HeIsManpundit(!) clearly has an acute case of blog-envy, which, if you think about it, puts him in a special section of Loserville.
HP's criticism is stunning coming from someone who's two contributions to the football blogosphere are
a) a set of rules that state in great simplicity what every football fan already knows about the Heisman (Qbs and RBs with good numbers from name teams tend to win ... wow!).
b) a long winded theory that sets about to prove that ... sit down ... teams that score more have better offenses, as evidenced by the fact that they score more. Which, by the way, happens because they have better offenses. And you can prove it by looking at the fact that they score more (mostly because of their better offenses).
Brian, I used to think you were the best judge of how to spend your time and energy, but it's now clear to me that "all in all, that time would have been much better spent discussing Michigan hockey, or ways to honor Lloyd Carr's brilliance as head coach."
I used to be a guy who liked to dig into the details and the numbers behind the numbers. But now I see that any attempt to provide more insight into Third Downs is a "wasted effort." I'm now wise enough to realize that "all [I] need to know, really" is the overall third-down conversion percentage.
Finally, I used to think I was anything but dull, but I now realize I was taking pleasure in "something that is really, really boring."
Well, he didn't *necessarily* screw up the axes ... as long as you believe that every hour you waste, starting at about 23 hours or so, will spontaneously generate a graph devoted to football.
Of course if the axis *labels* are the only thing that are reversed, it would take no waste of time at all to generate about 23 football graphs, which is a pretty good deal any way you slice it.
that should read "a certain number of graphs" devoted to football, as there is not a 1-to-1 correlation. My bad.
We're staying on message, Brian. If we don't mention Fulmer's weight, Jeff Bowden's sucking, or drop a Harry Potter reference every week, then the terrorists win.
That sad little fellow seems all kinds of bitter.
It seems ironic that the person complaining about wastes of time has an entire blog devoted to breaking down an arbitrary award that's completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Nevermind the fact that I could probably tell you who should and will win the Heisman despite watching a grand total of 0 complete non-Michigan football games last year.
I'm not sure the Heismanpundit axes are screwed up because which is the independent variable in that equation? Sort of a chicken/egg thing; do wasted hours cause graphs or graphs cause wasted hours? Even if you think he has it reversed, he could claim to be an economist, they were always screwing me up with independent variables as the Y axis. It looks like he did at least understand the law of diminishing returns as additional hours yield fewer graphs way out to the right.
As for your Hot Blog Groupies, the image search on Google is still bone dry right now. You could link to that to show that there is no real hard evidence for the existence of such a creature.
The Paul Davis = Eeyore image is perfect. Did he cry so much in his youth that his face froze in that expression?
I can't help but take another shot... based on his post, HP missed the entire point of the analysis. Yes, HP, in the aggregate, a team's chance of making a first down is a non-linear function of how close they are to the marker. No shit. What this analysis provides is a way to compare a team to "what is expected." A variation from the average represents a particular weakness or strength of the team in question. Brian, perhaps if you normalized the graph so that the average is represented by a value of 1, he would get it.(?)
...nevermind.
HP senses a challenge to his status as silverback of the college football jungle. He wants all that hot simian ass to himself.
MRG -
HP is not, nor has he ever been a silverback. He would have had to win at least one fight to earn that title.
Litte bit late to the party. Thanks for doing this Brian. Linked here:
http://www.bruinsnation.com/stor...2/17/163417/
688
this is exactly what HP wants... he's just doing the wannabe sports journalist thing where he says something stupid just to get people pissed off at him. If people are pissed, then it proves that enough people think his opinion is relevant enough to get pissed about it.
Everyone should just ignore him. He is not relevant. Devoting time towards belittling him only serves to ultimately dignify him as worthy of any sort of response.
Either that, or send him emails saying "I hope somebody in your family dies soon" in your best "message to harry manback" voice.
I know the "UM basketball = MSU football" thing is a convenient comparison for people to haul out every so often but I just don't buy any of it.
UM basketball is MUCH better relative to MSU football than MSU basketball is to UM football.
I concede that if the "argument" is restricted to just the past 5-7 years, it has some merit.
But the analogy is innacurate through about '97-'98, and I don't see it working in the future.
It's been a (relatively) dark era.
MS Paint is serious business.
It's fun watching the joker "He is Man(?!) pundit" getting more insane every minute..His latest quote
"Everyone IS wrong on this one and I am right. "
More love to Texas for beating USC!
First time I've been over to heismanpundit in a long time, and wow, I knew he had the "pointless talking head" act down, but he's also a sore loser.
He actually wrote up a blog entry criticizing Vince Young for his White House wardbrobe (how's that figure on the "hours wasted" chart?) and followed that up with one about how he wasn't impressed with Jevan Snead.
Maybe we should cut the guy a break. His two pillars in cfb are the Gang of Six and the supremacy of USC and both fell down this year.
What did Brian do to piss him off anyways?
He is Manpundit=Mark May (USC sycophant and a newskool analyst i.e shoot shit all the time) case closed genlteman.
Now how about that 3-4/4-3 defense stuff.....
Joe,
Brian was one of the most vocal early critics of his "Gang of Six" theory. Basically called HP out for slamming the media's shallow analysis and then turning around with even shallower analysis.
You say that "without Harris playing well we're screwed," but Dion actually went 1-12 in the first meeting. Replace "Harris" with "Horton," and I think you've got it.
As for the UM basketball/MSU football analogy, know this: UM leads the all-time series in hoops, 90-68--and that's AFTER having recently lost 12 of 13.
I didn't go over to that guy's website (and I won't), but that graph did give me a pretty good laugh! Did he say some really mean things on his blog, or what? If not, you guys need to lighten the fuck up. It was FUNNY. And although the geeky criticism of him "geeting his axes wrong" made me cringe, even Brian conceded (sort of) that it was funny. In the grand scheme of things, college football is a game played by kids with an oblong, somewhat slippery orb. Let's not struggle to turn this great, fairly unpredictable sport into a mathematic equation. It can't be done. Move on.
UM CAUP:
Read Moneyball.
Anon,
That's baseball, not football. Yeah, yeah, the whole "round ball, round bat" thing, but there are nowhere NEAR the whacky variables invloved in baseball as their is in football. To wit:
People colliding with other people creates a level of variation that baseball cannot begin to approach. Compared to football, baseball is conducted in a laboratory environment where the pitcher, batter, and fielders are all isolated in a specific spot on the field to conduct their given task. At that point, it is just a matter of skill and execution. Now let's put opposing players trying to tackle the pitcher and batter (and fielders too!)and see what kind of additional variations are created. Millions. Billions.
Football is pure chaos compared to baseball. The only thing a bunch of graphs can do is help visual-learners see what already occured.
Bill Belichick is considered a defensive genius. In the 2005 playoffs, did he compile an impressive collection of graphs to determine how to attack the vaunted Colts offense? No. His brilliant solution was "hit 'em, hit 'em again, and hit 'em harder." Guess what. It worked.
UM CAUP
Bad example. Belichick puts faith in these models and statistical analyses. He's actually called up statisticians who did NFL analysis and spoken to them at length about their work and what it means.
Wait, what Belichick did last season (04) was something that just cannot be attributed to "hitting people in the mouth". Yes he did that, but the game planning and schemes that were involved to achieve what he wanted were something unique and were a product of considerable time spent watching game film and studiying tendencies of the opponents.
Example: the deep ball to Branch for a 60 yard score against the Steelers was all scouting, baiting Polamalu and getting a slower Townsend to single cover a faster Branch. All this was run off a max protect 2 receiver set.
Point is schemes play a large part in football.
No question, schemes are vital to successful football game-planning. Belichick pours over stats and film that expose tendencies. I doubt he cares to examine a graph that charts a team's overall succes rate for 3rd and long. However, I will concede that it was a bad example to make my point.
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