The 2011 Rugby World Cup has climaxed with hosts New Zealand being crowned champions for the second time last night (joining Australia and South Africa, while England has won it once). They did so by defeating France 8-7 in a tense affair in the Final at Auckland’s Eden Park, in front of (a capacity) 60,000 supporters – certainly not the easy way as most expected, but having endured 24 years of angst since their last title in 1987, all Kiwis will still take it nonetheless.Oh yes! We will take it!
Lenten continues,
A co-author of mine, Niven Winchester (these days at MIT), is a native New Zealander who will no doubt be ecstatic after having been at the game in person. He is primarily a Trade Economist, but also has a penchant for modeling predictions and ranking systems in sport. His 2008 paper in JQAS (abstract here) concludes that the current bonus points system is sub-optimal at his defined objective of revealing the best quality teams over the duration of the season. Instead, he favors altering the narrow-loss bonus threshold from seven to five match points, and changing the try bonus to either a minimum of eight tries, or alternatively, for scoring at least three more tries than the opponent does.Not sure about the 8 try idea, how many teams score 8 tries?, but the 3 more tries notion could strength the incentives for try scoring. An interesting question is how such incentives affect the attacking-defending attitude of teams? Big defence seems to win the big games, so do we need more incentives for attacking play?
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