SageAgainstTheMachine

Yeah, I'm a total sabermetrics nerd. I hate to admit it, but I've even been to a couple of the conventions. Football Outsiders is one of my favorite websites, but I was unaware of the other two. I'm interested to read that article from Cold Hard Football Facts because passer rating, to me, is just short of completely useless as a statistic. As others have pointed out, it pays no attention to context and in football you absolutely cannot analyze without context. Additionally, passer rating severely overrates conservative QB play and pays no attention to plays during which the QB never throws the ball (sacks, fumbles, rushing yardage).

As soon as I clicked 'enter' on my previous post I thought "Wait...there ARE more lecherous male teachers, the teenage girls just differ in that they aren't willing to !@#$ disgusting middle aged men. Teenage boys on the other hand..."

Well, I'd say that Dad running off before the child is born is a lot more damaging than Mom's attitude toward money.

Despite the stereotype of the lecherous male teacher pining for teenage girls, it seems like you see a ton more stories about female teachers behaving inappropriately these days. I wonder what's up?

Thanks for the list. Fitzpatrick right in the middle of the pack, as I expected. It's interesting to see just how much better Brady was last year than everybody else. A full 7% ahead of number 2 Manning.

How...irrelevant.

I'm glad you brought up parenting first, because I too suspect this is the biggest ill perpetually affecting inner city communities. Single parent homes are the norm, and in many cases even the one parent isn't very involved, either because they have to work overtime to keep the family afloat or they're...let's just say otherwise engaged. When parents aren't in the picture, kids will seek family elsewhere. Too often, this is in the form of a dangerous gang. I'd say these flash mobs (flash mob used to be quite the innocent term, by the way) are a subset of said gang activity. Trouble is...how do you fix such a pervasive cultural trend like this, the lack of parenting? I don't know if anybody has that answer. Now, this isn't to say personal responsibility doesn't exist. Tons of young urban black men without proper parenting have made something of themselves. Most, however, just feed back into the vicious cycle.

Ok, the link encourages us to enter recent racial violence into the general discussion on race relations in our culture. So let's talk about it. What do you think is causing such outbreaks?

Any statistics nerds among you? Obviously, football tends to be a more subjective sport than baseball, but I'm hoping football will undergo some sort of Bill James style revolution in the near future. This newly thorough method of rating quarterbacks may be the first domino to fall in that effort. At the very least, it will replace the archaic and arguably useless passer rating system. Here's a good article on it...the details of the formula will be made public today, I believe. http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/6835090/nfl-total-quarterback-rating-shifts-way-see-position

It is a perplexing mistake. In the spirit of giving people the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was sleep deprived or something? People say some really stupid things when that's the case.

You called her an idiot, didn't you?

Poor kids. At least save them a trip to the dentist and steal the Milk Duds.

The best one is the Halloween paranoia. At some point in the not-so-distant past, it became common knowledge that only horrible parents don't meticulously rake through their kids' trick or treating candy on Halloween night because random creeps love to use hypodermic needles to poison the candy. There have been exactly TWO (2) reported cases of children getting sick from Halloween candy, and in both cases the kid was poisoned by a member of their own family.

I've always thought you could add another "Buffalo buffalo buffalo" onto the end of the sentence without corrupting its integrity. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo. In other words, Bisons from Buffalo bullied by fellow members of that population respond by bullying other bisons from Buffalo that are bullied by members of that population as well. You can argue redundancy here, but I think it's still gramatically correct. Could be wrong.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous with some parents. Partially to blame are media sensationalists, who would have you believe that every stranger is a child molester. Parents in our society seem convinced, for a number of reasons, that everything in the world exists simply to kill their child.

My favorite pastime is over-analyzing things that are barely worthy of analysis whatsoever.

There's a subset of situational irony called cosmic irony, which essentially refers to the discrepancies between our expectations/desires (oftentimes based on social, cultural and thematic constructs) and the reality of a situation. Rain on a wedding day fits into this mold, in my opinion. I was using situational irony more as an umbrella for the song as a whole. Among the lyrics that are certainly NOT ironic... "A traffic jam when you're already late." "Good advice that you just didn't take." "A black fly in your Chardonnay." The rest seem to represent ironies, if only loosely.

I've never really understood the criticism of this song's lyrics. Pretty much every example that she gives is indeed an example of situational irony. In specific regard to "rain on your wedding day", a wedding is an occasion theoretically filled with optimism and vitality, whereas rain is normally associated with pessimism, bad luck, and the interruption of plans. Therefore, the juxtaposition of the two concepts is ironic. The term "irony" indeed is constantly misused, but Alanis gets it right in her song for the most part. As someone else suggested, it's very possible that the 14 year old has younger siblings. Even if that's not the case, does it really count as "pussification" when the kid is sticking it to the babysitter?

"The trouble with citing quotations in online forums is that people rarely bother to check for accuracy or correct attribution." - Abraham Lincoln

I'm on record for predicting Tebow will struggle to succeed, but it's patently incorrect to say the stats mean zero. We all know numbers tell part of the story. Or are you saying the sample size is too small?

150-1? I'd put a Benjamin up on those odds.

I don't know. It seemed appropriate to punctuate the excessively verbose bickering in this thread with something purely meaningless. I was going to take it further, but how could I after such a well-placed Lebowski reference?

How many boxes of thin mints can I mark you down for?

Ok, we are on the same page then. My mistake if I misread the tone of your last response.

John, you're responding as if I'm trying to drag Tebow through the mud. I entered this thread to attempt answering your question regarding why it seemed like some people were rooting for the man to fail. I don't think I said anything particularly incendiary. My opinion is that Tebow is an awesome guy who has to overcome some bad habits if he wants to succeed as an NFL quarterback. His beneficial personal qualities will help in this endeavour, but they guarantee nothing. That's all I'm saying, honestly.