gehringer_2

NCAA football as a true competitive team sport remains a joke until/unless they put stronger SOS factors back into tournament selection criteria. It's a great season of exhibition games and great spectacle and makes lots of folks big $$ - but as team competition Logan Roy said it best -- you are not serious people.

This is still working pretty well for Putin in asiatic Russia but now it's a car for the wife once you're dead.

There is quality on the pitching side though. Run prevention gets you there just as well as run scoring. Tigers should be making a hard run at Gray or Snell.

It's a big assumption that people wouldn't be just as good at finding other reasons to kill each other in the absence of organized religions - genocides by Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, Rawanda come to mind. Even the Holocaust, while it was directed at a religious group, was not a religious imperative of German Lutheranism. Religion often becomes the stalking horse to dress up more fundamental aims of conquest, greed, land, ethnicity. Still, if conquest were made a harder sell without the availability of the gloss of God's consent, that might be progress.

A guy at AEI wrote a piece this week - can't remember which paper I saw it in, argued the only way out for the GOP (and country if the 2 party system is to continue) is institute ranked choice voting in all primaries as a means to neuter the power of the fringe in the primaries. Could work. The only other thing would be to rebuild party membership back to 40/40 and 20 independents so more normal people would vote in primaries, but thats a lift I don't anyone knows an answer to.

There is no end to where you can take it. I used to assemble XL systems that pulled data from industrial instrumentation databases, process it into live real time diagnostic reports and then have those send their data into monthly financial reports. Stiffness was really problem though - when something broke..... The funny thing is that the stuff you code in VB you can at least comment. There's no neat way I ever came up that I liked to embed the documentation information about what a spreadsheet is doing inside the spreadsheet at the cellular level. You can add text to backing sheets or stash text in hidden rows and columns. Workable at some level, but all kludges. I do not remember those tasks fondly.

Right. And I would guess that since Baseball pretty much has mid-summer to itself, a 'summer championship' could easily become a bigger thing media wise and financially than the end of year tourney.

McCarthy's Speakership had only one value - it demonstrated that giving away the store to a faction creates an unstable situation. We all knew this in January, but I guess it had to be proved to the GOP. So, I would think that leaves us in a situation where the majority of the GOP realizes that they can't just duplicate the McCarthy mistake with a new face - i.e. get someone into the job only after a long negotiation that buys enough fringe votes with giveaways that another unstable, unworkable Speakership is created. This is all pretty obvious to anyone capable of 2 + 2 = 4. The problem is that those GOP members still cannot face the crisis of tribal identity that a reach across the aisle for a consensus majority requires. And as is usually the case in human affairs, psychology will win out over logic and it will get even worse before it gets better.

Part of this is that the value of possession has gone up. I think the reason long passing is dying out is because it was never high percentage, but today's QBs can hit 70% completion rates throwing the short and intermediate routes, and that means you keep the ball, and that is everything in today's game. You have to score, and you need the ball to score. Go back a generation I'd guess there were more punts, each possession was worth less, low percentage plays with high return like the long pass made more sense. Go back 2 generations and you had the old clock rules that made the game much longer and single possession even less important. So it's been a very long term trend in one direction, and it takes years for players and coaches that came up in different circumstances to all either change their ways or retire.... LOL - sort of the inverse of the disappearance of the mid-range jumper in the NBA, which still hung around decades after the 3 pt shot came in.

I'd be more interested in the series result than just the first game, though generally a 1st game win tilt the odds the rest of the way in the winner's favor. For instance, a confounding factor would be that the (better) team on the layoff may also have the single most dominant pitcher in the series, that factor could wash out all the others for the first game.

used up your freebies, eh?

always my same question about leaving hitters in AAA. I think you can get too acclimated once you reach a reasonable level of success against a certain pitching level. Doesn't a guy like Edvinsson need to see and learn to deal with offensive players who do exactly what guys in the AHL can't show him? It's one thing with a guy like McIsaac where you questioned he was ever going to make it at all (and he didn't), but the assumption has to be that Edvinsson is going to play in the NHL.

It's almost funny that the Lions have gone so 180 deg at QB. Stafford to Goff is almost whiplash: Stafford, who could make all kinds of 'wow, did you see that' plays, but often (at least early in his career) made mistakes, to the ultimate methodical, workman, almost never make a mistake surgeon where at the end of day the opposition says, "How did *that* guy beat us?"

LOL! McCarthy is so untrustworthy he can't even trust himself - throws his hat back in the ring to be re-elected speaker! https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/09/house-republican-speaker/ Pointless windmill tilt though. He'd need some Dem support and I think he's just burned too many bridges there. Besides the Dems have to love having the best House GOP fund-raiser cut down. I would think if a half dozen Dems finally back a GOP speaker candidate to get the House off the snide even Scalise would be more likely than McCarthy.

Been there, done that?

I actually wouldn't mind doing a split/double season. Play 70, have a short midsummer playoff tournament. Then the inter-season trade period. Then play 70 more with another closing tournament. A season so long that the losers end up 40 games behind isn't particularly good for anything or anyone. And to reward aggressive management, the teams that improve between halves get draft bonuses in proportion to the increase in games won.

Mind games with the youngsters? Hoping for lightning in a bottle from guys there really is no reason to expect it from? Who Knows? The only important question is will they move on from the non-performers once they show who they are or will they gnaw the cold dead ends of contracts gone awry.

it is true that because of the very long season, oft times the team that finishes the season is nothing like the team that started it, being in a state where it is is either much better or much worse than its total seasonal record, and the other thing is that between a single pair of teams, particular match-up issues may drive the odds for their games more than overall win-loss record difference. But I'm not sure how you get out of the box on this because I believe that byes end up being more a more a penalty than an aid in baseball. I suppose the division winner could allowed to start a runner at 2nd at the top one or two innings per game......

There's incentive to win your division if you play the lower seeded team and have home field. If that's not enough just make it more money - 🤷‍♀️

1st round byes are no advantage in baseball. That's the only reason I'm willing to see the format changed even if it means adding teams. The layoff degrades your hitters' timing and trashes your pitching rotation. Apparently the people that set this system up were either football people, or people who didn't know the difference between the two.

Situation unchanged since the day he was drafted.

According to the local rag (Detnews) : so there's that.

Williams is still a big key to their ceiling going forward. When your best downfield receiver is a TE, you need better downfield receivers. Which, just to be clear - is no knock on LaPorta,

that blitz didn't work

yeah, you wan't him to have to make the shortest punt do decline the DOG. I'm not sure you have the option on a procedure call?