wolfman81

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Date	Title	Body
4 weeks 1 day ago	Calling fouls	You said:   I'm concerned that referees would be averse towards getting Wisky in the bonus with 16 minutes left in the first half If refs start calling the game as suggested Wisconsin will have to adjust...or get used to playing games with 4 players because everyone else has fouled out. Good teams should be able to defend without fouling.
4 weeks 2 days ago	Limit it...	30 seconds...if you can't tell that quickly, you don't have indisputable visual evidence... Also, teams must be on the opposite side of the court from their coaches. No over coaching allowed...plus, it is only 30 seconds...right?
4 weeks 2 days ago	Not sure the and 1 makes sense	This situation is usually when a foul is committed away from the ball.
4 weeks 2 days ago	Simple	Because players are so often drafted on potential. Teams often take chances on players, especially young ones, thinking they can develop that raw talent. But when that talent busts, teams cut the player and don't have a huge penalty to pay for their big chance. This rule would dis-incentivize that practice. Think about Darko...why the hell did the pistons draft him? At the time, they thought he was a potential superstar center. Someone who could stretch the defense with his outside shot. And since they were really good at the time, they could spend the time developing him. Work on his post game. Rebounding. Strength. Defense...after all he was so young... Don't get me wrong, sometimes drafting young works. But for every Kobe, there is a Darko. For every LeBron, there is a Kwame Brown. Make the right pick, and you could have a superstar for the next decade and a half (if you can put the right pieces around him). Pick a bust, and you get to try again next year.
6 weeks 1 day ago	Agreed	I've even found housing on Craigslist.  But you should ALWAYS: Meet face to face. Ensure that the seller (landlord) is legitimate. Make sure there isn't a real estate sign in the front yard. I totally saw someone take pictures from the realtor's website and put them in a phony Craigslist Ad.  But this failed the simple test:  If it seems too good to be true...it probably is.  (The house was a 4BR 2500 sq. ft. house with a manicured lawn in a swanky neighborhood being rented for $600/month).
6 weeks 1 day ago	Happy thoughts:	"I mean, think of Trey Burke as a corner. Ffffwow. I think he could lock somebody down." That just makes me smile. :)
6 weeks 4 days ago	I think that he means for the	I think that he means for the MONDAY.  So all of the Wichita State fans should go up to the Louisville fans after they beat them and then offer to buy their tickets for the championship for $10 each (adding insult to injury).
6 weeks 5 days ago	NO KIDDING! So true.  It was	NO KIDDING! So true.  It was so cool to see all of the different floors out there.  And it isn't like the locales have changed.  They still play at Rupp, New Mexico, UNC Greensboro...the same old sites.
6 weeks 5 days ago	Recipe for a win	Step 1:  Get into the middle of that zone.  (Trey, THJ, GRIII, Not Just A Shooter, this is job 1) Step 2:  Find the open man Step 3:  Profit  (Swish)   Alternate plan, shoot over zone.  Profit.
7 weeks 2 days ago	Correction...	Michigan football winning is NEVER a surprise.
7 weeks 2 days ago	Constructive Criticism	You asked for it, you got it. A few thoughts: I think that this is an interesting (and relevant) topic to study, and I think you have made a good start at it. Your mega-table at the end should be a Google Doc and you can give it to us as a link.  As it stands right now, I'm not sure why you put it in there.  It seems like it is simply your dataset, and if you want to encourage me to play with it, then put it in a play-able format and share it that way. I'm not sure of the value of the Tourney PPG stat.  It is an average of 2 numbers (3 in the case of VCU and LaSalle...first 4 teams that have made the sweet 16).  I would guess that the average should go up for 2 reasons. Mostly you get higher seeds.  #1 seeds often crush #16 seeds and usually make the sweet 16. They just won 2 games.  I'm guessing that if you randomly sample two wins from a team's season and average them you will often get a number higher than the season scoring average.** This seems like it might be a good application for a generalized linear modeling.  Your basic question is: Does the number of points scored matter on whether a game is played in a dome or an arena? So you'd probably build a model like this:      pts in S16 = avg pts + opp (def) avg pts + ARENA And ask if the ARENA variable is significant. ** I decided to investigate this statement further.  I took Michigan's results this season to look at stability of averages.  Here are a few facts I found: The average number of points Michigan scored this season (75.1 ppg) was not significantly different from the average number of points Michigan scored in their wins (77.9 ppg).  A Student's T-test of the hypothesis that avgppg in wins > avgppg is FALSE (p=0.1603) If we randomly sample two winning scores and compare that average to the average ppg, we find that the hypothesis avg2winppg > avgppg is TRUE (p<10^-15).  This tells me that the mean of 2 data points is worthless. The max point differential in my bootstrap sample (I sampled 1000 trials) was +22.4, and the minimum point differential in my bootstrap sample was -15.1.  These are similar to the values that you found in your data (+21.8 and -13.5). In the end, my point is that I think you should try a some sort of generalized linear model to support your analysis. Going back as far as you have, I believe, gives you the data set to explore this question.  I think you should do it!
7 weeks 3 days ago	Let's score some points!	79-71 Michigan
7 weeks 3 days ago	oh dear god?!?	Akron-level influenza?  I hope you are feeling better!
7 weeks 6 days ago	I'd like to see 4 more WINS!	I'd like to see 4 more WINS!
8 weeks 3 days ago	I rarely agree with anything the WH says...	But that response was pretty awesome.   So, no, it wasn't too political.
8 weeks 3 days ago	Michigan 95 - SDSU 72	Michigan 95 - SDSU 72
8 weeks 3 days ago	Actually...	Actually, I'm pretty sure that ISN'T Delvon Roe.  Look at his white double chin.
8 weeks 4 days ago	Nah...	There are plenty more UM v Minn (little brown jug) OSU v Illinois (that ugly turtle) PU v IU (probably some trophy that Indianans only care about...wanted to go with Hoosiers, but that's IUs mascot) Now we need some to turn into a tradition: PSU v Neb (I think the B1G was pushing that one) MSU v Wiscy (someone else thought that'd be fun) Rutgers v NW (just seems fitting to me) MD v IA (???? Only option left)
8 weeks 4 days ago	Yes, please	I logged in simply to upvote this. My wife thinks the all yellow unis make them look like "walking bananas".
9 weeks 1 hour ago	Agreed	And when the going gets tough, Trey jacks up ill-advised 3s. With the exception of (maybe) Stauskas, all of these players are better when taking the ball to the basket. THAT is how they cut the lead to 2. (Along with defense.) Trey, THJ, GRIII all need to commit a charge per game. Also, I'd liked to have seen this lineup: Burke, THJ, GRIII, McGary, Morgan I think it would have been helpful when Bo Ryan went with the "inside out" strategy. GRIII was getting abused by Evans, and Beilein never adjusted until it was too late.
9 weeks 1 day ago	My 3 year old can shake hands	My 3 year old can shake hands with more class than Crean. It isn't hard. (But his daddy is a good teacher so that doesn't hurt.)
9 weeks 6 days ago	Not a lot of effort	Speaking as someone who does some data mining, you should think that it would take them about an hour to figure out as long as Facebook isn't totally stupid. Seriously, if the vote came from a community account (or however the SECers were subverting the system), you just pitch it.  If it came from a real person, you keep it.  It isn't a democracy, they aren't worried about infringing on people's rights.
10 weeks 15 hours ago	Yeah...	I was going to write this post. I totally agree. It would be easy to get that data. It'd probably take someone an hour to fix it if they knew what they were doing. But seriously, FB has to have that data, and if they don't they are stupid. I think one of the ways that they make money is by selling targeted advertising,and knowing that you prefer DRob to whatshisname would tell an advertiser something about what they should try to sell you. (Hint: It isn't a TAMU jersey.)
12 weeks 2 days ago	I can't corroborate this...	But I thought Burleson was an outside receiver.  (Right now on ESPNs depth chart the Lions 1st stringers are Calvin...and Durham.  They also have Scheffler at TE and Pettigrew as the starting FB. So I'm confused as hell.)  But when everyone was healthy last season, this is how I remember them lining up: WR: Calvin and Burlson Slot: Young (or Broyles) TE: Pettigrew RB: Leshoure (or Bell or Smith or no RB and put in Scheffler) As I see Breaston as preferable to Broyles, I'd take him in a heartbeat not that we have Titus "Cancer" Young off of the team.  (And holy hell, that was so sarcastic that the /s tag would have been redundant.  I don't think that there is a single Lions fan who want to try to rehabilitate Young.)  So the Lions fan in me would love to see Breaston become a Lion.  He could be the "starting" slot receiver and might (should) be preferable to Logan in the return game. However, the Michigan fan in me would hate to see him go to the Lions because they are the Lions.  (I feel like sometimes I watch the Lions just to see them crash and burn.  Does that make me like a NASCAR fan?  If so, is that bad?)
14 weeks 1 day ago	Even then...	I feel that the college game is truly a guard's game. Especially in the tourney. The guards can do so much more to determine the pace of a game. Like push the tempo on the break. Slow down the other team by applying an annoying press. Distribute the ball and make his teammates better. Generate his own offense off of the dribble. Don't get me wrong. Big men are important. They get rebounds and score in the paint. Some even lead their team in scoring. But they rarely decide the game like guards do. If IU were down by 1 with 10 sec left, who gets the ball, Oladipo or Zeller?
14 weeks 2 days ago	Kill the meme!	Don't get me started on the "let them decide it on the floor" meme. They are deciding it on the floor as long as you call the game the way you should. Agreed.  How do we kill this meme?  It always makes me roll my eyes when announcers say that.  It ALWAYS comes off as, "F#$% the rules, let them decide it on the floor."  C'mon, basketball has rules for a reason.  Also, "decide it on the floor" means, "let the guys on offense shoot, no matter how badly they murder the defense."  (See, Michael Jordan pushing the Utah Jazz player off in the Finals to get open for the GW shot.)
15 weeks 1 day ago	Interesting	I think I follow you there.  I like the MLM because it dis-entangles the different variables more directly.  But I'm also a nerd... Speaking of being a nerd, I think it would be cool to look at a pairs plot of the four factors http://personality-project.org/r/r.graphics.html (like this one here).  You could even add the ADE in as well.  (I like the example shown here because the correlation coefficients are shown in the upper panel.  Kind of like one-stop shopping.)
15 weeks 2 days ago	Multiple linear regression	This analysis seems perfectly suited to a multiple linear regression. As you found, the four factors are inter-correlated. Try this out: http://www.stat.yale.edu/Courses/1997-98/101/linmult.htm Part of the functionality of multiple linear regression is to determine the relative importance of each of the explanatory variables (in this case, the four factors).
15 weeks 4 days ago	Looks like Excel	Looks like Excel to me. But R IS awesome.  Especially when coupled with Sweave or knitr.
15 weeks 4 days ago	Modified Cross Country Scoring	Just another idea for how to rank these teams.  In Cross Country (CC) you get points for your place, and the LOW score wins.  Your top 5 runners place counts toward your score and your next 2 runners can push runners from other teams back.  For example in a dual meet, a shut out occurs when you place your top 7 runners before the other team's #1 runner.  Your placements are 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and your score is 1+2+3+4+5 = 15.  The other team's placements are 8,9,10,11,12,13,14 and their score is 8+9+10+11+12 = 50.  If you have more than 7 athletes on your team, they don't count in the scoring. An advantage of this system is that it would take advantage of the depth of a class, as well as the top.  Highly rated players get few points, but a lower ranked player can really scuttle the ranking.  (Imagine if your CC team went 1,2,3,4,150.  That would be a score of 160.  Despite having the 4 best runners there, you --almost certainly-- wouldn't win.  I've seen a score as high as ~130 win the state meet, but that was a very close meet...#2 had only a point or 2 more.) Adapting this to recruiting rankings is (relatively) simple.  We'd first need to determine what teams you care about and rank ONLY THOSE players.  Now there are two parameters that you'd have to set.  First, how many players contribute to a team's score.  (I'd probably start with 20.)  Next you'd have to determine how many players you want to cap the total class size at.  (25 seems reasonable to me).  Once you set this second threshhold, you can eliminate any players above that threshhold from your "scoresheet". Lastly, you'll have to complete the teams who have less than 20 recruits.  Suppose there are 240 players on your scoresheet.  Because USC only has 14 players, they need 6 more to get to 20.  So you'd have to add in player # 241, 242, 243,...246 to their tally.  You'd also repeat this for any other team with less than 20 recruits (starting at #241 again).  From there it would be as simple as adding up places.

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