Usually this is in response to stories about fans behaving badly at games or even on the board. And usually it’s because one team has been singled out as having particularly bad fans. Now it’s no secret that there are at least two teams in particular in the state of South Carolina that are notorious for having badly behaved fans both at games and on the board.
I’m not going to mention the two teams I’m thinking of by name because I don’t want another marquee brawl opening up between some of these fans in my thread. And believe me, no thread is safe from these fans. They can make any thread look like an Irish pub on payday. Now I’m not talking about the fan bases as a whole of course when it comes to the shenanigans on the board. Just a few on each side that are entertaining the rest of us.
But although there are outrageous fans all over the state for every team, I do find myself wondering from time to time if some teams have a higher concentration of crazy fans.
Now I don’t know about at the games because I actually have had very little experience with badly behaved fans for either team at any Dorman games but we all get a front row seat every week on the board when it comes to watching how fans choose to act all around the state.
The first thing that I find interesting is fan representation on the board. Hasn’t anyone else ever wondered about that? I haven’t ever bothered to do any bean counting but there just seems off the top of my head like there’s roughly 5 posters give or take for each team who regularly contribute. Now you’d think that upstate fans would out number low country fans because the site is run by an upstate news organization but there does seem to be as much low country traffic as there is upstate traffic.
I’m not going by any numbers here because I haven’t done the research and I don’t think you could simply count the number of members because we all know that the number of people who regularly post is minuscule compared to the number of actual registered members. I’m just thinking off the top of my head. There’s probably 10 Gaffney posters contributing every week. No surprise that they will be the most prolific being that they have the most state titles at 16 (Bwah Ha Ha, there’s a little wriggly worm for an argument that’s older than a white turd).
Gaffney is also the undisputed king of the mountain this year so no surprise that representation for the Indians is strong this year on the board.
Let’s see, there’s what...about 6 different Byrnes posters in the mix from week to week.
Dorman has 5 I think who you can count on to hear from at least once a week.
Goose Creek has around 5.
Summerville probably about the same.
Greenwood has at least 5 guys rolling from week to week on the board.
And let’s not forget about Spartanburg’s fans! Let’s see...there’s Sparty! And then there’s....umm...no wait, don’t tell me...ummm...let’s see, Sparty and...
Of course I’m just kidding, there’s the new guy Dbyr...oh wait, he got banned...umm...
Nah, seriously I’m kidding. Of course victory6 has been pulling his weight and I’m sure Top Viking will be back around some time soon...I’m sure...
Ok, I have figured out why Sparty has been doing what he’s doing. He’s lonely guys! He’s been running around trying to keep up with the other fans. A tough job but someone has to do it. Just wish it was someone other than Sparty...
...JOKING! Sparty is a great fan and deserves more Vike fans for him to interact with. If Spartanburg keeps getting those W’s I’m sure more will sign up or old ones will come back and then Spartanburg will have as much representation on the board as the rest of the teams and Sparty won’t have to have conversations with nobody about the greatness of the Spartanburg Vikings. (Just for a goof, when you finish reading the thread go to the top of the page and type in 1923 in the search window and see how many posts it returns. No, seriously there are 4 pages! That’s 40 posts!)
(Ok, probably half of them are myself and other posters making fun of Sparty.)
Of course that’s only a drop of the fans that contribute but the bottom line is that there does seem to be a skeleton crew of posters here who keep things going. I’ve heard there used to be a lot more traffic back in the day but still I’ve noticed that as certain posters burn out and move on new ones show up to replace them but it does seem to hover at around 5 to 10 active posters per team.
Of course there are hundreds of readers every day who probably aren’t registered and if they are they obviously have no intentions of posting. Can you blame them? I mean it’s one thing to go to a WCW match and watch from a safe distance but who’d wanna get in the ring with us apes?
You gotta have a thick skin to open yourself up to this insanity on a daily basis. I’ve seen lots of guys since I’ve been on the board work up the nerve to create a new account and jump on the board posting their first thread ever only to be slammed by some old timer within minutes of his first post. Now the thick skinned ones just keep at it until they can carve their own little identity but most of them that I’ve seen that have that kind of experience never post again.
Maybe that’s why from time to time we get some hyper-jacked-up ass-hat who comes barreling through the saloon doors like he owns the place. It’s probably a defense mechanism for some noobs. A “get them before they get me” mentality. Or maybe that’s just who they are through and through and they just have what it takes to survive on the board.
Ok, so anyway...I certainly welcome any kind of a formal fan count on a per team basis as far as who is contributing on a weekly basis. Again Gaffney probably has way more active fans this year but who knows? Maybe I’m way off on my estimations of fans per team on the board. It may also be that no one really gives a turd about how much representation any given team has.
But back to the subject of ass-hats. What my original muse was was this...
...Do certain teams have a higher concentration of outrageous fans than other teams? Pound for pound, are there teams with a disproportionately large number of unruly, rude fans?
Let’s assume that successful teams have more fans than unsuccessful teams. Let’s also assume that for each team there is a percentage of the fan base who are “classless” fans. So it stands to reason that the teams who have higher numbers of total fans will have a higher total number of “classless” fans and those teams, it would follow, would be the most successful.
But what if the numbers are disproportionate? What if just maybe random luck threw a lot of crappy fans at one team for no good reason.
Recently I read a book called “Here’s Looking at Euclid” that has a chapter about probability and the study of chance. Now the book doesn’t discuss football fans and what percentage of fans you can expect to behave badly for any given team but it does discuss the distribution of randomness and how the more random something is sometimes the less random it seems.
Stick with me here. Lets say we have 30 football teams. And let’s say for simplicity’s sake that each team has exactly 4 fans. I know it sounds retarded, but remember I’m trying to keep it simple. Alright, now with 30 teams with 4 fans apiece that’s 120 total fans.
Let’s further say that out of these 120 fans, 25% of them are rude, obnoxious people who love football. Now 25% is of course 1 out of every 4 fans. So would you expect for each team to have exactly 1 rude fan for every 3 well behaved ones?
No, of course not. That’s because random events exhibit something called clustering. We usually equate randomness with even distribution but it’s usually anything but even. Take a look at the following picture...
Now take a look at this one...
One of these pictures was generated with a simple program I wrote that plots a number of truly random points on a screen. The other picture I made by simply pointing to several places on the screen that I felt represented random positions.
Once you understand the implications of random clustering it’s not hard at all to figure out which picture represents true randomness.
Try this experiment...
Grab a sheet of paper and a pencil. Now imagine that you have a quarter and you are going to flip the quarter 30 times. Don’t bother to do this with a real quarter, just let your mind do the flipping. Write down what you think the first flip will be. Then write down what you think the second flip will be. Do this thirty times in your head and write down an “H” or a “T” on the paper for each flip. We are going to see how well your mind does with faking randomness.
Now compare your list to this list...
T T T H H H H H H H H T H T H H H H T H H T T H H H T H T T
The above list was a list I made of flipping a real quarter 30 times.
Two numbers to be considered in either the real list or the imagined one is the difference between the total number of Heads and the total number of Tails and also the longest streak of either flip in the list. So, looking at the list above we have 11 Tails and 19 Heads which means the difference between the total number of each is 8. Also we have a streak of 8 heads in a row. Compare those two numbers with the list you made up in your head. If the difference between the total number of each side in your list is less than 8 and the longest streak of either flip in your list is also less than 8 then you’ve just done something that all humans do which is to expect no patterns in a truly random event. Think about that...
Your mind probably wrote down...say...4 Heads in a row maybe and then you said to yourself, “Ok, that’s about as many Heads as you can expect to get in a row, time for some Tails now...”
The sample size of 30 flips is small enough not to truly be 50/50 everytime but your mind has been conditioned to expect equal numbers of Heads and Tails in a large number of coin flips so you probably wrote down a list that was closer than a difference of 8 and also with a streak of one side being less than 8.
You can also try this with a couple of friends...
Have a friend flip a coin 30 times and write down on a piece of paper what each result is in order. Then have a different friend pretend to flip a coin in his head 30 times while writing down what each imagined “flip” is. Now while they are doing this, go into another room and wait for them to finish. When you come back you will be able to look at each list and pick which one is the real coin flip list and which one is the imagined coin flip list. All you have to do is look for the longest streak and the biggest difference between total flips of each side. That one will almost always be the true list. Until, of course, your friends catch on.
The following is from an article on the internet...
“There is a professor, of whom I can remember no biographical information, who likes to do a demonstration for his class. Two pairs of students are selected to record a series of 100 coin flips in his absence. One pair is actually flipping a coin and recording the actual sequence, and the other pair is making up a fake series of flips. It is very easy for the professor to detect the fake series upon his return. The fake series does not contain enough streaks of heads or tails. The clusters are missing.
I flipped a quarter 300 times. At one point I had a series of nine consecutive heads. If you picked up a quarter and flipped it nine times, the likelihood of getting nine heads would be extremely unlikely. But finding such a streak in 300 flips is not all that unusual. To draw your target around those after the fact and insist on an explanation makes no sense. Here is a typically random twenty flips that to most people looks clumpy. Six of the first seven flips are heads and seven of the last ten are tails
H T H H H H H T T H H T T H H T T H T T T T H T H
Everyone knows NBA basketball players get into the zone and go on hot shooting streaks and at other times go cold and can’t sink a shot to save their lives. However, some scientists studied the Philadelphia 76er’s and proved that their hot and cold shooting streaks were no greater than would be expected by chance. Their shooting streaks might has well have been coin flips.”
Now the impact of us expecting to see no patterns in truly random events is that when we DO see a pattern we know longer except the explanation that it is random anymore just as in the case of the hot and cold streaks of NBA players. Or maybe even NFL quarterbacks, who knows?
The bottom line about trying to make up coin flips is that the human brain finds it incredibly difficult to fake randomness. And when we are presented with randomness we often interpret it as nonrandomness. For example...
Most of us have or have listened to an mp3 player. Whether it’s an Ipod or another brand, they usually have a shuffle feature that plays a song at random, right? Well when Apple launched this feature customers complained that it favored certain bands because often tracks from the same band were played one after another. The customers were guilty of seeing patterns in their Ipod’s random song selection and inferring that it was not random. But if your Ipod is truly random then each new song choice is independent of the previous choice. As the coin-flipping experiment above shows, counterintuitively long streaks are the norm. If songs are chosen randomly it is very possible, if not entirely likely, that there will be clusters of songs by the same artist.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was totally serious when he said, in response to the outcry from customers, “We’re making the shuffle less random to make it feel more random.”
On the subject of probability, here is a curiously counterintuitive fact and also a way to make a little money from time to time if you’re the betting type...
Did you know that in a random group of 23 people there is a 50.7% chance that two of them have the exact same birthday? In a random group of 35 people there is an 85% chance that two of them have the same birthday. With a group of 60 people the odds of a shared birthday go up to 99%. This has nothing to do with seasons, birth rates, people being related to each other, or any other deciding factor. It’s just pure math given that any birthday is as likely as another. So if you’re ever at a large party of strangers, offer to bet someone that two people have the same birthday. You’ll probably win.
Ok, so the point of this? Aww, there’s no point really. Just sharing interesting things I’ve read and thought about. I usually have a meter in my head from day to day on the board that fluctuates while spectating how the other posters behave. Of course we probably all do this. Some days you see something that inspires and the meter goes into the green and other days you see things that just make you think, “What’s the point?” I’m just curious to know if my meter fluctuations are a result of complete randomness or is there really a pattern going on around here?
Peace Out,
DeCav
In my opinion Cityslicker is the best at giving and taking the trash talk. I like to think i'm good at it, but I could use some improvement at times. Take care bro!
