Lol you have me this close to posting “Webster’s defines ‘luck’ as…”
But I’m not gonna do it!
Anyway, I apologize for being a pain in the “rear”.
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And they didn’t feature Jones - who was legitimately terrific - on any of them! How do you do that?
Yeah, all of the regulars here know that UCLA benefited from a lot of statistically anomalous shooting, both on their own and their opponents’ part, both in the last few games of the regular season and first few games of the tourney–we’re all poring over the same info here, and not insulting one another with speeches about it. But just attributing UCLA’s entire run to “luck,” letting all of your analysis devolve upon that single word. . . just doesn’t cut it, pretty obviously. Lotta skilled players, coming together late, learning to play in the absence of several of their starts, hustling like crazy, banding together. “Luck. . .”? Just not a very satisfying or apt terms, especially not for a site where everyone’s working to discern the actual freaking variables.
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I said to my son “Stanford is trying to lose this, but I don’t think they have enough time to pull it off”.
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Make that Frantastickery and you’ve got me on board.
Iowa 2022 national champs, I’m calling it now.
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Michigan defense really did a number on UCLA aside from Juzang, but the offense pretty much let them down big time. We all knew that from watching this game.
The concept of “luck” depends upon one’s definition.
Much decisionmaking that takes place in certain sports is actually attempting to find the least improbable of a number of improbable options and then hoping the numbers even out.
Baseball is a good example of this. Even the best hitters do not reach base 50% of the time. So in any given at-bat, the chances are better that they will make an out. But we know that, over time, enough players will not make an out, and those non-outs will string together and result in scores.
Within the realm of strategy, underdogs may find that their best option is to choose a tactic that is usually lower in probability, but that will allow them to win if they can execute. I think of watching Fernando Verdasco upset Rafael Nadal in Australia a dozen or so years ago by hitting extremely difficult shots into small windows all game. If Verdasco had played a less risky, lower-probability-of-error game, he couldn’t beat Nadal. But his high-risk strategy worked because he made his shots.
A favorite doesn’t want to put themselves into a situation where they have to depend on a low-probability event, but underdogs are fine with that. If you told me before the 21 season that Michigan football would have the ball on the Ohio State 10 down 5 with one second to go… that’s a low probability play. And I’d 100% take it because Michigan is the underdog, so I’d love to be in a position where a single low-probability play could win a game, and credit the team for getting to that point.
Low-probability events don’t happen very often, and so we call it luck. But teams and athletes that are in the business of maximizing their opportunities will still play for those low probability events, because sometimes you roll double-sixes. That’s why teams foul when down 8, and why football teams rush to score a touchdown down 12 with no time outs and 30 seconds left to set up the onside kick. It won’t work most of the time. But you do it anyway, because of the rare opportunity where it does work.
Is it luck? Sort of. But you put yourself in position to get the lucky break. You gave yourself the chance.
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Not gonna dive into the “luck” discussion because that made my head hurt reading all of that 
With that said, I tend to call any perimeter shot that goes in off the glass…luck. No matter the time or circumstances of the game. It is not the ball flight the shooter intended. I’d much rather lose to UCLA’s overall “luck” than the “luck” of Suggs’ shot going in.
But for the March madness experience, I am glad he provided such a memorable (shining?) moment
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This whole dialogue about “luck” failed to acknowledge that Iowa got lucky in every game they won this year. I’ve never been more disappointed in the board as a whole.
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Do you have it set so any time the word Iowa is mentioned on this forum you get a push notification? Because if not it seems like it might be a real time saver.
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I think Dylan’s–and most statisticians–probably have something like a decent definition of luck as a skewing away from the mean, probability, and established averages. I don’t think anyone who watched closely thought that UCLA DIDN’T have a surprising share of it getting to the Michigan game. It just was very obviously not the whole story. It’s like you’ve erected this temple to the careful investigation OF all the angles, then you enter, look around, and attribute everything that happened to a fart. Or series of farts. And go on insisting that no one spent weeks, months, and years assembling the squad, drilling them, devising defensive game plans. Etc. Reductive and, in the end, not accurate.
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I’m definitely not a statistician, FWIW. Probably offensive to actual statisticians.
This is the big problem with your argument is that no one is saying that it is the whole story. People are just pointing out a half dozen reasons how it is a big part of the story (i.e. opponent free throw shooting).
You are arguing that “luck” isn’t the whole story while other people are just trying to point out it is an important part.
The reductive part is assuming that a conversation about luck is some how taking away from everything else, which isn’t what anyone is saying.
That’s not true, though. There are people reducing it to only luck.
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Who is doing that?
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This is the post everyone (including me) was replying to
It contains the explicit words “UCLA was lucky, not good.” So no, I do not believe I (or others) were wrong to argue against the binary.
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That’s fair; I did exaggerate a bit there. But that was a response to the claim that Michigan should only have been a slight favorite in the first place, which is at least as inaccurate.
How about, “UCLA’s success in the tournament was heavily, but not exclusively, dependent upon luck”?
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I only responded to one poster, Lopez, who definitely insisted it was the whole story. We all knew that UCLA had had considerable luck; you had pointed it out to us. I responded to a single poster, and then–to Stephenjrking’s much more measured take. And I’m not taking issue with him in my response, just clarifying my stance. My one and only take was that reducing it to that single word was absurdly reductive, and that was a response to the OP.
*factors unrelated to numbers
I think we should go with, “numbers unrelated to other numbers.”
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NUTON the haters
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