The All-American XI
January 9th, 2009First, to address what is probably the most obvious bias: tv time.
Below are the number of AAXI elections and % American minutes for the ten MLS teams:
Chicago 37 81.6
Colorado 22 81.2
Columbus 38 84.8
D.C. United 41 73.5
Dallas 27 73.0
Kansas City 30 83.2
Los Angeles 25 65.5
Metrostars 42 65.9
New England 29 71.4
San Jose 28 81.5
Total 319 76.1
From this, we should expect about .42 nominations per percentage point of American minutes played. Below are the expected nominations/team, and difference from expected and actual:
Chicago 34.2 2.8
Colorado 34.0 -12.0
Columbus 35.5 2.5
D.C. United 30.8 10.2
Dallas 30.6 -3.6
Kansas City 34.9 -4.9
Los Angeles 27.4 -2.4
Metrostars 27.6 14.4
New England 29.9 -0.9
San Jose 34.1 -6.1
These biases showed no correlation (-.03) to Goal-predicted win % or actual win % (-.05). Much of the bias here may be caused by small samples - the MetroStars got a huge boost from Eddie Gaven, D.C. I suspect from Nowak's attractive style, and Hankinson's unattractive one, had large roles in who got selected.
I tend to agree with voros. Younger players like Dempsey and Gaven were given a lot of nods partly because their performances were so unexpected and they were young players who generated excitement. I kind of feel that a player like Robin Fraser on the whole got the shaft. He had a young Chad Marshall next to him who got a lot of attention, but the truth is Fraser's performance on a weekly basis was probably just as good, if not better.
I tried almost on a weekly basis to explain to folks that we were either going to miss some games, or there were going to be some games that weren't televised. I think players from Colorado and Kansas City may have gotten more nods had we gotten more opportunities to see them.
For the most part, it was a fun excercise and made watching the games a bit more interesting last year. I won't do it again, but it was fun once.
I think there's been a lot of debate about this somewhere, but at least according to the Rapids press release here here (http://www.intermark.com/rapids/rp040322.asp) (forgive the terrible background), he's a dual-citizen.
Frankly, it doesn't make a lot of difference to me.
Through the first 9 weeks of the season, there have been 6 AAXIs (we got a late start), for a total of 66 slots. Here's the team-by-team break down, including nominations and current points:
Galaxy---13-----19
Revs-----10-----21
Fire------7------16
Metros---7------15
DC-------6------11
RSL------6------11
Dallas----4------21
SJ-------4------13
Chivas---3------4
KC-------3------15
Rapids---3------8
Crew----0------10
This seems to be pretty well correlated to how teams are doing (r(11)=.605, p<.05). We can explain a little more than 36% of the variance in AAXI nominations among teams simply by seeing how many points those teams have accumulated. The Crew's only participation has been through their fans, who claimed the "12th man" spot in week 7. Chivas has claimed the 12th man spot 3 times, the referees once, and the mls foreigners once. All of the Rapids' nminations have been defenders or Joe Cannon.
The current leaders in nominations are usual suspect Eddie Gaven, aerodynamic Pete Vagenas, and Pat Noonan. All have three. 48 different players have received nominations, so almost 3/4ths of nominated players have received only one nomination. High profile players with 0 nominations: GAM, Jon Busch, Chad Marshall, Danny Szetela, Jeff Cunningham (and others I'm too tired to think of right now).
The AAIX has "played" a different formation every week: 2-5-3, 3-5-2, 3-6-1, 4-3-3, 5-3-2, 4-4-2. 6 GKs, 21 defenders, 26 midfielders, and 13 forwards have been nominated. On average, that works out to a 3.5-4.333-2.167 formation.
I thought "Kicker syndrome" was the automatic addition of 1 point to any american player. Thus it is irrelevant to the AAXI!
:)
I tend to agree with voros. Younger players like Dempsey and Gaven were given a lot of nods partly because their performances were so unexpected and they were young players who generated excitement. I kind of feel that a player like Robin Fraser on the whole got the shaft. He had a young Chad Marshall next to him who got a lot of attention, but the truth is Fraser's performance on a weekly basis was probably just as good, if not better.
I think voros' analysis was tremendous, and particularly agreed with his points about confirmation bias and the Jay Heaps/Clint Dempsey problem, where technically gifted players are more likely to get votes, regardless of their in-game performance. However, interestingly, Marshall got few votes until the end of the season (nominated in weeks 7,9,17,21,22,23,25,26,27). Although the Crew's turnaround likely factored into this, it indicates to me that he wasn't simply being nominated for being surprising. I didn't watch many Crew games, so I'm not one to talk, but I suspect Fraser's Defender of the Year nomination was just as biased as these votes were.
I tried almost on a weekly basis to explain to folks that we were either going to miss some games, or there were going to be some games that weren't televised. I think players from Colorado and Kansas City may have gotten more nods had we gotten more opportunities to see them.
For the most part, it was a fun excercise and made watching the games a bit more interesting last year. I won't do it again, but it was fun once.
Well, that would be a shame, I certainly hope somebody continues it.
Maybe de la Torre suffered by not being American.
Also DC united and the Metrostars I think had every single match televised.
Only one United game, the 9/4 game in Chicago (a 3-1 loss), was not televised.
I thought he was a green card holder.
Er, I meant 26.43 leaguewide.
That's what I meant by 'confirmation bias.' People tend to see what they expect to see. If you're aware of it you can try and adjust your judgments, but realistically there's nothing much you can do about it when it comes to subjective evaluations, it's the price we pay for our ability as humans to learn and process information quickly.
The end result was a shortage of KC nominations. Also DC united and the Metrostars I think had every single match televised.
I think the guys did a fairly good job though I think the weaknesses and biases in this sort of system inevitably did surface.
Confirmation bias was a continual problem. I tried my best to overcome this by trying to nominate guys like Kenny Arena and Jack Jewsbury when they did play well. But nevertheless, I and the other selectors, like anyone else, are more likely to see during a game what we're expecting to see (and conversely miss what we were not expecting to). Once Gaven, Marshall and Dempsey showed what they were capable of, the nominations became nearly a weekly occurrence. In each case, they probably all got at least one more nomination than they deserved.
I think also that younger players did a little better than maybe they should simply because they generate excitement for the future National Team.
Great analysis, voros. There was some bias towards the selection of younger players for the teams - the average AAXI age was 25.27, compared to 27.43 leaguewide. Whether this is because younger players are better, or the best younger players are more talented than the best older players, or that people prefer picking promising players, I don't know, or feel qualified to guess.
Finally there is a bit of a difference between playing well in a match and displaying talent in a match. Eddie Gaven, for example, had a lot of games where he displayed enormous amounts of talent, but maybe did not have nearly as much of an impact on that particular game. I think maybe that was also a source of bias. The point being that even when Jay Heaps manages to play well, it's evident that he lacks talent, and even when Clint Dempsey has an off-game, it's evident he's loaded with talent.
The only player I personally disagreed with getting a lot of nominations was Ben Olsen. I watched a lot of DC United and I really didn't see too much from him to suggest he was playing as well as the other guys who got that many nominations. But of course that's a subjective judgment on my part.
Which brings me to the AAXI winners of the year - I meant to post the top AAXI/90 players earlier but never got around to it:
Sanneh, Tony 14.7
Oshoniyi, Bo 12.4
Gaven, Eddie 11.7
Johnson, Edward 11.1
Eskandarian, Alecko 10.8
Adu, Freddy 10.5
Jaqua, Nate 9.6
Albright, Chris 9.5
Marshall, Chad 9.3
Donovan, Landon 8.7
Dempsey, Clint 8.7
Olsen, Ben 8.6
Brown, Adin 8.6
Twellman, Taylor 8.6
Gros, Joshua 8.5
Magee, Mike 8.2
Gibbs, Cory 8.2
Mullan, Brian 7.3
Armas, Chris 6.9
Mastroeni, Pablo 6.9
Szetela, Danny 6.7
Ralston, Steve 6.5
Kirovski, Jovan 6.4
Parke, Jeff 6.3
Convey, Bobby 6.1
Klein, Chris 6.0
Beasley, DaMarcus 5.9
Buddle, Edson 5.9
Danny Szetela got in with one, Convey and Adin Brown with two.
It's pretty amazing how the board opinion of Sanneh completely reversed from the end of the regular season to the playoffs.
If statistics, be they subjective (AAXI) or pseudo-objective (Save %, GAA, etc.) are any indication, Bo Oshoniyi really deserves to start in Kansas City next year.
Adu got one nomination before midseason, and five after.
Six of these 28 are rookies (plus Gibbs and Kirovski), four are sophomores. That is, thirteen (Sanneh) of the 28 "best" American American players were added in the last two years.
Crawford, Matt 2534
Heaps, Jay 2415
Gray, Kelly 2112
Waibel, Craig 2005
Leonard, Marshall 1992
Meola, Tony 1890
Kreis, Jason 1703
Franchino, Joe 1693
Talley, Carey 1688
Whitfield, Evan 1665
Kamler, Brian 1653
Pause, Logan 1482
Prideaux, Brandon 1458
Jewsbury, Jack 1406
Dayak, Troy 1367
Denton, Eric 1310
Behncke, Matt 1239
Hart, Wes 1180
Rimando, Nick 1170
Gomez, Francisco 1097
Perez, Orlando 1075
A few of these guys have excuses - they're young - Matt Crawford, Kelly Gray, Marshall Leonard, Logan Pause, Jack Jewsbury, and Matt Behncke may not be good now, but they've still got time to improve. The others looks like a who's who of mediocre players; the two biggest surprises here may be Jason Kreis and Tony Meola. However, considering how little Kreis scored, and how un-dangerous he looked all year long, he probably shouldn't be that surprising. Meola is most striking in contrast to his replacement, Bo Oshoniyi (4 in 810 minutes); it's hard to imagine that Meola can justify his cap hit anymore.
Below is a second, similar list of players nominated once, separated into above-24 and below-24 groups:
Hartman, Kevin 2655
Corrales, Ramiro 2475
Jolley, Steve 2428
de la Torre, Antonio 2409
Kotschau, Ritchie 2351
Victorine, Sasha 2265
Suarez, Ryan 2154
Reis, Matt 2115
Paule, Ross 2059
Gbandi, Chris 1771
Broome, Paul 1758
Hejduk, Frankie 1644
Quill, Eric 1377
Pierce, Rusty 1179
Russell, Ian 1091
Garlick, Scott 1068
U-24's
Davis, Brad 1945
Wingert, Chris 1488
Perkins, Troy 1440
Cila, Jordan 1310
Dunivant, Todd 1212
The only surprises here are Frankie Hejduk and Antonio de la Torre. I suspect that de la Torre, like Crawford, suffered simply by playing for the Rapids. Hejduk, I don't know.
The end result was a shortage of KC nominations. Also DC united and the Metrostars I think had every single match televised.
I think the guys did a fairly good job though I think the weaknesses and biases in this sort of system inevitably did surface.
Confirmation bias was a continual problem. I tried my best to overcome this by trying to nominate guys like Kenny Arena and Jack Jewsbury when they did play well. But nevertheless, I and the other selectors, like anyone else, are more likely to see during a game what we're expecting to see (and conversely miss what we were not expecting to). Once Gaven, Marshall and Dempsey showed what they were capable of, the nominations became nearly a weekly occurrence. In each case, they probably all got at least one more nomination than they deserved.
I think also that younger players did a little better than maybe they should simply because they generate excitement for the future National Team.
Finally there is a bit of a difference between playing well in a match and displaying talent in a match. Eddie Gaven, for example, had a lot of games where he displayed enormous amounts of talent, but maybe did not have nearly as much of an impact on that particular game. I think maybe that was also a source of bias. The point being that even when Jay Heaps manages to play well, it's evident that he lacks talent, and even when Clint Dempsey has an off-game, it's evident he's loaded with talent.
The only player I personally disagreed with getting a lot of nominations was Ben Olsen. I watched a lot of DC United and I really didn't see too much from him to suggest he was playing as well as the other guys who got that many nominations. But of course that's a subjective judgment on my part.
I believe that, by the AAXI rules, de la Torre was eligible because he's a US citizen and still eligible for the nats - otherwise, he wouldn't have gotten any votes. However, maybe he suffered some sort of bias.
Only one United game, the 9/4 game in Chicago (a 3-1 loss), was not televised.
Thanks
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