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Did a Timer Error Change the Outcome of a Division I College Basketball Game?
New submitter javakah writes: Controversy has erupted from the February 10th basketball game between Boise State and Colorado State, and speculation is that a timer may have made an incorrect assumption about the number of frames per second the game was recorded in, and ultimately lead to an erroneous result. With the game tied in overtime, Boise State had the ball out-of-bounds with 0.8 seconds left on the game clock. The ball was thrown in-bounds, the shot went in, and the game clock showed that the Boise State player got the shot off with 0.4 seconds left. However there was a problem: the game clock did not start until a fraction of a second after the in-bounds player touched the ball. Referees decided to use video replay to examine whether the player had gotten the shot off within 0.8 seconds or not. To do this, they used a timer embedded in the video replay system. This embedded timer indicated that 1.3 seconds had passed between the time that the in-bounds player touched the ball and when he got the shot off. (Read more, below.)
With the result of the timer, referees ruled that Boise State's shot was invalid, and the game went on to double overtime where Boise State lost. Afterwards, the Mountain West Conference organization, in which both teams play, defended the outcome based upon the embedded timer showing that 1.3 seconds passed and released video of the replay footage. That footage however, clearly displays the game clock. It shows that the game clock, which was counting down from 0.8, counted down to 0.7 seconds 0.7 seconds after the in-bounds player touched the ball. The game clock also shows that there were 0.4 seconds left when the shot was taken. The problem arises however, that the video also reveals that embedded timer counted 1.3 seconds between when the ball was touched and when the shot was taken, meaning that in the time in which .3 seconds passed on the game clock, the embedded timer had counted .6 seconds. Speculation has now arisen that the video footage may have been taken at 60 fps, but that the embedded timer may have calculated the time with an assumption that the video was taken at 30 fps. This closely matches ESPN's own timing, showing that only 0.63 passed.
undefeated season
Good thing, being a basket ball game, it doesn't really matter.
.. does that timer say it took me to get first post?
This is why technical people actually need to review things before they're put into use, even for sports!
It's kind of a silly discussion because the clock is started and stopped by humans throughout the game. So even if an error was made here by some fraction of a second, there have to be numerous other errors throughout the rest of the game which aren't being considered with equal scrutiny. So yeah a timing error probably did cost one team the game but unless you go back across the entire game you'll never know which team got screwed by the timer.
It's like in football where the referee rather arbitrarily places the ball but then they measure it to the inch to see if they got a first down. The problem is with the spot, not with the measurement.
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
(ok, I didn't actually play basketball in hs, but if I had, I think the old coach would have said this the players)
Coming from a lifetime of bad calls in every sporting league ever, I'd encourage everyone to realize that the call made on the field of play is the only call that matters. It's a game, but not only that, it's a game you agreed to play under the appointed judges. Don't like the calls? Change the agreement you play under. Until then quit your whining and play ball.
So if we want to get non-technical people to care about technical issues we just need to find some way in which it negatively impacts a popular sports, preferably during an important game or tournament.
So how do we get the NSA to screw up March Madness?
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The timekeeping generally isn't especially accurate until the end of a half (or quarter for the NBA or women's basketball). Until the final minute, tenths of seconds aren't shown. In regard to getting shots off on time, the shot clock can be an issue, and that's always measured in whole seconds despite counting down from 30 seconds (or 24 seconds in the NBA). The timekeeping isn't particularly precise, especially because it's done manually and probably has to be. Usually there isn't a review of whether the clock started exactly when a player touches the ball after it's inbounded. Usually the only issue is if the ball is still in contact with the player's hand when the light on the backboard goes on. If we went back and added up any timekeeping errors in the final minute of the game, we could very well find that the actual count is off by a second or two if there are enough stoppages in play. Normally this isn't reviewed.
That said, this is an easy thing to fix though the MWC may be reluctant to do so. It's easy enough to declare Boise State the winner because, if the shot counts, the game is over. It's simple enough for the final play to be reversed, but what about demonstrably incorrect calls earlier in the final minute?
What I'm more interested in is the syncing of video from multiple cameras. I'll give an example relevant to football. Let's say a player loses control of the ball as he's trying to stretch it over the goal line. You have one angle that's not right along the goal line so it's not conclusive whether the ball is over the goal line, but you can see the ball clearly, where the player is holding the ball, and when he loses control of it. There's another angle along the goal line where you can see the player leaping and his arm reaching out but the ball is obscured so you can't see if it goes over the goal line. Surely it should be possible to sync these up and conclusively determine whether the player had possession of the ball when it crossed the goal line. It would really improve replay in football. I could see benefit to baseball, too, in determining whether a player tagged up properly on a sacrifice fly or left early. Why isn't this done?
This controversy is silly. Both teams had all the rest of the game time to score one more point, and failed.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Consider how laughably imprecise soccer timing is. Extra time is added in increments of minutes. Full time is called by a referee looking at his watch (or not). It cost the US a win against Portugal last world cup.
This is pretty cool. The more we let technology automate the more mistakes can happen that we don't catch. Thankfully a bunch of people were there and figured out something was obviously wrong. The ball was released either Before or At the buzzer - all those present know that. But for the refs to have seen 1.3 seconds when there wasn't that much time on the buzzer should have thrown an internal "does not compute." The player would have had to release the ball "far" after the buzzer.
Checks and Double checks. Man vs Machine. It used to be nice when MLB allowed John Henry to officiate and leaving the fun of human mistakes in the game. But in the NFL where mm count - it is up to the booth. When the machine makes a mistake - humans wind up in the ditch.
It was the Tri-Lambs getting their revenge on the jocks. Eat it, Alphas!
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Didn't I just post that you should get a good night's sleep timothy? You're on a roll with dodgy posts today.
Maybe slashdot should implement a "preview" button for editors too!
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time. If a bad call is made it is my job as the coach to try to get things set right but at the end of the day the goal is to leave no doubt as to the outcome even in the fact of bad calls.
There is human error in every part of the play. There's a delay between the time the ball is in-bounded and when the time keep starts the clock. There's also a delay when the ball is dead and the time keeper stops the clock.
Humans are trying to outsmart humans and usually fail in the process.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Now people might start taking software quality seriously.
The stacked errors should have impacted both teams equally (generally speaking) since it was a "constant" factor (same human performing the same error)
In theory you should be right provided there is a large enough sample size. In reality it is VERY unlikely that it would work out equally balanced at the end of the game. It's not going to be a perfect bell curve with both sides equal. I used to do a lot of statistical simulation and real world outcomes very rarely match perfectly with models.
I would put cash money on a bet that if you added up the over and under on the clock stoppages you wouldn't come out to zero at the end of the game. In fact I would be surprised if you weren't off by a fairly significant amount, probably well over a second. I would guess that it would tend to skew late because the guy running the clock has to react to the whistle being blown and can't start the clock until certain actions occur. I could be wrong but I doubt it.
Make the clock only full second resolution AND make some kind of rule that says that inbounding the ball to a player is a full-second play. This way the only play allowed with 1 second on the clock would be a free throw, which is immune from the clock (I've seen free throws done with no time on the clock). Fouling the in-bounding team with 1 second on the clock would be pointless then.
This idea that you can stop the clock with a fraction of a second on the clock and actually execute a play is silly, and reduces the last few seconds of a basketball game into a tedious chess match of clock stoppage strategy.
If the teams are tied with 1-2 seconds remaining, conceptually it's a tie and they should play an overtime period, not see who can decide the game on a single desperation play.
That everything is so very precise with regards to timing and distance. 5 yards back. 0.4 seconds. It's a load of crap.
The game is over when the person in charge decides it's over and provides a signal that ends the game at that point and/or when the last point has been scored. Not when some arbitrary timer expires, and really annoyingly, not when the ball thrown before that arbitrary time is given any time it needs to land in the basket after that (because, if you are going to have a hard time limit, have a hard time limit!).
It's what bores me about a lot of sport - arbitrary rules that make no sense and rely on all kinds of unnecessary technology to play, rather than just being a sport. Even down to "did the ball cross this line" or whatever. If the judge says it did, it did. If he's sure, by all means check. But when you're into millimetre analysis, it's just boring and no longer a sport but one long replay.
Same thing with Formula One. If you need 0.00001th of a second to determine the winner, it's too close and too boring. Similarly, "batting averages" - it's nonsense to state these to so many decimal places.
Sport turned into commercial gain by the ever-shrinking boundary of error isn't actually fun, to play or to spectate.
1972 Olympics the clock was fixed to let the USSR win
We, the people who work on the technical back-end to create the HD broadcasts you watch, are fighting a never-ending battle with crappy, hastily-written software that can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps.
Professional video gear that costs tens of thousands of dollars per unit still have software settings that assume the video coming into them is 29.97fps in both the settings and math calculations, which hasn't been used in broadcasting since the days of standard def. Even frame syncronizers - the workhorse devices that cross-convert and conform video feeds into whatever standards we need - still push out software that claims an output of 29.97fps when it's really pumping out 59.94fps. Not to mention, when the marketing staff puts together an on-air read to tell you how super-duper-awesome their new super-slow-mo cam-du-jour is, I can't tell you how many times I hear on-air talent still use the "regular cameras shoot in 30 frames a second but ours shoots 1,000!!@!" technical explanation, which just flat out isn't true anymore and hasn't been for nearly a decade.
If it's HD, you're more than likely staring at 59.94fps. In fact, any time you see an HD picture that is in 29.97fps, people immediately ask "Hey, why is that picture strobing?" This was a huge problem back when GoPros could only do 1080p at 30fps. Anyone who wasn't smart enough to set the cameras to 720p and upconvert them was met with very substandard results.
The only reason this hasn't come to a head sooner than this, is most of the time this poorly-written software and it's completely inaccurate timing isn't used as an official timing device to determine the outcome of a game. It was only a matter of time, pun not intended.
... the amount of money funneled from education and research to sports programmes in a couple of universities ...
Actually at many US universities the sports programs pay many non-sports bills for the university, sports being a revenue source for the university not an expense. Plus there is the dual use nature of fitness and sports physiology and medicine between athletics and medical science in general. Things are far more complicated than you suggest. The preceding is not meant to suggest that we do not overdue things with respect to college sports, just that the relationship is symbiotic not parasitic at many universities.
That depends on how you define "see" in this context. For starters recording at 60 fps makes sense if you review at 5 fps to see what actually happened, which in itself is reason enough to record with high framerates. Secondly the bottleneck is in the visual "pipeline" from the eye to the brain. This mean the benefit of 100 Hz TVs is to provide a more stable image for the eyes, which do catch the high framerate and actually relaxes more with the more stable image. I'm not certain this goes for anything other than CRT screens since it is mainly an issue of pixels fading between frames. I read back in the 90s about research telling that viewing a CRT monitor was stressful for the eyes unless it displayed at at least 76 Hz, preferably more. I haven't seen recent research into CRT monitors, likely due to marked shares.
Since I'm not feeling well with flickering lights, I intentionally selected a monitor where pixels stays lit the same until they are updated for the next frame. Also light level is controlled by voltage rather than pulse width modulation and the image is completely stable and calm for the eyes regardless of framerate. This tells me that required framerate highly depends on display technology.
In short using more frames than what the brain captures can make sense in some setups, but not all. Also I'm not certain about those 30 FPS being the max. Moving from 60 to 50 Hz monitor (full progressive) seems to result in mouse movement being a bit jerky, which indicates that at least in some cases we do experience at least 60 Hz. I will not trust any number written here (from AC or otherwise) unless backed up with a trustworthy link.
If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you. If that happens you have no one to blame but yourself. We insist on accountability and no whining. If it doesn't go our way we own it and figure out how to make sure we do better next time.
This fellow nerds is why sports is *one* important part of growing up and education.
And, nothing of value was gained or lost...
Actually something could be gained. The problem will be studied, technical solutions considered, possibly developed and implemented, and such technical solution would probably have uses beyond sports.
My area of research in grad school was computer vision. I can easily envision a thesis project or two.
Subject says it all....
They had adopted my idea for packing the basketball with explosives that detonate when the game timer reached 0.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
You know, this is important and everybody wants any Sporting Contest to be fairly refereed, and that includes issues with the Game Clock.
However, the Referees made a decision. Regardless of whether they were technically correct or not, the mechanism for applying rules to a Game is unambiguous; whatever the Officials decide is final once the game is declared "over".
You can do things under an appeal like remove the result from standings, or even award a win, but all that depends on whatever rules the game was played under and whether an appeal is even allowed, and what redress the rules provide for under that appeal, after the game was decided by the Officials.
Games have been decided this way since forever, and regardless of whether the Time Code on the Replay Video was correctly or incorrectly interpreted, the Officials make a rule and that's that. Appeal if it's allowed, or not, but there is no going back and complaining it was done wrong. And very important games have been settled this way since forever, and in some cases a "bad call" gives the winner an undeserved victory.
It's part of Sport. Get over it (Lord knows, as a Sports Fan, I have had to, many times).
Baloney. The vast majority of sport programs are a net loss for the University. ESPN did a story on this. Even the powerhouses like Alabama (Football) lose massive amounts of money. People think the Universities are making massive money off of these teams, but reality it is just the coaches and Athletic Directors getting rich.
And I'm talking just about timed games. US Football: so long as the ball's in play, the play continues until it's over, even if the clock expired. NHL hockey: puck must cross the goal line before 0:00 . NBA hoops: ball must leave shooter's hand before 0:00.
I'd rather see (not that I watch hoops anyway) the NBA follow the NHL method. That way, you could have a red light mounted in the backboard. If the light's on before the ball goes thru the hoop, no basket. Gets rid of the absurd subjectiveness in determining the synch between the game clock and the video of the player's hands.
BTW, even the NHL's method isn't perfect, 'cause the puck moves so fast. When the game clock times out, the red "Goal" light is defeated and green lights turn on. Problem is that the Red-light switch is manuallyoperated, so the puck can hit the net at 0.1 seconds and the goal judge can't hit the switch before the game clock times out. So they're stuck with the video-with-clock-overly method anyway.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
i don't know but...this would make an excellent work problem on a math test.
If colleges limited themselves to football (or ice hockey for some universities) and whichever of men's or women's basketball was more popular, almost every athletics department would make money. However, the more popular sports subsidize the less popular sports (Track & Field, Baseball / Softball, etc.) that don't make much or any revenue and then Title IX requirements mean that they have to offer funding for women's sports which typically make even less revenue.
Coaches are going to get well paid, but some are probably worth it given how much money the football/basketball program can bring in for the athletics department. A good amount does go into scholarships for the athletes, a few of whom may not be able to otherwise afford to go to college. Some don't make the most of that opportunity, but that's not any less true of the general student population itself.
Doesn't always work. My freshman/sophomore year of HS our 215 won state both years and only lost 1 match each year. In both cases he lost by his opponent scoring quick then stalling out the rest of the match without the official calling it.
You're missing the point. He didn't put enough points up so his opponent won. Whether or not the official called stalling is irrelevant. You can't depend on him doing that. You CAN depend on what you do and nothing else. Stalling in wrestling is almost entirely subjective so you cannot depend on it being called ever. Not for you or against you. It simply means your 215 didn't do enough to get the job done. Watch the wrestlers from the University of Iowa sometime, particularly Brent Metcalf. You will NEVER hear them say they were robbed even if they were. They will simply say they didn't do enough to get the job done and the responsibility is theirs and theirs alone.
Our coach would simply send me out to take the forfeit at 215 and use our guy to wrestle the other 215 in the heavyweight slot. I got enough wins to letter but they didn't count them because I didn't actually wrestle the matches. I got robbed.
Taking a forfeit is meaningless. It isn't a win because there wasn't an opponent. Unless you got your hand raised because you beat an actual wrestler then why should that count for anything? If you weren't good enough to crack the starting line up and all you did was take forfeits then you weren't robbed of anything because you didn't actually earn anything.
Since the clock is started and stopped manually, doesn't that mean the clock will be off anyway throughout the game, especially after half time? Also why don't we have sensors to detect the ball and start and stop it?
Professional broadcasts use something called "time code". Time Code Generators work along with a sync generator to make sure that every frame that a television truck creates gets created at precisely the same moment, and gets tagged with a unique and sequential timecode. The better ones sync with GPS or a modem to give precision time, the cheaper ones you have to manually set - usually with a cell call to the atomic clock. We embed that timecode signal into the ancillary data of each video frame, and produce a side-channel audio signal with the data embedded for devices that can't accurately read the timecode from within the video frames. We have to be incredibly accurate - as a video frame that is a fraction of a microsecond out of time can cause all sorts of issues. This used to be a huge deal in analog standard-def video - any frame that was out of time could cause the picture to shift horizontally or vertically (think of bad tracking on VHS tapes as a small example). Even sync was less accurate - sync was delivered through "black burst" which was literally just that - a burst of a black video signal, where you took the sync pulse and lined it up to ensure the timing of the frame was accurate or "close enough". Now with HD, we use tri-level sync which is way more accurate.
For the TL;DR crowd, in a production truck we can make precision measurements of time based on our sync and time code. The company that has created a good percentage of the official replay systems in the US - DVSport - has no access to our sync or time code. They also take our uncompressed frames and compress them into a video stream. They generate something loosely akin to our time code, but really it's just a reference point to where in the compressed stream you'd like to view.
Because of the inherent inaccuracies of how they time tag their compressed video and the inaccuracies of their internal clock itself, their time code - even when properly set - can "float". The longer you record, the more float you get - and it's not unusual to see minutes of float in a day. But if your internal source clock is inaccurate - and your math is trying to divide a second into the wrong number of frames - you get issues like this. You get severe time code float with 60fps vs 59.94fps alone, and that's BEFORE considering how accurate your reference clock is, and without any regard to how accurate your MPEG video encoder is. People are speculating that the software didn't know the video source was 59,94fps and was doing math based on 29.97fps or 30fps.
Even in the professional world we get tiny bits of "float", but ours is typically only a frame or two per day. We also issue what's called a "time code jam" - where we issue a uniform break in the time code stream to make sure every device is still synchronized to each other without falling too far behind actual time of day. These cheaper replay devices don't come anywhere near that level of accuracy.
Now imagine loosely time-tagging video into a compressed stream, and taking that wholly inaccurate time and reattaching it to video frames that are being uncompressed by an MPEG decoder on-the-fly. And now you can see how accurate relying on a replay system time overlay is. Prosumer video products like DVSport don't hold a candle to the timing standards we use in professional television production. Not that they can't - they just don't. More than likely because it's never become an issue up until now - or worked "well enough" for no one to notice. That is, until something as big as the outcome of a game relies on your kludge of a modestly-accurate timing reference.
To be fair, the decision of when to make the final throw in a game is based on reading the clock before the throw while for most of the game there's nothing particularly interesting happening when the clock runs out.
Those earlier decisions matter just as much as the ones at the end. The fact that they are to some degree contingent decisions does not change the fact that early decisions have just as much impact as later ones. A basket scored 20 seconds into the game counts just the same as one scored at the end of the game.
The exact instant the clock is started generally has no bearing on win/loss or even goal/no goal.
The exact instance the clock is started has a VERY direct bearing on when it stops and as such it can have a bearing on the outcome in a close game.
It also depends on what you consider revenue related to the sport. Tickets sales are a big part; television rights and branding are both nice, but for a lot of colleges alumni donations can easily be more than ticket sales. I saw a table once......it is old (2008) but still interesting. http://espn.go.com/ncaa/revenue
Moment if silence for the poor AC who has fallen victim to Poe's Law.
are a bigger problem that how many fps a timer thinks a games is recorded in.
The alumni money, for those wondering, comes from those who want better seats. Want one near the field, on the fifty yard line? Better give big money.
If it'll help, the basket looks kind of like a depiction of a gravity well.
Also, the observers changed the outcome. The discussion of this game might very well spark insights that unify quantum mechanics with general relativity.
You can say you were there when the 21st century Newton got hit on the head by a basketball.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Baloney. The vast majority of sport programs are a net loss for the University. ESPN did a story on this. Even the powerhouses like Alabama (Football) lose massive amounts of money. People think the Universities are making massive money off of these teams, but reality it is just the coaches and Athletic Directors getting rich.
Did ESPN only look at ticket sales? Did they look at the increased sales of school merchandise? Did they look at the increased donations from alumni? Did they look at the increased student applications/enrollment? There is both direct and indirect income.
News for *nerds* stuff that *matters*
How the hell did this get posted?!
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Your kidding me right. This is the type of thing that the "nation" is concerned with as opposed to using knowledge to solve something that, you know, actually matters?
In court, when timing is everything.
Look, just... get your shot together, Morty. I don't care what you have to do. Put it in a bag, take it to the shot store. Just get your shot together.
If colleges limited themselves to football (or ice hockey for some universities) and whichever of men's or women's basketball was more popular, almost every athletics department would make money.
That assertion is questionable, when you look at the way athletic departments spend money. At most schools, revenue has gone up significantly in the past decade, at many places even doubling or more. Yet schools aren't making larger profits -- instead, they just increase spending.
However, the more popular sports subsidize the less popular sports (Track & Field, Baseball / Softball, etc.) that don't make much or any revenue and then Title IX requirements mean that they have to offer funding for women's sports which typically make even less revenue.
Again, that's undoubtedly true, but that doesn't explain how doubling income (mostly without expanding those programs that didn't make money and already existed) doesn't result in increased profits.
If you read the link I gave above, you'll realize that this isn't a "rational market." It's an "arms race." Athletic departments generally have discretion over spending their income, and if they don't spend it -- they lose it... it goes back into the general university budget. So, if they increase profits, the athletic departments have motivation to spend them immediately -- and by doing so, they can try to gain an edge over competition. Thus, coach salaries, facilities costs, etc. continue to skyrocket.
Throwing out the other sports would just mean that the athletic departments would spend more money on coaches and facilities in the remaining sports.
Coaches are going to get well paid, but some are probably worth it given how much money the football/basketball program can bring in for the athletics department.
Again, the logic is circular. Coaches can demand more salaries because athletic programs make more money. Athletic programs then try to make even more money to attract better coaches, so salaries get pushed higher. If head coach salaries were 1/10th or 1/20th what they are EVERYWHERE in the major conferences, the system would still work fine and there would still be incredibly talented coaches out there for these sports. But if salaries are higher everywhere, schools increase revenues to afford them. The coaches often aren't "bringing in" that money -- they're forcing the schools to find ways to RAISE that money.
A good amount does go into scholarships for the athletes, a few of whom may not be able to otherwise afford to go to college. Some don't make the most of that opportunity, but that's not any less true of the general student population itself.
Well, when you have things like outright academic fraud, fake "classes" designed for athletes, etc., I think you can argue that some schools are deliberately encouraging their athletes to AVOID education and focus instead on what they were brought there to do... i.e., play sports.
TL;DR -- Athletic departments generally try to spend as much as comes in, so streamlining programs to "money-making" sports likely won't change that. And it's pretty clear what the priorities are when academics conflict with "student athletes" at big sports schools.
Years ago, police discovered that the timer clock guy at the old Montreal Forum was very flexible as far as starting/stopping the clock went. Turns out it had something to do with gambling, maybe the 50/50 draw, I forget. He knew when to start or stop the clock in order to avoid paying out on a goal or penalty time that some poor soul had chosen. But there's no betting on college b-ball, right?