DCOrange

I was glad to see Chris Godwin getting some love, though I think I'd personally have him ranked even higher than 9th personally. I think this points to multiple possibilities: Maybe he helped a whole lot but that team just wasn't good enough. Maybe WRs just aren't THAT big of difference makers (though they certainly are in the right hands). Maybe he somehow isn't as impactful as other elite WRs. I would tend to lean towards it being mostly #1. Beckham certainly has his issues between his health and his personality, but I think he's undeniably an elite talent when he's playing at 100%. One of the 50 league guys described him as being maybe the best all-around WR in the league in terms of being able to literally do it all. I think that's probably true though it was certainly more clear early on in his career than it was this past season.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/29400333/ranking-nfl-best-wide-receivers-2020-execs-players-coaches-debate-top-10 Figured this one could potentially drive some discussion as we finally have a player worthy of being considered for one of these articles. The top 10 according to the 50 league personnel panel ESPN is using (followed by their highest and lowest ranking) Julio Jones - 1st - 7th Michael Thomas - 1st - 6th DeAndre Hopkins - 1st - 6th Odell Beckham - 1st - 10th Tyreek Hill - 3rd - 11th Mike Evans - 1st - 12th DaVante Adams - 1st - 12th Keenan Allen - 2nd - 10th Chris Godwin - 4th - unranked Amari Cooper - 5th - unranked Honorable Mentions: Stefon Diggs - ""Would go to battle with Diggs all day. Dude is a beast. And he has that No. 1 WR dog to him. I love that." -- NFL offensive assistant; "He could have a career year in Buffalo by the way they will use him. He's a true No. 1 but he seems constantly unhappy and frustrated." -- another NFL assistant" Adam Thielen Kenny Golladay AJ Green Courtland Sutton

Big 10 commissioner also said they might end up canceling all fall sports including football.

Not sure it really warrants another thread, but for those that are interested, they published their top 10 RBs today: https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/29399166/ranking-nfl-top-10-running-backs-2020-best-big-3 1. Saquon Barkley 2. Christian McCaffrey 3. Ezekiel Elliott 4. Alvin Kamara 5. Derrick Henry 6. Dalvin Cook 7. Nick Chubb 8. Joe Mixon 9. Josh Jacobs 10. LeVeon Bell Honorable Mentions: Aaron Jones (lost to Bell on a tiebreaker for 10th) Chris Carson James Conner Melvin Gordon Leonard Fournette

I'm sure there are many cases of companies abusing the system, but with New Era for example, they got their PPP loan based on keeping 488 employees. Laying off the 117 employees that Polancarz mentions brings them down to 488 (or within like 1-5 of that), so they actually did exactly what they said they'd do (so far).

Agreed. And if she had an attendance policy, then yeah, feel free to punish me for not attending (though I would have attended if it was necessary and just figured out another way to get the rest of my ***** done). But you can't openly tell us that attendance is optional and then try to fail kids for not attending. It was pretty much the only time I've ever gotten in trouble in school at all (the only other time was a lunch detention back in 7th grade for shooting a basketball when we weren't supposed to lol). It was one of the most stressful times of my life since I was trying to apply for jobs after graduation while dealing with that and I had to try to explain to potential employers why I had nearly failed a math class while applying for math-ish jobs without trying to come across like I was making excuses for myself (even though I was completely in the right).

Yeah but how many red zone stops did he get on defense?

Yeah. I generally think you can make a case for a handful of guys after Mahomes, so there's some tweaking I would do, but this is a pretty good list. Surprised Kyler Murray got so much love already, though I tend to think he was very promising this year and will prove to be very good soon. There's some individual votes that are really weird though. One voter put Brady #1 and Mahomes #4 for example. Someone else put Wentz #2.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/29394204/ranking-nfl-top-10-qbs-2020-follows-patrick-mahomes Edit: To be clear, they're ranking QBs as they expect them to be in 2020. Not trying to project them 5 years out or anything like that (but in the case of Darnold for example, the guy that voted for him said that he expects him to take a leap this year). The Top 10: Patrick Mahomes Russell Wilson Aaron Rodgers Deshaun Watson Drew Brees Lamar Jackson Tom Brady Carson Wentz Dak Prescott Matt Stafford Also receiving votes: Matt Ryan - 14 votes out of 50 voters Ben Roethlisberger - 8 votes Kyler Murray - 5 votes Kirk Cousins - 2 votes Jimmy Garoppolo - 2 votes Derek Carr, Ryan Tannehill, Jared Goff, Sam Darnold - 1 vote each

Granted he's not in the athletic prime of his life or anything, but a family friend of mine had no prior conditions that would suggest he'd be at an elevated risk of suffering long-term from Covid. He tested positive and after being on life support for weeks and his family being told that he likely wasn't going to make it, he pulled through. But he lost like 50+ pounds and had to spend roughly 2 months re-learning how to walk and eat again.

This same thing basically happened to me as a student, though it wasn't racism, just a professor trying to protect their own. It was in my statistics class my senior year of college. I admittedly took advantage of my professor's non-existent attendance policy/our grade being entirely based off of exams and one project and just didn't go to class outside of exam days so that I could use that time to get work done on my other classes that were more difficult for me. My professor was incensed because she knew I was blatantly skipping her classes every day and then I'd walk in on exam day and get somewhere between a 95-100 on her exams. Then came the project. My partner and I followed all the instructions, did everything just as well as I had done on every exam and she came back to us with a 0, at first accusing us of turning the project in after the deadline. After I confirmed with a handful of other students that we had actually turned it in on time, she stuck us with a 0 anyways and accused us of cheating. The project's weight on our overall grade was high enough that we had failed her class and would have to go to trial for academic integrity to see if we'd be kicked out of school. My partner and I were able to pretty easily prove that we hadn't cheated (or at least prove that she couldn't prove it which is all we had to do since innocent until proven guilty) and the school agreed to have another professor grade our project. That professor happened to be a friend of our professor and despite insuring us that he wasn't being biased at all, he gave us like a 25% or something like that. Thankfully for me that was still enough to narrowly pass the class with a D and graduate (though it did cost me my Dean's List and ***** Laude status). My partner however hadn't aced the exams like I did so he had to re-take the course his last semester in order to graduate with us. Our beloved professor ended up being fired a year later. She remains one of maybe two people in this world that I feel comfortable saying I legitimately hate.

I assume this is sarcasm?

Not all team mascots are related to their city. At any rate though, based on their statements to this point it sounds like they're trying to thread the needle between honoring both Native Americans and the military with their new name, so the already trademarked Washington Warriors seems like the best bet so far.

He’s certainly a serviceable and maybe above average starter. Theoretically should be in a much better situation this season than last as well.

The reason they’re changing it obviously isn’t sports related. But it’s a sports team.

I love the Redtails concept but regardless, happy to see it appears that my local team is finally changing their name. Howard University just landed one of the best basketball recruits in the country too (assuming he’s actually goes to college). Pretty big day here sports wise.

I can't really speak to the hospitalizations part though I imagine most of the Covid hospitalizations are actually Covid hospitalizations. But regarding the spike solely being a result of increased testing, that just isn't true at all. Rolling 7-day %'s through June 1st compared to Rolling 7-day %'s through June 30th US as a whole: 5.4% vs. 7.0% (and most of that spike was just over the past 10 days) Florida: 3.8% vs. 16.1% Texas: 4.7% vs. 14.6% California: 5.0% vs. 5.9% Arizona: 8.8% vs. 22.9% Georgia: Can't really tell because they erased a boatload of tests towards the beginning of the month which makes it look like they had a negative %, but just over the past couple weeks their positive test % has more than doubled. I think you get the idea. The % testing positive has increased pretty much across the board and has increased pretty dramatically in the states that are considered to be spiking right now. I don't have the death numbers in front of me but it does seem like it's declining (in the very least declining percentage wise). Hopefully that continues to be the case. It still remains a relatively dangerous disease though AFAIK.

I think they were near the top in terms of the # of times they converted, but that was a result of how bad they were on 1st and 2nd down. I don't think I can find the exact same metric as Barnwell is using for Tyrod, but for example in the article in the OP it mentions that "When you don't consider his runs, Allen converted just 32.8% of his third/fourth-down dropbacks into first downs as a passer, which was the second-worst rate in the league." Not specifically 3rd and 8+ though. Edit: If I'm inputting it correctly into Pro-Football Reference, it looks like Tyrod converted roughly 28-29% of 3rd and 8+ depending on if Barnwell was specifically limiting it to pass attempts or not. Allen was also at 28-29% this past season.

Seems relevant to a lot of the discussion here:

No surprise that Barnwell's comparison to Tyrod is what's garnered the most attention from the article. I've mentioned the same thing in the past as well. Rookie Allen took chances with the ball in a way Tyrod never did, and because of Rookie Allen's deficiencies as a passer, those chances more often than not did not work out in our favor. Sophomore Allen was very similar to Tyrod; dialed back on forcing passes in a very major way, both in terms of throwing into tight windows and also in terms of throwing it deep. It shouldn't be an offensive comparison. Tyrod was roughly an average to above-average starter during his time here. The comparison is that as a sophomore, Allen played in a similar way to Tyrod, albeit he wasn't as efficient as Tyrod's best season. Obviously Allen is only headed into his 3rd season in the NFL; he should hypothetically improve moving forwards (though that isn't a given and some would even say unlikely) and become a much better QB than Tyrod ever was here. That's certainly my hope. Overall, the article is a really good read IMO even if the conclusions drawn aren't necessarily what we'd like to hear. I still like Allen a lot as a prospect but obviously this next season will be a huge one in determining what we have moving forwards.

They've never raked him to my knowledge. They received a ton of flak because he didn't have an elite grade this past season despite most people thinking he was top 5 at his position. As a result, PFF has had to come out and explain the reasoning behind his grade not being super high. Despite that, they have him ranked as the 4th best corner in the league heading into this upcoming season. It's a bit shocking that the underlying data wasn't as good as we perceived him to be last season, but at the end of the day, PFF agrees with everyone else that White is a tremendous player. I think there are bigger snubs than White as far as the Bills go personally.

For sure, which is what me and Gunner have been saying. It's just a tool and it's not at all an infallible tool. Like any other means of measuring a player's performance, it has its flaws.

That was an article in which one guy had to try to make the case for one team and the other had to try to make the case for the other. At the time, Hodges had a higher grade (though similar to my point regarding nickel corners vs. a corner like Tre, Hodges and Allen play totally different roles for their teams). I doubt the guy that was arguing for the Steelers legitimately believed Hodges was the better QB; he was just trying to make a case for the Steelers and had the grade (which was based on a very limited sample size at the time) to try to back his point up.

My opinion on this is: I'm more or less indifferent about statues. They don't really provide any value at all to me, so I personally won't fight very hard for them to stay or go, BUT For me, there's a difference between symbols that are held up pretty much purely for racist reasons (i.e. Confederate flag, Robert E. Lee, or anything related to Jim Crow) vs. something that isn't really synonymous with slavery even if they did support it in some way (i.e. "Slaveowner" is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of George Washington). I think a statue like the Teddy Roosevelt one that is coming down (or might already have been taken down) in NYC is kind of an exception because while the same point for Washington applies for Roosevelt, the statue itself is portraying minorities as inferior. Ultimately, it doesn't matter much to me, so if other people view it as extremely offensive, I would tend to be fine with removing it. I tend to be someone that very selectively picks my battles and statues is not one that I care to fight over.

They are mostly driven by data (though depending on what you think of watching the games and assigning scores on a play-by-play basis, that aspect might not technically be data-driven). The data that they collect suggests that Allen is a bad quarterback. They then use that fact and Bills fans' loyalty to Allen to drive clicks to their site. There's no coordinated attack to try to make Allen look bad; their data does that work for them.