Football
drorzel | September 14, 2010While waiting for SteelyKid to stop bouncing off the walls long enough to be put to bed last night, I watched a bit of the Jets losing to the Ravens on Monday Night Football. I saw most of the first half, and the end of the fourth quarter, and I noticed the announcers talking a lot about two things:
Rex Ryan's Jets blitzing all the time, especially on third-and-long, and
The Ravens converting an incredible number of third downs (11 of 19), especially long third downs
It was actually kind of amazing to me that none of them thought to connect the two. Because here's what I saw: the Jets played…
drorzel | August 25, 2010New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie is getting mocked for a clip where he takes some time to name all his children (the clip isn't as bad as the description makes it sound-- he's slow, but he doesn't struggle all that badly). Cromartie claims that HBO manipulated the footage to make him look bad.
Of course, there's an easy way to avoid this kind of mess: simply give all the kids the same name, thereby reducing it to a previously solved problem.
In discussion on a mailing list where this came up, someone wondered about how many children Wilt Chamberlain would've fathered, given his…
drorzel | February 7, 2010It occurs to me that if you take the Super Bowl as a comment on the current state of the US of A-- which, you might as well, because it's as good as anything else-- we are totally screwed.
I mean, consider the fact that two-thirds of the ads were for Bud Light. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration, but I think every commercial break in the first half had at least one Bud Light ad in it. That basically tells you that the only company with the money to spend on Super Bowl advertising is one that makes its money from helping people drown their sorrows. That's an encouraging statement.
Worse yet…
drorzel | February 7, 2010We're mere hours away from the start of the Super Bowl, the biggest football game of the year. Obviously, the question of who will win has been the subject of much debate over the last couple of weeks on sports media and in offices around the country. What these discussions have lacked, though, is Science!!! (with any number of exclamation points).
So, let's employ science to determine the winner in advance, with a totally accurate Internet poll:
Who will win the Super Bowl?(polls)
The game kicks off around 6:30pm ET, so make sure you vote before then, if you want your vote to have predictive…
drorzel | January 8, 2010Picking on stupid things that sports commentators say is the ultimate "Fish. Barrel. BLAM!" sort of activity, but this morning on the way to drop SteelyKid at day care, Mike and Mike kept repeating one of the absolute dumbest things that football commentators say. They were talking about Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals, and praising his ability as a receiver. In particular, they heaped praise on his ability to "go up and get the ball at its highest point."
That would be a pretty neat trick, if he could manage it. A football pass spends a second or two in the air-- let's call it two…
drorzel | November 18, 2009It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends…
drorzel | November 17, 2009Sunday night, the Patriots lost a heartbreaker to the Colts 35-34. The talk of the sports world yesterday was Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on fouth-and-two on his own 28 yard line when he was up by six with just over two minutes to play. They didn't get the first down, and turned the ball back over to the Colts, who went on to score a touchdown and win the game.
Yesterday's discussion was a low point even by the standards of sports talk radio, with one idiot after another holding forth about how stupid Belichick's decisions was, and how he "disrespected his defense," and various…
drorzel | October 30, 2009It's fall, which means that the major American sports are all ramping up (baseball is in its brief period of being interesting, the NFL is nearing the middle of its season, the NBA has just gotten underway, which means that real basketball will start soon). This also means that the major advertisers have rolled out the commercial that will be annoying the hell out of everybody for the next several months.
Sports are really the only place that I see commercials-- I tend to watch sporting events live, but use the DVR to time-shift other programming, allowing me to fast-forward through the ads.…
drorzel | October 22, 2009I've been up late all this week grading things, and I have lab all morning, so I'm not going to do any detailed blogging about subtle aspects of physics. So here's something from the pop culture side: I was listening to Bill Simmons's ESPN podcast with Chuck Klosterman yesterday, and at one point, they talk about the question of what modern act will be deemed sufficiently old and safe to play the Super Bowl halftime show. Klosterman has some amusing things to say, but this also seems like a perfect topic for a blog poll:
Who will play the Super Bowl halftime show in 2020?(polls)
Klosterman,…
drorzel | September 21, 2009Well, that kept me up way past bedtime-- my 9:15 lecture is going to be fantastic-- but at least my Giants pulled out the win at the end. I couldn't think of a better way to open the Cowboys' new stadium...
And really, there's no better metaphor for the Cowboys in the Jerry Jones era than that gigantic video screen: hugely flashy, ridiculously expensive, and liable to interfere with the playing of the game at any moment. If Jerry was setting out to build a scale model of his own ego, he nailed it.
While the end result was good, from the perspective of a Giants fan, this still left plenty to…
drorzel | September 4, 2009Summer is drawing to a close, which means we're finally starting to get some actual sports to talk about, after a long, dull stretch of nothing but baseball. So I've started listening to "Mike and Mike" again in the mornings in my office. Which may have been a mistake because I've just had to listen to Mel freakin' Kiper talking about the draft prospects of college players who have yet to play a game this year, and they've rather omninously promised a fantasy NFL update coming up later.
These are both pretty dire portents of the immediate future, and I think they're connected. The unhealthy…
drorzel | July 15, 2009I am a fan of the New York Giants.
I believe that they can win every game they play. I hope that they will win every game that they play. I get emotionally involved in their games to such a degree that my heart pounds and I get short of breath when they face a critical play in the fourth quarter. I yell at the tv, though I know that they can't hear me. When something goes wrong, I will punch things and curse. When they win, I will stay up late to watch highlights of a game I just watched.
I will re-arrange my schedule so as to be able to watch their games as they happen. If I can't manage…
drorzel | July 10, 2009If you're desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It's nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time talking about Michael Jackson (in a sensible way, not a vapid-entertainment-reporter way), the effects of fame, the effect of writing for an audience, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
It's about a week old, but I only got around to it yesterday. It's worth a listen, though. It also…
drorzel | March 7, 2009It's March now, which means that we're at the absolute peak of the college basketball season. Small conferences have already started their tournaments, playing for the one shot those teams have of getting into the NCAA's. Big conference tournaments start next week, with the Big Dance the week after.
So, of course, ESPN and all its variants are devoting all of their energy to... speculating about Terrell Owens and Alex Rodriguez. Because, apparently, those two have signed-in-blood contracts with Satan ensuring that not one week passes without one or the other being the lead story on…
drorzel | January 21, 2009I'm listening to "Mike and Mike" on ESPN radio, as I usually do in the morning, and they just spent the better part of five minutes talking about the point spread for the upcoming Super Bowl. The opening betting line has Pittsburgh favored by seven points, but some Las Vegas organization or another told them that the Cardinals would be underdogs to ten different NFL teams, had they made it to the game, including the Patriots and Cowboys, who didn't even make the playoffs.
I have no idea who provided this information, or why they would even have betting lines for Super Bowls in alternate…
drorzel | January 12, 2009Somebody really needs to arrange a game between the Giants and the Titans, so they can have an inept-off. Tennessee thoroughly outplayed Baltimore in just about every way, but coughed the ball up twice on stupid plays (LenDale White carrying the ball like the proverbial loaf of bread, Todd Heap trying to hurdle a defender), keeping them from scoring. And the Giants played an excellent defensive game, but completely blew it on offense, with some of the stupidest play-calling in history.
Giants Stadium is famously a terrible place to play on a windy day, and yesterday was a bad day for wind.…
drorzel | January 5, 2009It's NFL playoff time, which means that sports fans will be treated to the sight of the most high-stakes farce in sports, namely the ritual of "bringing out the chains" to determine whether a team has gained enough yards for a first down. We've all seen this: the play is whistled dead, a referee un-stacks the pile of players, picks up the ball, and puts it down more or less where the player was stopped. Then he tosses the ball into the middle of the field, to a second referee, who tries to replicate the spot closer to the center of the field. Then a guy on the sideline carrying a big stick (…
drorzel | December 31, 2008I generally enjoy Gregg Easterbrook's football writing-- he gets a little repetitive, and the shtick is starting to overwhelm any insight, but he makes some good points, and is usually entertaining. For example, I really enjoyed his take on the Dallas Cowboys at the end of this week's column (schadenfreude is a powerful thing).
Easterbrook's problem is that he insists on using his football column as a platform from which to launch bizarre digressions in all sorts of directions. See, for example, this week's weird and pointless foray into cosmology. Or, better yet, his lengthy excursion into…
drorzel | December 17, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a nice, concise post about what's wrong with college football. He's responding to a desperately stupid post that ends with this:
Let's not ruin college football's fabulous 13 week do-or-die regular season with a playoff!
This was posted back in October, so the author can perhaps be forgiven for failing to anticipate the way this very season would completely undermine the "do or die" claim. Specifically, consider the case of the Big 12's South division. Two teams, Oklahoma and Texas, finished with identical records of one loss each.
Texas's one loss was to…