Last week, picking against the Patriots burned me, so obviously picking in their favor will mean victory this week. Stephen Jackson, one of about three players I can actually name on the Rams, won't play this week. That makes this an easy one--Patriots (-8.5) over the Rams. Book it!
As Zuch is my witness (if he still remembers when I said it while out drinking Saturday night), I had intended to pick Miami as my Lock of the Week, which would have kept my perfect winless streak for the season alive.
I really don't know what to think of this. Had the Patriots won Super Bowl XX, this would have been The Super Bowl Shuffle, and would be played all the time for Patriots teams today. As corny as The Shuffle may be, New England, the Patriots, and we" makes it look like Ode to Joy.
I fear that by resurrecting it out of its internet grave, I may have pulled a Pet Sematary, and given birth to a demon spawn. Sometimes....dead is better...
I thought of incorporating this into a more detailed post, but I really don't know where to begin.
Rhyming "AFC" with "NFC," the smarmy jackass in the argyle sweater who probably goes to Williams or Harvard or some snotty liberal arts college, the entire O-line in MTV caps, the horrible rhyming, the repetition of the chorus for the last HALF of the song...
or the fact that there was a time when music was JUST THIS BAD...
or the fact that everyone who greenlighted this at the time thought it was A GREAT IDEA...
No one stood up and said, "This is kinda stupid."
This Sunday--being the Super Bowl and all--will be a fun occasion for us YCS folk, as it will be the fourth annual Patrick Scott Super Bowl Party Extravaganza, which in the past has included such highlights as frozen processed chicken-like nuggets shaped as dinosaurs, cheap and food poisoning-inducing pizza, a fridge stocked with 140 PBRs/JBLs/LaCrosse Lagers/Blatz'seses (photo, Mike?), and a big Alaskan-sized fist through our apartment wall (inside story to be retold upon request).
Sadly, I may not be able to attend for the second straight year because I love my job more than my friends, myself, and my non-existent wife and kids. Nevertheless, I'm determined to carry on my one contribution to this event--The Vinnie Bergl Super-Rigged and Arbitrarily-Scored Super Bowl Pool.
Now, this pool is not rigged by design, yet it is clearly rigged because a) I invented it, wrote the questions, and devised the scoring system, and b) I won both of the years we held it in college. So this year, I'm offering revenge, and I want all of our readers (i.e. the eight of us authors and HOPEFULLY a couple other people) to participate. As a prize I am offering any one of the following:
1) A post on any topic watsoever, to be posted on this blog, so that you can share your opinions to approximately 20 people
2) A free swipe at any one of my future preachy-ass posts, meaning I will remove it at your command
3) A small cash (or otherwise materially valuble--but not very valuable) prize
4) The chance to strap me to a wall and pelt me with oranges for ten minutes for bilking you out of your money (mostly applies to personal friends)
5) A custom prize, within reason. (Unreasonable prizes may or may not be honored.)
Now to the pool. The format is basically the same, just with different teams. It's super fun, as you can tell by the football-themed scoring system. Send your picks via comment or (more conveniently) to our email (yellowchairsports@gmail.com).
TDs (6 pts each)
Winner against the spread (NE -12)
Over-under (54)
Game MVP
FGs (3 pts each)
Most rushing yards (player)
Most receiving yards (player)
Most yards from scrimmage (player, rushing + receiving)
Most catches (player)
Most TDs (player, non-passing)
Most sacks (player)
Safeties (2 pts each)
Most passing TDs (player)
Most passing yards (player)
More total yards (team)
More forced turnovers (team)
More FGs (team)
First team to score
Extra points (1 pt each)
Coin toss winner
Highest scoring quarter
Lowest scoring quarter
First NE player to catch a pass
First NYG player to catch a pass
First song performed by Tom Petty at halftime
Last song performed by Tom Petty at halftime
Beer company with the most commercials - a) Miller b) Anheiser Busch c) Adolph Coors d) Other
Tie breaker: scoring margin NE / NYG by __ (closest +/- with correct winner takes it)
Note: In cases of ties (e.g. yardage, turnovers, FGs, co-MVPs, etc.), no points will be awarded for the category.
...That the Patriots aren't more of an overwhelming favorite on Sunday.
I just saw on the ESPN Bottom Line that NationOfStupidSportsFans (I think that's what they call it) are only 61.4%-38.6% picking the Pats over the Giants. Granted, I know there's a bunch of New York bias in that number, but I'm still surprised it's not more lopsided.
More surprisingly, the spread on the game is only Pats -12. Yes, I realize that's a pretty good margin as far as football games go, and especially as far as Super Bowls go.
But we're talking about a regular-season 16-0 team vs. a regular-season 10-6 team. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I believe that the Rams-Pats Super Bowl in '02--a matcup of 14-2 vs. 11-5 had a larger spread. And I know that the '95 Super Bowl between the 13-3 49ers and 11-5 Chargers was something like 19 at the start of the game (which, incredibly, the 'Niners covered).
At the time, the NFC was much better. But I think most people would agree that the AFC is just as superior now as the NFC was then. So why does a 6-game margin now mean less than a 2-game margin then? Are people just getting wiser, or is the league that much tighter in terms of team-to-team talent? (Data says, not necessarily.)
So what gives?
Last night during the NFC Championship game, Troy Aikman said something along the lines of, "I don't know if fans grasp how incredible this season by the Patriots has been. I'm not sure that I do."
It got me thinking: Could we assign a theoretical probability to this feat? The answer, I concluded, is, "Probably, but I doubt it's whatever half-assed way you'll come up with." While that's most likely true, it didn't stop me from pursuing that half-assed method.
My thinking was that if we treated NFL team win totals from the last fifteen years (arbitrary round number within the salary cap era) as a standard distribution, we could just base the probability on the Z-score for 16 wins. This is problematic for a few reasons: 1) A normal distribution shouldn't have such a limited number of discrete values; 2) a normal distribution should not have reachable limits (i.e. 0 wins and 16 wins); 3) using a normal distribution assumes win totals less than zero and greater than 16 are possible; 4) this is not a normal distribution, but it's not horribly bad either:
Over the last fifteen years, the standard deviation for NFL team wins was 2.96 and has not varied much from year-to-year or decreased because of the salary cap / revenue sharing.
So what does this caveat-loaded analysis tell us? 16 wins represents a Z-score of 2.70, or a probability of 0.35%, or about 1 in 285 NFL team seasons. Divide by 32 teams, and you get about a one-in-nine year event. Again, though, this is actually the probability of a team winning 16 or more games because I don't know enough about statistics to account for a reachable upper-limit, nor do I know how much this flaw distorts the result.
So Troy, the answer to your question is, I don't know, and I was probably the wrong guy to ask.
We've all heard Tom Brady's post-game statements about 9-0 not mattering, January is when it matters, and how he has the ability to walk on water and cure polio.
John Clayton wrote that this shows the players are buying into Belichick's philosophy. After every Patriots win we're going to hear the same questions about 16-0 and get the same boring response about how the regular season doesn't matter.
But if you buy any of that bullshit, you apparantly know a different Belichick than I do. The Belichick I know is an asshole, pure and simple. And winning another Super Bowl will not be enough for him, because he doesn't just want to be the best, he wants to be the best and rub it in your face.
That's what this whole ho-hum attitude is about. "Yeah, we just beat your ass up and down the field. Brady threw another four touchdowns and the guy we stole for a fourth round pick is cementing himself as the best reciever to ever play the game. Yawn. What's for dinner?"
But I wouldn't want to be Belichick's wife, kid or dog if they lose a game this season. As Mark "Greeny" said this morning, a team wins the Super Bowl every year, but 16-0 has never been done before, and would go down in history as the best team ever.
If the Colts lose another game somewhere down the road, the questions will really come to a head in the last two weeks when the Patriots will have nothing to play for other than an undefeated season. But this is the coach that plays his starters (and runs play action) in the fourth quarter when his team is up by 28 because he might see a little bit of life left in one of the opposing players that he hasn't beaten out of them yet. This entire season has been a big "fuck you" from the Patriots to the rest of the world. So why the hell would he sit his starters in week 17?
Of course, none of this will matter when the Steelers beat the Patriots in week 14 and James Harrison bends Brady's knee in four different directions.
Here were the first two so-called "Nike Keys to the Game" for the Pats-Dolphins:
If you have a Lemon, make lemonade (allusion to Miami starting QB Cleo Lemon)
Elementary my dear Watson (appeal to the Pats to involve Ben Watson in the passing game)
Evidently you can't make a hilarious pun with "Welker" or "Stallworth."
Dear New England Patriots,
Kindly don't wear those obnoxious silver jerseys ever again.
I know alternate jerseys are all the rage, what with the team's ability to wear a shirt twice a season and charge the fans a fortune for it, but come on.
Admittedly, it's just a jersey, and it's a team I don't root for, and yes, it's a small thing to be bothered by, but it's the principle of this jersey that bugs me every time I see it on TV. It exists for no other reason than to be a total money grab, and a poorly-executed money grab at that. Are the Pats' white jerseys that similar in appearance to your opponent's (today, Buffalo's awful-for-a-different-reason navy home jersey) that you needed to break out the silver to more easily differentiate yourself? Nope.
Is it a throwback to commemorate a historic moment in the team's history, like Philly is doing this year? Wrong again.
Is it even an attempt to gain a competitive advantage? Some teams employ the "George Costanza Law of Competitive Thermodynamics" and wear white this time of year whenever possible, the thinking being the players will be a few degrees cooler than their opposition in heat-absorbing dark jerseys. Not here though. You were playing in Buffalo, NY and the white jerseys would have actually fared better following that theory.
Even aesthetically, it's crap. It just looks like the equipment manager used cheap generic laundry detergent and left your Sunday (or Monday, Saturday, or Thursday I suppose) Best looking like a crappier, dingier version of your road whites. At the very least if you've got a chubby for alternates, bring back Pat Patriot, and retire this uncreative mess to the hand-me-downs and charities where this could be more useful.
Sincerely,
Me (and probably some other people...somewhere)
Normally I don't like adding analysis to topics that have already been overanalyzed, but this whole Patriots spying issue is becoming more intriguing the more I think or hear about it. More importantly, the wide world of sports media seems to be lacking logic and imagination in its analysis. So here I go continually oversaturating the world of sports commentary.
My main annoyance with most of the existing analysis is the "well let's not go that far" reaction to any suggestion that the Patriots' Super Bowls were ill-gotten. Everyone obligingly asks, "Does this tarnish their legacy?" pretending that they're asking the "tough" question, but of course the scripted answer is "No, no, of course not. Don't be ridiculous. They didn't win Super Bowls because of this."
Well of course they didn't win solely because they were spying, but it certainly gave them an advantage; perhaps it gave them a small advantage, perhaps it gave them a great advantage, but it most definitely gave them an advantage. Let's say I'm in a mile-long race and get a two-second jump on my opponent. I finish in 4:10, beating my opponent who finishes in 4:11. Now, I still ran a 4:12 mile, which is pretty damn good. So I would argue that the two-second jump was an insignificant advantage, and I was still awesome, but there's no way I could argue that I legitimately beat my opponent.
In a league with such parity as the NFL, and especially with the abundance of great teams in the AFC, the slightest edge could be enough to give the Patriots the winning edge. It's the same logic that turns a 379-foot Barry Bonds flyout into a 390-foot home run. Sure Barry Bonds would have been an all-time great player without steroids, and of course it takes a lot more than brute strength to hit a home run, but Bonds certainly would not have quite the numbers he has today without steroids.
Wait, what was I talking about again? Steroids...advantages...oh right, the cheating Patriots.
Consider this: of the nine playoff games the Patriots have won over the past four years, they outscored their opponent in the second half five times. All of those games were one-posession games at halftime (The Pats trailed once at halftime and were tied once). In three of their other four victories (in which they came out smoking in the first half), it was the second time they had seen that team that season, including the 2004 AFC Championship against Pittsburgh. Hines Ward said of that game, "It felt like they knew our playbook." (No homeristic whining here. Just presenting the facts and Ward's words)
The one exception to all of this? The 2003 Super Bowl against Carolina. And who's to say that Brady's methodic game-winning march down the field wasn't assisted by an advantage in reading the Panthers' defense. This, to me, is a perfect example of a game in which the outcome could have easily been affected by spying techniques.
I'm not going to say that the Patriots for sure would not have won particular games had they been playing fairly, and I'm certainly not going to start crying for them to be stripped of their Lombardi trophies. But too many people are dismissing the possibility of a tainted championship without a second thought. If we can accept that last year's Suns/Spurs playoff series was most likely won crookedly (which, obviously, would have given us a different champion), why can't we at least ponder the idea that the Patriots found a way to cheat themselves into a Super Bowl or two?
One final problem I have with the way this story is being analyzed is the idea that the Patriots' 2007-08 season will somehow prove one way or another if they really had an advantage. That's absurd. If the Patriots all of a sudden stink and Brady looks completely lost without his spy knowledge, that might prove something (and it would be hilarious), but that's not going to happen.
If the Patriots go 11-5 and lose to Denver in the first round of the playoffs, does that prove that they were undeserving Super Bowl Champions three, four and six years ago? No, it doesn't prove anything, other than that the AFC is stacked this year. The same goes if the Patriots go 14-2 and win the Super Bowl. That doesn't prove the legitimacy of their Super Bowls at all, because this is a different Patriots team (a very talented team) playing against different teams. How the Patriots do this season could certainly give further support to the legitimacy or illigitimacy of their championships, but to say that it proves anything is like saying that a USC/LSU National Championship this year would determine the legitimate champion of 2003. Sure it makes a nice storyline to run with, and gives television something to fill days of pre-game airtime, but it doesn't actually make sense. You know what, that last sentance pretty much describes 95% of ESPN's programming.
That's why we're here.
In what's shaping up to be the biggest heavyweight bout since Godzilla-Mothra III: Japananihillation, Belichick and Goodell sound like they're about to smack the shit out of one another.
On one hand, you have the tough disciplinarian commissioner who's made cleaning up the NFL the centerpiece of his stewardship. He's also been known to cock-slap any player, official, fan or cock-eyed passerby that happens to let his guard down. Bottom line: Goodell don't take no shit from nobody noways.
In the opposite corner, you have a man who's ego's been stroked harder and with more frequency than Nate's dick during the final trimester of Lisa's pregnancy (and that, friends, is a lot). Any player, coach, reporter or GM will tell you that winning one Super Bowl will give you a big head, deservedly or not (see Holmgren, Mike; Gruden, John). Winning three in less than a decade and being called a genius on ESPN? That's a recipe for disaster. Belichick's been propped up by so many that it's impossible for him to recognize that yes, league rules do apply to him.
Case in point: this business with taping the Jets' signals wasn't the first time (or anywhere close to it) that Belichick's been involved in funny business. He was specifically warned about going above and beyond what's considered reasonable in the course of looking for a competitve edge. Problem is, he's Bill Belichick and fuck you.
So, as the story drops and Goodell tries admirably do hand down a legitimate punishment (my only gripe: the pick should be a 1st rounder no matter what and he should be suspended for at least a game), you get this half-assed apology that comes off sounding as if it's a Hollywood actor addressing yet another drunk driving charge. He don't care, he ain't sorry, and all this means is that he'll just find another way to get an edge.
Opinions are all over the board on this one. How big of an advantage was getting the signals? My thoughts - huge. Knowing the coverage an front against a defense is invaluable to a quarterback - it makes the reads easier, the necessary routes more obvious and it lengthens decision-making time because you're not worried about the rush. Now, whether or not they knew all that all the time is debatable, but bottom line is, they were trying their damnedest to find it out.
While the revelations at least make you question some of the Patriots' dominance in the last decade, let's not go overboard. In Wisconsin, for example, there is news of Packers' players/journalists questioning last year's beatdown at the hands of the Pats. Let's not go nuts. Stolen signals or not, that Packers team wasn't going to beat New England. Maybe the game should have been closer, but the Pats didn't steal a win in that game.
To close, I'd like to propose to you the following question: What movie/tv/fictional character that had been caught red-handed did Belichick's "yeah, you caught me, but fuck you" attitude remind you of? Here are some of my first guesses:
1. Sideshow Bob when caught after rigging the Springfield mayoral election:
Your guilty conscience may tell you to vote Democrat but deep down you long for a Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals and rule you like a king!
2. Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in 'A Few Good Men' admitting to having ordered the code red that led to Santiago's death.
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
3. Detective Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) when the shit hits the fan in 'Training Day.'
Aww, you motherfuckers. Okay. Alright. I'm putting cases on all you bitches. Huh. You think you can do this shit... Jake. You think you can do this to me? You motherfuckers will be playing basketball in Pelican Bay when I get finished with you. SHU program, nigga. 23 hour lockdown. I'm the man up in this piece. You'll never see the light of... who the fuck do you think you're fucking with? I'm the police, I run shit around here. You just live here. Yeah, that's right, you better walk away. Go on and walk away... 'cause I'm gonna' burn this motherfucker down. King Kong ain't got shit on me. That's right, that's right. Shit, I don't, fuck. I'm winning anyway, I'm winning... I'm winning any motherfucking way. I can't lose. Yeah, you can shoot me, but you can't kill me.
Your thoughts welcome in the comments.
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