers the circadian rhythm part.)

http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(16)30499-5.pdf

That's one for mice, I'm trying to find the one I read years ago where they put people in hyperbaric chambers to reproduce the symptoms of jet lag and it worked very effectively, but can't at the moment.

In any case, how many teams are doing this for their players to prevent losing a competitive edge? None that I know of.

People don't care to actually try and learn real science. Everyone thinks "oh, changing time zones makes sense for causing jet lag" and the perception just makes people stop there. A common phenomenon in humanity, unfortunately. The fact that people still get jet lag when flying straight north or south for hours should be all the evidence needed for people to strongly question what the common belief is for its cause, but nope.

Also, light plays a role as well; I'm not saying it doesn't.

RolandDeschain":3bp92min said:

SeaChickN":3bp92min said:

Cue the "suck it up, real teams would fight through adversity and win anyway" comments.

Science isn't fashionable...

Click to expand...

Hard, accurate, unbiased science isn't fashionable. Even to those that think they love hard science.

Let's run a test...How many people think the primary cause of jet lag is flying across time zones?

Click to expand...

I'm fine with the theory, but it's weird to say that "hard, accurate, unbiased science isn't fashionable" in the context of this thread, as the actualy findings of the study under question contradict your theory.

Remember, the finding is that east coast teams returning from a west coast game suffer a small performance penalty in their next home game on the east coast.

If your theory about air pressurization was having an effect they would find a performance penalty for east coast teams when they play on the west coast, west coast teams when they play on the east coast, west coast teams in their next home game after returning to the east, and so on (add north and south, although I don't know if they tested that).

In this thread the closest thing we have to a "hard, accurate, unbiased" study is basically being ignored because nobody wants to move off their priors.

(all that said, to reiterate, I still have major doubts about this study, which are entirely about the effect they found, not the wide array of non-effects they found -- they have data from 48,600 games, if there was an effect going on they'd be picking it up, and I strongly suspect they're just slicing up their data in convoluted ways to save their study and have a finding they could publish on).

We had two 10AM games all season and went 1-1. Our road playoff game started at the same time a home game did. In fact our worst performances of the season came in late kickoffs.

I believe the early kicks on the east coast can affect the start of the game, simply because these guys are creatures of habit.. but to turn it into some vast conspiracy like the NFL has it out for us is hilarious.

Again, this isn't a conspiracy at all - its all related to television and ad revenue from said games.

LeftHandSmoke":7tow3hqg said:

Yep - Cue the #alternativefacts

Not sure what a good solution is. Maybe instead of NFC vs AFC it should be organized more along the lines of EFC vs WFC? Would help both the time-travel and the regional/fan rivalry interest.

Click to expand...

We play two AFC road games a season. It's not even NFC vs AFC now.

The best possible solution would be to have west coast teams play east coast teams in their regular 1:05/1:25 time slot, but again.. if the Seahawks are 11-1 and going on the road to take on a Giants team thats 9-3, and the NFL doesn't have many options for the 1PM ET time slot... guess what time the Seahawks are playing?

It's all television related. Always has been. Always will be.

At the same time that the 10 AM kickoffs are disadvantage for west coast teams, the 8 PM primetime matchups are favorable for the west coast teams regardless of whether it's 8 PM EST or 8 PM PST.

49ers have most all time wins on Monday Night Football, and Seahawks have best winning percentage.

The east vs. west coast MNF results tracked over a decade showed the west coast team winning like 75% of the time.

Overall, it's not the worst thing ever.

Harbaugh first year with the Niners won all of his 10 am starts. He had a pretty impressive 10 am record with the Niners. Even 2014 he beat Saints & Giants back to back 10 am starts.

Now go blame it on the Latitude. :mrgreen: