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The Tater
History
- Member for
- 4 years 11 weeks
Karma
- Current value
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Recent Comments
| Date | Title | Body |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year 1 week ago | BMI |
BMI really doesn't apply to guys like this (indeed BMI doesn't work particularly well for men in general). For example, I have Mike Martin's measurables at the combine at 6'1" and 306 lbs. That gives him a BMI of 40.4. Would you like to tell Mr. Martin that he's obese and needs to drop about a 100 pounds, or should I? |
| 1 year 19 weeks ago | Straw man |
This argument always strikes me as a bit of a straw man. The NFL playoffs take 12 out of 32 teams for the playoffs (37.5% of teams). For a proportionally similar playoff (and thus a proportionally meaningless regular season), college football would have to have a 24 team playoff (and that's if we're limiting it to BCS conferences). Nobody is actually suggesting that kind of playoff. Every reasonable suggestion is for somewhere between 4 and 8 teams. An 8 team playoff in college football (12% of BCS teams) would be like the NFL having a 4 team playoff. In that case, the regular season would be incredibly meaningful. |
| 3 years 8 weeks ago | Panthers |
The Panthers have to be doing somersaults right now. |
| 3 years 11 weeks ago | Hello: Front Page |
http://mgoblog.com/content/hello-jon-horford http://mgoblog.com/content/unverified-voracity-jingle-zombie Edit: Dang it. Pasting the second link cost me precious seconds. |
| 3 years 14 weeks ago | Boring Classes |
Classes I routinely fell asleep in included: Stats 350 And while I didn't usually fall asleep in EECS 183, that's only because I stopped going entirely in October. |
| 3 years 17 weeks ago | Sweep |
Announcer seems to think it was a sweeping fail, as opposed to a throwing fail. |
| 3 years 18 weeks ago | oops |
edit: oops, meant to post this above as a reply. |
| 3 years 18 weeks ago | Age of Consent |
I have either good news or bad news for you, depending on how you look it at it. The legal age of consent is 16 in Michigan (and a whole lot of other states actually). |
| 3 years 19 weeks ago | Morpheus |
Given that it's all a ridiculous hypo, we can create a situation to make this work. Imagine Morpheus comes to you tomorrow and offers you two pills. Take the red one and you won't get laid for a year but Michigan wins the NC. Take the blue one and you continue to get laid at your typical frequency, but no guarantee of an NC. Whichever pill you choose you wake up the next morning forgetting it ever happened. Note that it isn't that you opt not to have sex for the next year, it's that you simply won't get laid no matter how hard you try (Given that Morpheus can arrange a predestined NC, we'll assume he can control this as well). That way you don't wonder why you aren't having sex, you simply get frustrated. Admittedly this scenario allows for masturbation but I think it's still an interesting question (and you could always tweak the red pill to be super-anti-viagra so that masturbation doesn't even work if you want to answer that question...although this would probably lead to some odd doctor's visits). |
| 3 years 21 weeks ago | Big Ten |
These alumni would make for a great bizarro Big Ten Commercial. |
| 3 years 21 weeks ago | Oops |
Sorry, misread the post. But I don't recall any interview offers from ND or USC either. |
| 3 years 21 weeks ago | ND and USC? |
I don't recall any reports that Harbaugh was ever offered either the ND or USC jobs (or indeed that he was ever seriously considered for either). Correct me if I'm wrong on that. But assuming I'm not, that leaves the Bills and Raiders having been shot down, from which four conclusions could be drawn: 1) Harbaugh thinks those specific teams are both dysfunctional situations where it would be hard to succeed. 2) Harbaugh does not want to coach in the NFL (possibly just not now, possibly ever). 3) Harbaugh is holding out for one job in particular, presumably us. 4) Harbaugh loves Stanford and has no desire to leave. My personaly guess on the odds of those is (1) = 40%, (2) = 20%, (3) = 39.9999% and (4) = 0.0001% |
| 3 years 21 weeks ago | Money money |
Going to go out on a limb and suggest it was because of money. Quick google search yielded this: http://www.cnbc.com/id/19710056 Looks like Adidas coughed up more dough. |
| 3 years 23 weeks ago | Chance of Texas |
I'm not sure I buy that Texas would actually join the Big Ten either, but I think this is a bit dismissive of the pros for them. Mainly, the academics at UT would presumably all be massively in support of the move. The Big Ten is a much much better conference academically than the Big 12, and membership in the CIC is a big incentive for Texas. The comparison to USC is inapt on this point, since the PAC 10 has a number of other institutions on USC's level (UCLA, Stanford, Cal). Secondly, the money difference is a lot more important than you're making it out to be. Obviously I don't know whether Texas would do better financially in the Big 10 anymore than you do, but presumably Texas would look into it and figure it out. And if Frank is right that the difference is $10 million a year, that's a pretty sizable incentive to consider making some new rivalries. |
| 3 years 24 weeks ago | Ray's Red Hots |
Thought you might want to know that Red Hot reopened as Ray's Red Hots. Have not been since they reopened, so I don't know if they continue to be awesome or not. |
| 3 years 26 weeks ago | Geography |
Here's what I don't understand: why do we all assume that the divisions would have to be geographically separated? I get that it's sort of the intuitive way to divide a conference, but don't things like rivalries and balance seem more important that whether we can draw a line on the map that neatly divides all the teams? It's not like you can say that the travel would be a huge problem, because all of the teams have already been playing each other. Why would it matter if one conference was made up of (to pick teams largely at random) PSU, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, MSU and Purdue, and the other was Michigan, Ohio State, Illinois, Wisconsin, Northwestern and Pitt? The only tricky part I can see is what to name the divisions, but presumably we can figure out something. |
| 3 years 26 weeks ago | Map |
Umm, you might want to get yourself a map there. |
| 3 years 26 weeks ago | Larger Playoff |
I think this argument misses that the point of all this (if you're someone advocating for a playoff, or even originally for the BCS) is to identify the best team. Not to identify the 2 best teams in the current system, or the 8 best teams in a playoff system. The argument is that you identify some subset of teams that you think might be the best team, and then determine who is actually the best through elimination games. Either 1 game as it is now, or a playoff system. (Of course you could separately argue about whether or not 1-game eliminations will properly determine the "best team" but that's an argument against the BCS and playoffs). So, assuming we're going to use the current formula to identify a subset of teams, and have those teams play each other to determine the best team, is it logical to argue that if we increase the size of the subset, our chances of finding the best team increase? At first glance, yes obviously, since we increase the chance that our subset includes the best team. This should be clearly true regardless of the system for identifying the subset. Regardless of how well you think the BCS formula works, it seems clear that, similarly, it's more likely that the "best team" is ranked among the Top 4 than the Top 2, the Top 8 than the Top 4, etc. (Indeed it's a mathematical certainty, since the Top 8 includes the Top 2). The only thing that fights back against this is that the larger we make our playoff system, the greater the chance of the best team losing at one point, since it has to play multiple games, and thus the chance of a "fluke" increases (although one could argue that if there's really no "true" best team, we at least increase our chances of getting "one of the best"). That's the logic behind not increasing to a 64 team playoff (as many will point out that the Tourney doesn't necessarily give us the "best" team). It does not seem to me, though, that the chance of the upset by going to 8 teams, outweighs the likelihood that the "best" team is ranked somewhere between 3 and 8 (not to say that 8 is a magical number, I think Brian's 6 team argument makes some sense as well). None of this is to say that the BCS formula is good or not. Just that the logic that "if the BCS works for 8 it works for 2" doesn't seem sound to me. The point isn't whether it identifies the best 8 teams or best 2 teams, it's whether that set includes the best team. (this is what happens when I should be studying for law school exams). |
| 3 years 26 weeks ago | McShay |
Well, here's a mock draft the 2009 draft that he did in February of 2009 (obviously likely to be more accurate than the one he did now, since he actually knows the team orders in this one). http://insider.espn.go.com/nfl/draft09/insider/columns/story?columnist=m... On my count, he got 8 out of his 32 first round picks dead on Personally, I think that's actually pretty damn good for a mock draft that was done in February, and a lot better than most of the mocks I see. Not saying this make Golden a lock to Miami, but I'll certainly take McShay's opinion over a random schmo's on the street. (On a related note, I wish more sports writers/media sources would go back and see how accurate their predictions were this way). |
| 3 years 27 weeks ago | Votes |
1. Ndamukong |
| 3 years 27 weeks ago | Interesting sidenote |
Interesting sidenote for anyone who was in school around 2003 or so. Check out who's reporting for the KC Star on the coaching search: http://www.kansascity.com/166/story/1623907.html It's our own beloved J. Brady McCollough, former Editor of the Daily Sports Page. I was a big fan of Brady's columns, and worked on the page my freshman year for a bit while he was the editor. Seemed like a good guy, and I'm glad to see things are going well for him. |
| 3 years 27 weeks ago | Dombrowski |
Yeah, I hate it when a GM takes over one of my teams and takes them from being perennially one of the worst teams in baseball to competing for division titles and winning an AL Pennant. Let's beat the crap out of that guy. |
| 3 years 27 weeks ago | Other Wonderful MIT Pranks |
Other wonderful MIT pranks include turning a building's lights into a Tetris game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmKgLp6L55c Turning that same dome into R2D2: http://library.creativecow.net/articles/wilson_tim/iphone/artoo_in_killi... |
| 3 years 27 weeks ago | Texas v. TCU |
I had been thinking that TCU should get the nod as well after watching Texas squeak by Nebraska, but then I looked at their results from the whole season, and I'm not so sure TCU has really "looked better" than Texas all year. Now, I'll admit up front that I haven't had the chance to watch too much of either team this year, and if someone who has watched them play a number of games wants to tell me that TCU looks like the better team on the eyeball test, I'm happy to differ. But just looking at their results, Texas has two squeaker wins against Nebraska and Oklahoma, with another two relatively close games (10 points) against Texas Tech and Texas A&M. Their other 8 wins were by 24 points or more. TCU has two squeaker wins against Clemson and Air Force, and a close game against Virgina (6 points). There other 9 games were by 24 points or more. I'm not saying that Texas's results are definitively better than TCU's, just that those results are pretty comparable. Which leads me to wonder if all the "TCU has just looked better" talk is mainly about expectations. We all expected Texas to roll through everyone in the Big 12, so a few close games made them look bad. Conversely, no one really saw TCU coming too much, so their close games don't look bad, and their blow outs look impressive. I'd be fine either either team making the championship game, and I don't like the idea that Texas should be voted in simply because they're currently ranked higher. But looking at their results, I think Texas might get my vote even after tonight's (admittedly pretty bad) performance. |
| 3 years 27 weeks ago | Note 1 |
Note #1: Recruit more kids named "Ndamukong" |
| 3 years 29 weeks ago | Braylon |
You left out signing Braylon who will be a restricted free agent after this year. |
| 3 years 30 weeks ago | Academics |
It's a fair point that Utah/BYU/TCU aren't doing nearly as much research as the big PAC 10 schools, but research is only one part of being a university, and education provided is important as well. And I don't know that Oregon State, ASU and Washington State are particularly major research universities either (note that I'm saying I don't know this, they very well may be, I'm just not aware of them being so). Again, I'm not saying that BYU and Utah are at the level of Stanford, USC, UCLA or many other PAC-10 schools, I'm just saying I don't think a school like BYU would be laughed out of the room based on academics if they looked into joining the PAC-10. |
| 3 years 30 weeks ago | Leftovers |
Oh yeah, the other teams in those conferences would get totally screwed in this hypo, and would rightfully be incredibly pissed off. Just an interesting thought. |
| 3 years 30 weeks ago | Academics |
While I agree that these schools probably cannot really hang with the Pac-10 in most non-football sports, I think it's unfair to knock their academics. Based on US News Undergrad rankings (obviously just one measure among many) BYU is ranked 71 to Arizona's 102. TCU is ranked 110 to Oregon's 115 and Washington State's 106 . Utah is ranked 126 while Arizona State is 121. Oregon State is a tier 3 school. (Boise State only offers up to a Master's so it gets listed separately and is hard to compare, but admittedly probably falls well bellow these schools academically). Obviously this is the lower end of the PAC 10's academics, since Stanford, Cal, UCLA, USC, and Washington are all vastly better than these schools. But I don't think they'd "laugh at" BYU, Utah, or TCU academically. |
| 3 years 30 weeks ago | Separate Conference |
I actually had a similar thought to this earlier this year, although I thought they should just form a separate conference altogether. By ransacking MWC, WAC, and C-USA you can come up with an 8 team conference of Boise State That conference seems like it could make a pretty strong argument it should be a BCS conference. |
