Musings

Greetings Friends!
Our family has been here in the Philippines a little over a year and a half now. When we first landed David started halfway through Kindergarten and is now starting the second grade! Lynn has flourished and is just starting pre-Kindergarten and is having a blast. She loves going to school with her big brother and making friends of her own.

We moved from a cool climate to a hot and humid one. We moved from a place where cockroaches were only on tv to a place where they are everywhere. We moved from a world where the poor were much more invisible to a place where they are so numerous that to open you eyes is to see need. Life here is odd in an unexpected way as well. Many times I feel as if I have fallen into a 50's tv program. Sure people have smart phones and you can buy new technology, but finding a website for a company is difficult. You want to find the best price for something, or even find out if it is carried? You go to each place and scout it out yourself- maybe a friend will post a good deal on facebook. Glass bottles are the norm. You must bring a shopping bag with you- it is highly unlikely that you will be given a choice between paper and plastic. Sometimes I can't even put a finger on why it has a 50's vibe... but it is there. 

The city here is so big and expansive that it is difficult to see the sky and the horizon is only seen when you get a little out of the city. But once you do step out of the city it is beautiful. The fields are green and the sun is luminous. Farms are run with carabao instead of tractors. The Ocean is alive with color and coral and warmth I had never before experienced. 

We have tasted new foods and seen new places and me new friends and have found that wherever and whenever we move from this place there are things we will miss eating, places we miss going and people that we will miss and much as we now miss our friends in the States. 

In saying goodbye to Washington, to family and to friends in order that we might come here, we have entered into a lifetime of farewells. And as I watch new friends move to the next place that God has in store for them I realize that many of our goodbye's will also be "see you in heaven", because we cannot know that we will find one another in the great big and beautiful world of ours. If we find ourselves back in Washington among our family and friends. We will miss the mangoes, the friends and the waves that are only found here. I wonder if ever again I will find a place that is truly home. A home where my heart is content to be or if maybe a part of me will always be pulled in many directions. I know only that I trust God. I trust Him to guide our steps and to lead our family together to wherever His best waits for us.

The Seahawks should have run the ball . . . right? What do the numbers say?

As a typical fan I am coping with my team’s last second loss through math and statistics. (Wait, that’s not part of the normal grieving cycle?)

There has been much written about how bad the Seahawks decision was to pass on 2nd and goal from the 1 yard line with less than 30 seconds on the clock, down by 4 in the Super Bowl. They have the best back on the field (if not in football) and they have always been a run first team. Clearly this was the wrong call . . . Right?

Let’s take a step back. Here are some basic points which are sometimes over looked:

• With the time left on the clock, and only one timeout, the Seahawks would likely have to throw the ball once to have time to use all 4 downs
• Defending a play is much more effective if you know (or strongly guess) what is coming (pass or run).
• Throwing the ball on second down was the only way to also play 4th down if needed, and keep the defense playing both run & pass for the remaining plays.

Based on my own experience I estimated the following likelihood of scoring a touchdown on one play. These are arbitrary because to my knowledge there is no official stat for “Defense expecting run” or “Defense expecting pass”. There is certainly room to challenge the numbers, but I will say I ran the analysis below with my first estimate, and made no changes to manipulate the result.

	Defense expectation
	Run	Either	Pass
Offense Runs	40%	50%	60%
Offense Passes	25%	15%	10%

With these numbers I calculated the following results. (Note in this analysis the percentages are inverse – A larger percentage is a larger chance the defense stops the play. This makes calculations easier).

	Probabilities of not scoring a touch down			Total % of Defense stop	Chances of Seahawks win
Seahawks sequence	2nd down	3rd down	4th down
Run, Run,  out of time	50%	50%	100%	25.00%	75.0%
Pass, Run, Run	85%	50%	50%	21.25%	78.8%
Run, Pass, run	50%	85%	60%	25.50%	74.5%
Run, pass, Pass	50%	85%	75%	31.88%	68.1%
pass, pass, pass	85%	85%	75%	54.19%	45.8%

So, counter-intuitively the Seahawks best chance of winning is by calling a less effective play on second down. You can tweak the numbers to get a different result, but at least the call was not such a monumentally bad decision as it is being portrayed.