The Frankish Reich

Yes, THE Victor Davis Hanson, the self-appointed Sage of Fresno, Chair of the Classics Department at Fresno State, to which elite young classicists the world over flock. There's a certain kind of minor league academic who manages to ingratiate himself (always him, not her) with the right wing commentariat, who then hold him up as some kind of uber intellectual. The bar is awfully low, low enough for even this bozo to hurdle. Victor Davis Hanson is a joke. And a boring one to boot.

And to be honest, other than Josh McDaniels way back in 2009 when he was hired as Broncos HC at 33, I don't recall any of these young coaches acting like entitled spoiled children. I mean, compare the petulant and jerky yet well-seasoned Urban Meyer to all of the 30-somethings who've gotten jobs.

This is an awfully tired meme. Check, for example, the uber-nerd's analytic QB ratings: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2021-nfl-predictions/quarterbacks/?ex_cid=rrpromo Spoiler alert: Rodgers leads the pack, with Allen/Herbert/Mahomes/Brady in a virtual tie for 2nd. And it's been like that all season.

Same here. Too late. You are already supporting them as they have all your Athletic customer data. (Go back and read that 11 page terms of service document)

Changed my mind again. The sleeper star will be ... MITCH TRUBISKY. No reason to play Allen after we go up 31-0 with 12 minutes left in the 3rd.

There's a little hedging by the Bucs trainers/coaches here - he didn't tell us about ankle pain "on gameday," etc. But overall, yes, Arians is certainly more credible. - Brown is already confirmed to have presented a fake COVID card. In other words, his lack of candor is established. - Brown didn't behave in a manner consistent with a player who has an ankle injury/pain, since stripping off and jogging around the stadium is not usually associated with such - Brown was a bit late in presenting the ankle excuse. I mean, maybe he did that to the Bucs staff right after the game, but he's not known for being shy. The delay in going public about that is consistent with taking time to come up with a story... - It is unlikely that the Bucs staff would flat-out deny something that could be proven to be a lie, and they seem to be doing that here regarding pain injections on game day.

I don't know why I hadn't noticed - it's obvious in retrospect - that the infamous Alex Guerrero followed Brady to Tampa.

True. So I'm gonna go Tommy Sweeney instead. 😀

The Return of Touchdown Jesus, Jake Kumerow. Diggs/Beasley/Gabe, even McKenzie don't play a whole lot of snaps. You gotta throw the ball to someone!

Probably 50% skill, 50% luck. Exactly. To have poor situational luck like the Bills this year and to still win your division (not to jinx us or anything) is a sign of a pretty good team.

I think the Wonderlic had a 12 minute time limit for 50 questions. Given the time pressure, it measures something else too: ability to perform under pressure. We can argue about whether that translates to decisionmaking pressure in game situations, but the time-pressured characteristic of most standardized tests is a critical element. Nicely stated.

I still like my darkhorse theory - Carroll and Russell Wilson leave together as a package and go to ... Denver? The Giants?

Re: Trubisky. What exactly has he done this past year to make himself more sought after than he was a year ago? Is it just the halo of riding the bench on a winning team? No knock on Trubisky. I actually don't understand why the Broncos went after Teddy Bridgewater instead of Mitch. But the bottom line is he had to settle for being a backup behind one of the best QBs in football, so I have to assume nobody really pursued him as a starter. And then this season: Teddy Bridgewater performed with the Broncos exactly as anyone should have expected Teddy Bridgewater to perform. So now they want to dump him in favor of a guy they could have had instead of him last year? Bad NFL teams are just weird. Maybe that's why they're bad.

Unfortunately for Vince Young, he kind of lends support to the theory that the Wonderlic is useful. Although to be honest it was never clear how much of his initial promise followed by steep decline was due to lack of effort rather than lack of ability, mental and/or physical. I do think for QBs in the last 20 years we've seen only guys who are average or above on the Wonderlic (supposedly 24 for QBs) succeed at the highest level for a sustained period of time. https://www.insidehook.com/article/sports/wonderlic-test-predict-quarterbacks-nfl-success#:~:text=Counting Mahomes%2C the last 10,average Wonderlic score of 29.6. This article is a pretty crude and non-statistically significant take on it, but it's still accurate: Counting Mahomes [24 on the Wonderlic], the last 10 Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks — Tom Brady (33), Nick Foles (29), Peyton Manning (28), Russell Wilson (28), Joe Flacco (27), Eli Manning (39), Aaron Rodgers (35), Drew Brees (28) and Ben Roethlisberger (25) — had an average Wonderlic score of 29.6. Lamar Jackson (13) and even Kyler Murray (20) can certainly do a lot to disprove this supposition over the next several years. As can Tua (19). On the other hand, Josh Allen 2.0 (Justin Herbert) scored a 38, Joe Burrow a 34 ...

Yeah, but it's immediately evident to anyone who sees me that I'm slow. It takes them a while to figure out the stupid part.

I see your point. I just think that if I'm gonna know your hand size I might as well know your brain size too.

Agreed. And think about what we've seen a lot of this year: free agents signed off the street because a team has multiple QBs out on the COVID protocol. If I'm a GM wondering which street free agent to sign, I'm probably going to want a guy who can learn the playbook quickly. The Bills were in that situation back in 2013 and we signed Thad Lewis. He wasn't a top prospect so there was no Wonderlic on him, but he went to Duke, and they have some academic standards, so that probably weighed in his favor. On the other hand signing Vince Young (all-time low Wonderlic) to play with little prep time would be a mistake. It isn't all "which of these blue chip QBs/1st round picks will have the best career." Sometimes it's about finding value in lower rounds or UDFAs or emergency QBs. A certain 6th round QB scored a 33 (well above average) way back in 2000. I think he may still be playing somewhere ...

Why does it bother you? 40 yard time, cone drill time, height, weight, hand size, all published at the Combine. We have some kind of weird hangup in America now about just one thing: measurement of intellect. My kid's school stopped publishing the Honor Roll. Now you have to log-in to get that top secret info. Why do they allow the basketball box scores to be published? Or the cross country times? You can win all kinds of awards and trophies for physical achievements, but intellectual achievements must be all hush-hush.

Good comment. This agrees with my experience. When I first got into a position where I was making hiring decisions, a mentor shared his old Texas wisdom with me: "You can't teach smart." Some of the jobs were fairly technical. We could hire someone with a degree that matched up perfectly with a job description only to find out that that kid couldn't write a grammatical sentence if his life depended on it. We would also find an astonishing level of innumeracy even among the business majors. So he hired for "smart" - general intelligence, which he found correlated best with the ability to learn a new field and to succeed in it. Ever since the Supreme Court decided (in the Griggs case) that intelligence tests must relate to the skills required for the job (Griggs involved an intelligence test given to firefighting candidates) they've been on shaky ground. If an applicant can show that one group of people (gender, race, ethnicity) tends to score lower and that the test doesn't strongly relate to the skills required for the job, the employer can't justify using an intelligence test. And that brings us to Wonderlic. I don't know what the NFL knows, but they're a very lawyered-up league and I imagine they understand there's some risk here. Maybe it just doesn't correlate well with performance as a pro QB. But the problem is that we then start using proxies for the intelligence test. This is why Wall Street hires Ivy League grads - they can't give them an IQ test, so they let the Harvard admissions process (you got in, you must be really smart!) substitute for it. Or they subject you to lengthy interviews to try to gauge general intelligence rather than job-specific knowledge. Maybe they ask you those bizzarro questions Google famously acts, all to get at the same type of information that a half hour written test could reveal. It's inefficient. Perhaps more fair? Perhaps, but inefficient nonetheless. I probably like the Wonderlic just because those leaked scores are fun to talk about. But let's not kid ourselves - it is likely being eliminated for a combination of factors, and one big factor is the legal landscape.

Madison, Mason, and Mamie. I don't think I could vote for George Washington himself if he'd named his kids like that.

Ok, this is a bit more personal than I like to get, but here’s an explanation. My dad is in his 80s. He just went through a GI issue that required immediate medical attention. My mom had to call an ambulance; he was unable to even stand up. The EMT told us they had to divert him to a hospital other than the one where they’ve dealt with his previous serious issues, including cancer. The reason: that hospital/ER was full. Mostly with COVID patients, the clear majority of which were unvaccinated. He said he’d been an EMT for 10 years and had never seen it like this. Every ER had a divert order because they were over 100% capacity. They just put it in a big rotation for every hospital within about 40 miles - everyone would have to share the pain. I followed the ambulance to an ER in a far suburb. They got him into an ER room and got his vitals stabilized. And they keep him there in an uncomfortable temporary cot, with me in an even more uncomfortable plastic chair, from 8 pm until 8 am. 12 hours, waiting for a bed in a hospital we’d never been to, just lying there until a bed came free and the nursing staff rotated. From about midnight to 7 am no one ever checked in on him. I had to lift him out of the bed to help him pee into a plastic jug. I had to reattach an oxygen sensor and determine that the connection was loose and not that his oxygen level had actually entered into the danger zone. Alarms went off periodically all night - oxygen, blood pressure, heart rate. And no one so much as opened the door to see if her was ok. I think there was one nurse on duty for maybe 40 patients. It wasn’t her fault. There were car crash victims, drug ODs, and of course a bunch of COVID patients similarly waiting around with oxygen tubes keeping them from passing out. This impacts everyone. I know your immunity is superhuman and you won’t ever find yourself in that bed, and that your parents don’t have any medical conditions that would cause them to die if they didn’t get immediate attention. You are lucky. Or maybe you have only been lucky so far. Get your vaccine. Get your booster. Try your best not to overtax our hospitals and our medical professionals who are at the end of their tethers. Be a human being.

So conveniently omitted from the post here was the fact that the researcher - David Ho - still urges people to get a booster as the best, albeit imperfect, protection against omicron. It’s almost as if these copy-paste monkeys just repost whatever fringe websites throw out there. So much for “doing your own research.”

As those on the fringe right love to say “nothing to see here.” Other than Manafort promising to “never” give up info on Trump and Kushner, and then Manafort getting pardoned by none other than Trump. No, nothing stinks about this. Nothing at all.

Im not getting why a pregnant woman with both the flu and COVID is cause for such amusement. If my wife had that new combo I think I’d be just a little worried.

Passer rating is a very useful stat to allow for quick and dirty comparisons over the course of an adequate sample size. Our eyes tell us Josh Allen was markedly better in season 2 than in his rookie year, and that he took a quantum leap in season 3. QB rating confirms that. But on an individual game basis? Well, it's kind of useless. I mean, it's fun when a guy brushes up against that magical 158.3 "perfect" rating, but many times the more effective QB has the lower rating in a single game.