Started reading The Power Rank predictions. Does anyone know if that site's algorithms are usually on point or nah? Useful for betting or predictions? 

Did he just say jackalope?

"Also these [Notre Dame] fans have a lot to pay attention to, what with the Yankees, Duke, and Manchester United all existing" How brilliant a line is that? I actually do have that friend who is a huge Yankees and Duke fan - even has jerseys and hats and all kinds of apparel, and indeed he is a ND fan as well. Oh, and he grew up in SE Michigan.

And when you do it. . . just think of yourself as the enemy of your own football team.

"It kind of infuriates us as a group because it's like, 'That is our quarterback,'" Hill said. "But at the same time, we are just going to go out and play. When we ballin' and everything is going good, people that say Wilton was doing this and that, don't jump on the bandwagon then. If you want to be a criticizer now, then stay a criticizer. Don't jump on the bandwagon when we get rolling."

The sense of entitlement is unreal. 

Not a useful stat in isolation.  Is 33% bad, mediocre, ok?  I don't know. I can judge percentage completions in general because I've seen a lot of them.  I have an idea of the mean, even the distribution.  But I don't have the same sense of the distribution conditional on facing a blitz. Point being that you can't just apply your idea of the general benchmark to the conditional statistic. /rant

 

This point came up in a board thread, but while the sample size is small the scrambling issue is perplexing, because I recall Speight being quite good at improvising and throwing on the move last year (though I'd be happy to be corrected by actual stats). 

But it makes me wonder if the inexperience of our receivers plays a factor here. Darboh, Chesson, and Butt were all seniors with both experience and chemistry. The young guys are an upgrade in athleticism, but perhaps they aren't as good at moving when Speight scrambles and it's time to improvise. If they aren't getting open, he won't be getting good options.

Just a theory at this point.

"Brod Drilmus" - Dr. Steve Brule

 

Every time the PBP guy said 'Tyree Kinnel' it sounded for all the world to me like 'Tyreek Hill' -- which would be sweet

I love this screen shot almost as much as I loved how UGA fans overtook the Irish in their own stadium.  Reminiscent of how NEB did same about a decade or so ago.  

Michigan fans should pay up to do same next season when we waltz into South Bend and skull fucx the Leprechaun.

First, is it just me or does that notre dame cheerleader on the jumbotron have a goatee? 

Second, maybe Leo Lewis's mom said, "Six hundred fify, thousand" like between 650 and 1,000; not 650,000, and it was just misunderstood. 650k is just absurd. 

I used to live just outside of South Bend, and went to a handful of games there. Looking at the picture of the sea of read there, I have 2 thoughts.

1.] The seats above the tunnels in that part of the building are the vistor alotment. And while its a massave away fan section, most of the games I went to there had a large visitor group.

2.] I went to the Utah game in 2010 there, and almost that whole end of the building was red. So this is not a unique occurance there. This was most likely helped out by the size of the UGA fanbase, and the uniqueness of a Notre Dame game for them.

Godfrey is just repeating what people tell him without sanity checking anything. IE, Godfrey is being Steven Godfrey.

Sometimes that thing quacking is really just a duck. I stopped listening to PAPN over the offseason specifically because I found him beyond condescending and the type of faux "smart" that columnists embody where they say something wrong and then say "people I know in the administration" or "sources I got when I was embedded" support it. I have a hard time believing any school or booster is going to drop $650k on a recruit. If you have that money, you know enough about sports to know a freaking linebacker isn't worth anywhere close to that.

I cant imagine how terrrible it would be if we let another team's fan base turn the Big House red....

Oh wait.

To summarize what he said, Delany stated the Div 1 athletes are "educated not exploited" for the following reasons:

- Hardly any Div 1 athletes play professionally; therefore, most are preparing for life after sports. (He tosses around some numbers, but the definition of his data set is so loose that they are fairly meaningless.  Regardless, it is true that very few people get paid to play professionally.)

- Although colleges generate revenue from televised games, paying athletes will end college athletics as we know it.  (Again, which athletes is he counting to reach this conclusion?  However, you can't wish away Title 9 just by asserting that ahtletes in "revenue sports" will be treated differently.)

- The value of free tuition, room & board, etc. is greater than zero.  Athletes graduate debt free; other students borrow a lot of money.  Also, college graduates earn more than high school only graduates.

- Athletes graduate at a slightly higher rate than non-athlete students, and they are better prepared for life after graduation.

Anti-Delany: the hypocracy about the money in college athletics is rank, and Delany deserves every bit of scorn Brian can heap upon him over this point.  The Universities in the major Conferences rake in Billions (with a B) of dollars over several years.  If the school is a State run institution, its head football coach is making an order of magnitude higher salary that any other government employee, and his principle assistants are # 2-6 or so on the list.  Everyone associated with the enterprise gets paid for their work, except the people actually playing the game.  The only way that happens is because the NCAA artificially says you can't pay the athletes, and therefore all the money gets spent in an escalating arms race to have the best of EVERYTHING else.  The only 2% turn pro arguement is a distraction.  So what?  You're generating buckets of revenue from their services.  The players' "residual value" as professional athletes is irrelevant.  Delany's position as the head of a major Conference is like CEO of a charity spending all the money on his salary and perks for the full time professional staff because the charity's charter says it can't pay the volunteers who do the actual benevolent work.

Where Delany has a partially correct point: for the reasons stated above, paying the athletes some money clearly need not end college athletics as we know it.  However, you can't say that means only football players, with maybe some (i.e. male) basketball players included, because we think these are the sports turning a profit.  The NCAA, largely because Title 9 forced them to do so, sees no differences in scholarship athletes.  The deal is that some sports at some schools generate a lot of money, and that gets spread around to pay for the facilities and education of all their scholarship athletes.  In the Power 5 schools, there is money to sweeten the deal even if you have to include every sport.  Moreover, I couldn't care less if that means Whatsamatta U in the Rocky Coastal Conference has to step down to Div 2.  (For one thing, trying to compete in Div 1 "revenue" sports for new and/or marginal programs is one of the best ways know to man for losing money in large quantities.)  But it's way more complicated than the people hollerin' "pay the players" would have you believe.

Also partial credit: the value of a scholarship is clearly more than zero, and many athletes take full advange of it to get an education debt free.  However, that is mitigated somewhat.  The demands of big time athletics do limit choices in terms of feasible majors, choice of courses, and lost opportunities (e.g. internships, student teaching, studying overseas).  More to the point, there are some athletes in college whose academics are so woeful that they cannot get any meaningful education at the university they are attending.  Sure, they may shuffle through a mish-mash of courses that keep them eligible, but do they graduate, and even if they do, will the degree actually help them after college?  So, a scholarship has value, but not everyone is able to benefit from it.

More ridiculousness: Delany says look how well our graduates do after college.  Well woop-de-frickin'-doo, do you think that alum's hard work in the 20 years since graduating might have had a little something to do with it?  This is like Jabrill Peppers' Pee Wee football coach taking credit for his pro career.  C'mon man, and the agument over how much someone makes over the course of his/her career sounds a bit like a loan shark saying hey, they'll be able to afford me bleeding them dry.  (Yeah, student debt issues are leaking into my argument.)

So I would say Delany's article is completely clueless only some of the time, and semi-clueless the other part.  He has some valid points, but he is the worst advocate in the world for getting people to listen to them.

Can't believe that UGA actually played a game in the frigid cold north.

Why people consider being a Man U fan worse than a City fan (ohh cool, you discovered soccer 5-10 years ago and like the newbie who outspends people), a Chelsea fan (oh cool, you cheer for for the famous London team who literally still this season have fans singing antisemitic songs), an Arsenal or Liverpool fan (I cheer for a different famous, really good team from a big city), a Real or Barca fan (I cheer for 1 of the two best players on the planet for ten years straight, or a Bayern fan (I like knowing my team will win the title with a higher probability than Bama in the SEC west).

you pretty emphatically continued to support the regime's offense as sufficiently confusing/modern, but reading this commentary on OU's offense, it seems like maybe we're reaching the end of the honeymoon.

When you can run an offense that neutralizes the strengths of the defensive line (thus making it easier on your O line), and makes your skill position players plug and play, and gives your QB blitheringly wide open targets...sigh.

We were the 40th best offense in S&P+ last year despite a lot of upperclassmen on the line and NFL players at the skill positions.  If the excuse is that we need an elite QB or elite o line, isn't that an argument against the offense we run? When teams like Pitt, Texas Tech, California, South Florida with much less talent have top ten offenses and we barely have a top 40....just sayin.

Jamie, love you on the podcasts, but if you are reading this, it's ORY-GUN - not Ore-GONE