Unverified Voracity Has An Ungimmicky Top Five
This week in grimace emoji. Good news: COVID case fatality rates are plummeting. Bad news: it seems like a large reason why is that the average age of the infected is also plummeting, because:
Before and After. COVID-19 is real and the real implications for ignoring basic precautions. #mileg #COVID__19 pic.twitter.com/COEe8qPZW6
— Sam Singh (@singhsam94) June 23, 2020
I am dubious that The Youth are going to change their behavior, and The Youth cluster around college football players for obvious reasons.
Meanwhile, what happens if and when someone has to go to the ICU? This is napkin math but napkin math is probably enough in this situation:
Maybe it's lower than 0.1%. Or maybe only 5% of players catch COVID. Then again, maybe 30% do. The exact numbers are wildly uncertain. But, to a first approximation, it strikes me as fairly likely that at least 1 player ends up in the ICU with COVID, which I think ends the season
— Mile High Brendan (@MileHighBrendan) June 22, 2020
That probably shouldn't be the reason. We accept the inevitability that football will produce Eric LeGrands already. The reason should be the inexorable exponential math when R > 1. But that's not easy to put in a news broadcast.
Anyway, buy HTTV! We'll figure out something you'll enjoy even if the season is one FCS game! 30 pages of hardboiled detective Phil Martelli novella? Wait, come back, I didn't mean it!
[AFTER THE JUMP: some good cornerbackin']
Golly. PFF briefly removed this tweet. I assumed that was because someone had screwed up a database query and accidentally limited it to Michigan players, but it was merely because they'd grabbed the wrong 22 for the photo:
Lowest completion % allowed by a B1G DB since 2014:
— PFF College (@PFF_College) June 22, 2020
1. David Long Jr, Michigan ('18) - 29.0%
2. Channing Stribling, Michigan ('16) - 30.2%
3. David Long Jr, Michigan ('17) - 31.0%
4. Jourdan Lewis, Michigan ('16) - 31.7%
5. Vincent Gray, Michigan ('19) - 32.4% pic.twitter.com/mYM3KMTxdo
Michigan's defensive style has something to do with that. Press man coverage is high risk, high reward. So does Michigan's pass rush in the 2016-18 period. Still pretty remarkable, especially when you see Vincent Gray sneak on that list.
That's a good sign; I'm still bracing for some backsliding. Gray's sample is maybe 40% of snaps in a season and is thus less predictive than we'd hope. Also he didn't jump out when I charted in the way Lewis and Long did.
This tweet also prompted one of the worst attempted dunks I've seen in a while:
— Ventrilloquist Mike (@_TG12_) June 22, 2020
A classic example of terrible coverage: almost getting a finger on a ball while three feet off the ground.
Hell yes. An oral history of the Landon Donovan goal against Algeria? Why yes I might click on that, especially when it includes a section obliterating the official from the Slovenia game who inexplicably overturned Maurice Edu's goal. Bob Ley on antagonizing Michael Ballack:
Bob Ley, ESPN 1979-2019: I was at that match, and I go back and I still look for that foul that took away [Edu's] goal in much the same way that I look for how much Michael Ballack was offside in 2002. I still give him s---. "Ah Bob, you're such an a--hole."
I recommend the whole thing.
Also in things I clicked so hard I broke my mouse. A Freekbass deep dive at the Athletic:
“People thought this is gonna be the new alma mater,” Mandell said. “You’re supposed to be laughing about this. It was supposed to be fun. Then it turned into an anger release at Notre Dame for not winning football games.”
Notre Dame supported Mandell, but that didn’t stop people from leaving raging voicemails on his office line. Some demanded he resign in disgrace. There were charges that he had singlehandedly ruined Notre Dame’s reputation around college football. Worries that the video would scare away recruits. Fears that after the football program had bombed the previous three seasons and was paying its former head coach $18 million to not coach, this would make the Irish a running joke.
I'm not sure the anger was mostly about not winning football games. As Matt Hinton described it at the time:
• The new Notre Dame hype video undermines everything Notre Dame claims to hold dear. Whatever pretense Notre Dame ever had to possessing some kind of unique, dignified otherness that set it apart from the craven secularists of college football has been completely and utterly destroyed forever by a guy named "Freekbass" pretending to play guitar and what appears to be a rapping hobbit who majors in library sciences:
YouTube comments: Disabled. Black people associated with this "hip" marketing campaign: Negative five. Irish Guard cloggers: On suicide watch. The Irish are now aesthetically obligated to join the "Hang Time" Division of the TNBC Conference circa 1996.
Michigan would blunder down the same path a few years later when they enlisted a satanic collective of dog groomers to create "In The Big House," which featured lyrics like "in the big house, yeah" and "it's a really big house, y'all" and "uh yeah this domicile is expansive screeeeeeee."
What stands out about these two monuments to People Are Just In Charge Of Things is how cringeworthy they remain years after the fact. I couldn't stand more than 15 seconds of "We Are Notre Dame," and that's the one I'm supposed to like because it's my rival's problem.
Uh yeah good call. Michigan is not going to host a presidential debate:
“Given the scale and complexity of the work we are undertaking to help assure a safe and healthy fall for our students, faculty and staff and limited visitors — and in consideration of the public health guidelines in our state as well as advice from our own experts — we feel it is not feasible for us to safely host the presidential debate as planned.”
This eliminates the possibility I will forget about the scheduled debate and go downtown into a hellish maelstrom of takes. Instead, Miami will get to host that debate because Florida's approach to COVID is to assume it is the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
Incoming. Hockey is in the midst of announcing their incoming class on their twitter account. They haven't gotten through everyone but they have resolved the one question I had about the composition of the class by announcing this gentleman:
Our first defenseman of the group is @Sholtz024, who led @PentictonVees D-men in scoring this season!#GoBlue | #NewBlue 〽️ pic.twitter.com/3DTQZ59gqD
— Michigan Hockey (@umichhockey) June 23, 2020
So:
- G: Erik Portillo
- D: Jacob Truscott, Owen Power, Steve Holtz
- F: Kent Johnson, Thomas Bordeleau, Brendan Brisson, Josh Groll, Philippe Lapointe
Holtz a 1999 birth year, so he's out of junior eligibility, and is from Michigan. He is likely to be a 7th or 8th D who gets a minimal amount of money.
Holtz was one of a group of three D who had publicly announced Michigan commits without flipping elsewhere. (This used to be a group of four until Jake Harrison flipped to UNO.) That leaves Ethan Szmagaj and Cole McWard to defer or decommit. It'll probably be the latter since Michigan has just one spot on D next year (Cam York's) and has three D committed. Two of them (Luke Hughes, probable top ten pick in 2021, and Ethan Edwards, probable ~3rd rounder this year) have higher profiles than Szmagaj and McWard; the third is Luca Fantilli.
Etc.: The decade in a headline. Why Marco Rubio's NIL bill sucks. You can sign the petition to rename Columbus, Ohio, to "Flavortown." Eli Brooks heads into year four.
Unpopular Opinion (I guess?): Big House by Pop Evil was awesome.
Compared to "We are ND, yeah, it's not terrible.
Remember when they tried ramming "Hail and Unite" down our throats in 2015? Wanted to replace "The Victors." What an awful piece of trash idea that was and it thankfully died after they finally accepted that it was universally hated by everyone. Ironically, I guess they accomplished their goal by uniting the fanbase on something.
Pop Evil has gone on to be pretty successful within their genre. If that type of music is your thing, then I don't think it's that bad. It's just that it's not for everyone.
0.1% or 0.3% of 20 year-olds needing ICU care, doesn't consider that those are likely 99% morbidly obese, have severe asthma, etc. or some combination of those.
I think almost every football player is going to catch it at some point this season... but I'd be surprised if more than 1-2 wind up in the ICU.
edit: I didn't read "healthy"... Still average healthy and college football player healthy are two different things.
I was about to make this very point. The .3% figure is of the entire population and doesn't take into account contributing factors that are probably less common among college athletes.
One of the (should be) major concerns though is that we don't know the long term health effects of getting COVID. Is there lung damage? Will it drop everyone's life expectancy 15 years? Sure, mortality is lower in younger healthier people, but mortality isn't the only issue.
What % are going to get it from playing football though? If the season is cancelled and the players spend the semester partying on the weekends with the general student body instead... are things going to be worse or better for them?
If everyone is told to stay home for the semester, sure UM gets rid of liability, but are the players really healthier partying and going to local gyms in their hometowns vs. being monitored and tested frequently by UM doctors?
I get that there are long term concerns, but you aren't going to be able to force 20 year-olds who generally think they are invincible to stay socially distant from others. I think they're generally safer being monitored by doctors daily than on their own.
I don't know what behaviors can be changed, but I think there's basic consensus that some things help mitigate spread:
- Being outdoors
- wearing a mask
- staying far from others
- smaller house sizes (fewer people living together)
Things that are bad for spread:
- Face-to-face interaction without a mask (picture OL/DL)
- Extended periods of time indoors with groups (locker room seems about as bad as could be)
- Increased talking/yelling/singing in groups
My hope is that people wear masks and distance as much as possible, but I think so much of football (and many other activities!) are risky for virus spread.
We've mentioned the player pool and their mortality risk, but coaches, support staff, etc. should be included in any math as well.
You reduce this risk by testing the players regularly. If they didn't get a negative test result Friday they don't play Saturday.
First things first though - if I were a parent, I would want someone to quantify the risks relative to the seasonal flu. We live our lives with seasonal flu, even though we know some very small number of people are hospitalized with and some even die.
For an 18-22 year old with no pre-existing conditions - and they should absolutely be testing every one of these players for pre-existing conditions associated with negative COVD outcomes - what is the risk relative to seasonal flue? Is it 2x, 3x, 1.5x? And what does that mean in terms of numbers: is seasonal flu 1 in 20,000 hospitalized and 1 in 100,000 die?
And then how much more likely am I to get COVD by playing football, vs. living the life an 18-22 year old would live without playing football?
Whatever those numbers are, tell me what they are and most can make an informed decision. Coaches and staff need to do the same.
You ask does COVID have 1.5, 2, 3x the risk for seriously negative outcomes compared to the seasonal flu? Correct me if I'm mistaken, but hadn't it been 100 years since the flu killed this many ppl in such a short period of time? 30K+/month I believe since March 1.
How is this virus even remotely comparable to the seasonal flu, besides in composition I suppose? I'm not a virologist, so just looking at raw numbers the question seems preposterous!
It would only seem preposterous if you didn't read the question correctly, or didn't know much about COVD. If the latter, read up man, this is serious.
I'm guessing the former, even though I quite clearly state "For an 18-22 year old with no pre-existing conditions..." You may be aware that deaths and hospitalizations are distributed primarily in the aging populations. In fact 93% of deaths have occurred in those over 55 according to the CDC.
So you can see how far off your statement was, given there have been literally just 125 deaths from the 15-24 age group in the entire country so far (as of June 17). If we removed those with pre-existing conditions, and then further controlled for just college football-level athlete physiologies, I wonder if you could count any among that number at all.
As far as relative to seasonal flu for that age group, I've been able to answer my own on my way to fetching the data above. This chart from Bloomberg seems a little confusing at first. But flu deaths in 2018 are the first column after age group. Then the author gives 3 different scenarios in the next 3 columns, based on possible # of overall US COVD deaths. We've already surpassed the 100K scenario, and the IHME now forecasts between 146 and 181 thousand deaths in the US. So that would put us somewhere between scenario 1 and scenario 2. First notice that under age 14, the COVD risk is absolutely miniscule relative to seasonal flu (remember 1 = equal risk). It is horrendously worse over age 55.
Look at age 15-24. It is somewhere between .55 and 1.10. Which means COVD is less deadly than seasonal flu for this age group. For players, this is nothing. There is no more risk than seasonal flu, which is infinitesimal to begin with. As I say above, coaches and staff should be given the same data for their decision. Based on the below, testing for pre-existing conditions for those over 55 should be mandated.
Question 1: why consistently leave the 'I' out of COVID? Accident or intentional? Confuses us laymen.
Q2: While you claim COVID is no more dangerous to the specific subset of 18-22 year old athletes than seasonal flu (based an interpretation of data thus far, 4 months in), do you make the same claim for all the people they come in contact with?
Man, I'll be devastated if there's no football this year, but I just can't go twisting & ignoring dangers so we can watch games!
Wearing a mask is stupid.
Nuh-uh! YOU are!
Exhibit A as to why cases and hospitalizations are increasing.
just wear one, dickhead.
It's a given that colleges are going to be hotbeds for outbreaks in the fall, even if the vast majority of students should be fine physically. And that's a reasonable expectation and "worth the risk" compared to the alternative. But I've noticed that the same people who were "It's just like the flu", "the virus will die off during the summer", "only old people die", etc. are also promoting this idea that we're all overreacting to the very real possibility that college athletes will get sick and possibly have some adverse reactions. Like, we're better off if we are honest about the likely outcomes instead of sort of hand-waving it a bit.
Honestly, it requires a certain amount of compartmentalization to ignore the long-term health issues that playing football already poses. It seems a bit odd to be like "Yeah, whaddya gonna do?" about things like CTE but then decide that a respiratory illness is the line we can't cross.
COVID is likely to be with us for awhile. Future flu vaccines may also include a COVID component. All aspects of society have to decide what is the level of risk that is acceptable.
I don't agree with this take.
It infers a false equivalency between the flu and covid, when that is not remotely true - at least 120K people have died in ~4 months, despite efforts to limit the spread. We live with the flu because it is far less deadly and because we have vaccines that, while not 100% effective, do help significantly. And also, if we had a flu that was as deadly as this virus, I bet you we'd be shutting down large gatherings. I mean I can't be the only one that has noticed schools/gatherings closed for a week or two in some places every so often during peak flu season. And that's just the seasonal flu.
Also, this assumes the issue is the safety of the players themselves. I mean, that's part of it, but the issue is really society as a whole. The risk to players is definitely small, but they will spread it to other people. You can't spread CTE to another person (well...unless you hit them over the head a bunch of times). The nature of the pandemic isn't about risks on an individual level necessarily - it's about our collective risk as a society. And many people, myself included, think that it's probably not the best idea to resume team sports in this situation, just as a precaution...we can survive a year without sports.
"It infers a false equivalency between the flu and covid ..."
No, it does not. How did you get to your conclusion? Oh, and it's implied, not inferred.
"we don't know the long term health effects of getting COVID"
We won't know that until... well, until the long term. What is your suggestion? Would you halt football for 15 years until we know?
Do you have any evidence that COVD causes more long term damage than any other respiratory illness (or the cold, flu, other)?
Besides news reports and the like (https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/06/11/disturbing-photo-shows-what-coronavirus-can-do-to-your-lungs/), I do not.
As you say, we need to see what the long term is. What I do know is that this is a new, novel virus that people are still learning about. It's highly contagious and it's killed a lot of people, so I'm doing what I can to avoid getting it and spreading it.
And as to the straw man if I would halt football for 15 years. Nope! I'd recommend exactly what other countries have done to find safe ways to: mitigate spread, test, and trace (and quarantine) effectively. German soccer and Korean baseball are playing now.
So what was your point in noting that we don't know the long term effects of something the world has never seen before? Other than sounding an amorphous but seemingly foreboding general alarm?
A sample size of one photo isn't sufficient for any meaningful discussion. I had a friend in high school died of meningitis, but I wouldn't submit that as convincing evidence to scare you into accepting or rejecting a conclusion on that disease. Your photo is a scare tactic and a weak one. Why are you debating in such a way, it's not reasonable. Do you even know anymore or has the political dogma just taken over?
My point in saying we don't know the long term effects is to say "let's try to keep people from getting COVID".
I'm not sure how "let's keep people from getting sick" is a contentious idea. Places have been successful at this. It is not "Do everything 100% normal or do 0% normal".
This is reasonable, but just to be anal I'll say mortality rates aren't just "lower" in younger people, they are minuscule. Approx 200 deaths out of 110k deaths overall. It's definitely true we don't know the long term risks, because that will require well, long term study.
.....have you seen linemen? I'm not sure that putting on 40lbs in a year to be big enough to play a position qualifies as a healthy lifestyle. This also doesn't take into account the risk to the coaching and support staff.
Sure I also don't think many DB's are at risk.
I'm not saying shut everything down but lets at least acknowledge the likelihood of a player going to the ICU due to covid is relatively high.
It's not though. Unless you mean an individual player somewhere. Not the typical player.
On the other hand, those prime of their health athletes have parents and grandparents, most of which attend games and have regular contact with them and their team. Also a lot of coaches aren't exactly the picture of health. Even if no athletes get seriously sick, if people surrounding them start dropping, it would be a pretty terrible look for the NCAA.
Matt Patricia and Charlie Weiss say this is non-sense
Warde Manuel better stay in his house.
A lot of college football players are morbidly obese though.
The evisceration of Freekbass's sidekick as a rapping hobbit is still my favorite part of the whole "We Are ND" experience. Well, I mean after the version done by Stuffing the Passer which is three of the finest minutes of the internet ever.
There are a couple big flaws with the napkin math:
College football players are not evenly distributed between age 20-29 which is where the 0.3% comes from. They're age 18-22ish. That's a huge difference when severity rates increase exponentially with age as is the case with this disease.
And "healthy" in this case, is defined as no "reported" pre-existing conditions. It's pretty common for type 1 diabetes to go undiagnosed well into someone's life...until they get an infection that then causes them to get blood sugar monitoring that reveals it. It's happening with covid. Anecdotally, some of the teenagers that have died had pretty bad diabetes and they didn't know it. Likely similar with high blood pressure and other conditions that exist unknowingly amongst the general population but much less likely amongst college athletes.
On those basis alone, I'd say college athletes are likely to be well under these estimates, but perhaps the wild card is football linemen. They're pretty big. Probably obese by definition. They probably have much better cardiovascular health than others their size though. So not sure what kind of risk category they might fall into.
Obligatory Arrested Development reference:
STEVE HOLTZ!!!
*Steve Holt
Does he know who his father is?
Yes, I know, but the hockey commit's name is Steve Holtz
I am interested to see how people respond when some football players do get sick to a noticeable degree. It won't be a huge number, but if a starter on a top-25 team winds up in the ICU that would be jarring. I assume the season would power through it but who knows.
The Algeria goal is the perfect soccer highlight; I find myself periodically watching it and it's still so cool.
College teams should generally shy away from trying to be "cool" when it comes to music. There is no way you'll get it right and more likely than not you'll get some weirdness.
My Little Pony adults have always given me bad vibes, so the fact that there's racist fan art isn't a huge surprise.
College teams should generally shy away from trying to be "cool" when it comes to music. There is no way you'll get it right and more likely than not you'll get some weirdness.
RE: not getting cool right: this isn't just a matter of athletic departments being culturally tone deaf. These attempts at cool necessarily have to triangulate between the consumptive desires of an 18-22-yo student body and literally ever living generation of alumni and non-alum fans. There's virtually zero mutual overlap in pop culture sensibilities, and trying to reverse engineer a taste-amalgam of some of the objectively least cool people on earth leads to Bad Things. Just be who you are.
I didn't know My Little Pony was still a thing. I also didn't know there are adult My Little Pony fans. Bronies. WTF?
Didn't mod LSA-whatever-else-his-name-is talk about himself being a brony serveral years back? I know his avatar was a mlp.
I love the attempts to rationalize the idea that these young people should be putting their long term health at risk for our entertainment.
In case you haven't noticed, the sport of football puts a person's long term health at risk, irregardless of the COVID situation.
According to the NCAA (https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/NCAA_Football_Injury_WEB.pdf), there were 34 catastrophic injuries in a five year period across all of college football (64,879 players). That's a rate of 0.01%. Even by highly conservative estimates, you're talking about increasing that rate by 10 times.
Define catastrophic injuries?
I am guessing this doesn't take into account the thousands of ligament tears, broken bones, lacerations, etc., NOT to mention the possibility (LIKELIHOOD?) of CTE later in life?
Bro, if you think COVID-19 is the biggest risk these kids take - I have some Oceanfront land in Iowa I can sell ya.
Well, if you are looking for a legal definition, see 42 USC 3796(b): "'catastrophic injury' means an injury, the direct and proximate consequences of which permanently prevent an individual from performing any gainful work." Findlaw reference here: https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-42-the-public-health-and-welfare/42-usc-sect-3796b.html
So I would imagine that in a football context it involves full or partial paralysis from broken necks plus deaths from head injury, heart attack or heatstroke.
Bolivar I can't accept that you're too ignorant to realize all these examples of football injury dangers you submit are NOT contagious! They were not brought in by a teammate or coach, nor will they be carried out to players or coaches families.
So if you're not too ignorant to grasp that, you must have another motivation to completely ignore it in your posts ("masks are stupid" et al)?
Why would you choose to leave that fairly crucial difference out? Makes no sense...
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