Three Kinds of Lies: Statistics on BYU Football

I have been fascinated with the quarterback controversy that plagued BYU this season between the hyped phenom Jake Heaps and the grizzly "gamer" Riley Nelson.  While Nelson had much better traditional statistics than Heaps, Heaps played against a tougher schedule. The author of a the BYU sports blog LoyalCougars.com asked me if it were possible to statistically correct for the difficulty of the defenses Heaps and Nelson played to compare them on level ground.  Being a football fan and a math nerd, I dove right in.  The results are written up in a post over at LoyalCougars.com, so if you feel like delving into the statistical rabbit hole, go check it out.

Plot Showing Why BYU Football Should Be Proud.

The plot below, taken from the Wall Street Journal, shows why BYU Football should be proud and excited to kick off the new year tomorrow.  BYU's football team, better than most schools (good job Stanford), represents the the school very well both on and off the field very well.

Go Cougars!

Osama Got Jimmered

Unless you've been living in a cave in Afghanistan or a luxury fortress in eastern Pakistan without phone or Internet access for the past couple weeks, you already know the news.  But some enterprising BYU students put it best with the following sign in Provo, UT near BYU's campus (click to embiggen):

Couldn't have put it better myself.

[Hat Tip to Jay Drew's BYU Sports Blog]

BYU Puts Honor Code Over Potential Final Four Appearance

As most of our bloggers are BYU graduates we often comment on times when BYU makes the news here, and if you follow college basketball at all you know that BYU is having possibly its best season ever in men's basketball.  The team is ranked #3 in the country, their point guard Jimmer Ferdette is the leading candidate for national player of the year honors, and the team is likely to get a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament later this month.

The big story to me, however, isn't the success on the court but rather the commitment to the schools very rigorous honor code.  From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Three days after recording the biggest regular-season win in program history, a win over San Diego State that propelled the BYU basketball team to a No. 3 national ranking and into serious consideration for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, the Cougars’ postseason hopes were dealt a devastating blow. Starting center Brandon Davies was dismissed from the team on Tuesday because he ran afoul of the school’s strict honor code. BYU announced in a terse news release that Davies, a 6-foot-9 sophomore from Provo High, “will not represent the university on the men’s basketball team throughout the remainder of the 2010-11 season” because of a “violation of the BYU Honor Code.”

Among other things, the code forbids premarital sex, the use of alcohol and illegal drugs, and cheating on schoolwork.

So let's get one thing straight:  the honor code is strict but not draconian.  Davies did not get booted from the basketball team for sipping a coffee, swearing, or growing a beard.  BYU never reveals details about honor code issues to the public, so unless Davies talks we'll never know what he did.

The amazing thing to me is that BYU is actually getting a lot of respect in some media outlets for their actions.  For example, here is a clip from ESPN singing BYU's praises:


BYU put their standards before fame and fortune, and I applaud them for it.

217th AAS Meeting Coming to a Seattle Near You

Sometimes physicists pick really amazing locations for conferences - the existence of the Aspen Center for Physics is proof of this.  However sometimes we end up in Fairbanks in February or Las Cruces in the summer.  This January the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society will be held in Seattle.  I suggest packing a raincoat as northwesterners don't use umbrellas.

That being said, I will be attending this lively gathering for astronomers, physicists, and astrophysicists from all around the world and so I thought I would send out the word and see if any other bloggers or loyal readers will also be making an appearance.  If so I suggest the first ever Eternal Universe Nerd-fest where we can get together, eat a moderately good meal (hopefully on our advisers' grant money), and raise a glass of water to room N216 in the beloved Eyring Science Center.  Post your plans and thoughts in the comments and I hope to see you in Seattle.

Hard To Top BYU's Final Product. (Or: BYU produces great students.)

BYU is a second tier school in the US News rankings. (And I'm not going to argue they should be ranked any better in that ranking as it is a reflection of what US News values.)

However, when we get past the academic mumble jumbo and find how well BYU does at producing students people in the real world actually wants to hire and employ, it is hard to beat BYU.  The Wall Street Journal polled the US's top employers, corporations, government agencies, etc... and asked them what schools they most wanted to recruit students from to hire.

And the results: BYU is #11 in the nation.

According to the entities polled, the top schools in this poll:

1.  Had the most well rounded students.
2.  Had students who were the most academically prepared.
3.  Had students with the most relevant training for the real world workforce.

So, given BYU was my Alma Mater I must say I am impressed how well the school is preparing students for the real world.

BYU Leaves the Mountian West, Goes Independent (Maybe)

It's been a wild summer for college sports.  As of right now, in 2011 the Pac 10 will have 12 members, the Big 12 will have 10 members, and the Big Ten will have 12 members.  Utah, BYU's long-time conference rival, got a golden ticket to join the Pac 10 (along with my own Colorado Buffalos), leaving BYU as pretty much the biggest football program left out of the top conferences in college football.  Most BYU fans bemoaned the situation but felt there was nothing to be done.  Or is there?  From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Brigham Young University will leave the Mountain West Conference, go independent in football and rejoin the Western Athletic Conference in all non-football sports beginning in the fall of 2011, The Salt Lake Tribune confirmed Wednesday morning.

According to a source in the WAC office, BYU will seek final approval for the moves from its owner, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, either today or Thursday. Pending approval, a press conference is planned for early next week. But because of media reports that broke late Tuesday night, that timetable may change.

BYU officials have apparently decided that the best business model for BYU to follow is that of another large, religious university with a prestigious football program - Notre Dame.  And really it makes sense to leave the Mountain West - where in terms of tradition, facilities, and fan base BYU was clearly the king of the midgets.  The Pac 10 allegedly picked Utah with is smaller national following over BYU because of BYU's religious affiliation and the only other major conference that made any sense for BYU, the Big 12, might only be around for until Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma feel like they can't suck any more money out of the other 7 schools.

So BYU joins Army, Navy, and Notre Dame as the only conference-less teams in top-level college football.  It may be a bit of reach but here's to hoping they score big.  You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.


Thanks to Dr. Saturday for the heads-up.

Hilarious BYU "Old Spice Style" Commercial.

I'm sure many of you have heard about the new Old Spice commercials that have gone viral like this one. BYU just produced one of their own to encourage people to study. I have to say: it is very funny and I am impressed for sure.

Makes me proud to be a BYU alumni.   Now back to studying....

Brigham Young University / BYU - New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar

An Email I Never Got From BYU

One thing about changing schools during our education is that we get to see how different departments, schools and states handle basic stuff. Having only ever attended BYU before starting graduate school it was a slight adjustment starting school at UNC. Looking back I realize that the BYU physics department, and BYU as a whole is very "official" for lack of a better word (some would call it "up tight" or "autocratic"). At BYU any email sent out to faculty, staff and students had to first be submitted to committee, reviewed, "queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters." OK maybe not that bad but it was a process.

At UNC we have a department list-serv (actually we have several, I think I am on 5 or 6) where anyone in the department can send an email everyone else in the department, without prior approval. I won't share any of the more interesting (or in need of censoring) emails that I have gotten, but I did recently get an email that I would never get at BYU, for many different reasons.

Subject: flooding

"people in the basement should be on the lookout for water
during this heavy rain. the chance will get worse over time
it is going to rain hard until Friday. let me know if you see water
in the floor."

First, it doesn't rain in Utah, and if it does it is nowhere close to the rain we get in North Carolina. Second, at BYU the custodians are the ones that typically keep track of things like this, not the grad students. It would seem that at UNC this would fall under "building maintenance" which is separate from "housekeeping", thus the custodians could not do anything about it even if they noticed because of union, accounting, and organizational rules (gotta love socialism!). Third, no capitalization, and at least one grammatically incorrect sentence.

This little email was a simple reminder of some of the basic differences between BYU and UNC (and I would venture most other places).

BYU Students May Not Be As Nice As You Think

In almost all sports there is some level of technically illegal contact that regularly occurs. In football defensive backs and receivers commonly bump, grab, and push each other. In basketball the line between a charge and a blocking foul is razor thin. In soccer there are some hard tackles and even the occasional hand to the face or gut. All of this, however, is put to shame by this clip from a women's soccer game between BYU and New Mexico.

So as it turns out BYU athletics might not be as saintly as originally thought. Next time you play soccer at BYU (or New Mexico for that matter), wear a helmet and wrap yourself in bubble wrap.

Football + Art = Beauty

From the Deseret News comes a report of a couple from Huntsville, Utah that have taken their passion for college football, combined it with art, and made something very beautiful. Behold the wonder:

If you look closely, you'll see that this scene from the 2006 BYU vs. Utah football game isn't a painting or a photo - it's a mural made entirely from painted golf tees.

That's right painted golf tees. Don't worry, I didn't believe it either until I saw the close up.According to the Deseret News story, the mural is 232 rows by 451 collumns of tees and took something like 400 hours of work to complete. And it's shear beauty brings a tear to my eye.

Post-Season College Football Economics

College football has perhaps the most complicated post-season of any sport. There are 120 teams in Division 1-A, divided among 11 conferences with 4 independent teams. Because of the high risk of injury, teams can only play once a week and it's best to have about 3 games per month in order to maintain the health of the players. This leads to a 12 to 14 game season. That is already a nightmarish scenario for determining the best team. By comparison, in major league baseball each of the 32 teams play 164 games in order to set-up the post season. College football, with its meager 12-14 games and 120 teams cannot hope to definitively decided which teams are the best.

In addition to that, college football employs a totally unique post-season. Instead of some sort of tournament, for historical reasons college football uses 34 bowl games that match-up teams based on popularity, geography, conference affiliation, and revenue generation. Starting in 1998, the 6 largest and most popular conferences banded together with the organizers of 4 of the most popular bowl games and formed the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in an effort to provide quality match-ups and generate more revenue. It has worked beautifully, as shown by the following plot of where bowl revenue has ended up over the last 25 years with the three red lines indicating various stages in the evolution of the BCS, with its current form starting in 1998.
Of course this makes the "non-BCS" conferences unhappy, but really, what motive do the big guys have to share? BYU, Utah, TCU, Boise State, and East Carolina have all shown in recent years that they are among the top tier on the field, but yet their conferences get tiny slices of the revenue pie.

Is there any hope for change? It's already better than it used to be as Utah (twice), Boise State, and Hawaii have gove to BCS bowls in the past few years. But for further improvement "non-BCS" teams are going to have to continue to play and beat top-notch BCS conference teams in the regular season, which often means playing at the BCS team's home field since they have no motive whatsoever to come to a non-BCS team's home stadium. This year BYU is playing two major BCS opponents - Oklahoma and Florida State. Wins or close losses in those games will continue to raise the profile of non-BCS teams. Go Cougs!

Special Honors

Today I found out that I have been bestowed special honors. I have a whole chapter of a text book dedicated to me (or rather a problem I had). Unfortunately the author decided not to specifically say why he had included the chapter but knowing the author and my particular problem I can see that it was included as a direct result of my problem.

You may remember the books by Dr. Spencer used in the Numerical Techniques courses (230, 330, 430). Well, I had to go back and look through the books lately because I am currently the TA for the computing class here at UNC. As I was looking through the Introduction to MATLAB manual online to refresh my memory about a few things I noticed that the manual had been updated and a few chapters added. One of the chapters (Chapter 14: Fitting Functions to Data) seemed rather um...personal shall we say.

You may recall that a while ago I was working on my galaxy problem. Well I was trying to fit an arbitrary function to some data and was having a hard time with it. I went to Dr. Spencer for some help and he looked over what I had done and said, "I don't believe it! You have committed the classic mistake of fitting a function to data. This is something I have been warning students about for years but I have never actually seen anyone do it! You are the first!" What I had done was a little complex but the short of it was that I had solved for the data that I had input in the first place. After he explained what I had done he said, "I should include a section on this stuff in the classes because you probably won't be the last to make this mistake." (Maybe not those words exactly, it's been a few years, but he said something like that.)

So when I saw that chapter I just had to laugh because now future generations of BYU physics majors will have to solve those problems and read through that chapter all because of a mistake I made while writing a MATLAB script. If you look at the problem given in the chapter it has some striking similarities to the problem that I was trying to solve...yeah well I know that I made an impact. I wonder if I could put it on my resume?

BYU vs. CSU - As Witnessed by Me

One of the advantages of attending the University of Colorado is that BYU plays at least one football game within 100 miles of my residence every year. This year BYU plays at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado (~100 miles to the south of Boulder) on November 15th. Last year BYU played at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyoming (~70 miles to the northwest of Boulder). And last night, BYU played at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado (~40 miles north of Boulder). And I was there.

For those of you who missed the game, here's a quick recap:

1. CSU scored a touchdown
2. BYU scored a touchdown
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 2 more times
4. BYU scored a field goal
5. Repeat steps 1 and 2 3 more times
6. BYU wins 45-42
   

Basically, it was a high scoring thriller that showed that BYU's offense is very good and BYU's defense is very bad. The photographic summary of the game can be found below.That was BYU tight end Dennis Pitta catching the game winning touchdown with exactly 22 seconds left on the clock, courtesy of the Deseret Morning News. I was sitting less than 100 ft. away from Dennis Pitta when that play was made. I love Colorado.

Renowned Researchers Rebuke Recent Riemann Reasoning

I lifted the title of this post from the related discussion on Slashdot.org. Xian-Jin Li's proof has been reviewed and apparently there are some things wrong with it. Apparently Alain Connes, (I have no idea who he is but he won a Fields Medal in 1982) took a look at it and instantly saw a problem with it. On his blog he made some comments at the end of one of his posts about it and why it was wrong (scroll down to the comments and he talks about it).

As Dr. Connes explains it, "The "proof" is that of Theorem 7.3 page 29 in Li's paper, but I stopped reading it when I saw that he is extending the test function h from ideles to adeles by 0 outside ideles and then using Fourier transform (see page 31). This cannot work and ideles form a set of measure 0 inside adeles (unlike what happens when one only deals with finitely many places)."

Well that obviously clears it up. No wonder it's wrong! I should have seen that! So for those of you who missed it, someone else posted a comment after Dr. Connes to clairfy their take on the problem.

"it seems to me an elliptic curve functional on the closed measure 0 inside adeles would provide the requisite metric space for an extended test function h; the associated omega-consistent Goedel-zeta function transform would then serve as an adequate ring Hecke for a 1-0 Lie group functional connective space"

Man! If you didn't understand Dr. Connes' comment then that last one surely cleared things up for you!

Anyway, on a serious note, it doesn't seem like Xian-Jin Li's proof will be good enough. I have to give him credit for trying. He obviuosly understands more about it than I do. Even though he may have made a mistake it was a very technical one, a mistake that could only have been made by someone who understands what they are doing. Congratulations Dr. Li!

Did a BYU Professor Just Prove the Riemann Hypothesis?

Xian-Jin Li, a BYU professor, just submitted a paper to the arxiv claiming to be "A proof of the Riemann hypothesis". Two things to note:

1. This hasn't been officially peer reviewed yet.
2. He claims to have only done it for the rational numbers, but feels the proof should extend to all fields.
   

If this counts as "The Proof" then this will be a centuries old million dollar accomplishment!

No, I Didn't Go To Yale

Since I've been at CU, I have had to tell a lot of people that I didn't go to Yale. Why, you may ask, would people think I went to Yale? I happen to have a shirt that has a BYU logo like the one shown here.
For comparison, here's Yale's logo.Silly people! Can't they tell that BYU's is round and uses a darker blue?

Report: Brian Greene @ BYU

Brian Greene coming to BYU for the forum address was exciting for me in a few ways. First off Brian Greene came to BYU and secondly, I got to give the forum invocation and spend some extra time with Dr. Greene. It was a lot of fun to sit on the stand and feel 'all official' and then the fancy catered lunch afterwards was for 14 or so people in the Hinckley building. Anyway, I am sure that you're all not as interested in that stuff as I am, so I will move onto the meat of Dr. Greene's visit: string theory.

The address itself was very exciting; from Dr. Greene's initial wandering around the podium and his intensity to his great explanations of how the concepts of space and time have changed throughout the years. There were also two Q&A sessions: one right after the forum and then another for physics students later. I attended both and I will list, in bullet form, some points that he made.

• There is no stringy big bang model yet
• He does not 'believe in string theory' and will not until experimentally verified. It was nice to hear him say that
• Earth stays in orbit due warping in 'time.' I am not sure what he meant by that exactly
• Dark matter might be 'regular' matter hidden in extra dimensions
• Quantum foam is 'smoothed' out due to the minimum length scale introduced by strings. It does so because it prevents you from probing scales smaller than the string length. Also, this minimum length scale is what allows string theory to couple GR with quantum and it does not break Lorentz invariance
• As of now, there are no definite energies we need to probe at the LHC, but it could be soon when we get those numbers
• There are no practical application for string theory yet, but that's what they first thought when QM was first discovered
• String theory might come close to an eternal truth
• String theory unifies forces since all the force mediating particles come from the same strings
• Each of the 5 string theories is a different perturbative expansion

So that's a little of what Dr. Greene discussed. It really was a wonderful forum; he's a great speaker and is very enthusiastic about strings. You might be curious what he said when asked about rumors that string theorists are leaving string theory by the droves or what he thought about the last few books that claim string theory is wrong. He did address those issues and said that people are not abandoning string theory and that those books basically say the same that all string theorists say: that string theory has not yet been experimentally verified. Here is a link to the BYU NewsNet (not quite accurate) article reporting on the forum address.

BYU Wins On Last Second Block

BYU beat UCLA in the Las Vegas Bowl last night by a score of 17-16 on a dramatic, last-second play. As is becoming the Cougars standard mode of operation in big games, the Cougars almost blew their chance for victory by allowing the Bruins to drive from their own 2 yard line all the way to the BYU 13. The Bruins lined up for a their attempt with 3 seconds left and somehow 280 pound defensive linemen Eathyn Manumaleuna was able to jump high enough to get his hand on the ball and block what would have been the game winning field goal. Below is ESPN's version of what happened.



Go Cougars!

Kicking Off Grad School

When I was applying for graduate schools, I was told by several sources that BYU has a reputation for giving out inflated grades in undergraduate classes that resulted in less being demanded of the students. This would logically mean that starting graduate students coming out of BYU should be poorly prepared for graduate classes relative to their peers from other, tougher schools.

I don't know what Joe's experience is so far, but I can tell you that my experience here at the University of Colorado has shown that not to be the case. Not even close.

For example, in my math methods class, right now we're reviewing the linear algebra I learned in Math 343, which I took as a freshman at BYU. In my internal processes class (its the astrophysics version of quantum with a dash of E&M) we're talking about the hydrogen atom, which I learned both in Physics 222 and 452. The only one of my classes that is actually presenting new material to me is my Fluid Dynamics class, and even then we've spent a lot of time reviewing these things called tensors (anyone heard of those?), writing vectors with indices, and what the divergence, curl, and gradient operators do. It's pretty rough.

My sarcasm aside, I understand that graduate classes are taking people from a wide variety of programs that covered or failed to cover a wide range of topics, but right now I think I am among the most prepared students in my incoming 1st year group of students, which includes students from highly prestigious schools such as UC-Berkley, Chicago, and Cornell.

BYU may have a bit of a poor reputation for grade inflation and a "soft" undergraduate program, but in my experience, that reputation is totally unfounded. Maybe Joe is having a different experience, but from where I sit, BYU did a better job of preparing a student for grad school than almost any other program represented here at CU.