The Frankish Reich

Excellent point. 1. Run differential is more meaningful in baseball. 162 games, one run every time you cross the plate (not 6 every time you cross the plane), etc. 2. But some things are true in both sports. The AL East is a killer division. That run differential won’t get it done. 3. I’m too lazy to do the research myself, but I believe the rule in the NFL is that your record in close games (3 point margin or less) is more predictive than points differential. They’re similar measures, but record in close games comes closer to approximating luck, either good or bad, and hence (in the “good luck” case) predictive of likely regression.

And with the abundance of prop bets there'd be ample opportunity to do it, even with teams ostensibly playing to win. Imagine some latter day Pete Rose in an NFL jersey playing QB and trying to force the ball into the hands of a WR who's just short of 100 yards. Or a long snapper who bet the under making a bad snap on a meaningless PAT. Of course, wagering has always been out there, and I understand that's a big reason why they make teams lineup for the meaningless 0:00 on the clock PAT rather than doing the equivalent of a walk-off home run/touchdown. The NFL dares not mention point spreads (Al Michaels though is famous for hinting broadly about them) but they're always there just under the surface.

That's what I'm reading closely now ... thanks for the advice! I do think they're for real - it's the wild, wild west of online gambling out here in Colorado, with all sites in a race to gain market share - but it'd be really easy to get screwed by the promo restrictions if I'm not careful.

Looking for a little help here - I'm in one of the states that legalized online gambling, and we're getting inundated with promo offers from the big sites - Draft Kings, Caesar's, etc). I usually just do a little fun wagering when I'm in Vegas, but there's free money out there now so I'm ready to take the plunge. Example: Caesar's offer is "Bet up to $5,000 risk free." The small print: place a bet up to 5K. If you win, fine. Cash out. If you lose, we credit your account with the amount of the bet (up to 5K!). You can't cash that out, but you can place new bets and, if they win, cash out then. I'm risk averse on these things. I want to make the best possible series of wagers to come out, say, 3,000 bucks ahead with minimal risk like just losing the vig on the "makeup" bet. Seems like I should take a flyer on the first bet - something that will double my money if I win. Then if I lose I use the 5K credit on a "sure" thing to come as close to even as possible (like betting the favorite in some lopsided college game, then cashing out). Ideas? I'm sticking to football, mostly NFL, but maybe NCAA to cover a losing first wager.

Dr. David Samadi, whoever you are ... you don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "pandemic."

They weren't dumb AT THE TIME. Remember, the accepted thinking in the early days of all of this (think February/March/April 2020) was that COVID was spread by droplets - something plexiglass shields would contain. Same thing with the 6-foot social distancing, which would at least in theory prevent most droplet transmission. And same too with the incessant wiping down of surfaces. Masks are not so good against aerosols (they're great against droplets), but they have some positive impact. The problem is we seem to have lost the ability adapt quickly. From Summer 2020 on, it became clear that the primary mode of transmission was through aerosols. And that the primary way to avoid this is to ensure high air turnover rates. So from that time on it became bad policy to focus on plexiglass when we should've been spending our money on ventilation. Same for schools - some schools have improved ventilation, others not at all.

This one is nuts. I read what he said - not privately, but in podcast he called The Randumb Show. Dumb! On purpose. Seems like he was either a minor league Howard Stern imitator (much cleaner than Howard ten years ago, by the way) or almost a parody of those shock jock types. Whatever. He's probably embarrassed by it now, as well he should be, but nobody should be canceled for this. By the way, I watch a lot of Jeopardy with my elderly mom. So I saw the parade of guest hosts. This guy was actually the best! He may have been the show's Exec Producer hiring himself, but still ... out on the field of play he won the job fair and square.

No, I have not said anything about "masking of children." On that one, I'm an old fashioned local control proponent. If the Berkeley CA school board wants kids masked, good for them. If the Abilene, TX school board doesn't, same here. There is no clear evidence of the cost/benefit either way, so let the locals decide. How is wanting mandated vaccines "living in fear?" It's living in the real world. The cost/benefit calculus there is pretty damn clear and convincing. It's rational. Rational decisionmaking, once you explore it as a concept, is strangely liberating.

Why not? We mandate all kinds of vaccines to attend school, to serve in the military, etc. You may someday outgrow your fear of needles.

And that kind of proves oldmanfan's point. The Libertarian view has been in ascendancy since the 1960s. It is extremely skeptical of government initiatives. To that extent it rejects the kind of communitarian viewpoint that oldmanfan believes was the core of the American project, or Great American Experiment, or whatever you want to call it - a shared viewpoint that this country has a greater purpose, a shared purpose, that requires individual sacrifice and some limits on individual liberties in service of that common purpose.

Well ... ... it is an established talking point of the COVID mitigation skeptics that severe cases of/deaths from COVID are vanishingly rare in non-elderly people. And that's basically true: there's about 125,000 COVID deaths in the United States of people under 65 since this all started (about 18 months ago). I don't feel like digging deeper, so let's say 100,000 of those occurred in a year out of roughly 278 million people under 65. So if you were under 65, you had about a one in three thousand chance of dying from COVID. And polio? Well, cases (not deaths) from paralytic polio - what struck fear into Americans - ran at about 13 - 20,000 a year in the years preceding development of the Salk vaccine. Now, yes, a lot of these cases were in children, which for obvious reasons was more terrifying to people. And yes, the population of the USA was about 45% of what it is today. In mathematical terms: 15,000 severe cases per year in a population of 150 million = a one in ten thousand chance. OK, yes, yes, yes, you can look a co-morbidities and say that COVID as the cause of death is overstated, etc., etc. But overall even if you are NOT a senior citizen, your chances of DYING from COVID are in the same range as your chances of being paralyzed (not necessarily dying, and not necessarily severely or even permanently paralyzed) are on the same order of magnitude. So the point remains: one vaccine was accepted as necessary and, indeed, a civic duty; the other one is rejected by a big proportion of the American populace for all manner of mostly personal reasons.

I just edited my last comment before you posted this. And the way I put it is similar: it's "me first."

I don't really know oldmanfan's politics, but I think maybe statements like this one prove his point. Polio is caused by one of three types of poliovirus (which are members of the Enterovirus genus). These viruses spread through contact between people, by nasal and oral secretions, and by contact with contaminated feces. Poliovirus enters the body through the mouth, multiplying along the way to the digestive tract, where it further multiplies. In about 98% of cases, polio is a mild illness, with no symptoms or with viral-like symptoms. In paralytic polio, the virus leaves the digestive tract, enters the bloodstream, and then attacks nerve cells. Fewer than 1%-2% of people who contract polio become paralyzed. In 1955 Americans lined up for the polio vaccine. People trusted their government. We didn't have nonscientist/unscientific internet "experts" opining on everything. Americans celebrated scientific discovery and ingenuity that promised to deliver them from constant fear that their children would wind up walking with leg braces or, worse yet, be confined to an iron lung. And they saw the importance of getting the vaccine even if they, personally, were at minimal risk from the disease itself. If polio hit today, we wouldn't see Americans band together to say "it's my civic duty to get the vaccine even though I'm at very low risk of getting the disease; I'm doing this so kids everywhere don't have to live in fear every time they go swimming in a lake." No. They'd say: (1) I don't swim in lakes; (2) I don't have kids; (3) if I somehow manage to get it, there's a 98% chance it'll be like getting a mild case of the flu; (4) even if I do have worse symptoms, I'm more likely to die in a car crash than to be paralyzed." Me first. But the polio vaccine had overwhelming public acceptance, while stubborn pockets of vaccine hesitancy persist across the U.S. for the COVID-19 vaccine. Why the difference? One reason, historians say, is that in 1955, many Americans had an especially deep respect for science. "If you had to pick a moment as the high point of respect for scientific discovery, it would have been then," says David M. Oshinsky, a medical historian at New York University and the author of Polio: An American Story. "After World War II, you had antibiotics rolling off the production line for the first time. People believed infectious disease was [being] conquered. And then this amazing vaccine is announced. People couldn't get it fast enough." https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/03/988756973/cant-help-falling-in-love-with-a-vaccine-how-polio-campaign-beat-vaccine-hesitan

Teams with long winning traditions have more fans, and their fans are spread out over larger geographic areas. The percentage of fans who are hardcore - who could name your starting QBs from bygone eras - is simply higher for the teams that have been traditionally bad. I get that we were good - really good - for half a decade or more in the 90s, but that's overwhelmed by two decades of irrelevance. So Bills fans tend to be hardcore. We followed teams that really didn't deserve to be followed. And for a long time. But that changes. Depending on how the next few years unfold, you'll likely see a lot of new casual Bills fans. A lot of them will be Josh Allen fans who can name only Allen and Diggs (maybe half a dozen others if they're committed), and they'll live in places like the Central Valley of California (Josh ties) and everywhere that doesn't have its own loyal-to-a-fault fanbase. The places on the TV map that get the Bills as the second half of the Sunday doubleheader. I see a lot of Dodgers caps where I live. Those people are saying "I'm an LA transplant." (We tolerate you, but do you have to advertise it?) They maybe know Clayton Kershaw, possibly Mookie Betts. I occasionally see a guy (always a guy) in an old school Montreal Expos cap. That guy will recite from memory the Expos 1981 starting lineup from memory (they got cheated by the strike-shortened season; they were the best team in baseball). As time goes on we'll see more of the Dodger type fans, fewer of Expos cap guy in our fanbase. That, my friends, is called success!

Oldmanfan, thanks for sharing your thoughts. People come at this from different angles, but there is clearly something going on here. Ross Douthat is the house conservative at the NY Times, which means he's kind of an old school conservative who wants to "conserve" what's good about American tradition and society. He calls what we have now The Decadent Society. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/28/21137971/the-decadent-society-ross-douthat-book He hits on some of the same themes. Where is the shared sense of purpose in America today? Do we stand, collectively, for anything more than our own self-interest or the interests of people who fit within our demographic? Are we a society in decline? I'm a bit younger than you, and a bit more optimistic. (Maybe that optimism will decline with even more age?) But I do agree that there's something troubling about the state of the great American project. Maybe it's the notion of there even being such a thing that's sadly gone.

Actually that's not a terrible idea. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/dram-shop-laws-can-i-sue-bar-after-alcohol-related-accident.html

Now this is stupid. If it is meant as an incentive to get vaccinated ("come to the game and if you get a vaccine we'll give you a coupon for a free beer!), that's great. If it's "we won't let you in unless you have been previously vaccinated OR you are vaccinated in the parking lot before the game," well, that does nothing to advance public health. (My mission here: to offer positive reinforcement when someone makes a decent argument or calls out a stupid policy. And, of course, to call bs on people who advance or repeat stupid arguments)

I agree. If we look back to the very early days of the germ theory of disease, we'll see that the first attempts at vaccination were really innoculation - exposing a person to a less damaging pathogen that provides at least partial immunity against a more damaging one. Today we are astounded by the crudeness of the approach, but at least we recognize it as an advance over what we had before it. Seems to me that many of the commenters here are significantly less enlightened than the ordinary educated person c. 1796. https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html The basis for vaccination began in 1796 when the English doctor Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox were protected from smallpox. Jenner also knew about variolation and guessed that exposure to cowpox could be used to protect against smallpox. To test his theory, Dr. Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’ hand and inoculated it into the arm of James Phipps, the 9-year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. Months later, Jenner exposed Phipps several times to variola virus, but Phipps never developed smallpox. More experiments followed, and, in 1801, Jenner published his treatise “On the Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation.” In this work, he summarized his discoveries and expressed hope that “the annihilation of the smallpox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.”

The embedded quote is accurate. COVID is with us, and will be with us. The Alex Berenson (anti-vaxx nut - perhaps you should look to see how he's profiting off misinformation) take is asinine. Richard Webby: "so long as it's not impacting health care as a whole, I think we can live with it." Q. How on earth does it follow from that that "everything we've told you to do for the last 18 months was useless viral theater?" A. It doesn't. We had, in the first two waves, situations that were "impacting health care as a whole." Lack of hospital beds, lack of ventilators, etc., etc. We've got it again, regionally, with no ICU beds available throughout many areas of the southeast. Are the remarkably effective vaccines "viral theater?" That's as stupid as saying that modern water treatment facilities are "protozoic theater" - it's not as if we've exterminated protozoans from the earth, we still have to live with them, and people do - every year, all over the place - get sick because of them. Just idiotic.

It really only took a minute to google this and find the answer. Yeah, it's a boring ol' bureaucratic move, not some kind of shift to making Scotland into Orwell's Airstrip One North. Scotland has self-governance rights (much like a U.S. state), and they're asserting them to bring their COVID restrictions in line with England and Wales. Wow. Terrifying! Is Nicola Sturgeon coming for my single malt? My haggis?? Enlisting the Loch Ness Monster for COVID Protocol Enforcement??? Is it just me, or did that look a lot like Mel Gibson in warpaint with a COVID syringe in his mouth???? Run for your lives!

Oh, I agree with that. And let's not forget that we avoided probably hundreds of thousands of deaths through our COVID mitigation measures. 15 days was, in retrospect, not gonna do it. But as I said: it was a compromise. And it did do a lot of good. Behind the mocking of it is some weird conspiratorial theory whereby Dr Evil thought he could sell Americans on 15 days and then extend that indefinitely, all in service of his goal to eject Trump from office and begin his period of world domination with George Soros or something like that. Really, that's what these people think.

I don't think so. https://www.vox.com/2020/3/23/21191289/trump-social-distancing-tweets-coronavirus?__c=1 That's just one of dozens of sources that show what was going on in a chaotic White House response. Look, I'm not saying that here to be critical of the Trump White House in general. I'm saying it because somehow mocking "15 days to slow the spread" has become a favorite meme of the "let it rip like wildfire" crowd. Which strikes me as just plain weird since a lot of those people are Trump supporters, and they are mocking a Trump initiative. But I guess logic is a thing of the past in political argument.

WTF is wrong with people? Why keep quoting that "15 days to stop the spread?" It was an idea, kind of a bad compromise idea (if New Zealand is 10 out of 10 on the intensity of anti-COVID measures, we were about a 2 or 3), and IT DIDN'T WORK. We weren't in a position to let hospitals get overwhelmed and watch people die at home or in overflow tent units. And guess what? In certain regions of the country we're now in that position ALL OVER AGAIN because a large chunk of people stubbornly refuse to take the common-sense measure of getting a vaccine. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/17/us/covid-delta-hospitalizations.html It is beyond frustrating that we - in the USA, where we had the foresight, wealth, and good luck to be ready to emerge to a more normal way of life this summer - have to deal with an emerging crisis all over again based on the quasi-scientific (or ridiculously "you can't make me") rantings of the recalcitrant. MANDATE VACCINES NOW!

My Tebow post-mortem (and I really do think this is finally the end of his professional athletic career): He was a victim of his own early success. He was handed the QB role for a floundering 2011 Broncos team with a great defense and, well, Kyle Orton. And then the team went on a most unlikely winning streak, characterized by great defense and, well, a really good running game (Willis McGahee - yeah, really - and the kind of production an 11-on-11 run game will get you). And yes, they did win a playoff game using exactly the same formula, and they won it by Tebow and Demariyus Thomas hooking up on a 9-in-the-box slant that went for an 80 yard TD. It was the legend of "all he does is win" Tebow in Denver. Elway had the good sense to let him walk when Peyton Manning became available. He was clearly one helluva football player just as clearly as he wasn't anyone's idea of a franchise QB. It was too late to turn him into a TE/RB/Special Teams/Goal-Line QB guy. There was too much history, too much "legend," he was too polarizing for that. Rex Ryan tried (as usual, not too hard) and couldn't figure it out. Coaches were scared to use him at QB instead of more boring mediocrities because who knows? You stick him in at QB for, say, the post-EJ Manuel 2014 Bills and maybe he goes all 2011 Broncos again and then you've got yourself a QB controversy with no Peyton Manning waiting in the wings. Hell, if Rex had started him in 2012 instead of Mark Sanchez (6-10, 13 TDs, 18 INTs) it's likely his Jets would've squeezed out a couple more wins. So a very good and useful NFL player (just not a starting QB) never really gets an opportunity until he's too old and his old college coach comes calling. I didn't like Tebow in college ... that good clean living Christian boy thing was all a bit too much for me. But he grew on me in Denver. He just seems to really be that corny, that real in his understanding of himself and his beliefs. I wish him the best, and part of me is a little sorry that we never got to see what a creative coach in the right situation (Sean Payton?) could've done with him on the football field after that wild 2011 ride was over.

And we know Trump "would have evacuated people" (what people? you mean refugees? he's the guy who lowered the refugee admissions cap to the lowest levels ever!) because .... ??? If Trump wanted to do this, surely he would've started in December and January, ahead of handing over (well, being forced to hand over) the keys to the oval office. I am not defending Biden. This is a debacle. But my disagreement is a principled one - I believe it was a disastrous decision to withdraw from Afghanistan completely. All this "but we needed to do it the right way" crap is hair-splitting nonsense. Biden followed through on Trump's plan. Period. If you liked Trump's policy re: Afghanistan, well, this is it in action.