Thursday Links

Bryan has been wrapped up in other things so you are stuck with me today.

-Mailbags:
-Deadspin's Funbag
-NFP's Brandt

-For any budding football coaches out there, learn from the best: Nick Saban. [Smart Football]

-Speaking of coaching, this guy is no ordinary Joe. [SI.com]


-Interception of the day from Gallaudet University, a school for the hearing impaired:






The NFL and College picks are scheduled to be released over the next two days. Then, 11 Things I Know I Know on Monday, and an NBA post on Tuesday.

Tuesday Links

-Interesting question: should the Packers have let the Bears score a touchdown last night to give them a better shot to win the game? Hindsight, of course, and Brian Burke would say yes. [Advanced Football Stats]

 

-Another conundrum: should the Jets have gone for the two-point conversion to put them up by nine points? Hindsight and Brian Burke say no while I personally would have said yes. [Advanced Football Stats]

 

-Blast from the past: Kevin Jones signs with the UFL. I remember when Jones announced on national television that he would be playing his college ball at Virginia Tech. I was sure he was going to be a superstar. [Lost Lettermen]

 

-As teams start to clinch postseason berths, here is what organizations have to look forward to. [Biz of Baseball]

 

-Can you really blame Evan Longoria for calling out the fans in Tampa? I can't. We've said it before, the fans in Tampa do not deserve a team as great as the Rays.[ESPN]

 

-Does MLB payroll matter less than it used to? [Sabermetric Research]

 

-Revenue Sharing in baseball

  -Why it's broken [Biz of Baseball]

  -Why the Yankees are willing to give up so much [Sabermetric Research]

 

-Is hockey the next sport to realize a statistical revolution? [Ottawa Citizen]

 

 

 

BC 9/28/2010

Friday Links

-Weird is the day that I actually agree with Mike Francesa. Today is a weird day. [PFT]

-The Sports Banter sits comfortably in the top-10. We need the Angels to get hot to climb up as high as third. [Vegas Watch]

-Friday Blast from the Past: Chad Hutchinson [Lost Lettermen]

-Last week, Baseball America's Connor Glassey posted an interesting stat: Ichiro has more career intentional walks (155) than ARod, Chase Utley and Derek Jeter combined (149). We are all now wiser.

-Statistical proof that the 3-4 defense is better than the 4-3? You decide. [Advanced Football Stats]

-A study on how travel affects NBA teams. [Sabermetric Research]



BC 9/24/2010

Wednesday Links

-Mailbags:

 -Brandt [NFP]

 -Deadspin

 

-Buster Olney blog. [ESPN Insider; password required]

 

-Lombardi. [NFL.com]

 

 

Note: The daily links will transition to a three-times-a-week format in the near future.

 

 

 

BC 9/22/2010

 

Friday's "Finally Here" Links

-Buster Olney blog. [ESPN Insider; password required]

 

-Forget Prisoners. We have a Linebackers' Dilemma. [Advanced Football Stats]

 

-ESPN's Tom Habestroh names the five worst players in the history of each NBA team. My favorite part: Trenton Hassell comes in at #1 for two different teams. [Insider; password required]

 

-Real-life Jaws. [Fox]

 

 

 

 

BC 9/17/2010

 

 

Wednesday's "Halfway to Another Football Weekend" Links

-Tampa doesn't deserve the Rays. What a pathetic turnout.[Biz of Baseball]

 

-Solid day out of Deadspin yesterday:

   -Mailbag

   -Eric Bledsoe transcript fun (I especially like that he took Algebra 3 before Algebra 2)

 

-Buster Olney blog. [ESPN Insider; password required] 

 

 

BC 9/15/2010

Tuesday Links

-Peter King's MMQB. [SI.com]

-Florida Gators football = Jail Blazers * Bengals.

-Andrew Brandt breaks down the contracts of Charles Woodson and Tom Brady and then details the threat of NFLPA decertification. [NFP]

-JI Hassell wonders if the Darrelle Revis deal sets a poor precedent. [Inside the Cap]

-Pat White takes advice from the Banter and gives up football (at least for the time being). [Pro Football Talk]

-Really, you can't wait two seconds until celebrating? [Wiz of Odds]

-Buzzkill Central: On the heels of the university's most defining athletic moment, Northern Iowa could abolish their D1 sports. [Des Moines Register]

-Further to our point that Felix Hernandez should win this year's Cy Young [SB Nation by way of Rob Neyer]



-Dave Pinto still scheming about a massive tie scenario. [Baseball Musings]

-Mike passed this along because he claimed to have "called this" while it happened and before Elias confirmed it.

-One of the boldest marketing strategies I have ever seen. [ESPN]





BC 9/14/10

Friday Links

-Buster Olney blog. [ESPN Insider; password required]

-It drives me crazy when teams winning a title in the US (MLB, NBA, NFL) call themelves "world champs." This would help and be extremely entertaining. [Fangraphs]

-Kendall Rogers sums up the Big East offseason. [Yahoo]

-Top 50 Dunks of All Time [Baketball Reference]
If you dont have time for all 50, check out these eight:
-45: Deron Washington jumps off a trampoline to throw this down
-44: Renaldo Balkman dunks at MSG with Isiah Thomas in attendance prompting Thomas to waste a first round pick on Balkman
-43: Darrelle Porter - very underrated dunk. Could have been top-10 worthy
-39: The last time Travis Leslie and DeMarcus Cousins will ever appear in the same sentence. A great dunk nonetheless
-23: Jason Maxiell kicks Otis George (at least) three times in the head
-20: Chris Porter with one of the five best putbacks of all time
-14: Vinsanity
-12: My vote for #1



Enjoy the weekend.

BC 9/10/2010

Thursday "Are You Ready For Some Football" Links

-According to Banter-favorite Andrew Brandt, teams that win in March rearely win in January. [NFP] 

 

-Matt Bowen takes us inside the  playbook in a micro-preview of tonight's Saints-Vikings matchup. [NFP]

 

-Lombardi. I find a little humorous that seven of the most eight intriguing people in the NFL are quarterbacks and the eighth is a head coach. [NFL.com]

 

-In a recent article, Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats critiques some of Football Outsiders' "theories":

• Standard team rankings based on total yardage are inherently flawed. -- Ok
• Running on third-and-short is more likely to convert than passing on third-and-short. -- Concur
• If their overall yards per carry are equal, a running back who consistently gains yardage on every play is more valuable than a boom-and-bust running back who is frequently stuffed at the line but occasionally breaks a long highlight-worthy run. -- Not always. If you're the underdog or significantly behind in the game, you want the boom/bust guy.
• A running back with 370 or more carries during the regular season will usually suffer either a major injury or a loss of effectiveness the following year, unless he is named Eric Dickerson. -- False. As one of my commenters put it, this notion "is a violent assault on good logic and reason."
• Teams with more offensive penalties generally lose more games, but there is no correlation between defensive penalties and losses. -- Probably false. It's possible they've fallen for the same trap I fell into years ago. The NFL calls penalty yards by an opponent "defensive penalties." But if true, it's interesting. The real question would be why don't defensive penalties matter?
• Field-goal percentage is almost entirely random from season to season, while kickoff distance is one of the most consistent statistics in football. -- True.
• Field position is fluid. -- Huh? I think this is just supposed to mean that defenses affect their offenses' field position and vice-versa.
• Injuries regress to the mean on the seasonal level, and teams that avoid injuries in a given season tend to win more games. -- Ok. Did we need a study for this?
• A team will score more when playing a bad defense, and will give up more points when playing a good offense. -- And all this time I thought it was the other way around!
• The future NFL success of quarterbacks chosen in the first two rounds of the draft can be projected with a high degree of accuracy by using just two statistics from college: games started and completion percentage. -- Intriguing, but I'd like to see how this system has performed since it was published. As I recall, it's been off the mark.
• Championship teams are generally defined by their ability to dominate inferior opponents, not their ability to win close games. -- Interesting.

-Two of Deadspin's nerdier recent posts:

   -Real-time Sales Analytics

   -Breaking down the "greatest kick ever" with physics

 

-When Harold Miner surfaces, we link. [Lost Lettermen]

 

-Well, that was easy:

 

<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/YemlRf4lYwc?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/YemlRf4lYwc?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>

Wednesday Links

-Rich Lederer of The Baseball Analysts looks at strikeouts per pitch.  

 

-Someone much smarter than me calculates playoff probabilities in a back-of-the-envelop, exact kind of way. [Walk Like a Sabr]

 

-Feel good story alert. Rocco Baldelli homers in his first Major League swing of the season, and he has no plans to return to coaching. [NYT]

 

-As stadiums vanish, their debt lives on. [BYT]

 

-Jay Payton still plays baseball!? [Rotoworld]

 

-Kendall Rogers with a Pac-10 baseball summer update. [Yahoo]

 

-Most fans root for a particular team. Dave Pinto at BaseballMusings.com prefers to root for ties.

 

-SI.com's Tom Verducci explains how to "fix" baseball's playoffs. Truthfully, I had no idea the system was broken.

 

-The four guys that most impressed me this weekend in college football were RB Ed Wesley (TCU) and Boise State's three-headed running back trio - Doug Martin, DJ Harper and Jeremey Avery. These guys would start at almost every BCS school.

 

-Andrew Brandt breaks down the Revis deal. [NFP]

 

-"The Amazon Freak" might play this season afterall. [Baltimore Sun]

 

-In case you haven't gotten enough Boise State news this week, Chris Brown of Smart Football dissects their schemes from a coaching perspective.

 

-Deadspin Mailbag.

 

-Today's ultra-depressing Beiber stat. [Business Insider]

 

 

 

 

BC 9/8/2010

Tuesday Links

BC gets an extended weekend so you have to put up with me until tomorrow.

 

 

-Buster Olney blog: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. [ESPN Insider; password required]

 

-Peter King's MMQB. [SI.com]

 

-Dan Pompei's Sunday Blitz. [NFP]

 

-Lombardi. [NFL.com]

 

-NFL salary cap analysis from JI Halsell here and here. [Inside the Cap]

 

-This doesn't rank as high as Winona Ryder's shout out to Syosset in Mr. Deeds, but I'll gladly accept a Syosset mention/retweet from Chris Mortensen. [Twitter]

 

-Exciting stuff happening in the Field/fx world. [Rob Neyer]

 

-Giggling evilly. [Deadspin]  

Friday Links

-Buster Olney blog. [ESPN Insider; password required]

 

-Pat Andriola at it again with WAR jumps and falls. [Fangraphs]

 

-Self-absorbed, yes, but at least he does nice things for people. [NFP]

 

-Another day, another recognizable name cut from the UFL: Andre Woodson. [Lost Lettermen]

 

-Andrew Brandt's Friday News and Notes. [NFP]

 

-For the first time in a while, an entertaining Bill Simmons article. I really liked the Cutler blurb although it's a recycled bit of his. [ESPN]

 

-Dave Berri at it again: 2009-10's most underrated scorers. [Wages of Wins]

 

-Two entertaining Deadspin links: Jimmy Connors '91 US Open and Kelly Johnson getting Punk'd.

 

-A link to more links. [AG.com]

 

 

Enjoy the three-day weekend.

 

 

BC 9/3/2010

Thursday (Bitter) Links

BC is out today so I have today's links. Enjoy:

-Weird. Jon Heyman thinks a Scott Boras client needs more attention. [Twitter]

-Is Bill Simmons ever going to stop with the six-for-24 tweets? Kobe averaged 28-8-4-2 during the NBA Finals, and he won a ring. Joke isn't funny anymore. May never have been funny. [Twitter]

-Speaking of tweets that aren't funny and border on annoying, Ken Davidoff's "predicted records for NY teams" tweets should stop. We get it. You predicted their records. Enough. Note: I do have to give him credit for at least responding to my tweet although I do not know what it means. [Twitter]



-As if the job of an announcer wasn't hard enough, now we can easily (dis)prove their stories. [Baseball Analysts]

-Kendall Rogers provides offseason grades to the Big 12 and SEC baseball teams. [Yahoo]

-Congrats to Jeremy Jeffress on making his Major League debut last night. His career stats: 1 IP, 1 H, 3 marijuana suspensions.

-Best of Deadspin: Intern Horrors and DWOTW: Owen Hart.

-Women With Dumb Tattoos: Volumes 5,487 and 5,488 - This morning on the subway, I saw these two:

"i called, you answered" written in plain block letters with a lowercase "i" on a woman's upper back. Looked like a third grade artist did it.

"Hysterically Useless" written in script on a woman's inner bicep.



Coming up in the next few days: college and NFL previews, weekend predictions, fantasy top 100 and more.

Thanks for reading / following.

Wednesday Links

-Something the fans in Pittsburgh have waited decades for: Pirates have a five-game lead. [MLBTR]

 

-Buster Olney blog. [ESPN Insider; password required]

 

-Pat Andriola follows up his biggest WAR fallers with the risers. [Fangraphs]

 

-From first round pick to out of football in six short years, the Chris Perry story. [Lost Lettermen]

 

-Bruce Feldman of ESPN previews September's top college football games.

 

-Deadspin mailbag.

 

-Dave Berri tries to quantify the NBA's most overrated player in 2009-10. [Wages of Wins]

 

 

 

 

BC 9/1/2010