Inexplicable NFL Calls

By -
The Vikings had the ball with a handful of seconds left in the first half. They tried a long bomb to Randy Moss. He caught it, but got called for pass interference. The Vikings then let the clock run out, although they had time for two more bombs.

One of the announcers was so puzzled that she went and asked Minnesota's head coach about it at halftime. His explanation? "We decided we were going to take one shot at it."

That's an explanation?! That describes what they did, but certainly does not explain it. You just saw Randy Moss could beat his defender. Why not let him try again? (And Moss agreed with me: He was clearly exasperated when the Vikings ran out the clock.) I see teams do this a lot. But why isn't it a straight probability calculation: Yes, there is some chance a bomb will be intercepted and returned for a touchdown, but isn't that a miniscule probability compared to the (still tiny) chance that your team will score?

Also: Brett Favre is done. Stick a fork in him. His desire to be the hero is destroying him. Both recent interceptions (I write this in Q 3) never should have been thrown at all.

Comments

  1. Wabulon4:27 PM

    So this is not like, f'rinstance, rolling a seven and then passing the dice: the one motivation is ad fatum, the other is contra fato.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more