I think of it in a different way. The Pairwise Probability Matrix gives you total chance of making the tournament (IN), chance that they win the conference tournament (AQ), and chance that they don't win the conference tournament, but are high enough in the Pairwise that it doesn't matter (AL). So what it's really saying is there's a 14% chance Michigan wins the B1G tournament, but only a 5% chance Minnesota does, and Michigan still has an overall higher chance (99% vs 97%) of getting any kind of bid.
11-8-3 Denver and 11-8-2 North Dakota are currently on the outside looking in at 18th and 20th, respectively
Denver might not make it, but it's NoDak after the new year. They'll finish with an 11-1-2 run, win the WCHA, and get a 1 or 2 seed in the Random Number Generator.
Saban's comments were directed at agents, not scouts. It's the agents you hear about having improper contact with athletes, since the agent can directly profit off of them for their whole NFL career, but the scout just reports back on which guys to pick.
Nobody's making money in the airline industry these days, but international air travel is an obvious market that the 737 can't handle.
The 787 is really a replacement for the 767, which is used mostly on international routes and high-volume, long-distance domestic ones. It's offering a 20% decrease in fuel consumption, which is an absolutely ENORMOUS jump in efficiency, a 30% savings in maintenance, etc., etc., offering a much better deal in the long run for the airlines that operate those types of routes. If you're trying to say that an international airline should follow the Southwest model and just use one type of airplane to save on maintenance costs, the 787 would probably be your airplane of choice. And Boeing is going to replace the 737, but probably not for another 10 years.
Failed to complete his expense report? This is simply UNACCEPTABLE. Where is Free Press Compliance on all of this? The editors had said Sharp would be allowed to finish out his contract, but obviously this is the sort of thing a fine institution like the Free Press will not tolerate.
I'm not sure, but I don't think that the MMB will be at either one. After budget problems in the early part of the decade, they switched to only traveling to MSU, ND, and OSU, and are still on that schedule as far as I know.
Cabrera's "Most Similar By Age" list on Baseball Reference:
Ken Griffey (957)
Hank Aaron (931) *
Orlando Cepeda (927) *
Frank Robinson (920) *
Hal Trosky (901)
Mickey Mantle (891) *
Andruw Jones (888)
Al Kaline (887) *
Ruben Sierra (879)
Albert Pujols (875)
Yes, this is definitely a guy you want to trade away.
That may be a result of decisions by the production staff, keeping the crowd noise levels high in the mix. I agree that we won't really find out how loud it gets until we're in a tight, exciting game.
The now-defunct M Zone created shirts along these lines a few years ago. I have the one with MAKE NOISE on the front and DOWN IN FRONT IS NOT A CHEER written on the back.
were each hit by a pitch on Monday night and then again on Tuesday. And whether or not Porcello meant to hit Youkilis, any additional hit batter was going to make things ugly. Do we know if the benches were warned after Porcello came inside on Martinez?
The way it's just tossed in the article, it sounds like the reporter has no clue that there's any difference between this rumor he wants to believe and the actual facts. He probably saw Lloyd and thought, "Oh, it's Lloyd Carr. Michigan dumped him for that snake Rodriguez who Doesn't Understand The Rivalry". Meanwhile, fact-checkers don't exist at the Tribune Chronicle and the error makes it into e-print.
A share of the Big Ten title, a bowl game victory, and no BCS wins for non-BCS conference teams should be enough. If he beats OSU in the process, it's practically automatic. Book it.
Every Day Should Be Saturday is my general CFB blog of choice, and I also read a lot of stuff at TSB now that they have Brian, Orson, and OPS writing for them. Yahoo! Sports has done a great job of assembling some of the best bloggers out there. Doc Saturday on CFB and Puck Daddy on the NHL are both required reading for me, and their more traditional journalist types have been doing a lot of good work too.
Great post. It's interesting to think about the times in these rivalries when OSU and MSU have been most competitive. It's almost hard to remember that, in the modern era, the closest OSU has been in the overall series was in 1975, right in the middle of the Ten Year War, when they cut down the overall lead to 11 games. Woody had almost immediately started making up ground after he came to OSU in '53, and Bo only managed to claw back to one game over .500 vs the Buckeyes by the end of his tenure, leaving a 15-game lead.
On the other hand, MSU's best years were under Duffy Daugherty, but Bo quickly reversed that rivalry and only dropped four games to the Spartans in 20 years.
The not-at-all shocking conclusion: When Michigan is weak (like under Elliott and, to some extent, Oosterbaan), more teams beat us, including our rivals. When Michigan gets strong again, only a top-flight program can hang with us. It remains to be seen whether Dantonio can put together that kind of program at MSU and whether Michigan can return to its usual spot in college football. Maybe it'll end up like things were in the '90's, where Michigan is the dominant program, but winning 6/10 instead of the 8/9 we've won this decade so far.
Using the You Are The Committee feature at CHN, I found the secret combination to do it, but SUPREME wackiness must reign. It looks like the keys are
0. Michigan wins the CCHA title
1. Notre Dame loses twice at the Joe
2. Denver loses twice in the WCHA tournament
3. Minnesota wins the WCHA title
4. We get a very little help elsewhere, like St. Lawrence doing well in the ECAC. Bare minimum is that Air Force wins one more game (they're a Denver opponent, so they affect ND's RPI). At that point, the RPI difference between Michigan and ND is LESS than .0001, but is in Michigan's favor.
So...yeah. Not likely, but mathematically possible.
Excellent catch. Thanks, Brian.
If regionalization goes through and ends up as radical as USCHO thinks it would be (Who cares about seeds once you're past the #1's?), it's going to end up turning into one pair of CCHA/WCHA regionals and one of ECACHL/Hockey East + Atlantic Hockey Auto-Bid. And they're still not going to save any money on the western ones, because everyone's going to have to fly anyway.
That St. Louis regional is a joke. The closest college hockey program to is Miami, and Oxford is 344 miles away. The only programs that could drive to it are Miami, Wisconsin, and Notre Dame. Everyone else would have to fly, and attendance will be brutal.
I wonder what the financial side of going to home regionals would be. I'll try to take a look at that. Off the top of my head, a Clarkson-hosted regional a few years ago would've been rough financially, but the big programs do tend to be in cities that aren't too tough to get to.
The WCHA would definitely want to add another team to balance out Bemidji State. The thought had originally been that UNO would leave, but they've shot that down. Now the talk centers around Northern being the one to head west.
First of all, I saw the same scenario coming a couple days ago: http://hooverstreetrag.blogspot.com/2009/02/hsr-bracketology.html
Secondly, tanking a game in the regular season would be a terrible idea, since so many things can still happen in the conference tournaments that would affect the ever-volatile Pairwise rankings. Besides, if we ended up beating Notre Dame in the CCHA tournament, there may be an opportunity leapfrog them into a hypothetical #3 overall seed.
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I think of it in a different way. The Pairwise Probability Matrix gives you total chance of making the tournament (IN), chance that they win the conference tournament (AQ), and chance that they don't win the conference tournament, but are high enough in the Pairwise that it doesn't matter (AL). So what it's really saying is there's a 14% chance Michigan wins the B1G tournament, but only a 5% chance Minnesota does, and Michigan still has an overall higher chance (99% vs 97%) of getting any kind of bid.
11-8-3 Denver and 11-8-2 North Dakota are currently on the outside looking in at 18th and 20th, respectively
Denver might not make it, but it's NoDak after the new year. They'll finish with an 11-1-2 run, win the WCHA, and get a 1 or 2 seed in the Random Number Generator.
Saban's comments were directed at agents, not scouts. It's the agents you hear about having improper contact with athletes, since the agent can directly profit off of them for their whole NFL career, but the scout just reports back on which guys to pick.