About Me

Me showing the Portland Timbers stadium some Seattle Sounders FC love.

It's been nearly a month since I started this blog, and I haven't given much detail about myself except for the "Introduction" post I made. As I believe social media is about being authentic and knowing a good bit about the author's background and biases, I will attempt to give readers some insight into who I am and why I blog about soccer and statistics.

• My father was in the military, so I moved six times before I graduated from high school. I have kept up the behavior and have made three moves since then. I have lived in eight different cities, and can confidently say that the Pacific Northwest is the best place to live in the United States. This impacts my outlook on sports fandom.
  
• I currently live in the Lake City neighborhood of Seattle, and fancy myself as someone more inclined to live in a city than in the suburbs.
• I have degrees in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (undergraduate) and Purdue University (Masters), and I am a certified Six Sigma black belt. I also have a double major in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon. So, yes, saying I am a nerd is an understatement.
• As to my Six Sigma background, I believe good statistical analysis at the right time can yield breakthrough insights that one might normally miss. That's why I used Arsene Wenger's name for my email address. Conversely, I believe bad statistics are like bad acid - they should neither be produced nor consumed. And yes, that was a rip off of a quote on Pearl Jam's Vitology liner notes for Spin the Black Circle.
  
• I have spent my entire professional career designing diesel engines. I completed my first six years of work at Ford designing components for these two engines, and have spent the last three years working on the design of this engine for PACCAR.
  
• I love taking public transit whenever I don't have to be at work so early that I am forced to drive my car. I average 3 days a week on the bus, and the 45 minute commute each morning and afternoon is where I get most of my reading - books, blogs, etc. - done for the day.
  
• I am a divorced father of two daughters who spend the weekends with me. This explains why my detailed analysis comes in fits and spurts over a weekend - having two young daughters means I spend many Friday and Saturday nights at home.
  
• I am a lover of live sports except baseball - it is too slow. Over my lifetime I have grown to become a fan/supporter of the following teams: San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, Jordan's Chicago Bull's teams, anywhere Shaquille O'Neal has played, Detroit Red Wings, Seattle Sounders FC, and Arsenal.
• I have come to love soccer because of its beautiful simplicity, the fact that matches only last two hours (most pro sports events in the US last 3+ hours), and that the professional game in the US is so financially limited that the players are not like the spoiled brats in our other pro leagues. You can see this post for my explanation of why I am an Arsenal supporter.
• While I am a Libertarian politically (see my other blog if you're really that interested), I am more a socialist when it comes to sports. I want league competition to be interesting, and that means teams cannot be allowed to spend whatever money they want on players. I like the NFL's revenue sharing agreement, and I like the NBA's salary cap model with the Larry Bird rule that allows successful teams to stay together. Consequently, I dislike Chelsea and the NY Yankees. That being said, I like the European "association" model for soccer rather than the US "franchise" model for professional sports - the roll relegation and promotion plays encourages franchises to not stand pat and instead put their best foot forward every year.
  
• This blog, and the analysis behind it, is done in my free time. Someday, I would wish I could make enough money from such analysis to support my family. Until then, I can only post when time allows and I am not doing one of the several other activities I appreciate in my free time. Hence, I am not the most prolific blogger, but I always intend to put out above average analysis to compensate for the lack of frequent posts.

I hope this gives you some insight into "the man behind the blog". It should hopefully clarify the mindset I use in approaching the topics I cover. As the authors of Soccernomics have shown, it's high time emotion and conjecture be taken out of the world's most popular and beautiful game and instead use statistics and numbers to explain what's happening on and off the pitch.