Jake

QUOTE (bmags @ Nov 12, 2014 -> 05:02 PM) Is that the phrase? I always that it was "I'll be damned" QUOTE (Rowand44 @ Nov 12, 2014 -> 05:06 PM) Gage has his own language. LOOOOOOOOL He writes like a CPA QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Nov 14, 2014 -> 09:53 AM) You're being really selective with statistics to make him look bad. Why didn't you include some of these statistics? -- 6th cheapest defense in the league saves the Bears money so it can afford some weapons for Cutler, who has none -- #1 ranked practice defense in NFL for two years in a row -- Defense broke Aaron Rodgers' clavicle more times than any other defense in NFL history Keep pushing your agenda FWIW, that season where JAX had the 4th-ranked defense was the first season in which Mel Tucker was calling plays. Before that, Del Rio was doing the play calling.

See, the thing is, Briggs has still played well. That's why there hasn't been much huffing and puffing at this point. The problem is that he is clearly sabotaging the unity and leadership of the defense. Releasing him would be a bold move that I could get behind, though - especially since we are all but eliminated from playoff contention.

When I played HS basketball, we quit buying Nikes. We couldn't get a pair that cost ~$150 at group pricing to last an entire season for around a quarter of the team. They did stuff like Manu's, though a bit more gradual

The circumstances of Kenny's "promotion" - that is, his stated desire to be less involved in day-to-day management - leads me to believe his role isn't comparable to Epstein/Friedman. I think he has a lot of sway, but Hahn is the GM. My guess is that when push comes to shove, which may never occur, KW defers to Hahn (even if he might technically possess some sort of veto power).

DeRozan 3/17 against Jimmy/Bulls D

Derrick can't take days off for his sore ankles, that would make him a giant p**** that doesn't care about winning! You saw him walking, he should be playing!

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Nov 13, 2014 -> 11:37 AM) Why do they always come out and say "alcohol wasnt involved" right away, only to have that proven wrong shortly afterwards? They did the same thing with Rob Bironas, its just weird. I'm guessing there is some sort of clerical explanation, but I'd rather them be wrong that way than the other way. You'd just assume not slander the dead, knowing that many people will never see the correction. Plus, it feeds the conspiracy theorists when the story is revised to sound not as bad rather than the other way around

Derrick wishes not to bring more catastrophic injuries upon himself by pushing it when dealing with minor injuries in the first week of the season, everyone loses their minds

Yeah, I'll go ahead and celebrate even less salary flexibility for the Tigs

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Nov 11, 2014 -> 04:22 PM) I think it has a lot more to do with the league figuring Trestman and this offense out. It is entirely too simple and too predictable and opposing defenses know exactly what is coming. I think a lot of our offensive problems are scheme. I also think Jay is just not cut out to be an elite QB but this scheme doesn't exactly do him favors. It essentially plays up his weaknesses and when you watch our offense more and more you see that the vast majority of the plays are set from the start (on where ball is going, etc). That doesn't play well into the strength of a QB who can buy time and make big plays with his feet and arm. Right now we really don't allow our offense to break down opposition defenses. We also really miss having a receiver who has speed who can create seperation and stretch the seams. Jay and his fumbles are to be frank, probably his biggest problem. His picks really haven't been that bad, especially when you adjust for some of those throws where the wideouts were awful. This stuff is a total team collapse though but the biggest reason I want Trestman out (in addition to his inability to be an overall leader of this team) is the fact that we seem to be getting pantsed on our offensive scheme and everyone appears to know what is coming, etc. That is an awful sign when you are supposed to be an offensive guru. Having plays that don't require reads is playing to Jay's strength (or, put better, playing away from his weaknesses). He has the huge limitation of constantly locking onto a receiver pre-snap and not knowing how to find anyone else. If a scheme is giving him a clearer pre-snap read, it's probably better.

I don't hate Hillary, but she's toward the bottom of the list of Dems that may or may not be contemplating a presidential run. What she is though is tough, experienced, and probably the most thoroughly vetted candidate to ever run. I don't expect any big surprises or mistakes. I do wonder if Dem voters, particularly the sort that vote in primaries, may be tired of her by then. The left has been growing more and more worried about her whole not-really-being-all-that-much-of-a-leftist thing. They were worried about that with Obama too, though, and he still won - of course, I don't think people knew that much about where he fit into the spectrum when he was getting elected.

I still haven't heard/can't come up with a great explanation for why the offense has regressed so drastically since last season. McCown's run certainly propped up the season numbers to an extent, but that was only ~6 games. Cutler played much better than he has this year. The main change is that Cutler got a contract - do you think that explains it?

And - triple post - Pau looked loads better last night. I think Thibs might make a decent defender out of him yet. Offensively, he's good regardless. I love that he can make you pay when Rose drives but you can also dump it to him late in the shot clock and he can back somebody down and make his own post move.

Also, at some point, Thibs might have to think about how he can get Rose and Brooks on the floor at the same time. You can't always do that, particularly due to their defense, but he ought to look for matchups that allow us to get Brooks out there without coming at a direct expense to Rose.

One thing I think we can say for sure is that this isn't the same "meh" return we appeared to be getting from Rose last season. It's really impressive at how relatively little rust he has when he was so off last year. You can tell he really put the work in to get back to form.

I honestly don't think it's a bad move. Cynical, yes, but he just needs to get his troops aligned against net neutrality. Most people don't know anything about it and won't, so if he can be the first to go out there and say it's Obamacare for the Internet, that will be a ton of people's first impression of it. Right now you can nary find a regular person who knows anything about net neutrality and thinks it isn't something worth striving for - but you can change that if you just start saying vague, negative things about it. Think of all the people who, to this day, think Obamacare is a government-run insurance company. Not only is that not true and missing the point of the law, these are the same people who will gleefully accept Medicare (aka, the government-run insurance company) one day. Republicans got out there, though, and strategically turned folks against it before they knew what it was. Dems, per usual, sat on their hands. The ugly truth about the poor messaging on this topic for Dems is that they have big businesses in their pockets, too. There's a lot of lobbying going on for this - not to mention the likely fact that most of them don't really understand net neutrality, either.

I like to think of the last few Ron Zook recruiting classes. They had relatively high rankings, but most of the top rated guys never even got on the field. Even at certain ranking levels, there are different classes of guys - the guys who are an absolute longshot but with a lot of payoff predicated on a ton of improvement or the guys who are a sure thing that is one small improvement from being great

If you think the coaches are the only problem, you are very wrong. When you play this badly, the problems are very, very widespread. I'd look to the team leaders on offense and defense - likely Cutler and Briggs - as tremendous failures in their positions as well. Of course, the largest problem is that the players aren't good enough.

I'm ready to say that Pau is worse defensively than Boozer. The blocks Pau gets don't make up for his atrocious feet and laziness nor his awful rebounding. I don't know if he's just struggling with the workload or what, but he absolutely kills us on D

There are few things more disturbing than reading the stuff college freshmen turn in for a first-year writing class. Good god, are they awful at writing. And this is at a relatively selective school: the 25th-75th percentile ACT scores are 27-31, 95% were in top quarter of HS class, 65% were in top ten percent of HS class.

Jimmy looks unreal. He's Kawhi Leonard with more MPG now.

FWIW, Danish was reportedly often reported as hitting 95 pre-draft. I know Perfect Game got him at 94 multiple times. So, he might hit 95 again. Togh to say the cause of the velo decrease - laying off, mechanics, skills decrease, making the sinker more sinkery, etc

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 7, 2014 -> 01:13 PM) Well that's good to hear. I was hoping it wasn't as brutal as "relearn all of undergrad and then some." I really need to knock the GRE out of the park because my undergrad GPA isn't exactly stellar. I got 163V/161Q/5AW with only moderate prep. I basically invested no time in prepping for the verbal part. At the time, I had taken nothing remotely mathematics-related since HS so I devoted some time relearning some pre-calculus to prepare for the quant portion. Spending a couple of hours learning about what they look for on the writing would be worthwhile. My feeling on the verbal is beyond familiarizing yourself with the sort of question format they have, you can't really prepare. You're not going to study your way into meaningfully improving your reading comprehension. Trying to improve your vocabulary is not going to pay off for the time required to do so. What I'd suggest as a starting point is to utilize one or more of the free practice tests provided by ETS online to assess where you're at. If you're close to your desired score on those tests, you definitely don't need to freak out. If you're a little sub-standard, you might want to buy a prep book (preferably one that comes with practice tests so you can retest and continue to assess where you are).

The turnout figure I posted is not at all based on registrations. It is based on the voting-eligible population, which includes both registered and non-registered voters. They use data from census research, American Community Survey (to determine the amount of non-citizens), and prison records (to determine number of incarcerated and felons). A quick look at state-by-state data: Top - Maine, 59% Wisconsin, 56% Alaska, 55% Oregon, 52% Colorado, 52% Bottom - Indiana, 28% Texas, 28% Utah, 29% New York, 29% Tennessee, 29% Mississippi, 29% Oklahoma, 29% Even disregarding explanations, it's sickening to think that we are effectively ruled by such small portions of our citizenry. There's an extent to which we try to keep people from voting, there's an extent to which people's lives are too hard to really think about politics, some people just suck, some people are careless, the entire institution is rather unsupported structurally....whatever the reason, it hardly feels like living in a democracy when only a third of the people who can decide who governs end up deciding who governs. The portion of people old enough to vote who cannot legally vote has also increased in the past 30-40 years due to the rising felon population. While I get pissed at the Republican Party for what I believe are voter suppression tactics, the Democrats that have control in various places in the USA hardly over-extend trying to use their power to get more people to the polls. The goal of both parties ought to be to get as many people to vote as possible with as little fraud as possible. One party is just focused on the fraud and the other party isn't focused on anything. You couldn't spend too much money on trying to make sure your country gives a voice to as many people as possible. What's most difficult to account for is the possibly disenfranchising effect of geography. I live in Ohio, which is supposed to be super swing state. Despite living right smack dab in liberal Columbus, I live in an uncompetitive Republican congressional district. In statewide elections, it was clear long before the elections that Republicans would win everything easily. Several city-wide positions were uncontested. I voted, but I feel that the main thing of consequence that I did was cast votes for the local Green Party who needs them to get ballot access back (state government had no problem using bipartisan cooperation to pass laws removing third parties from the ballot unless they meet new, onerous requirements).

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 7, 2014 -> 11:43 AM) Could anyone who's taken the GRE give me a rough prep time estimate? Is 3 months adequate? Depends where you're starting from, of course. With that said, I'd say regardless of starting point, after 3 months you're looking at seriously diminishing returns. Feel free to PM me if you want any other thoughts/advice