Opinion Primaries: Modified Picks the Top 10 in the World

[C-Fan]

Recently, there was a thread about the top north american players in footbag. The OP of that thread clarified that he was asking about raw ability instead of competition results. This got me thinking... who are the current top 10 players in the world in terms of raw ability? Also, how would we measure that?

Comparing players abilities in footbag is exceedingly difficult for many reasons. I’m going to cover a few options of comparing player ability before getting to the goal of this thread at the end.
Competition Results

Perhaps the most appealing way to compare players, would be to look at Worlds results. After all, Worlds is the biggest and most prestigious competition, and the assumption would be that the best players attend and compete. In reality though, this is not the case. Every year many elite players do not attend worlds because of logistics (too far/expensive to get to). Indeed, most years that Worlds are in Europe, several top North American players don’t attend, and vice versa.

There have been attempts in recent years to take this logistical problem into account, by ranking players based on their competition results in tournaments of various sizes regardless of location. Unfortunately, this still doesn’t provide an accurate reflection of player ability, since some players do not travel to tournaments even within their region. Last year, I finished with the top player ranking based off of tournament results, despite the fact that I did not even compete in Worlds. While I won a few events last year, it opened my eyes to the possibility that somebody could finish in second place in multiple tournaments and still end up with a better ranking than multiple players who showed up to a single tournament all year and spanked me (e.g. Jorden in circle at USO).

Another problem with using competition results to compare players, is that even if it were objective, there are some elite players who do not compete.

Because of these issues, competition results aren’t a great way of determining raw ability, much less comparing the raw ability of various players. [Aside: for what it’s worth, I personally gauge a player’s ability as some combination of competition results and their raw ability. But that’d get too complicated for this discussion.]

Criteria

So if we are abandoning competition results as a criteria for measuring a player’s raw footbag ability, what criteria should we use? Style? Consistency? Uniqueness? These are all subjective, but I think they should have a place in people’s decisions. Are there objective milestones we can use to measure skill? Beast combos? 10 fearless? Fearless records? If two players rank roughly equally across the board using the criteria in this paragraph, would we then go to their competition results to use as a tie breaker? These are not rhetorical questions; I am genuinely curious to hear people’s thoughts.

Paring down the field

Assuming we could come up with an agreed upon criteria for judging players’ abilities (for the record, I don’t see this happening. We’d probably have to go with people’s subjective opinions), how would we then determine the top ten in the World? I gave this some thought, and had some ideas.

My first thought, would be to have regional voting, and then have the top finishers in each region enter a larger, head to head vote. For example, there could be a thread where people nominate/discuss the top Canadian players, and after a couple days, a poll would go up where people would vote for their top 3 choices. A similar topic and poll could happen for the US, and then a vote to pick the strongest 4 players from North Am, who would then go into the vote with the results from Europe, etc. This approach is appealing, since it’d break the process down into easy to digest chunks. The main disadvantage I see, is that skill is not currently divided up equally around the World. There are so many strong Finnish and Polish players, that this system would cut a lot of good players from those countries, who might be stronger than some North Am (or Japanese) players who’d make the cut. This could be resolved by having countries/regions within Europe have separate rounds, to take into account the number and strength of players in that region. Once we got all the votes counted up for each region, and once we finished the runoff votes across the different regions, we’d ideally be left with a pool of 15 players or so (again, decided by the unscientific consensus of the opinion of modified) in a final poll. People would only be able to choose players from that final list, and they’d post their vote by listing the top 15 in order. Then, we could assign a value for votes and come up with a top 10. Or something like that.

I guess my question is: does this sound interesting to anybody? Or would people prefer to cut to the chase and just post their own top 10 lists of players in the World? There is nothing at stake, and this would essentially just be a glorified primary of an opinion poll. If there is interest in this, I can go ahead and start the respective topics for each region. After a consensus list of candidates is made for each region, I’d start a new topic where people would vote by posting their top three in order. Off the top of my head, the regions I was thinking of were:

• Canada (or should it be incorporated with the US?)
• USA
• Japan/Australia/NZ
• Poland
• Finland
• Europe

What do people think?

[C-Fan]

My first stab at who would be on the ballot for each region would be:

USA
- Evan Gatesman
- Jim Penske
- David Clavens
- Lon Smith
- Scott Bevier
- Nick Landes
- Justin Dale

Canada
- Jay Boychuk
- Jorden Moir
- Johnny Suderman
- I know there has to be more…

Japan/Aus/NZ
- Takumi
- Kenzo Ogawa
- Taishi
- Phil Morrison
- Johnny Murphy (inactive?)
- Jeremy OWheel

Poland
- Olaf
- Rafal Kaleta
- Damian Gielnicki
- Szymon K
- Marcin Bujko
- Norek

Finland
- Juho Marjo
- Felix Zenger
- Anssi
- Toni Paakkonnen
- Aleksi Airinen
- Samu Ahola
- Tuukka
- Mikko

Europe
- Vasek
- Honza
- Milan
- Rene Ruhr
- Serge Kaldany (active?)
- Yves Kreil
- Karim Daouk (does he freestyle still?)


This is likely incomplete. In each region's thread people could argue for people they'd want on the ballot.

Just going over the names I already have here, it’s tough to come up with a top ten. Assuming I haven’t missed any major names, it might just be faster if people look at my above lists and post their top 15 players (maybe in three tiers), and if enough people have the same people on their lists, we can cull a top ten from that. I dunno.

[Outsider]

Ken,

Its a good topic, a fun and interest topic of conversation, but I voted against the idea -- I don't think there's a really objective criteria or objective way of measuring. Its not as though we can plug these shredders into some sort of skill-o-meter and just measure to see who has the most raw ability, so, as fun as it is to discuss and speculate, I don't see the point in trying to develope a serious "most-raw-ability" ranking system.

The topic got me thinking about a very similar question, though -- of the FORMER great shredders, who had the most raw ability? Of the guys who were the best players of their day 10 or 15 or 20 years ago (holy cow -- when's the last time Tim Kelly or Josh Casey competed?), who had the most raw ability -- which of those guys COULD be a top player today, hitting today's hardest tricks, if they were relatively new and enthousiastic and dedicated and young?

Also, perhaps its a little too earlier in the game for him, but this Christopher Schillem guy:
http://modified.in/footbag/viewtopic.php?t=22796
looks like he's got some pretty serious raw ability.

Now I've got to go and get back to work on my latest invention -- a Raw-Shred-O-Meter (part thermometer, part geiger-counter [to measure the best atomic and nuclear sets], and part tri-corder. It also has a built-in digital clock), patent pending.

[C-Fan]

as fun as it is to discuss and speculate, I don't see the point in trying to develope a serious "most-raw-ability" ranking system. .

I tried to get a lot in my first post, so I probably didn't emphasize the purpose well enough. As you point out, the goal of the project would mostly be to have fun compiling a list. This list wouldn't have any impact on tournament seeding, or anything else.

-- of the FORMER great shredders, who had the most raw ability? Of the guys who were the best players of their day ...who had the most raw ability -- which of those guys COULD be a top player today, hitting today's hardest tricks, if they were relatively new and enthousiastic and dedicated and young? .

The first name that came to my mind was Rippin. I have very little doubt about this. After that, I'd probably say Wulff...Tuan.

[MathieuGM]

USA
- Evan Gatesman
- Jim Penske
- David Clavens
- Lon Smith
- Scott Bevier
- Nick Landes
- Matt Keemer
Ken Somolinos

Canada
- Jay Boychuk
- Jorden Moir
- Johnny Suderman

Japan/Aus/NZ
- Phil Morrison
-I can't say much about the rest, i don't know them enough :S


Poland
- Olaf
- Rafal Kaleta
- Damian Gielnicki
- Szymon K
- Marcin Bujko
- Norek

Finland
- Juho Marjo
- Felix Zenger
- Anssi
- Toni Paakkonnen
- Aleksi Airinen
- Tuukka
- Mikko
-Tuomas Riisalo

Europe
- Vasek
- Honza
- Milan
- Rene Ruhr
- Yves Kreil
- Jacob Wagner
- Christopher Schilem

Here is my list! I basically took the Ken one and added / take away few players. Underlined players are those i added!

And i just realized something weird... I actually have met all the players in that list O.o That's crazy lol!

Mat

[C-Fan]

Can't believe I forgot Lauri A and Tuomas off my Finland list. But yeah, good additions.

[boyle]

I think the problem is the dominance of both Poland and Finland in the idea of a regional voting system. They are just both so strong at the moment, which makes sense for the location of the 2011 and 2012 Worlds.

I would add Dan Ednie to the Aus/NZ/Japan list, though neither he or Jeremy are playing anywhere near the level they played at 4-5 years ago and neither would challenge most of the other players on the list at the moment.

Another way you could do the measurements is get everyone to vote for their top 10. It could be done in a way where each persons number 1 is given 10 points, down to their number 10 with one point - no ties, no extra players in the list, etc.

Then the player with the most points would be declared the winner and you could go down from there.

I have always thought it would be cool to have a "pro tour" like they do in surfing, where a certain amount of players are on the circuit, then others can get wildcards to certain events.

It would be interesting on how to select the initial batch of players who make up the core.