American Pharoah for SI Sportsman of the Year

[Alabama Stakes]

Originally Posted by blackthroatedwind

I voted for Effinex.

Trivia.....What does effinex mean in Boston Speak ?

[RUFFIAN]

Not sure if anyone has posted this yet but the voting is on
for Sports Illustrated > Sportsman or Horse of the year

Here is the info


AT THIS POINT IN VOTING....
THE TOP 2 CONTENDERS ARE:
PHAROAH AND KANSAS CITY ROYALS.


http://www.si.com/sportsmanofyear/20...ear-contenders

[GenuineRisk]

American Pharoah easily dominates his human competition and wins the readers' choice for Sportsman of the Year. The breakdown of voting by region, age and gender is interesting:

http://www.si.com/sportsmanofyear/20...sportsman-year

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

American Pharoah easily dominates his human competition and wins the readers' choice for Sportsman of the Year. The breakdown of voting by region, age and gender is interesting:

http://www.si.com/sportsmanofyear/20...sportsman-year

Something's not right in those voting breakdowns. In the gender breakdown graph, KC appears to have twice as many male votes as Pharoah, while women voters appear to be split evenly between KC and Pharoah. So KC appears to have won. Yet in the overall tally, AP has 50% more votes. That makes no sense.

Okay, I see what's wrong. The gender and age breakdowns only included about 43,000 votes for all the nominees. But there were about 589,000 votes. So those gender and age graphs only show about 7% of the votes!

Somebody got carried away making pretty graphs but forgot about having it make sense or be representative of the data.

[bare it all]

Serena Williams ends up winning the actual title of sportsman of the year.

Take out the American Pharoah aspect and this selection still rubs me all the wrong way. Yes, Williams had another career year and did just what everyone expected her to do - except win the US Open in which she lost to an unknown Italian player in the semi-finals. Not even the finals. She was supposed to dominate and didn't and acted all put out like she usually does. She's a horrible sportsman and always has been. Women's tennis is notoriously weak at the top save Williams. She dominates an easily dominatable division. Sticking with tennis, a glance at the year Novak Djokovic had and anyone with a basic understanding of sports and competition can see that what he put together in 2015 was stunning. It's been called the "best year of tennis ever" in men's tennis. He was a set away from a Grand Slam (losing to Stan Wawrinka in the Aus Open final). He's currently miles ahead of the 2nd ranked player. I can't speak to the other nominees as I don't follow basketball or women's boxing or soccer or whatever else was nominated, but I can tell you the pick of William's in just the realm of tennis is an absolute sham because there were other competitors with stronger resumes for this year's award.

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Dunbar

Something's not right in those voting breakdowns. In the gender breakdown graph, KC appears to have twice as many male votes as Pharoah, while women voters appear to be split evenly between KC and Pharoah. So KC appears to have won. Yet in the overall tally, AP has 50% more votes. That makes no sense.

Okay, I see what's wrong. The gender and age breakdowns only included about 43,000 votes for all the nominees. But there were about 589,000 votes. So those gender and age graphs only show about 7% of the votes!

Somebody got carried away making pretty graphs but forgot about having it make sense or be representative of the data.

It's possible they pulled from the people who identified age and gender (I can't remember if I did, or had to), and not the rest who didn't. It's also possible they only analyzed a segment of the total data, but if they did, it's probably pretty representative of the total voting population.

Either way, I'll forward it on to my brother, who has a PhD in statistics and ask him what he thinks of the accuracy of the presented data. He lives for this kind of thing.

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

It's possible they pulled from the people who identified age and gender (I can't remember if I did, or had to), and not the rest who didn't. It's also possible they only analyzed a segment of the total data, but if they did, it's probably pretty representative of the total voting population.

Either way, I'll forward it on to my brother, who has a PhD in statistics and ask him what he thinks of the accuracy of the presented data. He lives for this kind of thing.

I'm sure your brother will come to the same conclusion I did. The data shown in the the male/female graph totally misrepresents the overall data. Likewise, but less glaringly so, the data in the "by age" graph also misrepresents the overall data.

Look at it again--don't you agree that the male/female graph seems to show that KC had more votes than AP?

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Dunbar

I'm sure your brother will come to the same conclusion I did. The data shown in the the male/female graph totally misrepresents the overall data. Likewise, but less glaringly so, the data in the "by age" graph also misrepresents the overall data.

Look at it again--don't you agree that the male/female graph seems to show that KC had more votes than AP?

I don't; what I took from it was that AP's win was dependent on women voting for him in much larger numbers, percentage-wise than men did. That said, graphs can be notoriously poorly designed, you're right about that. There was one recently used on FOXNews that was cited as a textbook example of a graph, while not exactly contradicting the information, was drawn as to lead to an incorrect conclusion about it. It was pretty funny to look at.

The other thing is that stood out to me with the SI stuff is that it lists more women than men voting, which, not to generalize, but I can't help but find unlikely for a sports magazine. So I'm curious if they took a random sample of all voters, or if more women voters than men were willing to identify themselves by gender when voting (though, again, I can't remember if I was asked to categorize myself).

[GenuineRisk]

It will be interesting to see if the Zayat response (their tweets quoted by Bloodhorse are, er, a bit bitter) will garner them the same level of vitriol from racing fans as California Chrome's connections got after mouthing off after Chrome's Belmont loss.

http://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-raci...an-of-the-year

[Danzig]

the horse don't care...so who cares?

but...if they didn't want to give to a non human, why allow voting on a non human?

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

I don't; what I took from it was that AP's win was dependent on women voting for him in much larger numbers, percentage-wise than men did.

It's true that a higher percentage of women than men voted for AP. But it's also crystal clear from those graphs that more people overall voted for Kansas City than for AP. If you only had those "by gender" graphs to go by, there's no rational way you would conclude that AP got the most votes.

Whatever way they got the sample of voters in that gender graph, it wasn't representative of the overall voting. There's nothing subtle about the discrepancy:

http://www.si.com/sportsmanofyear/20...sportsman-year (about half-way down the page, just above the comments)

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Dunbar

It's true that a higher percentage of women than men voted for AP. But it's also crystal clear from those graphs that more people overall voted for Kansas City than for AP. If you only had those "by gender" graphs to go by, there's no rational way you would conclude that AP got the most votes.

Whatever way they got the sample of voters in that gender graph, it wasn't representative of the overall voting. There's nothing subtle about the discrepancy:

http://www.si.com/sportsmanofyear/20...sportsman-year (about half-way down the page, just above the comments)

I wouldn't say "crystal clear," but I would agree that the bar graphs are a muddled mess- without showing the numbers next to the colors, there's not much you can take from the bar graphs (though they are very pretty). My brother's take on it was that it was highly unlikely it was representative data- if you're only taking respondents who self-identify their gender and age, you're not going to get a clear representation, because only using voters who voluntarily give out that data is already affecting the results. He mostly focused on the fact that the poll is clearly skewed by its nature to America, which made me laugh. To quote him:

"The world figure shows it was a pretty biased selection with the US dominating the number of respondents. The rest of the world cares about soccer and almost exclusively soccer. That figure does show that we do have to be careful in interpreting the data. Australia voted for Stephen Curry? Really? The American basketball player. Either there is a Rugby or Cricket player also named Stephen Curry or the only vote from Australia was by an American ex-pats living there."

But hey, props to Uruguay, for voting for the Pharoah!

[Alabama Stakes]

Rough to lose to a girl

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Alabama Stakes

Rough to lose to a girl

Imagine the rest of the nominees if AP had won- "I lost to a 3-year-old."

[TheFlyingFilly]

My response to "he's just a horse!"

[Danzig]

http://cs.bloodhorse.com/blogs/horse...t-nothing.aspx

well done.

and i also read that SI opened up voting, but also said they would choose the winner themselves. they never said the award would go to who got the most fan votes.

[OldDog]

Originally Posted by Danzig

http://cs.bloodhorse.com/blogs/horse...t-nothing.aspx

well done.

In-deed!

[Kasept]

As noted throughout the odyssey, work of @SITimLayden mirrored near-perfect American Pharoah's. And now, Tim's coda.
http://www.si.com/sportsperson/2015/...?xid=si_social

[Aly-Sheba]

Originally Posted by arizonadave

Maybe it's just me,but who looks at SI anymore. Wait, maybe just on that one special day.

Well said Dave, only one day a year you hear their name.

[Kasept]

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/52905...rts-story-year

NEW YORK (AP) — American Pharoah's sweep of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes for horse racing's first Triple Crown since 1978 was selected the sports story of the year Thursday in an annual vote conducted by The Associated Press.

Eighty-two ballots were submitted from U.S. editors and news directors. Voters were asked to rank the top five sports stories of the year, with the first-place story receiving five points, the second-place story four points and so on.

American Pharoah's Triple Crown win received 317 points and 43 first-place votes.

The No. 2 sports story, the "Deflategate" scandal that ensnared Super Bowl-winning Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, had 191 points and 13 first-place votes.

Here are 2015's top 10 stories:

1. TRIPLE CROWN: In the 37 years since Affirmed became the 11th Triple Crown winner — the longest drought in the sport's history — an unlucky 13 horses had won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness only to fail to complete the sweep at the Belmont Stakes.

But American Pharoah took the lead from the start of the grueling 1 1/2-mile race and kept extending it. The bay colt with the unusually short tail went on to win by 5 1/2 lengths for jockey Victor Espinoza, trainer Bob Baffert and owner Ahmed Zayat.

It was Baffert's fourth Triple Crown try and Espinoza's third, both records.

American Pharoah went on to cap his spectacular year with a victory in the $5 million Breeders' Cup Classic. He then retired at age 3 and will stand at stud for $200,000, one of the highest prices for a horse in his first year as a stallion.

2. DEFLATEGATE: The New England Patriots routed the Indianapolis Colts 45-7 in the AFC championship game Jan. 18 to return to the Super Bowl, but the on-field action was soon overshadowed by the scandal dubbed "Deflategate."

The NFL would go on to spend more than $3 million for the investigation by Ted Wells, whose 243-page report found it was "more probable than not" that two Patriots employees deliberately released air from Patriots game balls to below the league-mandated minimum at the game and Brady "was at least generally aware."

Brady, who had earned Super Bowl MVP honors when the Patriots won their fourth title, would be suspended four games. But a judge lifted the ban a week before the season, criticizing NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for dispensing "his own brand of industrial justice."

3. FIFA CORRUPTION: In an early-morning raid of a Zurich luxury hotel May 27, the U.S. government started a chain reaction that would take down soccer leaders around the world.

The 47-count indictment for racketeering and bribery was just the beginning. By year's end, FIFA's president, Sepp Blatter, and his one-time likely successor, UEFA President Michel Platini, had been suspended for eight years for unethical conduct by the sport's governing body.

4. WARRIORS WIN: Too small, not athletic enough. That was the knock both on the Golden State Warriors as a whole and on their star, Stephen Curry. Instead, the sweet-shooting Warriors won their first NBA title in four decades behind the league's MVP, beating LeBron James' Cleveland Cavaliers in six games.

Turns out that Golden State can play even better. The Warriors opened the following season with a record 24-0 start.

5. SPIETH CHASES GRAND SLAM: No one had gone wire to wire at the Masters in nearly four decades, but that victory was just the start of the year for 21-year-old Jordan Spieth. He won the first two legs of a Grand Slam, halfway to becoming the first modern player to complete the feat.

The only other men since 1960 to get that far were Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods — and none of them came as close to the third leg as Spieth, who was tied for the British Open lead with two holes to play before finishing one shot out of a playoff. He was also in the final group of the PGA Championship, where he was runner-up by three shots to Jason Day.

6. SERENA CHASES GRAND SLAM, TOO: In tennis, a player was even closer to completing a Grand Slam. Serena Williams was two victories from becoming the first since Steffi Graf in 1988 to win the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open in the same year. But in one of the sport's biggest upsets, unseeded Roberta Vinci stunned the 21-time major champion in the semifinals in New York.

Getting that far hadn't been easy, though. Eleven of Williams' victories at the majors came in three sets, including eight when she rallied from a set down. Hobbled by injuries all season, she was so sick in the final days of the French Open she considered withdrawing — yet somehow pulled out three-set wins in the semis and final.

7. WOMEN'S WORLD CUP: Four years after a heartbreaking loss to Japan in the Women's World Cup final, Carli Lloyd and her U.S. teammates made absolutely sure there would be no repeat in the rematch. Lloyd scored a hat trick in the first 16 minutes as the Americans won 5-2 in Canada for their first title since 1999.

With record TV audiences back home watching the prime-time matches, the U.S. looked shaky early in the tournament before some timely lineup changes by coach Jill Ellis put Lloyd in position for a scoring spree. All-time goals leader Abby Wambach got to end her career with her first World Cup championship.

8. ROYALS CROWNED: Kansas City was one win from a world championship in 2014, yet the small-ball Royals weren't considered favorites in 2015. The players in the clubhouse knew better, and they came from behind yet again in Game 5 of the World Series to beat the New York Mets in 12 innings for their first title since 1985.

9. MISSOURI FOOTBALL: Just two days after Missouri's football players threatened to boycott a game, the president of the university system stepped down. Tensions about race and other student welfare issues had been simmering for weeks before the athletes joined the protest in support of a graduate student who was holding a hunger strike.

As Tigers defensive end Charles Harris put it: "Let this be a testament to all of the athletes across the country that you do have power."

10. OHIO STATE TAKES FIRST CFP TITLE: The first College Football Playoff did exactly what it was supposed to, awarding a championship chance to a squad that seemed eliminated from title contention after an early-season loss and whose presence in the new four-team bracket was widely debated. Behind third-string quarterback Cardale Jones, Ohio State upset No. 1 Alabama and No. 2 Oregon to kick off a new era in the sport.