I was mentioned on ESPN today. Well, not me. But my work. I am one of the “four” researchers (That paper has three authors….) they are talking about!

I’m a pretty big deal.

Cheers.

So I recently did a comedy set (because I’m a comedian and you can’t stop me) about words you could spell with the symbols of the chemical elements. It’s hilarious, because I’m hilarious, and you can see it here.

Unrelated to this, Jay Cuda is out there setting the bar extremely high for the absolute best Twitter account right now. And Tej Seth suggested that someone should be doing what Jay Cuda is doing for NFL and college football.

as a football analytics community it is time that we got our own version jay cuda

someone needs to spend every waking hour creating posts about player names, photoshopping landmarks into stadiums, putting out player face graphics, etc. for the NFL and college football,

— Tej Seth (@tejfbanalytics) May 17, 2023

Now I can’t possibly hope to be as good as Jay Cuda, but I can contribute some meaningless nonsense to the world so here we go.

What are all the words that we can spell with NFL logos? I’m using these 9 logos with letters in them. This gives me a C, U (colts…sort of), SF, O (I need it), G, NY, KC, B, and T.

Using the code I wrote before and replacing the elements with available NFL logos, here is the complete list of scrabble words:

• bo
• bob
• bog
• bony
• boo
• boob
• booboo
• boot
• bot
• bott
• boubou
• bout
• bub
• bubo
• bug
• but
• butt
• buttony
• butut
• cob
• cobb
• coco
• cog
• cony
• coo
• coocoo
• coot
• cot
• cottony
• cub
• cut
• cutout
• go
• gob
• gobo
• gobony
• gogo
• goo
• goony
• got
• gout
• gut
• oot
• otto
• out
• outgo
• to
• tog
• tony
• too
• toot
• tot
• tout
• tub
• tug
• tut
• tutu
• ut

The longest word we can spell is COTTONY.

And, important to the immature among us, you can also spell BOOB and BUTT. BOOB can be spelled entirely with AFC North logos!

If I get some actual work done today, I’ll do the other sports.

Cheers.

We (Ben Baumer, Quang Nguyen, and myself) just got our paper entitled “Big ideas in sports analytics and statistical tools for their investigation” published. My favorite thing that I learned from writing that paper was about the existence of the sportyR package. It’s my second favorite package of all time……after teamcolors, of course.

We (Quang Nguyen, Ron Yurko, and myself) also recently posted our paper on STRAIN called “Here Comes the STRAIN: Analyzing Defensive Pass Rush in American Football with Player Tracking Data” on ArXiV. This is work that is based on our Big Data Bowl 2023 work (did I even mention I was a Big Data Bowl finalist this year……). You can see my Big Data Bowl 2023 entry here.

That is all for now.

Cheers.

Before I begin, I have to admit to being a hypocritical coward. We should all be boycotting this World Cup. Qatar bribed FIFA to host it and then when building the stadiums several thousand migrant workers have died. So……not great. And that’s not to mention that Qatar is one of 10 countries where homosexuality may be punished by death. I love the World Cup, but I fucking hate FIFA and I kind of think I hate Qatar, too. Ok. Time for advancement scenarios!

Group A

Qatar

First things first, Qatar is out. No host team has ever been eliminated after two games. That is Qatar’s legacy.

Netherlands

The Netherlands advances with a win OR a tie. They can also advance with a loss if Ecuador wins. They can even advance with a loss if Senegal wins, as long as they lose less badly than Ecuador. So a lot would need to go wrong for the Netherlands to not get through to the round of 16.

Ecuador

Ecuador advances with a win OR a tie. They can also get in with a loss if Qatar beats the Netherlands by worse than Senegal beats them. But they shouldn’t worry about that.

Senegal

Senegal advances with a win. They can also get in with a tie and then get some help from Qatar beating the Netherlands by a few goals. They can still win the group with a win and help from Qatar drawing or winning against the Netherlands.

Here’s all the advancement scenarios graphically.

(Key – Green: Win group, Yellow: Second in group, Red: Eliminated, Light Green: Tie for first, Orange: Tie for second.)

Group B

England

England gets in with a win or a tie or a loss by less than 2. They can also advance with a loss if Iran-USA ends in a draw. A win guarantees them first in the group.

Iran

Iran gets in with a win. They can also get in with a tie as long as England wins or draws their match against Wales.

USA

It’s as simple as it gets: Win and they advance. Any other result they are eliminated.

Wales

Wales still somehow controls their own destiny even though they are on one point after 2 games. All Wales needs to do to advance is beat England by 3 or more goals (which is, not likely, but hey, who knows). They can also get in with any type of win as long as Iran-USA ends in a draw.

Group C

Poland

Poland advances with a win or a draw. They can also get in with a loss and a bit of help from Mexico. They win the group with any type of win or a tie and a Mexican win or draw.

Argentina

Argentina advances with a win. They can also get in with a tie and a Mexican tie or win…but not a win by too much.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia advances with a win. They can also advance with a tie and a Poland win or a tie and an Argentina win……but not a win by too much. They also have a shot to win the group with the easiest way being a win and a tie in the Argentina-Poland game.

Mexico

Mexico has a sort of Wales situation on their hands here where they control their own destiny. All they need to do to guarantee they advance is beat Saudi Arabia by 4 goals. Any other win and they need a bit of help (i.e. Poland win or Argentina win by enough goals). Mexico cannot win the group.

Group D

France

France is qualified for the round of 16. They win the group with a win or a tie. Or even most situations in which they lose. France is good.

Australia

Australia advances with any win. They can also get in with a tie as long as France wins or ties.

Denmark

Denmark can advance with a win but they need help. They advance with a win as long as France win or ties. If France loses Denmark needs to beat Tunisia on goal differential. They cannot win the group.

Tunisia

Tunisia can advance with a win….but they need a lot of help….and beating France is hard. With the win they need a Denmark-Australia draw or a Denmark win and then you beat Denmark on goal differential. Just like Denmark, they can’t win the group.

Group E

Spain

Spain advances with a win or a draw. They can also get in with a loss and a Germany-Costa Rica draw or most German wins.

Japan

Japan is in almost the same bot as the US: Win and you’re in. Nearly every other result leads to elimination. The exception being that they can advance with a draw if Germany ties Costa Rica or Germany beats Costa Rica by exactly 1 goal and then Japan wins the goals for tiebreaker against Germany, which is currently ties 2-2.

Costa Rica

Costa Rica advances with any win. They can also advance with a tie and a win from Spain. Everything else is elimination.

Germany

Germany does not control their own destiny. They need a win and a Spanish win or draw. They can also advance with a win and a Spain loss as long as they blow out Costa Rica and Japan blows out Spain. No matter what they cannot win the group.

Group F

Croatia

Croatia advances with a win or a draw. They can still get in with a loss but they would then need help from Canada. You never want to have to rely on Canada……

Morocco

Morocco advances with a win or a draw. They also advance with a loss and a Croatian win. There are also scenarios where they get in with a loss and a Belgium win and even a Belgium-Croatia draw.

Belgium

Belgium advances with a win. They also have a few scenarios where they can get in with a tie, but they would need help from Canada…..and you never want to rely on Canada. They win the group with a win and a Canadian win or draw.

Canada

Oh, Canada. You are eliminated. I hope they enjoyed that 1-0 lead over Croatia while it lasted.

Group G

Brazil

Brazil is in the round of 16. They join France and Portugal one of only 3 teams to have already advanced to the round of 16. They win the group with a win or a tie or a loss with a Serbian win or tie. But they will probably just win so that won’t matter.

Switzerland

Switzerland advances with a win. If they tie, they need help from Brazil with win or tie or lose a close game. They can win the group with a win and a Brazil loss and then winning the goal differential tie breaker.

Cameroon

Cameroon can still advance with a win. But they need help from Serbia with draw or win (but not win by enough to take the goal differential from them). Cameroon will be rooting for Serbia but not too much. They need a small Serbia victory to help themselves.

Serbia

Serbia needs to win to advance, but they also need help. They either need Brazil to win or tie (it’s nicer to have to rely on Brazil than Canada…). They can even get in with a win and a Brazilian loss as long as they still beat Cameroon on the goal differential. Serbia is rooting for Brazil.

Group H

Hey, want to hear something weird? The advancement scenarios for Group G are exactly the same as the advancement scenarios for Group H. Just replace Brazil, Switzerland, Cameroon, and Serbia with Portugal, Ghana, South Korea, and Uruguay. That’s right. The points AND goal differentials are EXACTLY the same for Groups G and H (the third tie breaker, goals for, is different). Weird, right?

Portugal

Portugal is in the round of 16. They join France and Brazil one of only 3 teams to have already advanced to the round of 16. They win the group with a win or a tie or a loss with a Uruguay win or tie. But they will probably just win so that won’t matter.

Ghana

Ghana advances with a win. If they tie, they need help from Portugal with win or tie or lose a close game. They can win the group with a win and a Portugal loss and then winning the goal differential tie breaker.

South Korea

South Korea can still advance with a win. But they need help from Uruguay with draw or win (but not win by enough to take the goal differential from them). South Korea will be rooting for Uruguay but not too much. They need a small Uruguay victory to help themselves.

Uruguay

Uruguay needs to win to advance, but they also need help. They either need Portugal to win or tie (it’s nicer to have to rely on Portugal than Canada…). They can even get in with a win and a Portugal loss as long as they still beat South Korea on the goal differential. Uruguay is rooting for Portugal.

Cheers.

The 2022 FIDE Candidates tournament is being played right now with the winner facing Magnus Carlsen for a chance to become the world champion (or maybe not). Either way, the winner of this tournament will secure a spot in the World Championship Match (and possible the runner-up, if Magnus decides not to play).  The tournament consists of 8 players and who play each opponents twice, once as white and once as black, for a total of 14 matches.  Players get 1 for a win, 1/2 for a draw, and 0 for a loss and they are currently 9 games into the 14 total and are on a rest day.  (Why do they need a rest day in chess?  Because some of these games are like 8 hours long!?!?).

I’m also teaching a Bayesian class this summer, which gave me an excuse to use the data from the candidates tournament  in a Bayesian example.  So I showed the students a simple multinomial model for the three outcomes of (win, draw, loss).  And we got to have a nice discussion about what our priors should be.  I showed them that if we use a non-informative prior here and let the data dominate, we get kind of nonsense results because they’ve only played so few games in the candidates tournament.  But we have a ton of prior knowledge!  Since all these players qualified for this tournament, we are very confident that they are all very very good and also very very close in terms of skill.  In the model that we set up, the strength coefficients are all relative to each other so we put priors on the betas with mean 0 and HIGH precision (low variance) since we have confidence that these players are all very similar to each other.  We don’t want to let the result of a single game drastically change the regression coefficients.  I’ve included the JAGS model below and the full code can be found here.

Jags Model


"model {
#Likelihood
for (i in 1:N){
##Sampling model
#y[i] ~ dmulti(p[i,1:J], 1)
y[i] ~ dcat(p[i, 1:J]) # alternative
for (j in 1:J){
log(q[i,j]) <- alpha[j] + inprod(X[i,], beta[,j])
p[i,j] <- q[i,j]/sum(q[i,1:J])
}

yrep[i] ~ dcat(ppred[i, 1:J])
for (j in 1:J){
log(qpred[i,j]) <- alpha[j] + inprod(X[i,], beta[,j])
ppred[i,j] <- qpred[i,j]/sum(qpred[i,1:J])
}

}
##Priors
for (j in 1:3) {
alpha[j] ~ dnorm(0, 1)
for (k in 1:8) {
beta[k, j] ~ dnorm(0, 5)
}
}

for (m in 1:Npred){
ypred[m] ~ dcat(ppred2[m, 1:J])
for (j in 1:J){
log(qpred2[m,j]) <- alpha[j] + inprod(Xpred[m,], beta[,j])
ppred2[m,j] <- qpred2[m,j]/sum(qpred2[m,1:J])
}
}

}”

Results

Some model results

Given equally matched players the model predicts that the player with the white pieces will win 10.10%, the player with the black pieces with win 6.28% of the time and there will be a draw 83.62% of the time.  This all seems very reasonable. (Though the white win percentage in actual games exploded to about 27% given three with wins yesterday).  I also made some fun plots to see the differences in players.  The first plot is the the probability of the players winning vs drawing playing as white and the second plot is the same but for players playing as black.  The dashed lines represent expected values that are equal.  So for instance, in the first plot (players playing as white), Nepo is more likely to win as white and less likely than the others to draw, but his EV is near 0.55.  The only other player with a white EV above 0.525 is Fabi.  When playing as black, the model actually gives Caruana the highest probability to win, but Nepo’s draw probability is high enough that he still have the highest EV as black of almost exactly 0.5.

 

 

Expected Final Points

Based on the results of this model, I simulated the remaining games in the tournament 5000 times and then computed the final standings.  Here are the expected number of points for the final tournament standings, with 95% credible intervals:

1. Nepo: 8.70 (7.5, 10)
2. Caruana: 8.08 (7, 9)
3. Hikaru: 7.03 (6, 8)
4. Rapport: 6.99 (6,8)
5. Duda: 6.49 (5.5, 7.5)
6. Ding: 6.47 (5.5, 7.5)
7. Radjabov: 6.38 (5, 7.5)
8. Alireza: 5.87 (5, 7)

 

And I made a fun plot for the number of points that each player will end with.  The darker the colors the more likely that outcome.  (Is there a name for this type of plot?  It’s like a histogram with color.  Does this have a name?). What’s notable about this is that Rapport, Radjabov, and Firouzja are all stuck at 4/9 but the model is predicting that Rapport and Radjabov are likely to finish with more points of Firouzja.

Probability of winning the candidates

I’ve calculated two probabilities for every player: 1) The probability they win the candidates outright and 2) the probability that either win outright OR are part of a tie for first.

Probability of winning the candidates outright

1. Nepo: 67.76%
2. Caruana: 10.44%
3. Hikaru: 0.58%
4. Rapport: 0.5%
5. Duda: 0.06%
6. Ding: <0.02%
7. Radjabov: <0.02%
8. Alireza: <0.02%

Probability of finishing with at least a piece of first place

1. Nepo: 87.94%
2. Caruana: 29.46%
3. Hikaru: 2.26%
4. Rapport: 2.02%
5. Duda: 0.38%
6. Ding: 0.12%
7. Radjabov: 0.38%
8. Alireza: <0.02%

Probabilities of most likely outcomes

1. Nepo wins outright: 67.76%
2. Nepo and Caruana two way tie: 16.88%
3. Caruana wins outright: 10.44%
4. Nepo, Caruana, Hikaru three way tie: .76%
5. Nepo and Rapport two way tie: .64%
6. Hiarku wins outright: 0.58%
7. Nepo and Hikaru two way tie: 0.52%
8. Nepo, Caruana, Rapport three way tie: .52%
9. Rapport wins outright: 0.5%
10. Caruana and Hikaru two way tie: 0.26%
11. Caruana and Rapport two way tie: 0.2%
12. Nepo and Duda(!!!) two way tie: 0.16%
13. Nepo and Radjabov two way tie: 0.14%
14. Nepo, Caruana, and Radjabov three way tie: 0.12%
15. Nepo, Caruana, and Duda three way tie: 0.12%
16. Nepo, Caruana, Hikaru, and Rapport FOUR WAY TIE: <0.1%
17. Duda wins outright: <0.1%
18. Nepo, Caruana, and Ding three way tie: <0.1%
19. Nepo and Ding two way tie: <0.1%
20. Nepo, Caruana, Hikaru, and Radjabov FOUR WAY TIE: <0.1%
21. Nepo, Caruana, Rapport, and Radjabov FOUR WAY TIE: <0.1%
22. Nepo, Rapport, Radjabov, and Ding FOUR WAY TIE: <0.1%
23. Nepo, Caruana, Rapport, Ding, and Duda FIVE WAY TIE(!!!): <0.1%
24. Nepo, Duda, Radjabov three way tie: <0.1%
25. Nepo, Duda, Rapport three way tie: <0.1%
26. Radjabov and Rapport two way tie: <0.1%

Cheers.

 

 

Here is a link to the talk on Data Art that I gave at the University of Oregon.

 

Cheers.

 

Since I started paying attention to NCAA basketball two days ago, I am now an expert.  I’ve done my “research” and I will now tell you exactly what is going to happen in the tournament.

Some things:

• Worst 1 seed: Arizona
• Best 2 seed: Duke
• Best 3 seed: Purdue
• Best 4 seed: Illinois
• Best 5 seed: Iowa
• Best 6 seed: Texas
• Best 7 seed: Michigan St
• Best 8 seed: UNC
• Best 9 seed: TCU
• Best Double digit seeded teams: Michigan, Virginia Tech, Indiana, Iowa St, San Francisco, Notre Dame, Miami FL, Rutgers, Loyola Chicago (Go Ramblers!)
• Worst single digit seeds: Murray St, Creighton, Boise St, Colorado St, Providence, Marquette, Seton Hall
• Teams that are under seeded: Purdue, Texas,  Michigan, Virginia Tech, Indiana, UNC, Iowa St
• Teams that are over seeded: Villanova, Arizona, Wisconsin, St. Mary’s, USC, Providence, Colorado St, Marquette, Boise St, Davidson, Creighton, Murray St
• Why is Murray State a 7 seed?
• Best team to miss the tournament: Wake Forest
• Worst At-Large Bid: Wyoming.  (More like WHYoming, amirite?)

My current top 100 rankings (seed) Qualified for NCAA tournament:

1. Gonzaga (1)
2. Baylor (1) 
3. Kansas (1) 
4. Purdue (3)
5. Duke (2)
6. Arizona (1) 
7. Kentucky (2) 
8. Auburn (2) 
9. Texas Tech (3) 
10. Illinois (4) 
11. Tennessee (3) 
12. Texas (6) 
13. Iowa (5)
14. UCLA (4) 
15. Villanova (2) 
16. Arkansas (4) 
17. Ohio St (6)
18. Alabama (6) 
19. UConn (5) (Go Huskies!)
20. Michigan (11)
21. LSU (6) 
22. UNC (8)
23. Wisconsin (3) 
24. Virginia Tech (11)
25. Michigan St (7) 
26. Wake Forest
27. Indiana (12)
28. Oklahoma
29. Nicholls St (Wisconsin, a 3 seed, beat Nicholl’s state by only 3 points!)
30. Xavier
31. Florida
32. Oklahoma St
33. Virginia
34. Iowa St (11)
35. San Francisco (10)
36. USC (7) 
37. St. Mary’s (5) 
38. Miss St
39. TCU (9)
40. San Diego St (8)
41. Seton Hall (8)
42. Notre Dame (11)
43. UAB (12)
44. Miami FL (10)
45. West Virginia
46. Rutgers (11)
47. Loyola Chicago (10) (Go Ramblers!)
48. Kansas St
49. Providence (4) 
50. Marquette (9)
51. Colorado St (6)
52. Oregon
53. Washington St
54. Northwestern
55. BYU
56. St. Johns
57. Maryland
58. Clemson
59. North Texas
60. Texas A&M
61. Boise St (8)
62. Florida St
63. Penn St
64. Davidson (10)
65. VCU
66. UC Irvine
67. Vermont (13)
68. Syracuse
69. Vanderbilt
70. Dayton
71. UCSB
72. Creighton (9)
73. St. Bonaventure
74. South Dakota St (13)
75. St. Louis
76. Utah St
77. Colorado
78. SE Louisiana
79. Belmont
80. Murray St (7) 
81. Richmond (12)
82. Texas A&M CC
83. New Orleans
84. Toledo
85. SW Missouri St
86. Louisiana Tech
87. NC St
88. NM St (12)
89. Mississippi
90. South Carolina
91. Louisville
92. Wyoming (12)
93. Furman
94. Chattanooga (13)
95. Drake
96. Call Riverside
97. CS Fullerton (15)
98. Iona
99. Fresno St
100. Western Kentucky

 

 

 

Joe Rogan issued an apology about the whole Neil Young/Spotify/Covid Misinformation kerfuffle.  And since I know the world is dying to know what I think about the whole thing, I have written down some thoughts about apology.

If you are living under a rock, you can read about the whole slap fight here.  Basically, Neil Young (then Joni Mitchell) wanted his music removed from Spotify is they were going to keep Joe Rogan’s podcast on the platform.  People are pissed at Rogan for spreading some misinformation about Covid, and other people are pissed at Young et. al. for trying to “cancel” Joe Rogan while they vaguely yell “Free speech”.  (Some people are even trying to compare calls for Rogan being removed from Spotify to a Tennessee school board banning the Pulitzer Prize winning book “Maus”.  They are not at all the same, by the way. Just think for 2 seconds about the entity trying to do the banning in both these cases to figure out why.)

Anyway, Joe Rogan has issued and apology.  You can view the apology here:

I’ve written my thoughts in response to the apology with time stamps addressing specific comments that Rogan makes:

0:35: He mentions the two episodes that people have particular issues with.  The guests in question are Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone.  

For sure, both of these guys are highly credentialed in their fields.  But Peter McCullough’s field is cardiology.  He’s not an expert epidemiology or vaccines.  Yet on the podcast, McCullough makes a bunch of objectively incorrect statements about the vaccines, masks, how the virus spreads, and he even claims the pandemic was planned.  He also does not seem to understand VAERS very well and how the data is collected.  You can read a nice summary of the claims, complete with why they are incorrect, here.

Robert Malone’s story is a wild one.  I won’t summarize it in this post, but I encourage you to read all about it here.

1:40: Rogan says: “8 months ago if you said if you get vaccinated you can still catch covid and you can still spread covid.  You would be removed from social media.  They would ban you from certain platforms.  Now that’s accepted as fact.”   

No no no no no.  No vaccine is 100% effective.  All vaccines can do is lower the risk of catching a disease, which also lowers the risk of spreading it.  The original efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine for instance was 95%.  Which means that some vaccinated people got Covid.  It’s literally in the journal article describing the study.  It’s right in the abstract.  This statement is complete nonsense.   (Update: A commenter pointed out that Biden was saying things like “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” and “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.”  This was never true.  All vaccines do is lower your risk.  In this case these vaccines lower your risk a lot.  Side note: One of the biggest failures of this entire pandemic is the communication from public health organizations to the public.  It has been absolutely awful.  It was awful under Trump and awful under Biden.  Public health officials need to totally rethink how they communicate top the public because its been an un mitigated failure.)

And “I don’t think cloth masks work.  You would be banned from social media.   Now that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN.”

I’m pretty sure no one was banned from social media for saying that cloth masks don’t work.  Can anyone find ANY example of this?  (Update: So I was wrong.  Apparently Rand Paul was banned from YouTube for 7 days for saying that  “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection,” adding that “cloth masks don’t work.”  While cloth masks certainly don’t guarantee that you won’t get Covid, they definitely work in lowering the risk of spreading covid.

“If you said, I think it’s possible that Covid 19 came from a lab.  You would be banned from many social media platforms.  Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.”

Newsweek is a “zombie magazine” peddling right wing and alt-right conspiracy theories.  It’s trash now.

2:31: He totally admits to getting things wrong.  And he does admit when he’s wrong.  Somegtimes.  He says: “whenever he gets something wrong, he tries to correct it”

I’ve listened to my fair share of Rogan podcasts and he does admit when he’s wrong.  A lot.  But he seems to just double down on Covid mistakes.  It’s odd.  Because he’s so open to being wrong about other things.

2:37: “Cause I’m interested in telling the truth.  I’m interested in finding out what the truth is”

There are some people out there who are all like “He’s a comedian.  You shouldn’t be getting medical advice from a comedian”.  This is very true.  But in the context of this podcast, he isn’t a comedian.  He’s not telling jokes or performing.  He even says himself, he is trying to find the truth.  So he’s not acting like a comedian in this context.

2:46: “I’m interested in having conversations with people who have differing opinions”.  

Sure.  Fine, but some of these people’s “opinions” are factually wrong.  And just because someone has a differing opinion doesn’t make them worth talking to.  Flat-earthers have a different “opinion”, but they aren’t worth talking to because they are factually wrong.  And some of his guests are simply factually wrong about stuff.

3:20: I’m interested in finding out what is correct”.

Again, he’s not a comedian here!

3:55: He talks about the Spotify disclaimer.

He’s totally open to the Spotify disclaimer.

5:25: He tells a Neil Young story.

The Neil young story is great.  He even references Mansfield, MA and Great Woods!

7:35: “I’m not trying to promote misinformation”.

I genuinely believe him.  The issue here is that he has the largest podcast in the world.  And he seems to not understand what they means.  Millions of people are listening to this stuff and he seems totally unprepared for that.

7:55: “the podcast started of as  just fucking around with my friends.  and having fun and talking”

He even seems to admit this.  He just wants to talk to people.  The problem, again, is that millions of people listen to this podcast, and he is giving people a MASSIVE platform to share their ideas.  This podcast is HUGE.  So, I think it’s probably not a responsibility he ever wanted, but he probably needs to think a bit harder about who he gives his platform to.

8:50: “It’s a strange responsibility to have this many viewers and listeners.  It’s very strange.”

It is VERY strange.

9:26: “Thank you to the haters.  It makes you assess what you’re doing”.

I wish I had as many haters as he did.

Cheers.

 

 

 

 

There is a crazy scenario this week where the Jaguars (somehow) beat the Colts and then the the Raiders and Chargers could both make the playoffs with a tie on Sunday night football.  I for one want to see 60 minutes of kneel down, kneel down, kneel down, punt.  I would watch every second.

I live for stuff like this.  My favorite sports moments include the time the lights went out at the Super Bowl and the time Gurley accidentally scored a game losing touchdown.   And of course there is the all time greatest soccer game: Barbados vs Grenada where Barbados had to defend BOTH GOALS for three minutes.

So this got me thinking about one of my favorite topics: How bad can an NFL team be and still make the playoffs?  If you assume no game ends in a tie, an NFL team can theoretically go 3-14 and make the playoffs.  They would actually HOST A HOME GAME in this scenario.  But I wanted to see what this full season would look like, so I wrote some code to simulate the 2021-22 season (with the real schedule) with the caveat that NFC North teams lose all of their out of division games and split evenly with all teams in the NFC North.  I also required there to be an 8 win wild card team in the NFC, which is the lowest number of wins I could get for a wildcard team with all NFC North teams winning only 3 games.  So without further adieu, here is what that season could really have looked like in my dream world (there are many scenarios with this, here is one of them):

AFC

East

Dolphins 12-5

Patriots 8-9

Jets 7-10

Bills 6-11

North

Ravens 13-4

Browns 12-5

Steelers 10-7

Bengals 7-10

South

Texans 12-5

Jaguars 11-6

Titans 10-7

Colts 5-12

West

Raiders 13-4

Chiefs 10-7

Chargers 10-7

Broncos 5-12

NFC

East

Washington Football Team 13-4

Giants 11-6

Eagles 7-10

Cowboys 6-11

North

Bears 3-14

Lions 3-14

Packers 3-14

Vikings 3-14

South

Buccaneers 10-7

Panthers 8-9

Saints 7-10

Falcons 5-12

West

Cardinals 14-3

Seahawks 13-4

Rams 8-9

49ers 7-10

 

Playoffs

AFC

1. Raiders 13-4
2. Ravens 13-4
3. Dolphins 12-5
4. Texans 12-5
5. Browns 12-5
6. Jaguars 11-6
7. Steelers 10-7

Things get fun here!

NFC

1. Cardinals 14-3
2. Washington Football Team 13-4
3. Buccaneers 10-7
4. Bears 3-14
5. Seahawks 13-4
6. Giants 11-6
7. Rams 8-9

In the NFC this would lead to the following wild card games:

Rams 8-9 at Washington 13-4

Giants 11-6 at Buccaneers 10-7

Seahawks 13-4 AT BEARS 3-14(!!!) (This is theoretically possible!!!)

All I want for next Christmas is the 3-14 Bears to HOST the 13-4 Seahawks in a playoff game.  The Seahawks deserve to be that team to have to go to the 3-14 team after they hosted a playoff game withe a losing record (and then won!).

Cheers.

 

Subluxation, as defined by chiropractors, is simply not a scientific concept.  And it even divides practitioners within the chiropractic community.  But look, it’s still taught in schools of chiropractic.  Like Palmer College of Chiropractic (named after the founder of chiropractic, D.D. Palmer).  Just look at the third trimester sample schedule:

Chiropractors can talk all they want about how they have made progress and what not, but they are still teaching this objectively unscientific concept in the top chiropractic schools.  It’s complete insanity.

Some of the other fun classes that are in their curriculum for whatever reason include embryology, toggle (whatever that is), obstetrics/pediatrics (please don’t take your kid to a chiropractor) and cervical technique.  Cervical technique!

If you are in pain and suffering, please go see an actual medical doctor who went to a real medical school.

Cheers.