The Case of Ricardo Salazar

If you happen to be a Sounders fan or anyone who knows a Sounders fan, you probably already know who they hate with the passion of a thousand burning suns. This fiery hatred is directed towards the Portland Timbers Steven Lenhart pro-grass people MLS "ref" Ricardo Salazar. This name should be familiar with you, but if it isn't, let me give you a quick summary of him.

Picture if Ed Hochuli switched from football to futbol and became hispanic. There, that's pretty much all you need to know. In recent years, Sounders fans have grown to hate this man due to his constant bias against Seattle during our games that he refs. Now, I know the league rotates which refs we get at our games, but it really does seem like every other week has Ricardo's name written on the scorecard. This, however, is not true. He has only managed to meddle in six of our games this season (five MLS games and one US Open Cup final which shall never be mentioned again).

In our most recent outing, the Sounders played to a nil-nil draw with the Lakers of Real Salt and happened to have a few controversial calls/no calls for and against Seattle. Some examples of these are as follows:

• Two weak yellow cards accumulating for a 30' red for Zach Scott.
• A yellow when Shuler took down Montero as the last man
• No hand ball called inside the box against RSL

Let's start at the end. No hand ball was called when Fredy crossed the ball across the box. This was a good call no matter how many people were screaming for the call. The defender's arm was against his body and was incidental contact. Good job, Salazar. Next, in the second half, Fredy was taken down by Schuler during a break away. Schuler was the last man back (Borchers was a yard or two behind Fredy) and he was awarded a yellow when the rules state that a red should have been given. Good try, good effort, Salazar. Third, Zach Scott was given a delayed yellow near the beginning of the game (10') for stabbing for a ball and catching a little of Espindola's feet. This was not a yellow. Maybe it would warrant a verbal caution, but nothing serious should have came from this. In the 30th minute, Scott came in with a tackle on Morales and knocked the ball away but Salazar deemed this worthy of a second yellow because Morales ran into Scott and embellished the fall. Hey, Salazar, go f... yeah, I'll keep this clean.

This was the last straw for me. I decided to take to the inter google and Excel to make my judgement on Salazar and his bias. Disclaimer: I'm heading into this with the starting view that Salazar hates everything about Seattle, including Pike Place Market and the Space Needle.

Sources

I'm going to be formulating my opinion based off of three websites: refrefs.com (this site tracks different refs and how they award fouls and cards to teams compared to the team averages), football-lineups.com (this site shows lineups for a bunch of games and allows you to sort by ref), and good old mlssoccer.com (the super official MLS website).

Procedure

From the three websites I listed in the previous section, I will gather information about fouls called against the Sounders and see how that total compares to the expected amount of fouls based on the lineup. I calculated the average number of fouls committed by each player per minute by dividing fouls committed by minutes played (numbers from mlssoccer.com) and assigned each player their FC/M number. Next, I created lineup cards for each game that included starters and subs and how many minutes they played (info from football-lineups.com). The next step is multiplying FC/M by minutes played for each player and then summing the results to find how many fouls we should expect from the lineup. Doing this is especially important, in my opinion, for the Sounders since we use so many different lineups. An example of this would be if Tiffert or Evans were on the field. Tiffert is 5th highest on the team in FC/M (0.02 FC/M) while Evans is 22nd (0.006 FC/M). If both players were to play a full 90, we would expect Tiffert to account for 1.8 FC and Evans to only contribute 0.54 FC.

The next step is to assign each game to the official that was head ref for the game and then average the difference between actual fouls called and expected fouls called for each ref.

Blog Separating

Editors note: Brett and Jordon can be found over at West Coast Bias now, Dan will still be writing here at SportsMinds.

Hello out there, loyal readers.

Just over a week ago, we posted about a writer position opening up here at Sports Minds. In that post we mentioned some big changes coming. Well, little did we know the changes would be this big.

In finding our authors, we also came across an opportunity we could not turn down. The long story short is that Jordon and I will be moving our blog to a new website, complete with a brand new name, interface and collaboration with a couple great baseball writers. Our new blog is named "West Coast Bias" and you can find us by clicking on that link.

Our friend Brett Miller, who is my co-host on our radio show Sports With Brett And Brett, has been running his own stellar Mariners blog for about a year now over at King Felix's Court. When we approached other Brett about the opportunity to write with us he was hesitant at first, not wanting to completely abandon the image he had built over at KFC.

Over the last week we have been talking with other Brett and determined the best option for both of us was to combine our blogs into one great new blog with an awesome new direction. If you want to check out the new blog and read about the details of how that blog will be run, click on that link earlier in the post!

Before we go away, though, we want to say thank you to all the readers out there. When Jordon, Dan and I started this blog we never could have imagined the readership numbers we got, thanks to you guys.

The numbers have been fantastic and we appreciate all your clicks. We hope you follow us over to West Coast Bias, because we think the product we'll produce over there will be even better than what we could provide here.

We're incredibly excited about this new venture and we hope you are too. WCB will still cover all the major sports, as we did here on Sports Minds while also adding the brilliant Mariners coverage from Brett Miller.

Anyways, to keep this short we'll wrap it up here. Again, thank you for reading the blog and we hope you follow us over to West Coast Bias.

Go Cougs!

New Writer Search

Hello out there!

We are going through some changes here at Sports Minds, changes that make a search for a brand new writer necessary. To be sure we are getting responses that are best suited for the position we are looking for, I will lay out some basic qualities we're looking for. If you decide you posses these qualities, shoot us an email and we'll talk further.

Instead of emailing us at our contact email address, we would appreciate emailing us at this address or tweet to us on this account.

Below is our brief list of (minimum) qualities we would like in a new writer:

• Sufficient free time to write (at a minimum) one post per week.
• Extensive knowledge of Major League Baseball.
• Superficial knowledge of collegiate level baseball.
• Moderate knowledge of advanced statistical measures in baseball, or "sabermetrics."

If you feel like you posses these qualities, please let us know, we would love to talk more with you. Even if you are not in possession of all these qualities, but are interested in learning and potentially working into a regular role here, still send us a message. We're very open when considering this open writers position.

Sports With Brett And Brett - Episode 1

Hey look at that, my name is in the post title! So is this guys name! The other Brett and I have started a radio show this semester on KUGR radio, the student-run radio station at WSU. Our show is called Sports With Brett And Brett and we air live every Tuesday from 8-10 p.m.

Brett approached me months ago about possibly doing a sports talk radio show and I said yes just to get him to leave me alone. Joke, that's a joke; I was most definitely interested in doing a radio show. Long story short, we attended the KUGR general meeting and had a show scheduled a couple days later.

It's all moved pretty fast but it's been incredibly fun. Our first show was Tuesday from 8-10, which will always be our time slot. If you ever want to listen live the KUGR online stream link is right... here! The other option for you would be to add the stream into your iTunes, instructions for that process can be found on the KUGR website here.

For those of you who can't listen live but would like to listen to a recorded version of the show, I'll be posting it here every Wednesday! If you ever have any questions, our first preference would be to have you call in, we'd love to take some calls. Second option would be to post them in the comments here or Tweet us. Same goes for guest requests, send us any non-football guests you would like to hear on the show and we'll do our best to get them on with us.

After the jump, the first episode of Sports With Brett And Brett! We talk about WSU football, the Mariners, Sounders, and much more! Let us know what you think.

This Week In WSU Athletics: Sep. 2-8

Welcome to This Week In WSU Athletics! I'm trying out something new here, new and simple. Essentially all this will be is a listing of all WSU Athletic competitions on the horizon for the coming week, posted every Sunday morning.

In addition to a simple list, if a certain event is planned to be televised the event will be bolded and the channel will be listed. There wont be much written content in these posts, aside from the occasional snippet on a game I might find interesting.

If there's anything you would like to see added to this weekly post, send me a note in the comments and we'll see what we can do about it.

With that, let's head past the jump and take a look at the coming week in WSU athletics!

Everyone's Panties are in a Bunch About Cheating

"You caught me. I give up."

Lance Armstrong just gave up his fight against the doping charges being brought against him. This should be good news for the case as they will now be able to progress a lot faster with the important parts of the case (you know, the evidence and stuff like that). But what I don't get is why people are making such a big deal about this. The flow of the story should be: BREAKING NEWS LANCE ARMSTRONG GIVES UP FIGHT. That's it. A quick little article to refresh people about the case so far and then wait until real news drops before going any deeper.

It's not like 90 percent of people didn't know/assume that he doped. I mean, it's kind of obvious. The entire Tour is losing their top 20+ riders every year because of drugs and some bad meat and Lance just plain beat everyone. Yes, he could have just been a freak of nature (he is a bit of an extraordinary biological specimen) but to go out and beat the best cyclists in the world while they were cheating makes me believe that he was also dirty. Say that he had a 0.90 chance of winning the Tour each year. That gives him a 0.48 chance of winning for seven years straight. A 0.80 chance drops it down to 0.21 for seven straight wins.

I honestly don't care if he was cheating or not. I don't care if he was an angel or a complete douche. He has done great things for cancer, inspired kids to be active by getting on a bike, and he even beat cancer. That last fact alone should be enough of a reason to stop throwing him under the bus for cheating.

He is one man that may or may not have cheated that beat a bunch of other men that did cheat.

Wow, that's a very hypothetical statement that I just made there. Makes sense since that's all that we know as of right now. Let's let the courts do what they are supposed to do and let him have a trial. Do you recall that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing?

2012 WSU Volleyball TV Schedule

Volleyball: A lot more dramatic than you might think.

As some of you may know, I will be covering the WSU volleyball team for the second consecutive year for the Daily Evergreen. It was an enjoyable experience last year and I'm really looking forward to covering the beat again.

As part of the incredibly exciting new Pac 12 Network that just launched on Wednesday, we will be getting an extensive amount of volleyball covered on TV, which is pretty awesome. If you have not watched much women's volleyball, you should check it out, it's very entertaining.

Thanks to this new network, the WSU volleyball team will have 12 televised matches, compared to the two televised matches in 2011. If you're not going to attend games (which you should, because they're awesome and these women deserve support) then you should definitely watch these televised matches.

After the jump is the WSU volleyballs 2012 televised schedule.

Referees Make Correct Calls...When They Feel Like It

We all make mistakes. If you think that you are perfect, that is one of the many mistakes that you make. No matter what you do in life, you are bound to do something wrong eventually, it’s just basic human nature. However, what separates your average person that keeps on putting his foot in his mouth or hurts people through his action from those people that are highly respected in society is one word. Consistency.

This consistency could be doing good or bad actions repeatedly but the key is to keep on doing the same thing so that we know what to expect. One of the main areas that mistakes are magnified is throughout sporting events when the ref becomes observed by blowing his whistle.

Most of us have heard the old adage about the best ref is the one that we do not see. My very simple opinion of that statement is that it’s wrong. What’s the point of having a ref if they don’t do anything? Yes, I agree that the players should be allowed to play the game at whatever pace they want but the ref is there for a reason. Let’s use soccer as our example as that’s where our magical trip is headed.

Cougar Football Project: A Fun Perspective

I'm back ya'll! I'm deeply sorry I haven't been around at all this summer. But I'm back, for now, with an incredibly short post and cool picture I threw together on the Cougar Football Project.

You have all seen pictures of the CFP by now, you've probably seen upwards of 50 photos from different people at different angles during different phases of the project. Through all these pictures you've gotten an idea of what the CFP looks like, but what these pictures don't convey is the true scale of the structure.

What I did here was pretty simple, take a picture of what the CFP currently looks like and superimpose a picture of the old press box right over it. Hopefully you remember roughly how big the old press box was in comparison to the stadium, so seeing it right on top of what's currently there will hopefully help you understand how ENORMOUS the CFP is.

The Cougar Football project is about a month and a half away from completion, and it's already amazing.

Also, after the jump, a cool picture of the new and improved Cougar logo on the 50 yard line!

Sounders Play Chelsea While A Legend Retires.

Photo from sounderatheart.com

European Champions visit Seattle Sounders; A Legend retires.

Champions League and F.A. Cup winners Chelsea FC visited Seattle last Wednesday for the first friendly of the Chelsea USA tour. The game was played in front of 53,000 fans whose attention all night was on one man. That man can only be, the great Roger Levesque.

                                                                              

Oh Roger, the biggest fan favorite amongst the Seattle Sounders fan base. This is a man who made history in just 48 seconds. A man who made scuba diving the new thing. A man who has come be known as “The King”. Roger made his departure from his professional soccer career last Wednesday, and the very next day was at QFC in Seattle signing autographs for an hour. I actually went there, and he made time for each and every fan. I had a brief conversation with him and didn’t say much beyond how grateful I was for everything he has done. Roger wasn’t stoic the entire time, but smiling and grateful for my kind words. He seemed to really enjoy the interaction with his fans, and enjoyed every minute of it.