Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

We will not go back.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Fight them, without becoming them!

American history and black history cannot be separated.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

You are here: Home / Open Threads / NFL Open Thread

Reader Interactions

79Comments

  1. 1.

    Betty Cracker

    Here’s one thing I know: THE BUCS CANNOT LOSE TODAY.

    That’s because they’re not playing until tomorrow, at which time they’ll have an opportunity to go 0-9.

  5. 5.

    Bob In Portland

    I wonder how much the NFL has to do with the rise of atheism in the US. You know, Superman versus deity, the gods versus the titans. Although not the Titans so much.

  10. 10.

    Gravenstone

    Looks like a long afternoon ahead for the Packers, back up QB goes down after the first series, new QB was on the practice squad to start the week.

  14. 14.

    Tommy

    Is there anything cooler then the NFL Redzone channel? Now I just wish my cable provider, Charter Communications, could get the the NFL package away from DirectTV. Heck does anybody know when that deal runs out? I mean I live in St. Louis and Charter is based here and nobody I know has DirectTV, cause well at least here Charter’s service is amazing.

  15. 15.

    Amir Khalid

    In other football news:
    Arsenal had some key players out sick this weekend, and have just lost 1-0 at Manchester United. Unfortunately, the laws of football do not allow both teams to lose a match, no matter how much that would help Liverpool. But no matter. The Beatles’ hometown club are now within two points of the Rolling Stones’ hometown club, Arsenal.

  16. 16.

    Jewish Steel

    @Gravenstone: It’s like you’ve invited the stupidest person you know to watch along. He pipes up infrequently enough to be unpleasantly surprised he’s still there.

  17. 17.

    Mark B.

    I don’t know why the Packers released Vince Young. Unless it was a financial issue. He seemed to be playing pretty well in the preseason.

  22. 22.

    Tommy

    @Jewish Steel: I don’t really mind him that much. At times he can say some insightful stuff, as somebody that is a huge football fan but never played. The O and D lines are something I don’t understand much. The blocking schemes and such. In a burst of insight he can explain this.

    But honestly of all the folks to give this job, I am willing to bet there are about a few hundred that could do the same if not better. In my frat, we had two O linemen (powerful DII school). They were the smartest people in any room. I hear that is often the case even in the NFL.

  23. 23.

    Tommy

    @drkrick: Oh I hear you. I just don’t know why it isn’t offered up to everybody. Like Comcast and Charter and all the other cable providers. I have no idea what Murdoch is paying them, but I can’t believe the NFL can’t make more money with folks like myself buying the package.I’d buy it this second. And so would most folks I know.

    I live outside of St. Louis. I am of the age where the team I followed as a kid went to AZ. Then I moved to DC and became a Redskins season ticket holder. Heck I’d pay a few hundred dollars just to watch my Redskins lose the rest of their games this year :).

  28. 28.

    geg6

    So far, thank the FSM for the Bills. Hard to look worse than the Stillers, but they’ve diligently worked to do it.

    Miracles happen. Pitt beat Notre Dame last night, after all. Maybe the Stillers will get at least one more win this season. But it’s only half time and they still have plenty of time to blow it.

  29. 29.

    Tommy

    @Jewish Steel: It is tough how detailed you get. I follow this St. Louis Cardinals blog. I know baseball. The site has gotten so “geeky” I need to have like Wikipedia open in another tab just to figure out all the stats they reference. At times I have no clue what they are talking about.

  32. 32.

    Tommy

    @Jewish Steel: LOL. About seven years ago I got in a fantasy football league. I was like “dude I don’t have that much free time.” I mean I got a lot of free time but not that much. And I am a huge gamer, but the game I play the most my four year old niece turned me onto. Cut the Rope on my tablet. I like puzzles and not so much FPS or sports.

  33. 33.

    Roger Moore

    @Tommy:

    I just don’t know why it isn’t offered up to everybody.

    I assume the NFL thinks they’ll get more money by offering an exclusive deal to one provider rather than the same deal to every provider. Any kind of exclusive, highly desirable content is a potential goldmine, since it can get people to choose one provider over another and bring along all the non-exclusive business.

  34. 34.

    Jewish Steel

    @Tommy: I play solitaire on my ipod last thing at night to wind my brain down. That’s it.

    The Sega Genesis game Phantasy Star derailed my Junior year in college. Put the controller down and never looked back. I am weak.

  35. 35.

    Tommy

    @Roger Moore: I understand this business model. In fact I bet DirectTV is losing money on said deal. Kind of like paying billions for the NFL or the Olympics. You pay that huge sum of money with the hope of eventually making money. But you get the bonus of saying you have the NFL or Olympics. Heck as a former ad guy I’d love to have the NFL just for a lead into another TV show.

  36. 36.

    Mark B.

    @Roger Moore: NFL Network and redzone are on UVerse also. I don’t believe that it’s an exclusive deal with DirecTV, but it’s more a matter of providers not wanting to pay NFL network’s price. They probably cut favorable deals with the smaller providers to get the product out there and put pressure on the bigger providers.

  37. 37.

    Tommy

    @Jewish Steel: Oh I have a PS3, but also my Sega Genesis. Got to play Zelda. I often think I am an under served gamer. My favorite PS3 games are Little Big Planet and Civilization. I get GTA and Call of Duty are huge business, but have to think you can make money selling me the type of games I enjoy.

  38. 38.

    Baud

    @Mark B.:

    I think all the NFL channels are available on any cable or satellite provider. DirecTV has an exclusive only on providing nationwide coverage to the live games.

  41. 41.

    Tommy

    @Baud: They are, but I want the entire game. Now with that said, I bet DirectTV is mad I have the NFL Redzone, cause they don’t cover just the red zone. I get to see my Redskins play a ton on this channel. But I’d pay a lot of money to see the entire game, but alas that isn’t the case.

  43. 43.

    Steeplejack

    @Mark B.:

    Just checked, and Red Zone is available on my cable system (Cox in NoVa). The screen cordially invites me to subscribe but doesn’t say how much it is. But it appears to be an a la carte selection, i.e., you don’t have to order a huge package of sports channels to get it.

  44. 44.

    Roger Moore

    @Tommy:

    The site has gotten so “geeky” I need to have like Wikipedia open in another tab just to figure out all the stats they reference.

    I think this kind of thing is a big mistake. Most of the benefits of “sabermetric” stats comes from considering things like walks and GIDP that have been ignored or underrated by conventional statistics and from finding Voros’s rule (most of what happens on a ball in play is the result of defense, not pitching). You can include those insights with some fairly simple stats, though the details of the fielding stats can get convoluted. More complicated statistics seem to be searching for greater precision even when it comes at the cost of increased complexity and, paradoxically, reduced accuracy,

  45. 45.

    Boudica

    @Steeplejack: But is there a link to just Benen? I used to be able to go to just his posts (and see more than just an introductory sentence) plus I had his RSS feed in my aggregator. The new MSNBC website is a mess.

  50. 50.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    @Roger Moore: It’s more than that. A lot of the work in baseball stats are in two directions: projection (such as PECOTA or ZIPS) and value (such as WAR or VORP). Both of these are about a lot more than just adding precision. It’s particularly the latter set that are causing a lot of the complexity but it’s an inherently complex subject.

    Something like OPS or OPS+ is a lot simpler but also of limited value. Those allow us to be able to compare one batter to another batter but they don’t tell us how much any given hitter contributes towards actually winning games. They also don’t let us compare a hitter to a pitcher. In order to do either of those things you have to translate the relatively simpler stats that can compare two players to do the same thing into one universal rating. And so you get a lot more complexity.

  51. 51.

    geg6

    @AdamK:

    Hardly. That (dis)honor belongs to any one of these three: MMA, WWF (or whatever it’s acronym is these days) or NASCAR.

    Football has its problems, but it’s hardly the worst offender among sports.

  52. 52.

    Roger Moore

    @Tommy:

    In fact I bet DirectTV is losing money on said deal.

    I’m not even sure how you do the accounting for that. It’s not as if they’re charging separately for the NFL deal; it’s included in their basic package, so it’s very tricky to tease out how much it’s bringing in. To get the real value, you need to look at how many viewers have chosen DirecTV over cable just to get the NFL, which is a speculative number.

    And it’s a very different deal from a network getting an exclusive sports deal like NBC and the Olympics. In that case, they’re expecting to lose money on the direct value of the event because they’re going to use it to promote their other shows. You can think of it as selling themselves ads at below market rate and charging the loss to the Olympics rather than to their in-house ad budget. It’s inherently risky because lots of people who turn into NBC to watch the Olympics will go back to their regular shows after the games are over unless NBC’s shows are actually worth watching. The DirecTV/NFL deal is different because the cost of switching to cable is much higher. People who have decided to go with DirecTV to get the NFL are unlikely to switch back to cable once the season is over, so the subscribers they’re stealing from cable are much more valuable than the ones NBC gets for the Olympics.

  55. 55.

    Amir Khalid

    @geg6:
    Its acronym these days is WWE, for World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Occupying as it does some strange no-man’s land between scripted soap opera and sport, it describes its product as “sports entertainment” — presumably so that people won’t mistake it for either actual sports or actual entertainment.

  56. 56.

    scav

    pffffflllllltttttttt!

    not exactly random drive-by comment. If it’s not in the 1800s, it’s dead to me today.

  57. 57.

    Pogonip

    Can someone here explain to me, a non-football fan, why the NFL is suddenly concerned about bullying? Is it costing them money somehow?

  58. 58.

    Redshirt

    @Pogonip: Moms, I bet. I think the NFL is deathly afraid that mothers won’t let their sons play football as children, thus drying up the talent pool for the league. Due to concussions, primarily, but bullying certainly does not help.

  62. 62.

    Redshirt

    @JPL: It really is a big deal for football – the concussion issue could threaten the fundamental nature of the sport. I also see no easy way the NFL will escape this doom without substantial rules/equipment changes.

  63. 63.

    Roger Moore

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
    I guess the point I’m making is that most of the value from sabermetrics is from moving from BA/HR/RBI to BA/OBA/SLG, from pitcher W-L to ERA (or DIPS), and from Fielding Percentage to Defensive Efficiency. Those changes represent genuine insights into the mechanics of the game and are major advances to our understanding of what goes on down on the field. Most of the rest of the stuff in terms of value statistics is about making the numbers prettier, e.g. translating everything into runs or wins added. This is supposed to make things easier to understand, but in practice winds up confusing people who are trying to find out what’s going on under the hood. Even worse, IMO, is that by reporting things to great precision those stats give a misleading impression of accuracy, when in practice different measurement methods give substantially different answers.

    In terms of predictions, PECOTA is a good example of just how badly we’re doing. They grind through a ton of effort to give numbers that A) have enormous admitted error bars and B) are not a lot better than predicting that everyone will keep producing as well as they have been. A lot of this is because prediction is inherently challenging, but it does more to show our limits than it does to give real value added.

  64. 64.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Jewish Steel:

    I play solitaire on my ipod last thing at night to wind my brain down.

    That’s interesting. I group several solitaire games in an iPad tab I call “Start the Day,” and I usually run through three or four games each morning before I get up. I find they start my mind working properly.

  65. 65.

    ? Martin

    @Pogonip:

    Can someone here explain to me, a non-football fan, why the NFL is suddenly concerned about bullying? Is it costing them money somehow?

    Pro sports get certain benefits (approved monopoly status, for one) because they have been justified as being in the ‘public interest’. Tax money for stadiums, etc. The drug scandals and bullying make it much harder to keep that ‘public interest’ spin going – doubly so if there’s clear racism in the mix.

    If it were an isolated case, it’d be nothing, but the NFL’s reaction to the problem suggests that it’s endemic and they know it. They’re telling us something that perhaps we didn’t know before. If the public get the impression that bullying and particularly racist bullying are part and parcel of the NFL, not only will they lose advertisers and viewers, they’ll lose some of that free taxpayer money as well. Their biggest concern is likely that the racism seen among players will empower fans to follow suit. That’s the problem FIFA is trying to deal with, and if it spreads to the fans, then the problem will get huge – fast. That it comes on top of the injury problem as Redshirt notes, doesn’t help.

  66. 66.

    geg6

    @Redshirt:

    No doubt it’s the mom factor. The NFL has spent beaucoup bucks the last few years trying to be female friendly. Now, with the concussion issue and the bullying, it looks like the effort may have been partially wasted. Add to that the reported precipitous drop in children participating in Pop Warner (also an issue they’ve been trying to address), and you’ve got a problem. I admit to being more squeamish about the game than I used to be because of the brain injury stuff, despite having been a rabid Steeler fan my whole life. So if I’m having problems, imagine women, especially moms, hearing all this stuff and not being dedicated fans. Not good for the brand.

  67. 67.

    nineone

    Seems to me if you lose twice to the De-stroid Leos you should be regulated to a lower division. Fire Trestman. Accept no Walsh substitute.

    @Baud: They’ll be fine as long as somebody, anybody reminds Payton and his Familiar ,D Breezy to RUN THE FUCKING BALL!

    Why, yes I feel much better, thanks.

  69. 69.

    nineone

    @Baud: I know, I know. Still, it’s hard to see them lose games they should win ‘cos they can’t/won’t RUN THE FUCKING BALL!

    Sorry, still not quite over the Pats game.

  70. 70.

    Anne Laurie

    @Tommy: Remember the old joke? “Professionalism is knowing more and more about less and less, until the day when you know everything about nothing!”

  72. 72.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    I am not even seeing what good it does to watch the Packers while Rodgers is out. Until he’s back, GO RED DEVILS!

  73. 73.

    CaseyL

    @Redshirt: The NFL is putting more emphasis on penalty calls for unnecessary roughness. Seattle’s gotten dinged a few times in the last two games for hits that once wouldn’t have drawn a flag, like “late hits” caused by a tackler not able to stop in mid-step or mid-air. I think the coaches and players are tweaking their tacking techniques to try preventing inertia-driven tackles.

  74. 74.

    opiejeanne

    @CaseyL: Yes, Seattle got dinged once today for a player not being able to stop mid-air. We were more than a bit surprised by the call as were the announcers, but they explained it was becoming a Thing. They stopped just short of calling the fear of serious injury a sissification of the game.

  75. 75.

    trollhattan

    Mwa-ha-ha, SF loses at home to the Panthers, putting Seattle in control of the NFC West, regardless of their December rematch. MondayTuesday at work’s gonna be fun (and that’s also letting the Raiders fans stew in their own juices without my help). Am certain Alex Smith is enjoying from afar.

  76. 76.

    MrSnrub

    @Boudica: Not sure if you’ll see this at this point of the day, but I use RSS for Benen via Outlook at work, I’m getting all of MSNBC, but I have all but Benen collapsed and ignored. It would depend on your RSS method.

  77. 77.

    different-church-lady

    OK, the “___day Night Football” opening segments have officially gotten ridiculous.

  78. 78.

    The Sailor

    Am I the only Colts fan here?
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++
    And BTW, my two cents, the Miami Dolphins have a culture of bullying and harassment, even beyond what the league allows.

    The coaches need to go down for it as well as the players. It’s a frat that went wrong.

  79. 79.

    different-church-lady

    “X-Box, just show me the fucking game I’m watching without all this other shit on my screen.”

Comments are closed.