Gary Kubiak and Coaching Scared
I'm stunned, absolutely stunned (your sarcasm meter should start going off about now) by the double standard that exists with complaining about coaching decisions. All last week, I heard about how a decision is judged on what happens thereafter. Well, by that standard, I saw plenty of decisions that were bad enough to merit complaint, but not a single talking head is yelping about it. Okay, so those were not in prominent prime time games. Well, then Gary Kubiak, with one timeout in hand, in position for a deep field goal from the thirty yard line with a kicker who had already missed from the same distance and had

NFL ratings through 11 weeks
On Monday, I posited a way to predict future NFL team performance while ignoring things like points scored, points allowed and win-loss record. Instead, I argued that we should break each team into four parts: passing efficiency, rushing efficiency, defensive passing efficiency and defensive rushing efficiency. Passing efficiency is defined as simply net passing yards per attempt ((passing yards minus sack yards lost), divided by (pass attempts plus sacks)). Rushing efficiency is just yards per carry; the defensive statistics follow the same method. After comparing each team to the league average in each of the fo

Tecmo Super Bowl Game of the Week: Patriots at Saints
Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at PFR! And as usual, thanks are in order to Matt Knobbe and the Tecmo Super Bowl Repository, who present your Tecmo Super Bowl Game of the Week for Week 12, featuring the New England Patriots and the undefeated New Orleans Saints. The highlights: (How did we do this? Matt and the other de

Malcolm Gladwell, google searches, and quarterback draft status versus performance as predictor of f
Last week, a high level cat fight broke out over Malcolm Gladwell's book "What The Dog Saw" when Dr. Steven Pinker wrote a critique in the NY Times. That critique included a reference to one essay in the book, which originally ran last December in the New Yorker, entitled "Most Likely to Succeed: how do we hire when we don't know who's right for the job?" In that essay, Gladwell states, in reference to what he calls the quarterback problem, that "[t]here are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before t

PI Finds: Ravens Don’t Relish the Red Zone
The Baltimore Ravens can't buy a red-zone touchdown these days -- against the Colts on Sunday, they had four chances from inside Indy's 20, and four times they came away with nothing so show for it. This isn't a new development, either; since they scored two red zone TDs against the Patriots on October 4th, they have scored just 5 total TDs from inside the opponent's 20 in their past 6 games: G# Date Opp Result Qtr Type Dist Scorer Passer 6