There is no way the football field is 2 miles away from Clawson high school. There's nothing in Clawson 2 miles from the high school, the whole city is only about 2 miles across and the high school's right in the middle.
I didn't think of that at the time, but it might also make sense to exclude FG and PAT attempts as well. It's arguable whether you want to call those defensive or special teams plays. Chances are that doesn't change the sample size by much one way or the other, so I'd say include or exclude those specific circumstances based on what's easy to filter out.
One quibble though - for forced turnovers I would look at them on a per play basis rather than per game. Each defensive snap is an opportunity to force a turnover, so if you want to isolate defensive performance from external factors that should give a better picture. You can express it as a percent of plays where the defence forces a turnover (say 0.195% turnovers per play) or invert it and say how many plays the defense needs on average to force a turnover (like 512 plays per turnover). My gut feeling is that will make a big difference for good defences that don't allow many plays per possesion and/or slow paced teams that don't allow as many possesions per game.
But by far the biggest advancement needed is in charge/discharge rate. That's the property that limits how much current you can force into or out of a battery before a 'runaway thermal event' where things tend to get uncomfortably explodey. I've seen some articles on nanowires being used in the electrodes that seemed to have promising results, but no telling how far away that is from any affordable manufacturing solution.
The other main point for improvement is energy density, both in terms of size and weight. That seems less urgent to me though, since the Leaf, Bolt, and Teslas can already get 200 miles from their battery packs. If the charge rate can be improved to the point where they could be recharged from empty in 15-20 minutes then 200 miles is good enough range.
Centric/Stoptech branded brake pads are pretty good. I like them in large part for their excellent technical info that's publicly available. I've also heard good things about Hawk.
Generally you only need to replace the rotors if they've worn below a minimum thickness, which you can check with calipers or a micrometer. It's a good idea to replace them also if you're changing the type of pads you're using, but as long as you do a decent bedding in of the new pads it shouldn't be absolutely necessary.
Unless you're taking your car to a track or dealing with mountains you really just need to get pads that are able to lock up your wheels/kick on the ABS. All the brakes can do is stop the wheel, stopping the car is up to the tires. Racing or mountain descents need you to consider fade and what temperatures your pads can handle, but for normal driving in the flat midwest even the cheapest pads are probably fine. The main reason to step up would be for longer life before your next brake change, which ceramic pads are normally good for.
My understanding of Nuon though is that it's title sponsor is a Dutch utilities company, but the team itself is pretty much all grad students from TU Delft. I have heard they take a whole year off classes and get paid a small stipend, so depends on your definition of 'professional' as to whether they qualify.
If I recall the years right Nuon has won the 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007 races before Tokai created a team, then won again in 2013 and 2015. They've won more WSCs than any other team, and if they win this year they'll have won half the WSCs ever held.
Maryland no UFR, per game recap titled "whatever."
OSU no UFR.
Not sure how comparable the scores really are, since Cole was a fixture in the starting line from the beginning and racked up good numbers on awful competition, and meanwhile the last 3 ugly games went unscored.
Purdue had a team in 2005, but I think they failed to qualify. I have no idea about years previous to that, but I can't recall seeing a car from them since. Chances are when the race had a funding crisis between 2005-2008 their team disbanded and never got resurrected.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive. Hart would burn clock and grind out yards and improve get small positive WPA with each carry. The opposing team's 2 minute offense though would take big chunks of WPA off against our defense, more than offsetting Hart's effort. If our offense had been in scoring mode rather than clock management mode in those close games chances are the overall offense WPA would have been higher and maybe able to offset the negative from our defense.
Short version: Mike Hart was great at grinding out wins, but in some cases was used to burn the clock when we should have been trying to score.
Here's an extra fun fact about the 1990 race: Sunrunner was the only car to finish the race entirely under it's own power. If I remember the history right MIT's car was faster through most of the race, but broke down in the last day or two and had to be towed to the finish.
Fred Jackson describes Lauren as "similar playing style as Mark Ingram, except faster," and went on to praise Kristen as "a shiftier, more leadership focused version of Mike Hart."
Personally most of my preferences for coverage are based on the commentators, and Mickey and Ken on FSD are impossible to beat when it comes to the Wings. CBC typically has some insightful people too, so I give them the edge over VS by a little bit. NBC/ESPN are the absolute worst.
I think one of the main theories is that not many people play the sport when they're young. In the frozen north and canada you can play it in the winter with just sticks and skates on a frozen lake, but for a large part of the US the only way to play is to join a league and buy pads, which makes it a distictly more upper-middle class sport.
Joining the team is actually pretty easy. You go to North Campus for the meetings once a week and you're added to an email list. Nominally there are around 200 people on the team at any given time.
Of those 200 though only a handful, maybe 40-ish, contribute useful work calling companies for sponsorship, designing, or building the car. At some point, typically before spring break I think, about 20 people are picked by the team leaders to actually go on the race. Those are normally the ones who would skip classes to work on stuff for the team and have all the skills needed to keep the team and car running smoothly during the race.
Think of it like a walk-on program. You don't necessarily need qualifications coming in, but you go to the team meetings, prove yourself, and possibly work your way into going on the race.
I'm assuming Brian isn't counting the second goal because it was an empty net with under 1 minute remaining and thus isn't really indicative of anything. For the sake of consistency though I would hope any other empty net goals in the chart were also subtracted.
Definitely excited to have a commitment from Michigan Robot, but has anybody heard if he got qualifying test scores yet? My cousin from the same production line as him said he really struggled with writing. I'm hoping he can make up some ground on the math sections.
First off I'd like to say I appreciate the reasonable tone of the post. That seems to be a sadly rare trait after a few losses. That being said, I happen to subscribe to the philosophy this diary attempts to debunk and it has not successfully changed my mind. Here's why:
Point #1 - "The Offense is Not THAT Good"
I will concede our offense is not the efficient killing machine of Oregon. Initial impressions of it were a bit overblown based on playing competition much weaker than we thought they were. However, we are solidly good offensively and have been gaining more yards on our Big10 opponents than they typically give up. Were that combined with better special teams and decent starting field position it would likely translate into points. Even as it stands though, we put up 28 points on Iowa and 31 points on Penn State, which for an average defensive team would make those games very winnable.
Also keep in mind that we are doing this with a true sophomore in his first season as starter at quarterback, the most important position in this style offense. This indicates a potential for an Oregon-esque death machine to develop over the next two years.
Point #2 - "The Lack of Hope of Defensive Improvement"
As others have stated, freshmen typically get better as they become sophomores and gain experience. Looking at the 2-deep, there are either true or RS freshmen at virtually every position, and are many of the starters in the secondary. Therefore, almost every position will be better next year than it is currently. How much better? Probably still not good, but perhaps mediocre.
Also, I find the assertion that Rodriguez is incapable of building a competent defense unfounded. There are a number of West Virginia teams he coached that were not ranked last in I-A. He hasn't proven an ability to build a dominant '97 or '06 level defense, but there's no reason to doubt his ability to build at least an average unit.
The attrition on the defensive side of the ball does raise valid questions. One of the key ones being 'have we had epically bad luck the past couple years or is the coaching staff doing something horribly wrong?' Unfortunately the most likely answer is a combination of both, and I have no idea in what proportion.
I seriously didn't mean to write a thesis about all this, but it seems like a valid discussion to have. My general opinion is that we are going to have a better team next year, that this is not Rodriguez's peak. For that reason I'm in favor of keeping him, even after 3 disappointing seasons, for the potential of what his peak could look like. If I thought this was as good as the team can get under Rodriguez then I would be on the bandwagon to fire him, so I can certainly understand where that side is coming from.
Last Friday basic user status got bumped up to 100 MGoPoints, so we the riff-raff can't vote anymore. If you check your email there should be a notification that you lost part of your MGoTriforce.
Mostly I don't like the idea of a team getting over 100% efficiency. I prefer metrics to make sense in all possible scenarios, not just realistic ones. On the other hand, we could look at points per redzone appearance and avoid the issue completely.
In August I picked UM to start 5-0. Of course, I also said they would finish 7-5, with the final two wins being Illinois and Purdue. I'll stand by those as wins, but I think we can throw most of our remaining schedule in the toss-up column at this point.
Recent Comments
Ward definitely is a player to watch. One of the biggest questions for MSUs season is how well he recovered from his reconstructive ankle surgery.
There is no way the football field is 2 miles away from Clawson high school. There's nothing in Clawson 2 miles from the high school, the whole city is only about 2 miles across and the high school's right in the middle.
You are right about the good restaurants though.
Terrible against the blitz.
I didn't think of that at the time, but it might also make sense to exclude FG and PAT attempts as well. It's arguable whether you want to call those defensive or special teams plays. Chances are that doesn't change the sample size by much one way or the other, so I'd say include or exclude those specific circumstances based on what's easy to filter out.
Good analysis, and well thought out.
One quibble though - for forced turnovers I would look at them on a per play basis rather than per game. Each defensive snap is an opportunity to force a turnover, so if you want to isolate defensive performance from external factors that should give a better picture. You can express it as a percent of plays where the defence forces a turnover (say 0.195% turnovers per play) or invert it and say how many plays the defense needs on average to force a turnover (like 512 plays per turnover). My gut feeling is that will make a big difference for good defences that don't allow many plays per possesion and/or slow paced teams that don't allow as many possesions per game.
But by far the biggest advancement needed is in charge/discharge rate. That's the property that limits how much current you can force into or out of a battery before a 'runaway thermal event' where things tend to get uncomfortably explodey. I've seen some articles on nanowires being used in the electrodes that seemed to have promising results, but no telling how far away that is from any affordable manufacturing solution.
The other main point for improvement is energy density, both in terms of size and weight. That seems less urgent to me though, since the Leaf, Bolt, and Teslas can already get 200 miles from their battery packs. If the charge rate can be improved to the point where they could be recharged from empty in 15-20 minutes then 200 miles is good enough range.
Centric/Stoptech branded brake pads are pretty good. I like them in large part for their excellent technical info that's publicly available. I've also heard good things about Hawk.
Generally you only need to replace the rotors if they've worn below a minimum thickness, which you can check with calipers or a micrometer. It's a good idea to replace them also if you're changing the type of pads you're using, but as long as you do a decent bedding in of the new pads it shouldn't be absolutely necessary.
Unless you're taking your car to a track or dealing with mountains you really just need to get pads that are able to lock up your wheels/kick on the ABS. All the brakes can do is stop the wheel, stopping the car is up to the tires. Racing or mountain descents need you to consider fade and what temperatures your pads can handle, but for normal driving in the flat midwest even the cheapest pads are probably fine. The main reason to step up would be for longer life before your next brake change, which ceramic pads are normally good for.
My understanding of Nuon though is that it's title sponsor is a Dutch utilities company, but the team itself is pretty much all grad students from TU Delft. I have heard they take a whole year off classes and get paid a small stipend, so depends on your definition of 'professional' as to whether they qualify.
If I recall the years right Nuon has won the 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007 races before Tokai created a team, then won again in 2013 and 2015. They've won more WSCs than any other team, and if they win this year they'll have won half the WSCs ever held.
Pros:
Cons:
Was only thinking head coaches when I counted originally. Let's add him to the board, he'll probably get there someday anyhow.
Here are Cole's freshman UFR numbers:
Appalachian State +7.5
Notre Dame +2
Miami (NTM) +3
Utah +0.5
MSU -0.5
Minnesota +2
PSU -3.5
Rutgers 0
Indiana +2.5
Northwestern can't find a UFR - M00N game
Maryland no UFR, per game recap titled "whatever."
OSU no UFR.
Not sure how comparable the scores really are, since Cole was a fixture in the starting line from the beginning and racked up good numbers on awful competition, and meanwhile the last 3 ugly games went unscored.
Purdue had a team in 2005, but I think they failed to qualify. I have no idea about years previous to that, but I can't recall seeing a car from them since. Chances are when the race had a funding crisis between 2005-2008 their team disbanded and never got resurrected.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive. Hart would burn clock and grind out yards and improve get small positive WPA with each carry. The opposing team's 2 minute offense though would take big chunks of WPA off against our defense, more than offsetting Hart's effort. If our offense had been in scoring mode rather than clock management mode in those close games chances are the overall offense WPA would have been higher and maybe able to offset the negative from our defense.
Short version: Mike Hart was great at grinding out wins, but in some cases was used to burn the clock when we should have been trying to score.
#OccupyStateStreet
No, but somebody should definitely shop him into one of the celebration pictures.
He comes from a long and proud line of Bwgrudts, such as Bwgrudt the 1412th who played a key role in the sack of Rome.
At least most of the video shown on the scoreboard was actual footage from testing. They've been driving it on the road for a while now.
I prefer hike-o,
to stay with a football theme.
Five more syllables.
Heiko, your name is
still confusing to us all.
Welcome anyway.
This is my serious face.
Here's an extra fun fact about the 1990 race: Sunrunner was the only car to finish the race entirely under it's own power. If I remember the history right MIT's car was faster through most of the race, but broke down in the last day or two and had to be towed to the finish.
Fred Jackson describes Lauren as "similar playing style as Mark Ingram, except faster," and went on to praise Kristen as "a shiftier, more leadership focused version of Mike Hart."
Personally most of my preferences for coverage are based on the commentators, and Mickey and Ken on FSD are impossible to beat when it comes to the Wings. CBC typically has some insightful people too, so I give them the edge over VS by a little bit. NBC/ESPN are the absolute worst.
I think one of the main theories is that not many people play the sport when they're young. In the frozen north and canada you can play it in the winter with just sticks and skates on a frozen lake, but for a large part of the US the only way to play is to join a league and buy pads, which makes it a distictly more upper-middle class sport.
Joining the team is actually pretty easy. You go to North Campus for the meetings once a week and you're added to an email list. Nominally there are around 200 people on the team at any given time.
Of those 200 though only a handful, maybe 40-ish, contribute useful work calling companies for sponsorship, designing, or building the car. At some point, typically before spring break I think, about 20 people are picked by the team leaders to actually go on the race. Those are normally the ones who would skip classes to work on stuff for the team and have all the skills needed to keep the team and car running smoothly during the race.
Think of it like a walk-on program. You don't necessarily need qualifications coming in, but you go to the team meetings, prove yourself, and possibly work your way into going on the race.
I'm assuming Brian isn't counting the second goal because it was an empty net with under 1 minute remaining and thus isn't really indicative of anything. For the sake of consistency though I would hope any other empty net goals in the chart were also subtracted.
I saw Lloyd Brady in video of the 1948 Rose Bowl. Front row of the endzone, as usual.
Really just pick any Lotus, but the Elise SE or Sport 300 should be good fun to drive.
If I were able
I would pos-bang you so hard
Alas, 403
Definitely excited to have a commitment from Michigan Robot, but has anybody heard if he got qualifying test scores yet? My cousin from the same production line as him said he really struggled with writing. I'm hoping he can make up some ground on the math sections.
How about the Winston-Butler Award for excellence in nerd beatdowns?
But where would we find enough Japanese high-schoolers to fight to the death for us?
Nothing we can do now but wait it out in our mineshafts. Or in GERG's case fix a nice drink of grain alcohol and rainwater.
this is the war diary!
I find these comments quite illuminating.
My one regret about moving closer to the stadium my final year on campus was that I didn't get to walk by him every week.
First off I'd like to say I appreciate the reasonable tone of the post. That seems to be a sadly rare trait after a few losses. That being said, I happen to subscribe to the philosophy this diary attempts to debunk and it has not successfully changed my mind. Here's why:
Point #1 - "The Offense is Not THAT Good"
I will concede our offense is not the efficient killing machine of Oregon. Initial impressions of it were a bit overblown based on playing competition much weaker than we thought they were. However, we are solidly good offensively and have been gaining more yards on our Big10 opponents than they typically give up. Were that combined with better special teams and decent starting field position it would likely translate into points. Even as it stands though, we put up 28 points on Iowa and 31 points on Penn State, which for an average defensive team would make those games very winnable.
Also keep in mind that we are doing this with a true sophomore in his first season as starter at quarterback, the most important position in this style offense. This indicates a potential for an Oregon-esque death machine to develop over the next two years.
Point #2 - "The Lack of Hope of Defensive Improvement"
As others have stated, freshmen typically get better as they become sophomores and gain experience. Looking at the 2-deep, there are either true or RS freshmen at virtually every position, and are many of the starters in the secondary. Therefore, almost every position will be better next year than it is currently. How much better? Probably still not good, but perhaps mediocre.
Also, I find the assertion that Rodriguez is incapable of building a competent defense unfounded. There are a number of West Virginia teams he coached that were not ranked last in I-A. He hasn't proven an ability to build a dominant '97 or '06 level defense, but there's no reason to doubt his ability to build at least an average unit.
The attrition on the defensive side of the ball does raise valid questions. One of the key ones being 'have we had epically bad luck the past couple years or is the coaching staff doing something horribly wrong?' Unfortunately the most likely answer is a combination of both, and I have no idea in what proportion.
I seriously didn't mean to write a thesis about all this, but it seems like a valid discussion to have. My general opinion is that we are going to have a better team next year, that this is not Rodriguez's peak. For that reason I'm in favor of keeping him, even after 3 disappointing seasons, for the potential of what his peak could look like. If I thought this was as good as the team can get under Rodriguez then I would be on the bandwagon to fire him, so I can certainly understand where that side is coming from.
I think he's clearly saying to stop due to it being hammer time.
Time for us to give RR and the team a break and spend more time berating our families.
Has the Hero of Tiananman Square heard this yet? Is he arranging a 'save the Rose Bowl' campaign?
This one doesn't even make Edam bit of sense.
Y'all need to hide your engineers, hide your women, and hide your hockey players 'cause they're criminally assaultin' everybody out here.
Last Friday basic user status got bumped up to 100 MGoPoints, so we the riff-raff can't vote anymore. If you check your email there should be a notification that you lost part of your MGoTriforce.
Mostly I don't like the idea of a team getting over 100% efficiency. I prefer metrics to make sense in all possible scenarios, not just realistic ones. On the other hand, we could look at points per redzone appearance and avoid the issue completely.
In August I picked UM to start 5-0. Of course, I also said they would finish 7-5, with the final two wins being Illinois and Purdue. I'll stand by those as wins, but I think we can throw most of our remaining schedule in the toss-up column at this point.