cabiness42

Look at the records of Navy & BYU over the last 10 years. Those teams are NOT comparable to the lower half of the MAC, CUSA, WAC, or any of the Sun Belt or FCS teams that other schools play. If Navy and BYU are second tier, then those other teams are third or fourth tier.

I was pointing out that ND's schedule is more difficult year in and year out because they do not load their schedule with cupcakes. Navy is not an elite team but it is also not a cupcake. Navy is better than the worst 2-3 teams on most schedules. There is a big difference. Navy, NIU, Toledo are teams that can beat a Top 20 team if that team has a bad game. Akron, Eastern Michigan, and Coastal Carolina aren't beating a Top 20 team no matter how bad they play.

It's not just about next year, but long term. The first step is to make season tickets more affordable by lowering prices and more desirable by fielding a winning team. Then, once you get a season ticket base built up, single game tickets (especially good seats) are in shorter supply which drives demand.

Navy, or an upper level MAC team, would beat the worst team on any other Top 10 team's schedule by quite a bit. That is my point.

Most of the MWC games were against BYU (now no longer in the MWC), who is generally pretty good. Other than that I think it's been one game against Utah and a couple against Air Force.

Navy is the only academy ND plays every year, and they've been pretty decent recently. Army and Air Force are on the schedule an average of about once every four years.

Yes, ND has not played an FCS (I-AA) school since Division I split into two. They also rarely play teams from the "second-tier" FBS conferences. In the last 10 years, only one game each against CUSA, MAC, and WAC and none against the Sun Belt.

Hunter is 37, so good luck actually getting an .800 OPS out of him over 2 years. Plus, he probably left money on the table to go to a team he thought would win.

Record and schedule strength are the two biggest components of the computer rankings. Notre Dame's schedule strength is slightly better than KSU and quite a bit better than Oregon. By Sagarin ratings, here are the three worst teams each has played: ND: Pittsburgh 70, Navy 83, Boston College 99 KSU: Kansas 80, North Texas 110, Missouri State 138 Oregon: Washington St. 94, Colorado 152, Tennessee Tech 174 Now, Oregon's schedule strength will improve with Stanford/OSU/Pac-12 championship coming up.

It's a clear win for the Canadian government with the massive increase in tax dollars.

I would not use Buehrle being left-handed as a reason not to get him. In 2012, the Tigers had a -47 point OPS split differential vs LHP, Cleveland was -62, KC was -16, and Minnesota was +10. You can't have too many lefties in the Sox rotation with those kinds of splits. I do agree for contract reasons that Buehrle isn't enough of an upgrade over Floyd to make the trade straight up.

I have a friend who knows some advance scouts at ND who had been scouting potential bowl matchups and they told him Alabama would have been a much easier matchup for ND than KSU or Oregon, and it wasn't even close. They'll take a loss by any team ahead of them but they were really hoping the other two would lose and Alabama would win out.

So he's the new Lillibridge?

That's about $40M more in taxes those guys now have to pay.

Anybody live in Indy and feel the massive explosion Saturday night? My brother-in-law lives only a mile away and it shook their house pretty good. My mother-in-law lives about 2 miles away but wasn't home at the time.

Yeah, my in-laws are all headed to get their Missouri drivers' licenses today.

The actual answer to this puzzle is Independence, Missouri. Anybody want to guess what a contestant answered?

One thing you may not realize if you've lived in the Chicago area your entire life: Chicago airports are great for flying in/out of as an end destination. Pretty easy check-in, getting through security, claiming bags, and getting transportation. Chicago airports are TERRIBLE as airports where you have to catch connecting flights, especially O'Hare. Try getting from C32 to F12 in less than 20 minutes.

I don't mind the actual flying, but I hate airports and airlines. It's very inconvenient and time-consuming to get anywhere unless you live near a major airport that has non-stop flights to a lot of places. When I lived in Michigan, I had a girlfriend who was from Augusta, GA. When she went home for Christmas, her flight was Lansing-Cincinnati-Atlanta-Augusta, including a couple long layovers. I dropped her off at the Lansing airport, and I could have driven to Augusta and picked her up when her flight arrived.

32/6561, which is approximately 0.5%, is the correct answer to the probability of an 11% event happening exactly 3 out of 4 times if you don't care about the order of the events.

Yes, stops in Memphis and about 100 other places in between. Outside of the Boston-NY-Philly-Baltimore-DC corridor, Amtrak is almost always more expensive and very little if any faster than a bus. Amtrak needs express trains in order to be viable.

Yes, the backfield is good, but how good? They are facing terrible defenses. I want to see what they do with Stanford.

Sox aren't trading Rios for "salary relief".

Almost every highlight of an Oregon passing TD I see has the QB sitting in the pocket having a cup of coffee before throwing the ball. That isn't a luxury he'll get against good defenses.

So who is the best team Kansas State has beaten?