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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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not really. For example, if someone takes a shot in 10 seconds, the shot clock and it's accuracy has no impact on anything. If the clock started a half second late at the beginning of the game, it means nothing at all to the outcome.
If you see from the clock that you have 10 seconds to shoot, that's fine even if you should have had 10.2 seconds. If you see that you have 4 seconds, and it takes 2 to take the shot, perhaps you take 2 quick strides and shoot. It matters very much if someone retroactively decides you only had 3 seconds left when you looked and saw 4.
Actually, the NBA (and college basketball) definition of when the game ends makes more sense for basketball. The NHL's definition makes more sense for hockey.
In hockey, the definition of a goal is that the entire puck must cross the goal line. Requiring a game clock overlay isn't perfect, but it's almost never an issue because goals aren't that frequent and you don't usually have last second shots in a period. If the rule was like basketball, the puck would have to leave the shooter's stick before the end of the period. There are enough deflections that totally obvious at normal speed to be a problem. What looks like a goal initially could be disallowed because of an apparent deflection. Also, what happens if the shot leaves the stick before the period ends but it hits the goalie right after the clock is at zero and bounces in? That's a goal at any other time, but it would have touched a player after the clock expired. It's easier to require that the puck cross the goal line.
In basketball, there are orange LED strips that show when time expires. As long as the ball leaves the shooter's hand before the light goes on, it's a shot. It's not subjective at all, nor does it require a game clock overlay. As long as the game clock is correct, you simply have to see if the ball leaves the hand before the light turns on. It's almost always very obvious in the replays. If the ball had to go through the hoop before time expired, you'd have to determine at what point it's actually a field goal. Does it have to completely pass through the bottom of the net? Does the top of the ball have to be below the hoop? Does the widest part of the ball have to be below the hoop (more than halfway down)? Does it have to be partly inside the rim? Does it simply have to be above the cylinder? You'd have to position cameras to get just the right camera angle for some of those. You'd actually have more controversy than you do now.
Normally if the game clock doesn't start, officials just whistle and stop play. If the error isn't significant enough for the officials to catch it in real time, perhaps it shouldn't be reviewed at all. As long as a person has to start the clock, there's going to be some margin of error between when the player touches the ball and when the clock starts. If we reviewed every inbound pass in the final minute of a close game, it would destroy any flow to the game and make it unwatchable.
Let's say the ball is inbounded with 5.0 seconds left, enough time for the player to dribble and get an open shot. Let's say the clock doesn't start until 0.8 seconds after the ball is touched. The player dribbles and gets off a shot with what appears to be 0.6 seconds left. After replay, it's determined it actually took 5.2 seconds to get the shot off and the basket is waved off. The player taking the shot is basing the decision of when to shoot on the game clock that's shown in multiple places. Because of the error by the officials, and a small one at that, the basket doesn't count. That seems really unfair to me. And yet it's a completely realistic scenario. That's why I think such reviews should have to be a real time decision by the officials, initiated by blowing the play dead.
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