Beyond The "X's" and "O's"--Why Stanford Beat UCLA in the Pac-12 Football Championship Game

Last night, Stanford beat UCLA 27-24 in a nailbiting conference football championship game that went down to the wire. This was just six days after the same two teams met at the Rose Bowl, with Stanford prevailing 35-17. While few people gave UCLA a chance to win the rematch, the oddsmakers favoring the Cardinal by 8 points (after opening as a 10 point favorite), I thought UCLA would win due to factors other than the physical matchup, which one might refer to as psychological or behavioral factors. However, as things turned out, Stanford won the game, and again for reasons beyond the X's and O's of game analysis, I fully accept the outcome.

There were two main reasons why I thought the Bruins would win. First of all, UCLA had played an atypically bad game against Stanford the week before. UCLA quarterback Brett Hundley failed to scramble as he usually does when pressured in the pocket, his throwing accuracy was off, his receivers had uncharacteristic dropped balls, and the defense missed tackles. To me this was easily explainable. UCLA had just beaten crosstown rival USC the week before, for the first time in six years (and as statisticians point out only the second time in 13 years, though as most statisticians ignored, also the tenth time in 21 years), and I was sure that the team was still savoring that win. I know I was, and for the first time in memory I was sitting in the stands at the Rose Bowl, not particularly enthusiastic about the game unfolding in front of me. Plus Stanford really needed the win. Consequently I expected UCLA to play much better in the rematch.

The second reason was that Stanford had played three emotional, must win games in a row against Oregon State, Oregon, and then UCLA. It is my strong belief that no team can bring its "A" game four weeks in a row--it just isn't humanly possible. Just go back to UCLA's stunning 13-9 win over USC in 2006. Even though most observers had mailed in a USC win even before the game, USC had won three straight games against tough, ranked opponents, Cal, Oregon and Notre Dame, and was bound to have the letdown that they did. While the Bruins played a gutty game that night, SC's off night was also a major factor in the loss that knocked them out of the BCS championship game. As such, I did not expect Stanford to play their best game last night.

As things turned out, I was right on both counts. Where UCLA was unable to run the football the week before, this week they shredded Stanford's seemingly impenetrable rushing defense. And UCLA's defense really stepped up its overall performance against Stanford. Yet, in the end, Stanford won again despite a performance which upset Stanford coach Shaw throughout the game. Bruin fans lament the nearly "Pick 6" thrown by Hundley early in the game with UCLA leading by 14-7 and threatening to score again. UCLA fans also point to the Bruins' statistical advantage and declared that despite the score, UCLA was the better team that day. But while I was certainly extremely disappointed by the loss, I don't look at the "what if's" or think that UCLA should have won, though I agree that they could have pulled it out.

With regard to the apparently game changing interception, I don't think that changed the ultimate outcome. Through 50 years of watching football and other sports, I have concluded that some games are meant to come down to the wire, and that the details of the game coming up to crunch time are nearly irrelevant. Yes, if Hundley didn't throw the interception UCLA might have gone up 21-7 or 17-7, but under those circumstances I believe the game would have unfolded differently. Athletic contests are interactive events, and when one team does something, the other team responds. You can't assume that if you change the outcome of one play in a game that everything else would be the same. And in a what turns out to be a close game there is just going to be an ebb and flow.

My other behavioral observation from years of watching sports is that the "better" team is the one which performs when it counts. Statistically and aesthetically, UCLA did look like the better football team. But the important thing is who came through at crunch time. Last night, despite having the better offensive performance, UCLA did not score in the fourth quarter, when the game was on the line, while Stanford scored 10 points, which was sufficient to give them a 3 point win.

So while I was terribly disappointed in the outcome of the game, I was pretty much over the loss fairly quickly. In hindsight, Stanford is a great team, significantly better than UCLA, and UCLA was fortunate in being in a position to possibly win the game at the end. It was a game that UCLA could have won if everything went right, but not one which they should have won.

Bowl Championship Series Chaos--Wooden's Rule Rules Again

Every college football season I laugh when a month before the end of the regular season there are still several undefeated teams and pundits worry about what will happen if three or more teams remain undefeated at the end of the year. Yet, time after time, there is typically only one undefeated team left by season's end, which lends to its own controversy about which one of several one loss teams deserves the berth in the BCS championship game. Because what happens is that in the final weeks of the season, most of the undefeated teams fall victim to upset, quite often in a stunning manner, such as last night's loss by Kansas State to unranked Baylor, Oregon's shocking home loss to Stanford, and Alabama's previous week's loss to Texas A & M. Or back in 2007, when a whole parade of unbeaten teams suffered stupefying losses while on an apparently clear path to the BCS title game.

These stunning year end losses occur every year, and as I pointed out before, are easily explained by John Wooden's simple, yet not widely recognized observation, that being on a winning streak creates pressures that lead to the streak's demise. It is not clear why such is a case. Is is conscious or subconscious in nature? Do teams start playing not to lose instead of to win? I don't know, but it happens pretty much like clockwork all the time, in all sports. Now there are refinements that have to be made to the rule. A team that is vastly superior to all of its opposition can continue to win for an extended period of time, like the classic UCLA basketball and Oklahoma football teams. In contrast, a team that is not clearly superior, particularly when marked by a series of close wins, and particularly against mediocre oppostion, is much more susceptible to an unexpected winning streak ending loss.

However, there is one element to this rule which befuddles me. A lot of these streak breaking losses are inflicted by teams that on paper are quite inferior to the teams that they beat. Why do these teams rise to the occasion at the right time? Even if the streaking team concededly doesn't play its best game, the other team needs to play near its peak performance How does an average Baylor team rise up and dominate the #1 rated Kansas State team? Or do the same thing to Oklahoma State last year? How did a Miami team that had been stomped the week before come back in the last game of 1998 and knock UCLA out of the BCS championship game? Why did so many underdogs bite back at the end of the 2007season to derail teams headed to the BCS championship? It happens too often to be a coincidence, but I really have no good explanation why.

Spending The Night At JFK Airport

We've all see the news reports of passengers stranded at a closed airport, forced to sleep on the floor or on uncomfortable chairs until they could catch a flight out of town. Sometimes I would wonder why they don't just get a hotel room someplace, or perhaps they didn't budget for another night's hotel stay. So it was stunning last week when I found myself forced to stay overnight in Terminal 5 at JFK airport.

A couple of months previously we were booked to fly to New Orleans from Dallas on what turned out to be the day before Hurricane Issac hit that city, but properly warned, we instead flew home to Los Angeles from Dallas. When we flew out of Burbank last Wednesday morning to New York, and then connecting to Washington D.C., we were aware that a Nor'easter might strike the east coast, but the last reports the night before were that the storm was starting to veer away from the Atlantic Coast and the effects would not be serious. And when our flight boarded as scheduled at 7 am, I figured everything would be manageable. Now flying on Jet Blue, we had the advantage of watching TV while flying cross country, and the reports were worrisome. The storm had been given a name, Winter Storm Athena, and we saw that some carriers were canceling operations at JFK, prior to our scheduled landing time. However, we did continue on and landed on time at JFK, where it was raining with snow flurries. We waited for our flight to DC and even boarded the plane but it started snowing heavily. We were on the plane for a couple of hours, watching the snow blow horizontally and cover much of the window, before they eventually canceled the flight, due more to the winds that the snow. When we got to the front of the customer service line after an hour wait, it turned out the best alternative was to fly to Boston at 6:30 am, then from there to Reagan, rather than Dulles. However by the time that was settled, there were no hotel rooms by the airport so we had to stay overnight at the airport, essentially homeless. (I would have considered staying in Manhattan if we weren't booked for such an early departure in the morning.)

We really didn't sleep much at all overnight, since the seats in the terminal weren't made for sleeping, plus they didn't lower the lights, even though there were no flights after midnight. Also for some reason they kept running a general announcement about the pet walking zones once or twice every hour. And it seemed like a lot of the other stranded passengers didn't even try going to sleep, preferring to engage in animated conversation. So by 4:30 am we were up and walking around. And the airport at 4:30 am was a real revelation, seeing how busy it was with shops opening up and passengers (aside from those who were stuck in the terminal overnight) arriving for the flights. There was an incredibly long line of people buying coffee at the Dunkin Donuts and at the Cibo checkout.

A major issue in all this was our luggage. When they rebooked us for the New York to Boston to Washington Reagan circuit, I asked about our luggage. The agent told me it would stay on the original plane and be delivered to Dulles airport in the morning, where our cancelled flight had been scheduled to land, and that indeed it would be there before we landed at Reagan. I really didn't relish the thought of driving out to Dulles just to pick up our luggage, but it would be much better than losing your luggage completely. However during the chaos I heard a voice shout out of a speaker phone something like that there would be no rerouting of cancelled flights "except for the DC flight". At first I didn't understand what that meant. However later in the evening while perusing the flight departures board looking for an update of the morning's Boston flights, plus looking for clues or patterns from Thursday flights already cancelled, I saw that the Thursday morning Jet Blue flight from JFK to Dulles had been cancelled. Well if that flight was cancelled, how would would our luggage get to Dulles? Did the reference to "not re-routing except for the DC flight" refer to luggage, and were they going to track the replacement flights of the passengers on our plane and send those luggage along because there was no follow up flight to Dulles? So when we arrived at Reagan, I went to baggage claim and asked them if our baggage might be there. The agent replied that another passenger from our cancelled flight had already found his luggage so it could well be there. And by the time I caught up to Mrs. Chandavkl, she had grabbed our bags and I was happy that I pieced things together and didn't believe what Jet Blue had told us.

At the time all this transpired, it was certainly aggravating, tiring, and trying set of circumstances. But in hindsight, this turned out to be a very interesting adventure that was almost worthwhile.

How Americanized Food Came To Be (My Huffington Post Article)

If you visit any of today's modern Chinese American communities, such as the San Gabriel Valley outside of Los Angeles, Flushing in New York, or numerous areas around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and even Houston, you will find an interesting array of wonderful and delicious Chinese food. Yet when you compare that to what most 20th century Americans believed to be Chinese food, (and what still passes as Chinese food in many parts of the country to this day), there's absolutely no comparison. So what happened?

Of course, this is a complicated question with many factors at play. But the leading cause is the little known history of the immigration patterns from China to the United States. The Chinese first came to the United States during the Gold Rush, went on to build the railroads, then developed the agricultural industry. But few people realize that virtually all these Chinese came from one small part of China: the rural districts of Toishan outside of the city formerly known as Canton. The Toishanese came to America because of a combination of dire circumstances at home and easy access to the seaport of Canton.

Now everything else being equal, people from other parts of China would have eventually started coming to America. However, due to the racial enmity that built among the American populace, the United States passed a series of laws that made it illegal for most residents of China to come to the United States between 1882 and 1943. In 1943, China was given an annual quota of 105 legal immigrants. This is not to say that all of the Chinese who were in the U.S. were the descendents of pre-1882 immigrants. Rather, as the only nationality barred from coming to the United States, the Chinese resorted to various forms of illegal entry to come here anyway. But those who came surreptitiously were exclusively relatives or neighbors of Chinese already here, keeping the population homogenously Toishanese. Indeed, despite the Chinese exclusion laws, it was said that in many Toishanese villages, virtually all of the adult males were in the United States.

Suddenly, the difference between what Americans believed to be Chinese food, such as chop suey, chow mein, moo goo gai pan, won ton soup, and egg foo yung and what we know today as authentic Chinese food, becomes easy to explain. The Chinese who were resident in America until changes in American immigration policy in the 1960s were not geographically representative of the people of China, and furthermore, were rural, not urban, in origin. I like to make the analog that it's the same as if all of the Americans living in China came from someplace like Victorville, California. From this starting point, factor in the lack of availability of popular Chinese ingredients here in the United States, and on top of that throw in the need to adapt the food to make it palatable to Americans. Mix these all together and core 20th century Chinese food becomes understandable as a combination of authentic and modified food prepared by immigrants who came from a single small area of China.

Of course, not all Americanized Chinese food is traceable to Toishanese food and mutations thereof. A new wave of dishes destined to become Americanized Chinese standards arrived on the scene in the late 1960s with dishes such as kung pao chicken, mushu pork, General Tso's chicken, and hot and sour soup joining the pantheon. Once again, immigration was the key to these dishes, as America's doors opened up to more categories of Chinese immigrants beginning in 1965. The first wave of new Chinese immigrants came primarily from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as immigration from mainland China would be years away, not until after President Nixon's historic China visit in 1972. But many of the Taiwanese newcomers were Nationalists who fled from the mainland, bringing with them their penchant for a spicier Chinese cuisine than that of the Toishanese or the Hong Kong peoples. Branding this new, spicy regime as Hunan or Szechwan style, and significantly tweaking the food to suit the locals, Taiwanese chefs took New York by storm and captured the imagination of Manhattan. But this was faux Hunan- and faux Szechwan-style food adapted to New York tastes, as true Hunan and Szechwan food from immigrants from those regions bringing their native foods to America would not arrive on our shores for decades. So once again, even these new style Chinese dishes were not particularly representative of the food actually found in China, but that didn't stop it from sweeping across the entire United States.

So really, what America has come to know as Chinese food for 150 years is really a combination of historical accidents and adaptation to American tastes. In contrast, today's authentic Chinese food in the United States represents not only advances in culinary sophistication, but more importantly, reflects that Chinese and their food from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and all regions of mainland China are now represented in the United States. And that's quite a difference.

Californians Are Special

As a proud Californian, I like to think we're ahead of the curve on a lot of things. This is the land of innovation where many national and international trends get started, so indeed we here in California are special. But not everything about being special is good. Last week I was in Las Vegas, where I paid about $3.60 for a gallon of gasoline. Then I come back to Los Angeles to find gasoline priced a dollar higher at $4.60 per gallon. Besides hearing rightfully outraged consumers being interviewed on the radio and television, the airwaves have also been full of politicians expressing their outrage and promising to get to the bottom of the mess, implying collusion, profiteering, and other dastardly behavior could be to blame.

However, there is no conspiracy theory to be proved. This is just a matter of California being special. Specifically, the problem is California special blend gasoline. California has mandated that only special blends of gasoline may be sold within the state to minimize air pollution. Indeed, there are two special blends, one for winter and one for summer use. Gasoline sold in most of the rest of the United States is unfit for use in California. What this means is that California gasoline is a specialty product, which is only manufactured by a small number of refiners. So if the regular source of gasoline sold in Nevada is knocked off line, it can be easily replaced by other gasoline on the market, with little disruption in supply or price. But when one California gasoline refinery goes off line, like the Chevron refinery in Richmond which has been closed for months by a fire, there is a measurable effect on supply and price. And when there is a second disruption like the Exxon plant power failure last week, the effect is magnified. So it's no mystery what caused the price spike in California gasoline--it's the mandatory special California gasoline requirements imposed by the state of California. The politicians all know this is what is going on, and they are just pandering to the public who is unaware of the economics involved.

Now given the precarious supply situation in California, the conspiracy theorists strongly suggest that California gasoline refinery problems are actually orchestrated to restrict supply and jack up prices. However, the fallacy in this assertion can be easily demonstrated by the fact that the producer whose facility goes off line does not benefit from the higher prices, since the producer doesn't have any gasoline to sell at the higher price. Does anybody really think Chevron is happy that their refinery is going to be closed for several months before reopening while everybody else's refinery is in full operation? [Update: Chevron's quarterly earnings were down 33 percent.} But everybody loves a conspiracy so this point is never raised.

The Road To 6,000 Chinese Restaurants

The original L.A. Weekly/Huffington Post/People.com item on my visits to over 6,000 Chinese restaurants has generated all sorts of comments. One common reaction has been disbelief, with a number of commenters actually trying to do the math. How could I possibly have eaten at 6,000 different Chinese restaurants, since that would require trying a new Chinese restaurant every day for over 16 years? And even if you did one a day, wouldn't you run out of new Chinese restaurants to try?

Well the question is a valid one, but there really is an explanation. First of all, I've been doing this for more than 16 years, more like 35 years, though in the older days there weren't that many places worth trying. But more importantly, a good chunk of those 6,000 restaurants are located outside of my Los Angeles home base. When I'm home, I probably average at most maybe just two or three new Chinese restaurants a week, a pace which would indeed take forever to reach 6,000. However when I'm out of town I literally eat four or even five meals a day, each at a different restaurant. Consequently a four day trip to New York or San Francisco can easily add 20 restaurants to the listing, with most of my non-work hours devoted to scouting for food. I've perfected the breakfast and lunchtime subway dash between Midtown Manhattan and Chinatown (take the B or D train from under the Sheraton Hotel to Grand Ave.). And San Francisco is an especially fruitful destination, since besides the large quantity of good Chinese restaurants there, if I order a bad dish somewhere I don't have to finish it, but rather I can pack it up and give it to one of the homeless people that are ubiquitous around San Francisco Chinatown at night (where I always stay, though do not necessarily eat). That's what I call a win-win situation--leftovers for the homeless and I don't have to fill myself up on something that's not very good.

Once in a while I get even more ambitious, like the dim sum crawl through the suburbs of Toronto that I previously blogged about two years ago, where I hit up six dim sum restaurants one Sunday between 9 am and 3 pm. Or similarly the eight hour drive I took from Miami to Boca Raton (a straight line distance of less than 50 miles) as I zig zagged across South Florida to the scattered Chinese restaurants I had located in the Miami area Chinese newspaper.

Sometimes I'll drive, rather than fly to meetings in places like San Francisco, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Phoenix to sample Chinese restaurants on the way to my destination. (When else would I get a chance to try the dim sum in Palm Springs, Fresno or Bakersfield?) And when I do fly into the Bay Area for a meeting in San Francisco, I often fly into San Jose instead, so I may eat at restaurants in Silicon Valley or somewhere else between San Jose and San Francisco before making my way into the City. Attending a meeting in Washington D.C.? A couple of times I flew to New York and then rented a car, so I could sample some of the eateries between New York and D.C. Another out of town strategy is that I often make it a point to stay in a hotel closer to the focal point of Chinese food than my business site to maximize my access to Chinese restaurants. Also, that makes me feel more like a local as I drive 20 miles to my work destination, rather than staying on premises. Things like that are a necessary part of getting to 6,000.

A corollary to these rules is that when scheduled for a trip to one city, if that city doesn't have a large representation of Chinese restaurants, I'll look for relatively nearby (by my standards) localities that expand the pool. For example, after attending numerous meetings in Orlando and pretty much trying all of the worthwhile Chinese food there, I've driven at dinnertime to Tampa, St. Petersburg and even Gainesville and Cocoa Beach. A trip to San Antonio meant arriving in town two days early to enable side trips to Austin and Houston. And of course there were my driving marathons mentioned in previous blog posts, such as from Dallas to Houston and back the same day after taking the early morning flight from Los Angeles to Dallas. Or Monterey to Silicon Valley, twice--in the same day.

A corollary to the corollary is that aside from the Chinese food, my side excursions also provide an opportunity to see sights that I wouldn't otherwise get to visit, and which I have found to be quite enjoyable. Yes, that was a circuitous trip around South Florida, but I got to drive along the other Hollywood Blvd., and rode the entire length of Hypoluxo Road asking myself why would they name a major street after a chemical process? (Hypoluxo turned out to be a Native American chieftain.) And I saw how the urban area abruptly ended at the Everglades, and how they built way too many new houses in that metro area. I learned that most businesses in the Chinese suburbs of Toronto were not located in storefronts on the streets, but in giant shopping malls, often largely obscured from street view. So while the food was the immediate goal, there are definitely major non-culinary benefits.

And don't forget the phone books. Each year when the new Los Angeles Yellow Pages come out I check the restaurant listings to see if there are any new neighborhood restaurants I may have missed.

So yes, the road to 6,000 was real, but you just have to work extra hard to make it happen.

The Election Is Over

Yes, I know the calendar says it's September and there are still seven weeks to go until election day. But the election is over and the Republicans will be taking a pounding. A year ago, Intrade futures pegged President Obama's chances of re-election at no more than 50 percent, and the prospects for a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate were riding at 80 percent. The first to turn was the presidential race, when this past spring some good economic numbers shot Obama's odds up to 60 percent. They receded two or three points this summer as the economy seemed to stall. However as it became clear that even though national polls showed a neck and neck race, the electoral numbers didn't add up for Mitt Romney, Obama's odds surged past 60 percent. Add to this Romney's remarks about the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax, and Obama's odds are now 70 percent.

Now unseating an incumbent president is always a difficult proposition so an upcoming Obama re-election would be far from shocking under any circumstances. However what is shocking is the evaporation of the prospect that the Republicans will control the Senate. Even last month the odds favored a Republican senate, but almost overnight the odds on Republican Senatorial control have plummeted to 20 percent. I'm not sure what triggered such a rapid reversal of fortune. Certainly, the pigheadedness of Rep. Akin in turning a certain victory in Missouri into a certain loss didn't help. More likely, Romney's comments about the 47 percent, while probably not that significant since he wasn't going to win the election anyway, possibly sets up an Obama landslide that will submerge a number of Republican Senatorial candidates in its wake.

Of course futures tradings in political events is highly volatile and it is possible that things may turn again. Indeed during election day of 2004, the odds on a Kerry victory shot up to over 60 percent, thanks to the release of exit polling numbers that eventually turned out to be inaccurate. But unless President Obama is photographed kicking kittens or punching first graders, such a reversal of fortune appears to be unlikely.