Fantasy Football, Ranking, Playoff Seeding and The American Electorial College
So how do I link the #ElectoralCollege to !Fantasy Sports Discussion?
Well, I was realizing this season how put-off I was by the way things were working out. Despite my revulsion towards Hillary Clinton (though not for the reasons you may think, and more for Bill), I couldn't help think, "so this is how she felt." Mind you when reading this, I'm the Commissioner and I set all the rules for how the season would be measured.
- I had the best draft of my life, A+ rating and most likely to win all games before the season started.
- I've been consistently scoring the highest or nearly the highest number of points each week of the season.
- As each new week starts the statistics have me easily predicted as the winner for the week by about a 10% point margin at the least.
- My accumulated "points-for" has been consistently higher all season than all other teams for every week.
- Only one game this season could I blame my own actions for a loss, and that was because I didn't get to fill the empty slot after a player trade went through before game day.
My record right now is 6-6-0! I'm barely making the playoffs! I'm only "inches" ahead of the second-place team in my division!
- I have players that randomly underperform each week.
- My opponents have been consistently scoring the highest or nearly the highest number of points for the game they play me all season long.
- As each new week happens the opponent's players perform better than expected.
- My accumulated "points-against" have been consistently higher all season than all other teams for every week.
- I routinely have players in the lineup become injured immediately after the game starts or players marked as doubtful on the bench who have a great day and their points don't count for me.
It's the win ratio that teams are ranked on; (Wins + (Ties / 2)) / Games. That formula ignores the total points scored. It's like the way the electoral college ignores the total number of votes and just counts each district as a win or a loss. I'm aware of my own cognitive dissonance here. I know I'm unhappy with the way the scoring is being done because I'm losing despite all the statistics saying I should be winning right now!!! And that's why I think I know how #HillaryClinton felt, but just a little bit. I'm not going to get #PTSD from this season.
If I were to change it next year to total points, I might then have an undefeated record and have fewer points than most teams putting me in the same pickle.
There's a big difference between the fairness of each; the Win Ratio and the Electoral College. Remember above in the bulleted list where I admitted one of the losses was clearly my fault because I didn't put a player in the lineup who was on the bench? That is (at its best) not entirely in the control of the candidates competing in the Electoral College. In #FantasyFootball a manager controls all aspects of their team and it is competition in the most egalitarian way possible; most of the results of what happens to your plans is just good and bad luck, not treachery. We will get to treachery later, but first I want to show why the idealized Electoral College is valid.
If you don't know much about how the Electoral College works, you need to know at a minimum that districts are formed by trying to have equally populated groupings across the land. Each district is like a team in fantasy football with a set of players that can be put into the game and depending on performance players can add points to the team they signed up to or the other team (fumbles, interceptions, missed tackles, etc). Now suppose America had 2 districts. One district is typically points for team Blue and it's a city, and the other is typically for team Red and its all farmland.
- Team Blue won in the city by 2 million votes and 30 million voters showed up out of 40 million voters.
- Team Red won on the farmland by 1 vote and 1 voter showed up out of 40 million voters.
We can say were fairly certain that in the city we have some solid evidence that if all 40 million voted, Blue would be the victor. It's only ludicrously plausible that if all the 40 million farmland voters showed up it would still be a Red team victory (let alone a 100% victory of 40 million votes), but that's all the evidence we have, so in the end, it's a tie election where one vote had the same weight as 16 million. It would be negligent to tell the 39.999999 million voters they don't matter just because they didn't show up on game-day and assume they wanted team Blue to win.
I have had people complain that in the Electoral College it's winner-take-all in most states, but that's just a second level of smoothing where a super-district is formed based on individual districts, and that's comparable to the overall goal. Math note here, it has been proven that an average of sample averages tends towards the true mean of a population, the winner-take-all is an average of sample averages. The reason to stop aggregation at a State level is because we are the United States, not a United State.
Personally I would rather have it be a popular vote if voting was mandatory (side-note to follow), barring that option I would not want winner-take-all for any state. I don't want to force people to vote if they don't like any candidate so my ideal voting ballot would only allow one up-vote for a candidate (or rank choice voting) in a position, but it would allow down-votes for all the other candidates (or even down for all!), and that way we could see how weak of a mandate the elected official has when taking their position of power.
The real trouble with the Electoral College is how to draw the lines that form the equal population groups. #Gerrymandering is a mindful method of cheating one majority group out of their voice in politics for the benefit of another group with less voting power. Because their's no truly egalitarian way to draw the lines objectively serving all people equally, the #SCOTUS just tossed up their hands and said figure it out for yourselves, so we do hellscape instead of heading towards justice.
There's also trouble with the players sitting on the bench in the Electoral College. In the Fantasy Football metaphor, it would be as if all the other managers had ways of making your players decide to not play on game day. #VoterSupression can be as small as telling your opponents voters the wrong voting day, or moving their voting booth farther away, or not staying open when they can show up to vote, or having people in red hats exercise their open-carry rights near the polling doorways, or misplacing their mail-in ballots, or as wholesale as hacking a voting machine's computer to flip the tally when it's close to a given side which was losing.
The problems we have with fair and open elections are numerous in the #UnitedStates but I don't believe the #Electoral #College is one of them.
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