mad dog

You know, I actually thought Quoner was Gordon Keith for a while until I realized that Gordon cares nothing for football. But they do fulfill similar roles... both enjoy conversational arsonism, one just does it on the airwaves, one does in on a series of tubes.

Iono... mebbe the winning team puts on pirate hats and raids the Alabama sideline for rum and athletic tape?

I tried to grow a 'stache once. Children cried, women wept, and all who looked on me despaired. It was truly wretched.

Is this veiled racism?

Wait at least a half hour between hand grenades.

As usual, I’ll take anything from a Russian op-ed with a sizeable chunk of salt. So much of it sounds like the typical Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that kept getting lobbed over the Berlin Wall for half the 20th century. I’m not saying everything is great here in the states, because it certainly is not. It is simply amusing and more than a little ironic to hear a Russian lecture Americans on moral bankruptcy, spiritual degradation, economic turbulence, and political instability. This, of course, from a nation who, mere decades ago, disavowed God as mere bourgeois sentimentality. This from the same nation that has been hemorrhaging ex-Soviet Republics since their fourth collapse of the 20th century. This coming from the same nation whose defacto acceptance of criminal activity as legitimate business (Bratva, Russian Business Network) coined the tongue-in-cheek term “Russian Oligarchy”. No, things aren’t perfect here, and things might get really bad in the next few years. But, based on our comparative track records, I have a feeling we’ll still come out ahead of the Great Bear.

Everything is stupid. That is all.

Is that an oil tanker in the background?

VVIP Board will be updated later that night.

Hold on, I think we're burying the lead here. Why is the Joker crotch-rocking Aquaman?

Multiple threads consolidated. No funeral.

Yeah... the Citrus conference was woefully unrepresented. I claim selection bias.

This.

152 is pretty close to the number of unique posters we've had on the site in the past year or so. It is entirely possible that most of those are duplicates. Even if they are, I think it only proves the point that, collectively, we are a very, very small group. Our voice is just louder because of the interwebz. Ah, who am I kidding? I guess I should come clean. I am actually Quoner, The Tasty Greek, Kram1, and Glad to Be Green. My shame is eternal, as is my propensity for message board arson. Be gentle.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

It may be a last-minute call - we have a few errands and chores to do right after work. If one or both of us is able to make it, how do we find you?

In that case... Deal Joker?

Done Deal Joker?

Assuming I can swing that by the missus, I could do that. Is it still roughly general admission?

What about player styles? What kind of players are White and Odafuwa? What about the other starters? What kind of game do we play - do we spot up for 3 pointers? drive to the basket? play the post?

I'm going to try and get back into the swing of basketball, but the last time I really had a close eye on things, Mike "Who" Jones was roaming the court for the mean green. What are the storylines and key players for the team this year?

Could be a lot of things. For whatever reason (doing better, everyone else sucking, Fout's psychological toll on players, Rick V's sweaters, the price of legos on the North Korean black market), the team is trending positive. Me too. There's nothing I love better than watching laboriously slow improvement. And I wouldn't assume my model is correct or even oriented in that general direction. In fact, even referring to it as a "statistical model" gives it a laughably undeserved credibility. I think I woke up in my college stats class once and heard the word "linear regression," which I promptly turned into a bar napkin "model" five years later to describe the objective improvement of a football team.

/creeped out

I predict this will be a very underrated and underappreciated post.

I meant to post this a while ago, but I got busy with work and forgot about it. It seems somewhat germane to this discussion. I did some research about the team's margin of victory/defeat. Here's my formula - Take points scored per game of TD era. Take points given up per game of TD era. Subtract PPG from points given up per game. Chart those numbers (Differential or Average Margin of Victory/Defeat) Using the last four games of the 2006 season as a lead-in, establish a six game rolling average to reduce seasonal variation. Chart those numbers. Assume the current rate of growth will hold constant ad infinitum. Project when differential > 0 using linear regression. Using this formula, the data suggests that 1) the team is, in fact, actually improving, and 2) the average margin of victory/defeat will finally cross 0 sometime in the middle of the 2015 season. Historically, teams around 0 had a .500 record.