Wraith

The difference being Young is getting nearly all the credit for the Titans resurgence.

Wow, good thing he got that last yard or he would've had one hell of a lousy game....

Yup!

You do realize that over 40% of the Bills' home games in the 90s were blacked out, right? This sudden panic by a lot of simple minded people is comical, nothing else.

I figured as much.

No, that wasn't the whole idea.

Bungee Jumper is correct that the binomial distribution for discrete variables is somewhat analogous to the normal distribution for continuous variables. That being said, some of the explanations that have resulted trying to rationalize what he said are reeeaaaally stretching logical thought. The binomial distribution, as HA initially asserted, is used when there are only two discrete outcomes from a process. Where some of the rationalizations have departed from logic is by lumping "anything else" together as a "failure." For the binomial distribution to be useful, what is defined as a success or failure has to be meaningful. Randomly selecting a possible outcome such as two or three to be "success" and making everything else "failure" is not meaningful. If I were to do that, I would not get a useful picture of the underlying probability distribution. In fact, I would need ELEVEN seperate binomial distributions to get a useful discription of the pair-of dice-rolling process (2 is successful, all else failure, then 3 is successful, all else failure, then 4....and so forth). Using the definition supplied by some of you, ANYTHING can be represented using the binomial distribution (which is true) and that representation would be useful (which is not true). The binomial distribution is VERY useful for determining the probability of getting repeated values (I rolled a 12 the first time, what are the odds I get a 12 the second time...?). In reality, the pair of dice scenario is MULTINOMIAL. The normal distribution is much more useful for describing the pair-of-dice scenario despite having to make the concession to "not-quite-continuous variables." After all, not much, if anything, in the real world can actually be measured on a continuous basis, yet the normal distribution works just fine. So, in conclusion, BJ's original comment was not wrong. But I really have to laugh at other peoples attempts to explain what he meant (as if he needs their help...). OWNED? Please! Hahahahaha.

Gee, ordinarily, you would think that the only thing required of you to move up the list would be to PLAY BETTER THAN THE PEOPLE AHEAD OF YOU ON THE LIST. I wasn't aware there was some kind of statistical criteria that needed to be met...

This is an incomplete analysis at best. Why not look at the whole game, for starters? Secondly, do you have any "analysis" from other DEs to compare it to? It's hard to take this seriously as it stands right now....

You've drawn your little arbitrary line in the sand, and you won't budge. It's either 250 yards passing or bust. It doesn't matter that you've shown absolutely zero evidence that passing more win games. It doesn't matter that others in this topic have shown that running more DOES win games. You cling to the Colts/Bills/Titans example as your only shred of evidence, but the fact is, the Titans won against the Colts by passing for 163 yards and running for 219. Do you have that short a memory that you can't remember how we lost in that Colts game, or against the Patriots in the first game? Both opponents ran more than 5:00 off the clock on one fourth quarter drive by RUNNING THE BALL. THAT IS WHAT GOOD TEAMS DO IN THE FOURTH QUARTER WITH A LEAD! But of course, none of that matters. All that matters is, you've picked a number, and damn it, that's what matters. It's either meet your arbitrary standard, or you will go home and cry and take your ball with you.

If I want to annoint J.P. Losman as pretty decent, damn it, I will annoint him as pretty decent!

You are making this waaaaay too complicated. Evaluate how well he throws, not how much he throws. Losman is 18th in passing yardage because he is 20th in passing attempts. The fact is, he's 12th in YPA, 10th in Comp. PCT, and 13th in TD PCT. Those are all statistics that are all independent of passing attempts, and that is where Losman gets to show that he is a pretty decent NFL quarterback. Yardage by itself is not very meaningful. Look at the top ten in yardage, it is littered with underperformers such as Jon Kitna (3rd), Favre (6th), Roethlisberger (7th), and E. Manning (10th). Look at the passing attempt leaders: Favre (1st), Kitna (2nd), Bulger (5th), E. Manning (6th), B. Johnson (8th), and Delhomme (10th). These are not QBs from teams that are winning many ball games....

The entire line played great. The most encouraging things I saw were that even though they let the pocket collapse a couple of times, most of the time they had a very nice pocket, and never let defenders come untouched. The Bills also succesfully ran to the right side of the line, which is huge, because we haven't seen much of that with this "new" oline yet.

Ah, I understand now, thanks.

The Bills played today? According to Ian Eagle, the Jets were playing themselves this week....and lost.

I disagree. I think the most telling stat of the day is that the Jets longest pass play of the game was 23 yards by Coles on a SCREEN pass against our DECIMATED secondary. We had Jim Leonhard (a guy who was out of the league the first few weeks of this season) and Coy Wire sharing time at safety, and Kiwaukee Thomas starting at corner, and all Pennington could do was dink and dunk. Since we're both basing it off what we think we saw, I guess we'll have to leave it at that.

Exactly. The MAC actually produces teams that are capable of making noise in the Big Dance. In 2001, Kent State made it to the Great Eight and lost for the second time all season. The first time they had lost that season was to Reggie's UB squad.

This leads me to believe you didn't actually watch the game. UB played 7 players the entire game (Yassin, Greg Gamble, Eric Moore, Andy Robinson, Calvin Betts, Parnell Smith, and Vadim Fedetov). UB was simply out of gas with 5:00 left to go, and it had nothing to do with strategy or coaching. A couple of years ago, when we had Calvin Cage, Mark Bortz, Jason Bird, and Mario Jordan coming off the bench, we might have won. But our bench is simply too unproven at this point in the season to go up against Pitt, which is known for the their depth.

Actually, measurement error does need to be present for the behavior Holcomb's Arm has described in his initial premise to occur. Without it, absolutely no "movement" of the scores will be seen on any subsequent retests, no matter how many times you try it.

You're point in this post, I believe, is that how extreme a person scores in regard to their OWN "mean" or "true IQ" or something determines the probability of scoring higher or lower on a subsequent retest. If I score extremely far below my "real IQ" the first time I take an IQ test, it is very probable I will score higher the second time I take the test, even though my first result was extremely high compared to the overall population mean. This is absolutely reasonable, and more importantly, true. However, you seem to be ignoring the fact that if the overall population being sampled from is normally distributed, and I ask people who scored at some extreme value, I am more likely to get someone who has a "real IQ" closer to average and scored at a more extreme value due to testing variation than I am to get someone who has a "real IQ" further away from average and who scored closer to average due to variation. That will always be the case because there are more people in the center of the distribution of the overall population than there are on the tails. As HA said, if the underlying population were uniformly distributed, this behavior would not happen. So the overall population distribution is an underlying factor and that is the point HA is trying to make here, I believe.

Did you really mean to say this? Because that is not true and goes against what you've been saying for weeks. If we continue the assumption that error on the test is normally distributed and centered at zero, the only way someone would have a 50/50 chance of doing better/worse the second time they had the test is if they had zero error (gotten the "true" IQ) the first time they took the test. Unless I've totally misread what you're trying to say.

I'm sorry, you are a f@$king moron if you actually believe what you are saying. Hell, I thought this topic was sarcasm it was so ludicrously stupid. UB loses by 3 points to the 2nd best team in the country, and you're calling for his job? Insanity. Witherspoon IS the reason UB Basketball is where it is today, a program on the rise. His recruiting ability is what lured players like Turner Battle and Mark Bortz to Buffalo and they put the team on the map. Going "in the right direction in the Mid-Continent Conference" is hardly comparable to be a major player in the MAC Conference finals for the last four years. Hell, Buffalo actually gets national media attention now and nearly got an AT LARGE NCAA bid two years ago. The basketball program was dormant before Witherspoon. Buffalo has won many big games in the last five years. Get a clue.

I still don't think you fully grasp what people are trying to tell you... We'll play the Cowboys once and only once during the regular season every fourth year. We'll play the Chiefs, Bronco, Chargers, etc., AT LEAST once every third year, with the possibility of playing them in between if they finish in the same slot in their division as us... It's impossible for the scheduling system to have us miss AFC opponents for years, unless you mean only two years, in which case I would say you're gradually exaggerating the problem.

Plummer's statistics were pretty bad his ENTIRE career in Arizona. He's had some pretty good years in Denver, at least statistically, but the stats from this year resemble his Arizona years much more than his Denver years.

The first quarter of the Houston game is not overly inflating his splits for the first quarter all year. He has been pretty consistenly rated in the mid-90s in the 1st and 4th quarter and in the 70s range in the 2nd and 3rd quarter all year. Starting and finishing strong and playing crappy in the middle does seem to be Losman's hallmark at the moment. I can think of worse modes of operation to have, but I would be very interested in finding out why Losman is so much worse in the middle of games. I suspect it is because the passing game, either by design (from Fairchild) or just in practice (Losman), get's very conservative in the middle of games. I've seen the gunslinger-like play from Losman in the beginning of many games and at the end of many games, but the Minnesota game is the only one that stands out in my mind where Losman was consistently good for the entire game. This is definitely an area of improvement for Losman.