Pitt19802
2d ago
Yeah, it seems if anything so far the NIL has increased the parity in the sport, which has been nice, parity is one thing college football hasn't historically always done all that well.
As to the academic logistics of being a student athlete, I have no firsthand knowledge, but I'd be curious to know what ratio of online classes athletes sign up for these days.
That was barely a thing when I went to school, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the flexibility some online classes provide are fairly essential lynchpins of making the logistics of being a student athlete these days work. I suspect there are a fair number of athletes who are almost never in physical classes. Especially sports like basketball with middle of the week travel (especially in conferences with across the country schedules).
Pitt19802
2d ago
Update to Diego Pavia situation from https://www.themotte.org/post/1250/weekly-nfl-thread-week-11/267828?context=8#context
"A federal judge in Tennessee granted an injunction Wednesday that allows Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia to pursue another year of eligibility and could represent another significant blow to the NCAA's ability to enforce its own rules.
Pavia sued the NCAA in November, claiming the organization's rule that counts a player's time in junior college toward his overall years of NCAA eligibility is a violation of antitrust law that was unfairly limiting his ability to make money from his name, image and likeness.
Judge William Campbell's decision Wednesday is not a final ruling on the case, but it prevents the NCAA from keeping Pavia out of college football until the case is resolved."
Was listening to a podcast between Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman yesterday - https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2024/11/27/a-holiday-check-in-on-anything-and-everything-with-chuck-klosterman
Kosterman remarked that despite all the structural changes to college sports over the last couple of years, as best he could tell, it hadn't affected the popularity of college sports as he could see it.
His thesis was that college sports fans ultimately don't care about the meta structure of the sport.
I'm not totally sure those guys have their pulse on the exact nature of college sports fandom.
That said, I probably typify their point, I'm mostly neutral to negative on most of the changes that have happened over the past 10-20 years. I'm not especially negative towards players getting paid (although I don't feel like it's a matter of basic justice the way some people seem to feel), I am quite negative towards the conference realignment, playoffs, unlimited transferring, and a number of other changes.
Yet, I still follow it pretty closely, none of those changes have affected that.
I think this might be a thing where its hard to see the damage these changes do. You have a bunch of fans who are just in the habit of consuming your product, you can make a bunch of changes without effecting those habits.
I do wonder if those changes effect the habit formation of new consumers those. I got into it when my dad took me to a bunch of college games when I was a kid. As it turns out, I only have daughters, for the most part, I don't feel especially motivated to turn them into football fans. Occasionally we'll watch a game together, my younger daughter isn't interested at all, my older daughter will occasionally humor me be acting interested. But I would say that sports fandom is a decidedly non-central part of our relationship, somewhat different from me and my dad in the way that it was a big part of our relationship.
Pitt19802
19d ago
"Did prediction markets and other indicators that called the race correctly just get lucky?"
Is beyond the paywall, if anyone happens to have access beyond the paywall and is willing to C+P ....
(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack. I would absolutely sign up for something like that. Signing up for 10 different substacks for the sake of reading the 1 or 2 articles a month that interest me .... not so much).
Pitt19802
25d ago
The Raiders and Giants were bad with Barkley and Jacobs, they're still bad without them.
"The flipside of this is a good blocking and offensive team that has a bad RB who is carried by his environment. Najee Harris maybe? Not a lot of examples come to mind."
'bad RB' is sort of an odd category, the list of low resource acquires, considerable success, and then replaced by another guy with considerable success, just within the various branches of the Shanahan coaching tree is long (start with Terrell Davis), (even this year the 49ers have gotten 700 yards at 5.1 yards a carry out of Jordan Mason), and fairly central to skeptical valuation of RBs.
Pitt19802
25d ago
How much of Barkley success do you want to give him vs his situation?
Between him and McCaffrey...
I mean, it's a team sport, everyone looks better when give them better teammates.
Both those guys did a lot of good work on not particularly good teams, stick them on a strong team.
idk, both are fun guys to watch when they get it going, I'm glad they both found good situations.
I'm not sure it changes the narrative around how to value RBs as much as people might suggest. (as much crap as the Giants are getting for it, I still think that was a fairly reasonable decision).
Pitt19802
1mo ago
A federal judge on Tuesday denied Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia's request for a temporary restraining order that would grant him another year of eligibility https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/42367444/vanderbilt-qb-diego-pavia-denied-tro-request-added-eligibility
Pitt19802
1mo ago
In the week 7 version of this thread Rov_Scam had a long effort post about college football https://www.themotte.org/post/1209/weekly-nfl-thread-week-7/259169?context=8#context
Towards the end of his thread he made a prediction that at some point the traditional NCAA eligibility limits of playing 4 years out of 5 years at school would come into question.
Well, 4 weeks later, we have movement on that.
Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia has sued the NCAA over it’s eligibility limitations.
So, it appears the basis of the lawsuit centers around the distinction between how years at a prep school and years at a junior college are counted.
Prep school years are basically counted as extra high school years, and don’t count against eligibility, junior college years are counted as college years, and do count against eligibility.
Pavia spent 2 years at New Mexico Military Institute, a junior college.
(Oddly, NMMI occasionally has prep schools on the schedule in 2018 and 2019 they played against Air Force Prep https://www.nmmiathletics.com/sports/fball/2019-20/schedule though the years I checked they never had more than 1 game against a prep school)
Anyway, as it stands now, it appears that this represents a fairly limited challenge to the eligibility structure, he doesn’t appear to be arguing that he should have open ended eligibility.
That said, the language the espn article quoted from the lawsuit, it’s not obvious why any of those arguments shouldn’t apply to open ended eligibility.
I’ll quote at some length:
“ "The JUCO Eligibility Limitation Bylaws neither promote competition nor benefit college athletes with respect to their impact on persons who attend junior colleges before transferring to NCAA schools," the lawsuit says. "These rules stifle the competition in the labor market for NCAA Division I football players, harming college athletes and degrading the quality of Division I football consumed by the public.
"These harms are contrary to Defendant's stated mission of promoting the well-being of college athletes and are the very ills federal antitrust law seeks to remedy. Pavia, and other former JUCO football players who are harmed by this illegal restraint, have a small window of time to compete in Division I football."
The lawsuit argues that the NCAA and its member institutions "have entered an illegal agreement to restrain and suppress competition" and are violating the federal Sherman Act.
The lawsuit says junior college transfers face eligibility restrictions that "are not placed on athletes who choose to delay entry to a Division I NCAA college to attend prep school, serve in the military, or even to compete professionally in another sport."
…
"Because Pavia cannot relive his short college career, the harm inflicted by the JUCO Eligibility Limitations Bylaws is irreparable and ongoing, and temporary and preliminary injunctive relief is necessary," the lawsuit says. "Pavia brings this action to put a stop to the unjustified anticompetitive restriction on universities who seek to compete for college athletes, and to restore freedom of economic opportunity for himself and other college football players."
—————-
If you’ve watched Ted Lasso, Welcome to Wrexham makes for an interesting companion piece.
If you’re not familiar with the premise Hollywood actors buy a lower level soccer club. And then it follows their process of trying to get promoted up the various levels of UK soccer.
There are a lot of interesting things going on with the show, but of the things that stood lower level UK soccer is stand alone from the highest level of UK soccer in a way that struck me as unusual for American sports.
What I mean by that is the Wrexham is decidedly not a developmental set up. Of the players they follow, several of them are in their mid 30s, really good player in the lower levels is sort of where they’re going to top out in their careers, one goalie they follow was a prominent Premier League player, who they bring in for 1 last go around at the very end of his career.
We don’t really have that here, in baseball if you’re still hanging around the minors as a 30 year old, it’s a matter of time before you’re put out to pasture in order to open up a spot for a younger prospect, even if you’re on of the better players at that level. The lower level is subservient to the higher level (that’s basically the premise of Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham).
Anyway, it seems unlikely that Diego Pavia will ever be a great NFL prospect, he probably could be a quite good 32 year old college QB, he probably won’t get that opportunity.
The crumbling away of the NCAA institutional rule making ability seems likely to continue.
The ability to make falsifiable predictions is how we know we understand things about the world we live in.
Not understanding the world we live in has real consequences.
I’m arguing for more discourse around predictions, in response to your argument for less discourse around predictions.
I suspect we agree that the discourse could be much better than it actually is.
TLDR, I actually like Nate Silver’s schtick quite a bit, and wish we had more people trying to do it across more areas of interest.
Yeah, I think I'll go strongly the other direction on this.
"Terry Bradshaw may predict the Browns to beat the Bengals, but at a certain time we'll know the winner and if the Bengals win the sun will rise the next morning and his being wrong about it will have no effect on anything."
The problem is, this isn't true at all. It's not true in football, it's not true politics, it's not true across many dimensions of life. And the world we live in is worse off for it.
Terry Bradshaw is one guy out of many many people giving opinions, I wouldn't say that his opinion alone is the basis that people's futures ride on, but when Brandon Staley goes for it on 4th down, and Terry Bradshaw says that he's the reason the Chargers lost (everytime that happens, a guys livelihood is on the line), when the Rams lose a game and Terry Bradshaw says the Jared Goff is the reason why they lost (a guys livelihood is on the line). (I don't know if Bradshaw actually had those particular take, I made them up as example, though I do remember various talking heads making them, just not which particular talking head).
Every little statement like this affects public perception, and public perception affects reality. We humans are highly susceptible to group think.
The presumption is that that the guy on TV knows what he's talking about, knows the factors that goes into whether the Browns have what it takes to beat the Bengals [1], I agree that for the most part no one really cares, I'm saying that we should, if in reality, these guys are actually just full of shit constantly. That's actually extremely useful information.
This obviously applies to politics as well, no matter what happens on Tues, the Wednesday morning QBs will come out, it's extremely useful to understand that most of them are full of shit.
[1] Somewhat hilariously, these picks typically aren't even against the spread, to the degree that these guys can't even figure out to just pick the obvious favorites... truly wasting all of our time.
Pitt19802
1mo ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rv0t_S7bl0I&pp=ygUJcWIgc2Nob29s
Interesting breakdown of a similar play by the Colts defended differently by the Texans.
At 27:12
Pitt19802
1mo ago
Deserves some credit for scrambling around long enough to buy time for everyone to get down there, but yeah, once it left his hand ....
Good to be lucky.
Yeah, I agreed with all that (although I would give the same advice to Tomlin or Belichek) (I didn't actually start watching until the coverage flipped over for the last couple of plays)
So did you startle your relative when it happened?
It was one of those games that they changed over to at the end where I was, I was kind of half watching while washing the dishes while my daughters were on their devices.
It definitely got an involuntary "Whoa!!!" out of me that startled my daughters lol
https://x.com/joe_abdo/status/1850688286022406264
Lets pretend your Bears head coach Matt Eberflus. How should you handle Tyrique Stevenson?
For some background, he's a second year player, was a 2nd round pick a year ago (so still on a rookie contract).
He's a starter now (with fairly middle of the road PFF grades), (so his value relative to his contract is pretty high).
He's already expressed contrition on social media - "To Chicago and teammates my apologies for lack of awareness and focus .... The game ain't over until zeros hit the clock. Can't take anything for granted. Notes taken, improvement will happen. #Beardown" https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/42043231/tyrique-stevenson-taunts-commanders-fans-seconds-bears-lose-hail-mary-td
The twitter comments I read last night indicated that he needed to be cut immediately to send a message to everyone else on the team.
I think this is a space that understands that if twitter comment declare one thing, the wise man should probably do the opposite.
Indulge me the opportunity to knock down the straw man for a second.
I think if Eberflus is smart, he'll do the opposite, he won't publicly blast him, he won't privately blast him in front of the rest of the team either.
I think this is one of those deals where you either destroy your credibility by searching for scapegoats, or build a lot of trust by conspicuously not calling out obviously available scapegoats.
To the media - "I know Tyrique is really embarrassed by what he put on tape there, its obviously not what we want to be doing, and its a brutal way for that to end, its hurts for all of us, hurts for me, hurts for Tyrique, hurts for every guy in the locker room who put in the work to get a W. It was 1 play though, in a game with 120 (or whatever the actual number is) plays. Those 119 other plays were also opportunities to make the plays we needed to get the W. Tyrique learned a hard lesson in a hard way, he'll get better from this. Everyone else in that locker room will get better from it as well"
To the team - (in a calm none yelling voice) "Hey guys, Tyrique made a mistake there, it on you guys to learn from what he did, this a good reminder that we're out there in front of 70,000 fans with smartphone every second, everything you do is something that will be captured. It only take a second to put something on tape the will define you to people who don't pay attention to each play. The margins for winning and losing are small, let's all be better from this".
At least that's how I would advise handling it, it'll be interesting to see how Eberflus actually handles it.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
This is the wrong way to figure this out, but....
On August 30, 2016, Gaetz won the Republican primary with 35.7 percent of the vote to Greg Evers's 21.5 percent and Cris Dosev's 20.6 percent, along with five other candidates.[37] This virtually assured Gaetz of victory in the general election; with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+22, the 1st is Florida's most Republican district, and one of the most Republican in the nation.
In the November 8 general election, Gaetz defeated Democratic nominee Steven Specht with 69 percent of the vote.[38] He is only the seventh person to represent this district since 1933 (the district was numbered the 3rd before 1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz#U.S._House_of_Representatives
Just for spit balling, let say he keeps 35.7 % of the republican vote as a 3rd party candidate
.357 x .69 = .246 for Gaetz .643 x .69 = .444 for Republican Gaetz replacement 1 - .69 = .31 for Democratic Replacement
That looks like they should threaten to kick him out
running the numbers if he keeps 50% of the Republican vote
.5 x .69 = .345 for Gaetz and his Republican replacement .31 for his Democratic replacement
That looks like risking turning a safe district blue
I suspect the people whose careers are riding on these decisions, can get better data to run the math on if they want it
Pitt19802
1yr ago
How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?
It's not especially different, that's it hypocritical though, doesn't make it bad advice.
Is it prudish? Yeah, it probably is.
We (both sexes) desperately need to rediscover our prudence though.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
My go to parenting recommendation is the book 'How to Talk so Kids will Listen, and How to Listen so Kids will Talk"
Perhaps more in tune for once you've figured out how to keep them alive for a year or so ...
Beyond that, one of the things that make humans distinctive in the animal kingdom is how adaptable to different environments we are. Your kid is only here because their ancestors figured out how to adapt and survive famines, wars, ice ages, economic collapses (at least well enough to keep the line going) .... In the grand scheme of things any particular decision you make about a parenting gadgets or sleeping techniques, the kid will probably survive.
Try different stuff, figure out what works for your family.
One thing that worked for us, my wife breastfed for the better part of a year or so, about a month in, she read that if you give the baby a bottle of formula at bedtime, kid digests formula slower than breast milk, less likely to be hungry and wake up in the middle of the night.
Bedtime was the main time we gave the kid formula, but worked like a charm for getting the kid to sleep through the night, which put us in considerably saner moods.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
"Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people."
I'm going to push back on this as a mis-recollection of the actual facts.
Trump's rise badly damaged Silver's credibility, but its wasn't Trump's general election win, it was his GOP nomination.
Examples that aged poorly:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-winning-the-polls-and-losing-the-nomination/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/
To his credit, Silver has largely fessed up to screwing this up:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/
Another article delving into the details of this:
All in all, I'm a Silver fan, in the grand scheme of things, I think he does a pretty good job, but the Trump nomination screw up showed that he's not immune to certain biases.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
Which groups do you have in mind here? Tammany Hall era Irish immigrants? That process took the better part of 100 years.
Your responses in this thread have been better than I deserve, thank you.
You've quite perceptively picked up that we likely have vastly different filter bubbles. You're correct that I don't live in a large city (exurb of a medium size city probably most accurately describes it). My brother, sister, sister in law and her husband all live in places that would meet any definition of large multicultural cities, and I talk and visit them all fairly regularly, so I don't think I'm totally oblivious to what at least some people's lives are like in large multicultural cities.
My exposure to trans people mostly come through 2 sources.
First, when my sister got married, her husband already had an 8 year old daughter. My new niece had a variety mental health problems, many of which she might have inherited from her biological mother who also had a variety of mental health problems. At one put she started cutting herself, there were multiple episodes where she threatened to kill herself. These episodes predate her announcing that she was transgender when she was 12.
Zhe is 15 now, and has decided that zhe is non-binary now, so I'll try to switch over to those pronouns the rest of the way.
What to make of this episode? Quite frankly, I'm hesitant to make it too much about trans people.
Not sure if you've read Scott Alexander's review of Crazy Like Us https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
In the parlance of that review, zhe had a significant amount of psychic stress, it was going to find an outlet in some manner or another.
That said, I'm unimpressed with our culture that gender confusion has become the psychic stress release valve for people such as zer.
Fwiw, zhe growing up in a large multicultural city doesn't seem disconnected from this being the valve zer psychic stress went to. The large multicultural city zhe has grown up in has a political culture where identifying as trans changes how therapists and teacher treat you in relation to your parents.
Life is confusing and full of psychic distress, for all of us, we all want validation. If you give people validation for something, people desperate for validation will be attracted to it.
Second, while physically I might be a hobbit tucked away in the shire, I'm a citizen of the internet.
I realize this sounds ridiculous.
The internet is where we are all on our worst behavior, I know all sorts of seemingly normal irl people who seem nuts when they start outputting on a keyboard.
That said, in the sea of crazy that is norm of internet interactions.
It is a distinct impression that I have that the trans community interacts in a uniquely deranged manner.
I don't have any scientific cites for you, it's just an impression I have come to.
If you imagine a community as a giant bell curve, with their median members as the big middle, their most gracious members on one end of the spectrum, their least gracious members on the other end of the spectrum.
I hope we can agree, that while there might be some gracious Trump supporters online, as a giant bell curve, the fat part in the middle of their bell curve is at a different spot than Biden supporters online.
If we can imagine different communities like that, it's my impression that the trans community is distinct from nearly any other community.
Such that the assertion that your observable ratio of trans people enjoying their lives is 50-5 kind of blows my mind.
That said, that 'there are reports that the ratio of trans people enjoying their lives off the internet is 50-5', is probably a good update on my mental model of the universe.
Thank you, I appreciate your responses in this thread, they are a useful addition to my sense-making of the universe.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
I'm not of the belief that support for abnormal people is the motivation for liberal promotion of transgender issues.
I'm of the belief that liberal's motivation is status competition with conservatives, transgendered people are just a prop liberals use towards that ends.
I'm also not of the belief that the promotion liberals engage in should count as support.
I'm largely of the belief that transgenderism is self-destruction, similar to cutting, or suicide attempts.
People who are attracted to it need empathetic treatment, not celebration.
In large part I'm quite unimpressed with the approach that most conservatives take, their approach is genuinely unhelpful. But I largely perceive them as flailing wildly at a response to a game that liberals largely initiated.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
My uncharitable mental model of it is that liberals ran out of ways to paint conservatives as bigots.
Its important to the liberal worldview that they're the tolerant ones, and conservatives are the intolerant ones.
For a long time this was not a problem, because conservative had fairly negative views around gays, and to a lesser but still real extent non-martial sex.
Liberals won around those topics, the standard issue conservative now knows they're supposed to be respectful toward gays, and for the most part, they publicly at least, largely are.
They can be a little freer about complaining about non-martial sex, but they're very little they can actually do.
Liberals can't declare victory and go home though, its a forever culture war, so they need to find something that conservatives aren't yet tolerant of, so trans issues it is.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
I suspect he hasn't, if the hat was passed around, are you putting money into it?
I don't think most people who haven't been exposed to public criticism have a good sense for how they would respond to it if they were.
I suspect most people would react in 1 of 2 ways.
-
Find it extremely unpleasant and basically avoid any exposure to it again, ie shut up and go away (to some degree, this is how SA has handled it)
-
Find it extremely unpleasant and dismiss as invalid out of hand, in a way that makes it difficult to make any improvement, (I suspect this is how EY has largely handled it).
The people who can expose themselves to it, keep coming back for more, but stay open to improvement.
That's actually a pretty rare psychological skill set.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
I hope EY lurks here, or maybe someone close to him does.
I don't know EY at all, but if you actually want to impute some knowledge to him, posting it on a forum he may or may not read, or possibly an associate may or may not read ....
Probably isn't an effective strategy.
While he has some notoriety, he doesn't seem like a particularly difficult person to reach.
That said, "hey, in this interview, you sucked", probably won't get you the desired effect you're hoping for.
Some sort of non-public communication - "hey, I watched this interview you did, its seemed like a succinct 'elevator pitch' of your position might have helped it go better, I've watched/listened/read alot of your (material/stuff/whatever), here is an elevator pitch that I think communicates your position, if it would be helpful, you're free to use it, riff off of it, and change it how you see fit. It meant to help, be well"
might get you closer to the desired effect you're hoping for.
Being good at media appearances is a tough deal, some people spend a lot of money on media training, and still aren't very good at it.
Bit of googling came up with this article about athletes and online classes - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2019/12/23/online-classes-keep-football-players-out-of-academic-fray/40878105/
"Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow is a hero on LSU's Baton Rouge campus, but he hasn't seen much of it because he took graduate courses online. Justin Fields rarely has to step inside an Ohio State classroom building because he also does most of his school work online to accommodate his grueling football schedule.
...
Of the 46 Power Five conference schools that responded to an AP survey, 27 have no limits on how many online courses athletes may take. A dozen others have few online course offerings or limit how many athletes may take. Just six have no online offerings or prohibit athletes from taking them, including private schools Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Southern California, Texas Christian and Notre Dame. Michigan is the only public school among the Power Five conferences that doesn't offer online learning."
(Article is pre-Covid)
I suspect they still spend a lot of time with the academic support tutors, especially the younger athletes.
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