gehringer_2

well, they will be if they don't end up 2-4 in those matchups.... more seriously, that was the question of some posts upthread: Is it the schools that matter or the quality of play, or is it more complex than that? Schools build an audience based on a consistently high level of play - the momentum from that can probably sustain them throough multiple poor years before their audience base would fall away, but the flip side of that is nobody cares about Indiana. If they win the conference enough times we assume that changes? But how long does that shift take? Michigan, USC and OSU have decades behind them.

It's going to be a fine line for Mac to walk. Talbot has been playing well but at 38 you just can't go to that well too often or he will either end up hurt or even just out of gas long before the end of the season.

If it's 'just' a process fracture, the recovery prognosis from that is about as good as anything could be. IF

that's not too bad at first glance. You have to look close to see the right hand has fingernails and the left hand doesn't. The lighting on Usha is also to the left of the lighting on Davidson.

that game is a bit rigged. If you sell out of equities and go into bonds you will do better than 1%. Nobody has to leave their stock sales proceeds sitting at 1% yield. That said, I wouldn't advise anyone to try and out-anticipate the market as a short term investment strategy, but that's not quite the same thing as deciding that longer term you are overall over (or under) exposed to stocks at a point in history.

I was thinking about this one a little. From on stand point, the huge depreciation hit a car takes the minute it's driven off a lot seems silly. A thousand miles on a vehicle built to go 150K+ isn't mechanically significant, but that's not what the discount is about - the discount is about uncertainty. You don't know what has happened to a car used as loaner, how it was driven, if the kid threw up in the back seat or a dog crapped in the back or someone spilled coffee with cream under the front seat, or some other hidden interior damage that you'll end up smelling on hot days forever unless you have a detailer take the interior apart, or some nut just over rev'd it or internally parted a tire belt in a couple of panic stops. It's the certainly that you aren't dealing with any of that crap that is why you should demand, and get, a steep discount on any loaner or demo that's been off the lot.

nobody wants to watch, or carry, Indiana. Good team, no audience draw.

Two goals direct off missed coverages off a face-off - A little bit of bad luck on deflections, a couple of goals Gibson should have stopped deflection or not, and IDK what Mo&Si thought they were doing on the last one but it hardly mattered at that point. But even excusing bad defensive puck luck one night - you can't get shut-out.

He can still throw hard and spin it, so someone was going to be willing to take a flyer on him.

sounds maybe like the 'drafted' policy got 'undrafted' once a little light was shone on it.

One might believe that the level of morality in society bears a clear correlation to the level of religiousity, but I don't.

It's pretty simple, too many young American men are idiots. We've made them that way. Raised on video games, hovered over by parents who never taught them how to be responsible for themselves by being responsible anything else, and thus never learned how to be fully formed adults, socialized sexually by pervasive porn. What sane woman wants any part of that?

not sure what this means other than nobody walks the ball up the court anymore. Could be a lot of reasons for that, but I would guess one is the disappearance from the game of the Shaquesque 7ft 300 lb center who you had to wait for anyway before you could get to your half court O. 😉

I've also wondered on more than one occasion if the drive toward minimalist mechanics is hurting guys. How much did those big windups maybe help collect, store, and transfer energy for the pitch?

Farrah Fawcett's hairdresser lives!

Yup. We've talked about it before, the fans tend to be very short horizon, what the schools realize that fans don't is that you put together one conference of all the perennial top 20 teams, half of them will start losing half their games, and I don't think that's an appealing future for a Michigan or a Clemson. In the heyday of the Yankees being the Yankees, was when the Senators were being the Senators. Someone has to willing the be the Northwesterns of a new super league and I don't imagine any one is.

It's always been a big point in A^2 that the football program was always cash flow positive back the rest of the U, which I suppose is or should be true in a lot of places, but in any case, you can understand leadership that didn't want to responsible for that changing. Goes to show just because you look doesn't mean you find something useful!

Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a crass, no-class jerk, so I can be President!

Del was noting that tempo was down, but I wonder how much of that is just because they are leading a lot in the 4th now and want to slow it down.

I think you can make a case that a taller person (not necessarily a heavy one though) simply has longer levers - both in his stride and his arm length, to achieve velocity at lower stress. But as you note, those longer levers probably also stress connective tissue proportionally more, so maybe in the end it's a wash. Experience seems to argue the big guys aren't holding up any better. But probably they are just more likely to be *able* to throw hard so we continue to see a lot of them.

well, that pretty much confirms it was bad news, doesn't it?

I think you get a certain synergy with Holland out there with Thompson. You get a real speed overload. Without his running mate he doesn't seem quite the same.

and it's also doubly good if your big man can make those late FTs as it's a lot easier to inbound the ball to size against pressure.

Is there any evidence about smaller pitchers being more fragile? In the past regime the Tigers almost had a fixation about not bringing in anything but big pitchers - 6'3" and up and I've wondered if that was their reasoning, but that didn't help Faedo, Skubal, or Fulmer - all on the bigger side and TJ victims anyway.

I think I have to disagree with the premise. The quality of NCAA football has always been miles below that of the NFL, but that never kept schools from filling their stadiums. So the key in college football hasn't been how good the players are, it's the draw of the ties to the schools that people are attached to - either by direct relationship, geography or just general fandom. Back in the Bo/Woody days of the B10, they were clearly playing an inferior brand of football than what was appearing on fields in the South and West, didn't affect the popularity of the product in the midwest at all. No M fan moved his allegiance to UCLA because they had figured out how to pass the ball. The beauty of football is that you get exciting games as long as teams are well matched at whatever level that is. The rest is all in the legacy allegiances. As I argued to Buddha the other day and still believe, if you took all the players in the NCAA and put them in a 'AAA' minor football league, that league with the same players playing the same game would only be worth only a fraction of what they are attached to their Universities.