Whipped Cream Difficulties

NFL announcers are maroons. At least, according to Gregg Easterbrook.

Why?

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

Mostly, because they don’t agree with TMQ about going for it on 4th and short. Secondarily, because they don’t agree with TMQ about going for two points on conversions. You can now mostly skip the first 1500 words of this week’s column, though Easterbrook does offer some good advice on how to avoid listening to bad announcing.

There’s been an explosion in understanding of sports analytics, yet almost no reflection of this in football television broadcasting. Today’s middle-school kids know the data showing that going for it on 4th-and-short improves the odds of victory. But network booth crew members who are paid millions of dollars per year to do nothing but football 365/24/7 seem oblivious to the existence of sports analytics. Clued-in fans find football announcers clueless.

TMQ keeps saying “the data shows,” “the data shows”. Where is this “data”? Where can the interested sports buff download this “data” so they can run their own analytics?

Generally, the math shows that going for two produces slightly more points overall than going for one.

“Generally”. “Slightly.”

We don’t have any love for bad sports announcing, but this whole thing reads more like an excuse for Gregg Easterbrook to grind his favorite axes.

In other news:

There’s just a tiny chance the rules-tweaking pendulum has swung too far in the direction of offense.

Ya think?

Stat-O-Matic. Sweet: Indianapolis. Sour: Miami.

TMQ on global warming: it’s bad, m’kay? But exaggerating the possible consequences is bad, too, m’kay? Or to put it another way (and you can skip another 1,300 words):

Exaggerating the situation with doomsday rhetoric, in contrast, makes it seem there’s no way to fix the problem, shy of a return to pre-industrial existence.

(Also, TMQ has a new book out, which he mentions twice in this item.)

We’ll leave this here for Lawrence, as he might get some fodder out of it:

During the report’s release, PBS interviewed Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geoscience at Princeton. Oppenheimer is an accomplished academic and an admirable person who really cares about this issue. But he’s long spun out worst-case projections that did not stand the test of time. His 1990 book about climate change, Dead Heat, predicted that by the year 1995, global warming would “desolate the heartlands of North America” while a new Dust Bowl would “stop traffic on interstates and strip paint from houses” and the Mexican police would have to “round up illegal American immigrants” trying to cross the border to escape the United States climate change doomsday.

Americans are drinking earlier in the day. We blame global warming. Urban Meyer is not a good person. We’re glad Ohio State won, but: yeah, TMQ’s right. Canadian football. (The twelfth man runs the snowblower.)

Dance, dance, revolution. Big particle accelerator.

Yet music, dance, and theater have proven important to the economic revival of urban America

[Citation needed.]

while atom smashers are important economically only to the people who work at them.

It’s always odd to see Easterbrook, who claims to be scientifically minded, decry…science.

Saquon Barkley. “Adventures in Officiating”: you can push the ball carrier, but you can’t pull the ball carrier.

Tom Brady is a geezer. Pittsburgh drove 97 yards for a touchdown..and still lost.

Next week: “Why not just make it official and leave Christmas decorations up all year?” Which reminds us: when is “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” airing this year?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2018 at 3:41 pm and is filed under NFL, Sports, TMQ watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.