gehringer_2

I can believe there is some market for a strong evangelical who will play the game inside the lines. There have to be some small d democrat repubs left, just not that many. If you assume "GOP" immediately limits you to <30% of the electorate, then 6% of that is less than 2 in 100 total voters. Probably for these folks their support was exactly contingent on him throwing Trump overboard ergo the bump. I also wonder if that profile doesn't fit more GOP women than men.

Z came out to vote in decent numbers in the last cycle. It's possible apathy is higher again in the newest 18-21 cohort - only time will tell.

another 3 walk inning for Lange. He did throw a few FBs for called strikes, which is progress, though the strike % on the FB was still only 50%, too low but it's better than where he was. But now guys ware just taking the curve because he's not throwing in the zone enough either.

LOL - if you wonder why the NCAA is so desperate for Congress to act, these are the reasons: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/07/pac-12-collapse-conference-realignment-ncaa-college-athletics/ If NCAA member schools are going to screw CA, CA is going to screw the NCAA right back!

They broke ground on the Howe over 5 years ago, it's still not halfway across the river.

Brieske at least throws a hard FB with decent spin, which is a better fail safe than the weak sauce FBs Wentz and Manning have been featuring.

This is the first time I've been interested in the start of a Pistons season since.....I can't remember. Who knows if they are going to shoot well enough for all the other upside to be in play, but if they do it should be fun.

I don't think 3/17 would do it. I'm sure he's looking for 20AAV

You mean Lorenzen? Sure, I could see that. In fact I'd make the odds better than that they extend ERod.

It's also probably more work to understand in sufficient detail than your average college board members is willing to do or maybe even should. The board is there only for the broadest policy guidance - and fundraising. 99% of the time if the admin says "We have to do this" they are going to go along because they basically trust the expertise they have put in place in the admin. I think the bigger breakdown comes with the fact the at a big research university, the Athletic Dept is an unnatural cultural graft onto the rest of the institution. The top admin and the AD and coaches are from different worlds, speak different languages and largely have different overall objectives. So before you even get to any disconnect between the admin and the board, you have a disconnect between the admin and Athl Dept. And so same phenomenon where the AD tells the University President "We HAVE to do this" and he is more or less captive.

This is a very good point. In today's society, people need/crave shared experience because it's in large part missing from the rest of the modern society. That is largely what a concert show is about today - connection. From that viewpoint, a Swift concert is not fully about the music - as music per se, it's what the music represents in term of a bridge - a shared total sensory experience - across the audience. In small scale live acoustic music performance, or if you plug yourself into a Hahn recording of a Bach partita, the variety in tempo, bending of a note, all the freedoms the performer takes in that particular performance as they put their present tense (even if recorded) emotional stamp on the performance make that an animal different enough from a concert show to be apples and oranges. In that case music is an individual experience. All the texture that electronics could wash out is the whole point. It's almost an exact converse.

I am about as completely divorced from pop music as a person can be so I have no dog in this fight, but strictly philosophically speaking, the question might be where is the line between reproduction and performance? Does the modern fan care? Probably not. It's not really even a new question since as noted, performers have been lip-syncing in front of their recordings since pop music first started showing up on television. Today it's just more like "American Bandstand" has met I-MAX. I get more musical enjoyment from walking into a church somewhere to hear a little gospel choir sing live into nothing more electronic than thin air than going to a stadium music concert, but that's fine, to each his own. EDIT: just to note. Video production SW like OBS will have all the video overlays pre-cued for the show and the operator just has to follow the performer in real time if they want to bend things a little. And the artist can cue the booth if they are going to skip or add a verse etc. You can have a human in the loop - it could be completely tied down but it doesn't have to be.

Just for a little cold water, remember last week the Athletic coach/GM survey ranked Goff as a Tier 3 QB. 🤷‍♂️

That was truly terrible. Jones is the only one the least bit interested in keeping the PBP on track or has that any useful analysis, but his elocution is so bad he's hard to listen to. I like him but he needs to go to radio school if people are going to keep putting him in front of a microphone. It's testament to how bad they know the regular broadcast is that these are even getting on the air. Should we/can we assume Shepherd is gone after this season?

Not that I care about Acker, but to be fair, these are big institutions with a lot of different voices and internal constituencies. Maybe Acker did lobby and vote against expansion when he could (pretty sure he wasn't there for Nebraska or Rutgers/Maryland). That's probably giving him more credit than he deserves, but I have no idea one way or the other.

QFT

Depends on the artist, there are holdouts and purists, but sure. Autotune is a digital tech, but splicing and overdubbing goes back as far as good studio tape machines (1970's). It was done, just not to such a fine grain and it was more work. What I wonder about is how much of the digital tech is used in a typical live show today. I'm sure no artist would want to admit it, and of course in small venues with little or light amplification you are going to hear a real voice in real time, but in stadium level shows like Swift, or even auditorium size venues where the volume is cranked to >110 db, no one will hear hear any of the actual voice going into the mic, only what the PA system puts out. Any mixing board has plenty of equalization and compression options but I wonder how far beyond that live tech goes now.

This regime really loves the slider. I understand why, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I still believe it's the hardest pitch on an arm.

Whether honest or not, I think his complaint is that the schools find themselves having no choice but to put out current fires (i.e conference re-alignments) because the NCAA has failed to do any fire prevention (system reform). I haven't seen anything about what kind of debates have taken place inside the UM regents about any of these decisions but it's a fair question. Press reporting was that the decision to let UCLA move was contentious for UCal. But again the reports were that the financial pressure at UCLA was so severe UCal Regents didn't see any other option for how the program at UCLA could survive without the injection of income the B10 offered. I think at some schools, maybe in the AAU or where research and medicine are really huge $$, top administration looks at their AD depts as a "We have people for that" situation. They only tend to be involved themselves when there is a crisis.

it goes back that Lee talked about. You are exactly correct, the young voter skews left. If that voter stayed the same, then a blue bulge would pass throught the chart above like a pig in a python, but as noted, it hasn't happened because there is an average fade right with age that keeps the chart looking roughly the same from cohort to cohort. Now as a boomer, I wonder if boomer's may actually drift less either way because we were so strongly radicalized by Vietnam in our political formative years. Will that make our preferences stickier? There is an assumption that the boomers do drift right because old voters skew GOP today, but for there is a false premise at work there. The boomers ar always assumed to be liberal because of the srength of 60-70s left side activism, but that was never a majority of the boomers. The majority of us were always straight arrows, Young Repubs for Reagan, etc.

I thought the comment at the end about revenue sharing was curious - or at least a lot easier to toss out there in principle than to make workable in practice - which I take is your point. I thought it was interesting because it goes so exactly against the direction I think college football is inevitably going to trend, which will be the rich getting richer and cutting out the rest rather than sharing with the rest. I mean, I can imagine a world where every dollar of FCS television revenue is put in a pot and then doled out equally to all 13x teams. But imagination is as far as I get with the idea. The other question is how representative of the whole board is Acker's take here? Based on politics, he's pretty much in the same pod (Dem) as the majority, but I don't know that there is any predictable red vs blue take on NCAA issues. If his is a common view on the board, you wonder if it's common to any of the other schools, or at least some others with independent boards.

My SO's 96 yr old aunt informed me just the other day that she 'used to be a republican, but not anymore' But GOP electorate does skew older than the Dem. The only question is does the skew change over time or not. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184426/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-age-us/

UM Regent Jordan Acker unloads on the NCAA: https://www.mlive.com/wolverines/2023/08/michigan-regent-pokes-ncaa-mall-cops-for-standing-idle-during-big-ten-expansion.html or https://twitter.com/JordanAckerMI/status/1688240170682769409

I believe there is progression that enough people go through in life to show up in average survey data . When you are young, your are hypersensitized to injustice, the world always appears grossly unjust to a child and you carry that with you into early adulthood. That tends to drive left, but not always, it can also result in a move into any rigid ideology like fundamentalist religion that promises neat resolutions of all moral ambiguity. Then in adulthood one takes on responsibility for other people, accumulates property and gradually preservation of your own interests, particularly your economic ones, tends to drive you to conservatism - mostly as regards economics, taxes, and opposition to any social change that threatens the existing economic hierarchy you are situated in. Then the final stage can go either way. For the larger number, post retirement the circle of social concerns/awareness begins to shrink, social empathy falls, if you fear loss of personal agency or security with your aging - those can all drive you right. OTOH, apparently it's a lower number for whom the reverse happens. Age lowers those intellectual personal preservation barriers you constructed to justify yourself in middle age and you become more intellectually flexible and there is a return to some of the idealism of youth.

looking at some more pitch data for Manning, this season he's increased his slider usage about 30% at the cost of the his change and curve. I'm going to guess he did that to chase a higher K rate against RHB, but as has been noted, his slider isn't that good, and it doesn't give him as much delta Velo as he had with more curve and change-use. And without the change/curve he's now he's giving up an 815 OPS against LHB (657 in '22). Tell me again about the brilliance of Tigers' pitching coaching? They don't seem to be pushing the right buttons with Manning.