Thanks largely to an obscurely worded link from “the most important philosopher on the internet”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/ yesterday was the biggest day in the history of this blog – with somewhere between 1900 and 2800 page views (depending on which counter you believe).

I was worried that some of the new readers would not understand the subtle ironies of this site. So just to be clear, I don’t think Andy’s tournament picks reveal a disposition to akrasia. I do, however, think that Cornell is both the best philosophy school and the best basketball school in America. 24 hours later, the arguments I made for those conclusions just still look compelling.

But it seems basketball posts get all the hits, so here’s another.

Why is it that players are taken out of the game when they get into foul trouble? If they stay in the game, the worst thing that can happen is they foul out. And the cost of fouling out is that you have to spend part of the game on the bench. So to avoid the risk of the player spending a chunk of time on the bench, you make them spend a chunk of time on the bench. This doesn’t obviously make sense.

I can think of three possible explanations, none of them in general very good, although they might work in some cases.

First, minutes at the end of the game are more highly valued than minutes in the middle of the game. So sitting the player down so they can come back at the end is important. The problem is that there’s little evidence I can see that that claim is true. Buckets don’t count more at the end of the game, for instance.

Second, there might be some strategic loss from not having the option of moving the player in or out once they’ve fouled out. But that wouldn’t explain why star players, who would normally play most of the game anyway, sit when they’re in foul trouble. And the strategy coaches actually follow of automatically benching guys when they get in foul trouble seems to lead to just as large a loss of strategic options.

Third, if the player is part of a platoon, where two players rotate in and out of the one spot to each get a reasonable amount of rest, you might not want the other player being forced to cover the last ten or twelve minutes on their own. This one I think does make sense, but only when the players actually are meant to be platooned in this way.

So I think in general coaches would be better off leaving the players in foul trouble in, and telling them to be a bit careful about picking up cheap fouls.

Of course, I’m 11-5 in my selections after day 1 of the tournament, so you might want to ignore everything I have to say about basketball because I clearly still have a lot to learn.

Why were the picks so bad? I always pick 9 seeds over 8 seeds unless there’s a compelling reason, but all 3 8 seeds won today. And I was robbed on Dayton-DePaul. Dayton clearly should have won at the end of the first overtime. That would have made it a semi-respectable 12-4. The good news is that all my second round winners won, so I can still make up for the losses in round 2.