Old guy

Moytoy this thing about "picking some weird hills to die on" is something I never heard before. Care to expand a bit on the meaning of the phrase? This is a serious question, I am interested.

Thank you very much Hoosier Pal, I do want to see it. Appreciate your kindness in posting this link. Agree

Let's choose who to place the blame upon. My choice is fouls, both French and Hankton got 5 fouls and left the game and Goodwin and Thatch had 4 fouls each at the end. Let's look at reality here. We are playing or trying to play thug ball, move fast, and pester the opposition constantly. We are likely to make a lot of fouls in the process. As our fouls mount in the first line players, we will have a ready made spot for some of the others to play. If these additional players carrying the burden could become Bell and Hargrove (after they are ready), we are going to be using our depth in a very good fashion. I really see a play consisting of all out close defense and opportunistic offense with many fouls and substitutions from a very deep bench as the season progresses. This is just my imagination talking, I may well be far from what Ford will do.

Deleted, double posting

Thank you cheeseman, and a good thing it was they woke up.

By what I have read, there was one point in the game that Valpo tied or came near a tie with about 5 minutes left in the game. I was not there and do not know how this was done, but team blue went back and built their lead back to 11 pts. before the end.

Remember the old saying SLU 72, "the bigger they are the harder they fall." We will have a good chance to bring them down.

That settles it, we need Bell to play because it is the only way he will progress, we need Hargrove to play because he may very well become our best player. So, we need to go to a 12 man rotation.

You forget that a massive social experiment, which ultimately failed after 60+ years, was carried out by the Soviet Union. This experiment used scientific and expert opinions to set centralized rules for economic development and consumption. It ultimately went bankrupt and failed. Computers might improve the performance rating you might wish to assign the Soviet Union's social experiment, they might last longer than the Soviet Union did if they were given the task of running the world. However ultimately they would fail, probably because of bankruptcy. You see the best these things can do, even juiced by AI, is to model the future and then manage the model. They will fail in the attempt, because all math based and statistical based models are flawed.

Thank you for the information and the visuals Hoosier Pal.

I will say this now for the record and you can reference later on in the season. I will not be surprised if the Bills end this year in A territory, how high can they go I have no idea. I think the limit of the move allowed by the system to 2 steps up or down is basically placing a limit of 2 std deviations up or down. This, of course, and provided a normal distribution of all possible outcomes (which is not necessarily always the case) fully encompasses 95% of all possible outcomes. This is basic statistics after all. I mention this because this leaves 5% of all possible outcomes going outside the limits both up or down. Again this assumes a normal distribution of all outcomes. However, as it happens in the market, the skew of the distribution curve does not necessarily follow the "normal" distribution. In truth a normal distribution curve is just one specific case in the family of distribution curves. Amplitudes, skew and kurtosis may vary. What I mean to say is that sports events have enormous numbers of not easily controllable variables involved. These will affect the shape and location of the overall distribution curve for any particular year. The change does not have to be marked, but it will be there. So, what I would be interested in is the 5% of all outcomes left out of the curve by the 2 std deviation limit. Can we go farther up or down than the 2 std deviation limit? My answer is yes, although doing this would not be a common event and require a special set of circumstances. Therefore allow me my own fantasies about the Bills ending the season as an A team (-, +, or just flat A) by the end of the year. I mentioned the market earlier in this post. Take the SP 500 as an example. When the SP gains money for a year, the distribution curve skews to the right with the amplitude and kurtosis remaining the same. When the SP loses money for a year, the distribution curve skews left with the amplitude and kurtosis remaining the same. This will work exactly the same way with your own portfolio. But now, here comes the interesting part. Depending upon the degree of diversification of your portfolio, you will approach the amplitude and kurtosis of the SP distribution curve as the degree of diversification of the portfolio increases. On the other hand if you decide to develop a non diversified, concentrated portfolio, the distribution curve for the year will be a lot flatter (less amplitude) than the SP's, and the degree of kurtosis will change to give a much wider distribution curve with much larger tails both up or down. You may not have heard this ever before, but it is the way it actually works for the market in the real world. Modern portfolio theory aims to highly diversify portfolios according to a complex set of rules, creating portfolios with characteristics approaching the SP's. This will make your portfolio approach, but never exceed, the performance of the SP. On the other hand, if you concentrate instead of diversify your portfolio you will be playing for longer tails in its distribution curve, which will allow greater gains or greater losses than the SP's for any given year. Most of you may find this pretty boring but I find it fascinating, both as it applies to the market and as it may well apply to sports. A winning team will see its performance distribution curve skewing to the right, a losing team will skew to the left. Again, in order to beat the system, a team has to promote changes that will give a distribution curve of performance results with long, fat tails. I happen to think this is what is likely to happen with the Bills this year, allowing us to exceed the 2 sd limit of your model and get our performance level into the 5% tail area of the distribution curve.

I guess there was no divine assistance provided when EWU whupped the Portland Bible College 107 - 25. Yes, we should win this one, and I hope your estimate of a 13 pt. lead is far too low. I am pretty sure we are not yet close to reaching our potential for this year. I think we have a fair distance to go before we reach this level. I have no doubt we will be ranked in the top 100s (to say the least) by the time the ooc is over.

Have patience with Hargrove. When he figures out his role and how to do things within Ford's system, his entrance into active play will be devastating to the opposition, believe me there. I really like this kid and his potential, he will NOT disappoint, he is solid as a rock.

@Sheltiedave Take insults thrown your way from the point of view of who is insulting you. Henry B should be ignored and left alone. Pay no attention to him.

I have seen the refs acting like this against SLU countless times over the years. I have seriously wondered if they are being incentivized to do this, or if they just hold some kind of obscure grudge against SLU.