Monday, July 09, 2007

Random blizzard

USA Today says that Dan Marino, the greatest quarterback ever to set foot on a football field, is the 11th best player in the last 25 years. But we refuse to get into the spirit of irrelevant controversy season: we will accept this slight from the paper designed to be fast, punchy, and mediocre.

The Fanhouse looks at why the University of Texas has not retired Vince Young's number.

Pro-football-reference.com looks at the desire for consistent fantasy players, and says the reality is you want your team to be good, and consistency is relatively irrelevant. It's true you want your team to be good--consistency doesn't matter if your team sucks. But if you want to join the Revolution, know that you're better off with people good on a week-to-week basis than with boom-and-bust guys. Certainly, in 4 of 5 years the team with the most total points won the league (and I'd have to look closer to see if consistent teams simply end up compiling more points than boom or bust teams). Overall, I think in the revolutionary system, you're better off scoring 50-60 points every week than fluctuating a lot: perhaps this season I'll monitor this.

The Outsports book is now available: the table of contents really makes the book intriguing. Uff da, I sure hate parting with money, especially on new books (I've got centuries worth of books to read: I rarely see the need to shell out 30 bucks to read any particular one now--not since Stephen King finished up The Dark Tower, anyway), but this month I might want to buy The Outsports Revolution and the Pro Football Prospectus. Gosh, and my wife is going to be buying the Harry Potter book: July is going to be hum ding in a notoriously frugal household.

Deadspin talks about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, and says "I don't mean to tell Spain their business. But isn't it time someone stepped in and ended this bullfighting business once and for all? Why torture big, dumb animals in the name of sport?" In PV's younger days (back when I at animals and didn't have the P), I imbibed Hemingway and found the idea of a bull fight romantic. Well, nuts to anybody who says people don't change: I've clearly grown disgusted with the idea of torturing animals for any reason, much moreso for our mere entertainment. I suppose I also shouldn't tell Spain its business--we've got plenty of brutality toward animals here in America to protest and resist.

Oh, and since we posted way too many times for a weekend, I didn't want What was that bang?'s hyped up post on Bryant McKinnie and the Vikings to escape your attention.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:06 PM

    with regard to consistency and the revolution, try this experiment:

    Take Chad Johnson, or whatever other inconsistent player you want, replace his actual scores for each week with his seasonal average, and see how much it would have moved his owner in the standings.

    But really, the main point of that part of the post was that, whether Chad Johnson was consistent in 2006 or not, it's extremely tough to know whether he's going to be consistent in 2007.

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  2. Anonymous10:02 PM

    that usa today list is idiotic. i won't argue my point i'll just mention the inclusion of a half dead terry bradshaw and step aside.

    rk

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  3. Doug, that's a good idea, and I'll probably try something like that before the draft.

    RK, I like the idea of providing a group of 25 (like when the NBA did its 50 anniversary team); I think the idea of a ranked list is stupid and intended to generate irrelevant controversy. Of #s 11-25, four of the QBs are arguable top-10 all-time, with legitimate claims to #1, and I would say 12 of the 15 could deservedly be ranked in the top 5 of this list. It might be reasonable to make a list of 25--why the ranking would go in what order seems senseless.

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