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Business employees are not…

Business employees are not prohibited from negotiating their compensation, and are not banned from employment if they do so. They're also not required to undergo mandatory 1 year unpaid internships that generate millions of dollars for their employer. 

She's not writing about…

She's not writing about basketball. She's writing about labor rights as they pertain to college basketball. 

Her point is that it doesn't…

Her point is that it doesn't actually matter how Beilein is distinct from other coaches because those differences do not get at the fundamental injustice -- athletes not being fairly compensated for their labor. Yes, he's a great guy, yes he doesn't freak out on his players like Izzo, yes, he doesn't cheat. But he's still a cog in an immoral system, and "not cheating" means "not finding ways to give players money to compensate them for their labor."

The people who owe 6 figures…

The people who owe 6 figures are not contributing millions upon millions of dollars of value to the university. Athletes are. They deserve the be fairly compensated for that. Until they are, the system is fundamentally immoral and must be destroyed. 

I love John Beilein, but her…

I love John Beilein, but her issue with college sports is correct and good. 

She's not skewering Beilein…

She's not skewering Beilein. She's skewering a system that profits off of unpaid labor. 

Winning 3 games by 4 points…

Winning 3 games by 4 points isn't actually an accomplishment. It's just random variance around which a narrative has been constructed. His Final Four run should award him zero points. 

Edit: Loyola's Final Four run is the equivalent of a MAC football coach who goes 11-1 because his team finished second in the nation in turnover margin. It's a reflection of incredible luck that dumb ADs are desperate to view as evidence of skill. And it never, ever works out for the hiring team. 

They jumped Kentucky by…

They jumped Kentucky by winning today, so if they lose, they're probably in UNC's region. 

For anyone wondering why we…

For anyone wondering why we got Gonzaga and State got stuck with Duke: the Committee doesn't use a true s-curve. Within a seed, they prioritize distance over matchup. So State got "rewarded" by getting to stay in the Midwest, while Michigan gets "punished" by getting sent out to southern California where they have a billion fans. 

I mean, I'll take it, but this is a bad process. 

Largely due to underwhelming…

Largely due to underwhelming performances against the dregs of the schedule.  Also because Michigan's 2 point defense was performing at an unsustainable level at the beginning of the year.  Over the last 8 games or so, teams have started converting way more 2s, leading Michigan's D to drop from #1 by a mile to #4.  

Kenpom.  

Kenpom.  

It's not the bowl games…

It's not the bowl games themselves, I don't think.  It's a corollary to the Brady Hoke "I would have walked to Michigan for a chance to coach there" thing.  A lot of fans would do anything for the chance to suit up for their favorite team, and there's a strong desire to think the actual players feel the same way.  When guys sit out bowl games, it destroys the illusion, and shows that many of the players (correctly) view college football as, essentially, a legally mandated internship rather than the opportunity of a lifetime.  

People don't like that.  

I'm always amused by how…

I'm always amused by how many random people on the internet are convinced that they would never think about sitting out if they were the potential first round pick.  It's pretty easy to be cavalier with someone else's livelihood.  

Pay them.  

Pay them.  

Depends on whether there's a…

Depends on whether there's a better game she'd rather be watching. If Michigan is playing Rutgers and the Cocktail Party is on or something, she'll get pretty annoyed.  

How new is "new"?  The Hold…

How new is "new"?  The Hold Steady's best stuff from the mid-2000s has a similar vibe, although the lead singer's voice is rawer, but it's throwback rock with a piano backing.  Stuck Between Stations is probably their best song.  

New Mitski album, which is…

New Mitski album, which is probably going to be my AOTY.  

Barkley

Seth: I'm of the belief he's worth a top five pick. Barry Sanders-level guy.

The thing is, Barry Sanders himself shouldn't go in the top 5 in the modern NFL. The replacement value of a truly elite RB is just not that high these days, and the salaries the top guys get paid bears that out. I don't think I'd even take Marshall Faulk (who added a ton of value in the passing game) in the top 5.

Michigan can absolutely lose

but man, I wanna play poker against some of y'all very, very badly.  There's some serious struggling with sample sizes going on.  Absent an injury to a key player or a specific schematic issue like Syracuse's zone, the best explanation for "why did team X have a great/horrible 2 games?" is almost always "variance."  The rest is just constructing narratives around it.  

This

is just question begging.  There's absolutely no reason the goal can't be to pick the teams that have the best shot at winning the tourney.  That's exactly what I think the goal should be.  Sort by Kenpom et al., admit the top 32.  

Believe it or not

Multiple people who have looked at it have found basically no correlation between how a team performs in its last 10 games and how it will do in the tourney:

http://blog.bracketvoodoo.com/post/158321282577/momentum-is-a-myth

http://blog.minitab.com/blog/the-statistics-game/basketball-statistics-…

 

Contrarian take

But I'm rooting for UK. I think the committee is likely to hose Michigan with a 4 seed because it'll hate the big 10 as a whole, and I really, really don't want to get Kentucky in a 4-5. I'd like to see them win the SEC tourney and bump up to a 4.

They actually

Went 2-3 after he went down (including a win over Alabama). 2-4 if you include the game where he got hurt. Which is a pretty thin reed for the Committee to hang it's hat on. Particularly when we're talking about a guy averaging like 7 and 5, not Kevin Durant.

Here's one analysis

http://blog.minitab.com/blog/the-statistics-game/basketball-statistics-…

Basically, it's a version of the hot hand myth, and there's no obvious correlation. 10 games is a smaller sample than an entire season, so will likely be less predictive and more subject to variance.

Your argument wasn't

The Committee will seed Auburn lower because it'll decide the injury makes it a fundamentally different team. It was "the Committee will see that they've gone 1-5 down the stretch."

Which is explicitly, expressly not how they do things. And Anfernee Mclemore is not Kenyon Martin.

Please see #8

https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/bracketiq/2018-02-15/march-mad…

The committee no longer uses last 10 as a selection criterion.

For the millionth time

The Committee does not look at record down the stretch. Which is good, because there's no correlation between performance in your last 10 games and performance in the tourney.

The Committee looks at overall resume, regardless of when wins and losses came.

My issue there

is that every year, the Committee insists it doesn't look solely at RPI, that this time it really is going to consider Kenpom and Sagarin and BPI and various other things.

And then pretty much every year, their unexpectedly high seeds and unexpectedly low seeds line up almost exactly with pure RPI (including last year where Maryland got a ridiculously high seed because of it).  

I'll believe the Committee aren't just a bunch of RPI-bots when they actually show it in practice.  

They're 25th on Kenpom

and a 7 seed on the Matrix.  Michigan has 2 wins over teams better than that.  

The Committee cares about bad losses

It also cares about good wins.  

People around here consistently overestimate the quality of Michigan's wins.  They only really have 4 to write home about (at MSU, OSU, at Texas, at Maryland).  By contrast, Oklahoma, a 17-12 team that's increasingly in danger of missing the whole damn tournament, has 8 quality wins (USC on a neutral court, at Wichita State, sweep of TCU, Texas Tech, Kansas, Baylor, Kansas State). 

Michigan scores very well by advanced metrics and has no truly bad losses.  But the lack of wins absolutely limits its ceiling, and the people saying they can get up to a 4 just by beating Nebraska are not being realistic.  

They all get 98% of the teams

The Committee only throws one or two curveballs a year in that regard.  He consistently rates as one of the least accurate brackets on the Matrix in terms of overall seeding accuracy.  He's not good at this.  At all.  

Oh no

What will people do without one of the worst bars on the planet?

Seriously people, just go to the Jug or Ashley's.  

Counterpoint

Jemele Hill is good.

He's probably using per-possession

rather than per game.  Which makes sense for all the usual tempo free reasons.

This is like the slide replay plaguing baseball

there is a moment in basically every slide into a bag where the runner's foot comes of the bag for an instant before his leg hits.  If you slow it down to a frame-by-frame you can call the guy out according to the letter of the rule.  But at that point you're just punishing a player for unavoidable physics.  

Unless a defender rips completely through the ball, the ball is virtually always going to be in the ballhandler's hand for an instant or two after the defender knocks it away.  It's basically unavoidable.  You're punishing a guy because frame by frame replay reveals a physical reality we had all just previously agreed to ignore and could never catch in real time.  

It's beyond me how that accomplishes anything useful for the game or is in the spirit of the rule.  

So Raiders

Since you apparently have $100m to throw around on a guy who hasn't coached in almost a decade, you gonna give some of that taxpayer subsidy money back, or . . .?

This isn't the issue

it's not about people reading "fewer articles per unit time."  It's about advertisers having no reliable way to track the effectiveness of video ads.  The reason everyone is pivoting to video is that traditional clickthrough web ads are like the most transparent form of advertising out there.  Advertisers know exactly how effective the ads are because of the clickthroughs, and the answer is: incredibly ineffective.  

There's no reason to think video ads are more effective, but people who do this say they're far more difficult to track and analyze.  Facebook recently had to adjust its estimates of video engagement massively downward because of a "mistake" it made in the calculations.  "Pivot to video" is just another way of saying "trick advertisers for a while," and I don't see any way it's sustainable in the long term.  In the meantime, it's pissing off its readers, who want good written content (very few people like video, in part because people do a huge chunk of their internet surfing at work).  

Worth Nothing

"Arguably the Cubs #1 prospect" doesn't meant what it meant three years ago.  He's a back end of the top 100 guy (midseason MLB rankings had him at 92).  Obviously not bad, but people shouldn't think he's Kris Bryant just because he's the Cubs' top guy.  

Which is why

the one-and-done rule is bad and anti-labor and needs to be eliminated immediately.  

Beating a woman

is not a mistake.  It is an intentional crime.  

 

And the NFL's handling of the Ray Rice situation was so egregiously terrible that it caused me and several others I know to stop watching the NFL completely.  That Stoops was marginally less shitty in his own handling of the situation does not mean his handling of it was appropriate or acceptable.  

Edit: also, many, many people (including Orson) raked Stoops over the coals at the time.  To claim this is backdated outrage simply isn't true.  

Carly Rae Jepsen

Is actually our greatest modern pop star.

And

Even though everyone has apparently forgotten it, Michigan had hilariously bad opponent three point luck for the first 8 games of the Big 10 season.  Opponents shot like 55%.  

It's not really a coincidence that the defense improved when threes started going in at a more normal rate (though as Ace has noted, Michigan's been a lot better at preventing opponents from taking 3s in the first place).  

3 Point Defense

There was a big debate around here after the Illinois loss about whether Michigan's opponents were shooting 54% from 3 over a 6 game stretch because Michigan's D was that bad or because of variance.  Hope people remember the last few games (where Michigan's opponents can't buy a 3; Wisconsin was 3-16 tonight) the next time we go on an unlucky stretch.  

The dropoff is 2 guys

and one of them is a 3 star kicker.  Their only other 3 star is a low ranked WR out of Texas.  

WAR Graphs For Recruiting!

I love this.  Also, I know a lot of it is a class size thing, but the fact that OSU doesn't even have the #1 overall class is just insane given what they put together.  

Greenstein is a tool

And he's obviously wrong that it's uncommon.  But that doesn't mean it's not bad.  

I mean

the post I'm responding to said that the shoes would be distracting because they're pink.  I genuinely don't understand that at all.  And no, I wouldn't feel weird at all wearing a pink suit one day a year for breast cancer.  Why would I?  

Is there

something wrong with bright pink?  Again, I don't see why bright pink is supposed to be any worse than any other color.  

Serious Question

Would you be offended if the shoes were a color other than pink (i.e., if the official breast cancer color were, like, slate gray)?  If not, I have . . . concerns.  

This is Wheatley's replacement

Sam has been saying for over a week that we would fill the Wheatley opening with a non-rb coach and have the rbs coached by someone on the existing staff.