Thursday, September 24, 2015

Terminal Thursday Thoughts

I've talked about this all week, and this is my last scheduled post of the cycle, so let me start and end with the reminder: if you're reading this blog and want it to continue more or less as I'm doing...
COMMENT ON THIS POST THIS WEEK!

The issue, of course, is that as much as I love doing this blog, as much as crunching numbers to quantify and align teams at their supposed performance levels is fun for me to do...the time and effort it takes to do the thorough job for all of the teams I feel need to be covered each week is more than I have available to me, at least when you combine that with my regular (read: "paying") job, caring for my children, and the deteriorating condition of my health (which has zero to do with this blog). 

In the past, I've had people from Idaho, California, Nevada, North Carolina and Washington who've contacted me about what they've read, and I've known through that kind of anecdotal evidence that we were reaching people, that what we were doing was valued by someone out there. It's not like we need a thousand regular readers, but if we don't have any, which is what the lack of comment feedback suggests, we're just "spitting into the wind", as they say.

If that's not the case, we need you to tell us so.

CONTACT us through the comment section on this or either of the other two posts over the last two days (our regular UPS and DOWNS column, and our PROPHECIES in PHOOTBALL overview of the weekend's procedings (which starts today with the Giants and "Redskins" - an article on line today suggesting the life expectancy of the latter name is close to becoming a finite, definable number). 


Here's a thought we were having ourselves that 538 picked up this morning - there seem to be a bunch of "good teams" in the NFL who have started their season 0-2, usually an indicator that the playoffs are out of reach for most. Consider this list of teams: Seattle, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Houston, Detroit, NJ Giants, and Philadelphia. History suggests that ONLY ONE of those seven teams will make it into the post-season! (I've not "forgotten" New Orleans and Chicago. That was intentional.) The chart below in the 538 article shows that of the 7-8 teams over the last two years to go 0-2, only one made the playoffs each year.To make the postseason, most of the time it'll take at least ten wins - and you only have fourteen games left to do so it. A tall order, given that something's not going well to begin with (or you wouldn't be 0-2!). 

(By the way, my thought is that the best bet for a playoff team out of this group is the winner of the Indy/Houston race, as Jax and the Titans are unlikely to reach more than eight wins apiece.)



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