Recent Comments

HOPE SPRINGS FALLS ETERNAL

On my way to work in the past 2 weeks, I've passed a lot of cars. On a few of those cars have been anOSU, ECU, Pitt, NCState, Miami, Duke, UNC, and loluva stickers. They haven't passed me, I've passed them. That has to be a sign, right?!

I yell Go Hokies at some guy wearing a VT shirt and I might get a Go Hokies back.

Sadly, I'm usually the guy who isn't paying attention and just naturally chuckles a little. Unless I'm in Blacksburg, it's generally something I'm not expecting to hear.

However, it's still a great conversation starter. I've met plenty of good Hokies over such a greeting!

But as others pointed out, that punishes the whole team. Say your QB has to sit out a quarter because he did something stupid and would have otherwise received a 50 dollar fine. Then your star receiver may not have had that three touchdown game that got all the scouts attention and he doesn't get drafted as highly.

I know it's a bit of a stretch but still, why should the whole team be responsible for one person's actions?

There has to be other ways, I guess I'm just not seeing them.

Momma's only ever been wrong once. We forgive her, though. She came around eventually.

What tools do the coaches have left to enforce the player's end of the contract?

Playing time. Each violation comes with x number of plays you miss the next game.

Massey has a number of different procedures to formulate his rating; I don't recall which of the several he's developed he uses for the "official" one. I did a presentation for my Master's degree that discussed a number of different rating schema that took different linear algebra-based approaches to ranking teams; Massey's original system, developed for his undergraduate honors project at Bluefield College, was one of those systems.

The main driver of his simple linear algebra system is score differential - and, as I think someone else pointed out, the fact that VT tends not to overwhelm the scoreboard when facing lesser foes, VT tends to lose out in the "simple" Massey scheme. He has a more complicated method that relies on a way of "scoring" offensive and defensive capabilities, but I didn't review that one for my project.

I don't know that I'd necessarily agree that it's "ironic" that Massey is a VT alum - to my knowledge, he's made pretty big money (for the field) doing this type of athletic analytics, so it would obviously behoove him to maintain a system that is mathematically justifiable rather than engineer it to drive particular preferences.

For what it's worth, though, I did find that the Massey system tended to yield results that were often inconsistent with other systems that didn't rely on score differential. Also, the NCAA actually proscribed the use of score differential, at least up to a certain point, in computer algorithms that underlie the BCS ratings. So Massey's system provides another interesting data point - but its utility may well be limited. It would be interesting to experiment with his ratings by explicitly capping score differential (e.g. winning by 100 is functionally no different than winning by 20) to see what that does to things...

The off season elk get after ya.

Eta: Also getting after you: auto correct wildlife.

I don't think it's a bad idea, just bad PR given today's college football public debates over money.

Points for using IT Crowd and not using "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" Speaking of which, have we tried that with that tv screen? Maybe there's some part of the image missing like "check out UVa's idea for making football a revenue sport!"

Tubs taking one for the team. Thanks, guy.

How's this? Better?