A few links for you on this lovely Tuesday...
Chris at Smart Football critiques Ron Jaworski's Games That Changed The Game. What's funny is, his biggest critique is quite possibly right up my alley:
But then there’s the bad. First, the format was extremely cumbersome and dull: each chapter, typically about a discrete topic or figure, begins with a brief introduction — the only redeeming part of the chapter (leaving aside such incorrect assertions like the idea that Don Coryell’s San Diego Chargers were the first team to move their tight-end, Kellen Winslow around the formation). But then the chapter launches into a text-only play-by-play description of a specific game that I found tiresome if not unreadable. Seriously, it’s 2011, even if the game is fifteen or twenty years old I’d rather watch the game than read what is effectively a transcript of someone describing it.
Because of circumstance, and the fact that I have devoured thousands of play-by-plays in recent years, I find myself drawn to exactly this mundane, no-personality level of detail. I'm no libertarian, but I find myself extremely distrustful of written authority at this point -- instead of trusting somebody's description of the game, I'd like to digest the game myself, then read others' interpretations of meaning. But then, I'm both a) mundane and b) a nerd who has decided that writing 2,500 words about 120 different teams sounds like a nifty offseason project.
SBN'ers respond to a couple of my Summer Vacation pieces: Sippin' On Purple wonders if Northwestern fans undervalue Pat Fitzgerald as an in-game coach (general tone of the comments: "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about--Fitzgerald's lucky."), and Rock Chalk Talk wonders why the Kansas piece was 2,700 words instead of about seven -- "Holy crap, were they terrible last year."
Senator Blutarsky and The Mercury News' Jon Wilner get to the heart of the biggest problems with the "ANTI-TRUST!!!1!" argument.
… Just to underscore the disparity in TV money — and financial might — here’s an updated list of the per-school revenue (all figures approx; some figures taken from SportsBusiness Journal and other reports):
Pac-12: $21 million
Big Ten: $21 million (includes Big Ten Network)
SEC: $17 million
ACC: $13 million
Big 12: $12.5 million
Notre Dame: $9 million
C-USA: $1.3 million
MWC: $1 million
MAC/WAC/Sun Belt: < $1 millionYou don’t have to be a Nobel Prize winner in economics to realize that those at the top of the food chain are going to do what they feel they must to protect it.
Is the BCS a "cartel"? You could certainly make the case. But it was a "cartel" created by TV revenue, conference commissioners and university presidents. As I continue to say, attacking the BCS is completely missing the point.
I continue to find myself more and more fascinated with football soccer stats, and this Globe and Mail article is a good example of why. The stats are so simple, and they tell so, so much.
Everybody's probably already seen last week's interesting Tom Dienhart quotes compilation about coaches and stats, but I'll go ahead and share it here and mention that I have an extensive post about it on the way ... if the SBN profiles and Football Outsiders Almanac 2011 rough drafts ever stop pummeling me...
As a Missouri citizen, I feel compelled to also pass along the link to the Ozarks Red Cross for those interested in donating to the clean up and recovery of Joplin, MO. My only connection to Joplin is that I have a few friends who live there (they're fine), and I always stop at the gas station and Starbucks there on my way from Columbia to see family in Oklahoma City. But it's an awful, awful situation. These storms are becoming more and more common, and it's not going to stop anytime soon.