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I agree with you other than the replay decision. That was an easy overturn. The PI was either offensive or neither because of an uncatchable ball (not defensive like it was called), and the unnecessary roughness has a chance of being the right call, but very likely wasn't. The ball can touch the ground if the player has control and keeps control. He did. I completely disagree that he had any control at all on that play (as did the announcers and the ref). I agree the ball can touch the ground, but he used the ground to help him secure it which is not allowed. If I can find the replay after the game I'll take another look though. Wayne has completely obliterated the theory that he was old and in severe decline.

I agree with you other than the replay decision. That was an easy overturn. The PI was either offensive or neither because of an uncatchable ball (not defensive like it was called), and the unnecessary roughness has a chance of being the right call, but very likely wasn't.

Have the Bears received the ball first yet this year? Not sure how to look that up, but seems like we've kicked most of the time. The Bears received the ball first in the Colts and Rams games. Interestingly, in all four Bears games so far the team who has won the toss has chosen to defer.

Strength of Victory is not margin of victory. It's calculated by taking the records of all the teams a team has beaten and putting them together.

I don't see what is nice about that. It might make Garza a little more amenable to signing an extension early instead of holding out for free agency unless he gets the perfect deal, for example. There are some benefits to a happy clubhouse, especially when the team isn't winning which would naturally cover up most of the potential problems. It's way down the list of important things, but it's nice to have.

The way the league does schedules makes your record almost irrelevant when it comes to difficulty. Hell, New England went to the Super Bowl and they got one of the easiest schedules in the league. It's not irrelevant. Having bad teams in your division is one help, and the division rotation schedule is helpful too. But you do still face teams that finished in the same "spot" as you did in other divisions. Next season, the Saints get the NFC West and the AFC East. With the exception of the Pats and Niners, there's some very beatable teams in there. So the Saints schedule is likely easy next year, but it had very little to do with how they played this season. The two games that are variable will be against an NFC East team and an NFC North team. The East is so balanced that there really isn't a team that will be quite a bit easier than the others. The North is a little more unbalanced, but has no team that is likely to be bad both this year and next year. So the Saints struggles will not affect their schedule much at all next year. If they were in the AFC, it would be a little bit of a different story, but the NFC is so balanced right now.

The Baylor-WV game has three 200 yard receivers and two other 100 yard receivers and there's still 13 minutes left.

There was an oddsmaker on one of the behind the bets podcasts that ESPN has that I caught a little bit of. It was interesting to hear him say that oddsmakers aren't hoping to make the bets even (which he said wasn't really possible even if they wanted to). He said even if they could do that, there wouldn't be enough profit involved to make it worth it. They're trying to make money by getting the public to bet one side and the sharps to bet the other. Since there is much more public money than sharp money, they tend to win whenever the sharps do. He said they know they've really messed up the line when the public and the sharps bet the same side.

I'm not a fan of the deal. How many keepers do you have? Green is a great keeper option for multiple keeper leagues so I would have been hesitant to get rid of him. Sproles is a big step downward as a replacement for Green since there are huge usage question marks with him. Johnson and Smith are comparable. Johnson is consistent, and Smith is going to have some huge weeks and some poor ones. Leshoure should be a steady back without a large amount of upside, and Tate is a lottery ticket with huge upside if Foster went down. I see those two as pretty comparable as well overall, but obviously your situations would make him want Tate more and you to want Leshoure more. I would have kept mixing and matching and working the waiver wire, or maybe tried to find a better RB straight up for Green.

Probably based on respect from last year, and their close win over Lousiana-Monroe is discounted since it was Monroe's 3rd straight quality game against a BCS opponent. The computer rankings that are up would support they are pretty close as well (although they are pretty unreliable themselves at this point of the season due to lack of data). 34th in Sagarin ELO, 28th in Sagarin predictor, 28th in Colley. It's essentially picking out of a hat at this point of the season between the undefeated teams with weak schedules and the teams with stronger schedules who have a loss already.

If you mean kick the ball sky high and have a defender challenge the receiver for the kick, doesn't the halo still apply if the kick hasn't touched the ground? Does the halo apply to kickoffs or only punts? I've never seen a kickoff return man challenged for the catch, so I don't know. I don't think there's a halo, but I'm pretty sure that in both college and the pros that you can call for a fair catch on a kickoff. That's why kickers make sure on onside kicks to have the ball hit the ground immediately so that the fair catch possibility is gone. But even if they didn't want to kick an onside kick, Michigan still should have treated it more like a punt and have a high kick short of the goal line. They would have had a good shot at trapping ND inside the 15 in that scenario if not inside the 10.

The only thing off the top of my head that I'd add to the expenses for this year are the salaries for Hendry, Quade, and anybody else fired before the end of their contract. That adds a couple million more to the total.

Obviously we don't know what was said so we don't know how far Cutler went, but Manning has had his share of confrontations. In 2004 for example, Wayne shoved him at the end of a close game after a shouting match between the two. The next year they were playing the Rams on MNF and Manning went on a tirade against Jeff Saturday (Tarik Glenn had to step in and tell Manning to go sit down) and he forgot until after that he was wearing a microphone for the whole world to hear. He also screamed at Donald Brown loud enough one time that the overhead microphone picked it up during a play. Manning was always a perfectionist who expected everyone else to be to. It's laughable to put him as an example like that.

Looking at the play by play, this didn't really start happening until the second half. The Bears had 9 first down plays in the first half. 6 of them they dropped back to pass, while 3 of them were run plays. The 3 run plays were all on the same drive in the second quarter that was derailed by the Carimi unnecessary roughness penalty. The 6 pass plays resulted in 3 incompletions, 2 sacks, and a defensive pass interference penalty. Now in the first 2 drives of the 2nd half, they did try to run it quite a bit before abandoning it late. But I don't see the overall run heavy emphasis in the playcalling. In fact, even disregarding the sacks, they gained 4.1 yards a carry on the ground while only gaining 4.6 Y/A through the air. It's possible they should have run it more than they did.

I'd imagine most of the top 10 leaks out reports that they wanted their guy #1 overall. Usually that kind of report doesn't leak out before the draft though. Did the Cubs also say something to that effect as well? The original pre-draft report was that some other clubs believed that the Cubs loved Almora so much that they would take him at #1.

I have no idea why this would be relevant. YEAH THE AFC IS BETTER!!! THEY HAVE NEVER SEEN SPECIAL TEAMS LIKE OURS BEFORE!!* *except when they played the AFC teams 4 times during the year. Not to mention the Colts special teams was very poor. They had almost cost them the game against New England when Hobbs had an 80 and a 46 yard return in the second half. I've heard before that the coaching staff let the players decide whether to kick it to Hester, and that was a ridiculous decision. Of course the players are going to say they can stop him even when they're terrible at it.

I think Kyle is likely right with a big caveat attached. First, some evidence. Even if we throw out Jackson's last section of AAA AB's where it spiked to 37%, as Kyle said 28% is still really bad for AAA. Here are the top 10 qualified players in strikeouts this year and their AAA strikeout rate: Adam Dunn: 20.1% Pedro Alvarez: 25.8% Carlos Pena: 21.7% Chris Davis: 23.7% Drew Stubbs: 22.3% Dan Uggla (AA stats as he was never at AAA): 17.8% Curtis Granderson: 24.9% Danny Espinosa: 20.4% Kelley Johnson: 12.1% B.J. Upton: 20.3% So even if we take Jackson at his best split possible, he still was well worse than all these high strikeout hitters. That's a massive red flag. It's not like his AAA numbers are a terribly small sample size, and it's not the first time his K numbers have been crazy high for his level either (his last year of college was highly problematic as well). Without any changes, it's hard to project him for anything less than 35% at the major league level, and 40% as Kyle has mentioned is definitely possible. The caveat is that I believe there is some reason for hope. It's quite probable that the previous regime never really worked hard on changing his swing because of the amount of success he was having. And he seems like an ideal candidate for a mechanical change because he doesn't have to worry about refining his approach while doing so. A successful overhaul could throw the previous projections out the window. But I am concerned that a mechanical change that takes away some of his strikeouts will also negatively influence his power. So I think the book is mostly shut on the current iteration of Brett Jackson, but I think there is more room for change than most people in his position have.

The current OT rules are a hell of a lot better than that suggestion, and I kinda hate the current OT rules. Do you hate it because it takes away a team trying to rush down the field at the end? I can see that. I guess it is just whether you want the excitement of someone trying rush to score at the end or being more fair. I didn't mind the old OT rules, but just thought this would be more fair. A tie game in sudden death is already exciting. I wouldn't really care either way--and honestly wouldn't totally mind ending the games in a tie. I hate it because football doesn't work as a "short game". Yes, occasionally there's a quick drive, big pass, etc. But generally it's a grind it out, get 3-4 yards, try to sprinkle in the occasional big play game, and I dont' think that fits well into a confined space. I think OT ends up giving a win to one team and a loss to another, for a game in which both proved equal over the course of 60 minutes of play. I'd rather give them a tie and move along. Obviously that's not an option in the playoffs, and something has to be done there. I wonder how ties instead of OT would have affected this past season? If I get some time later in my Friday, I'll see if I can figure that out. Denver would have finished last in their division instead of first (with San Diego going to the playoffs). Arizona would have had a much better draft pick since they were 4-0 in OT games. Dallas would have had a worse record. Hard to know how that would have affected the NFC East because the tiebreakers already caused some strategy changes at the end of the last year.

Fun with small samples. Coming into today, with hitters who have 80 PA's or more, Jackson is: 14th in MLB in walk rate last in K rate 34th in MLB in isolated power Jackson is either walking or striking out in 57.9% of his plate appearances. Next most was Cody Ransom and Adam Dunn at 50.2%.

Possibly, at least at the start. But unless Theo/Jed go outside the organization again, I'm thinking Stewart is still a distinct possibility. And if we're looking at another "lost" season, I'm fine with seeing how much of a problem his wrist really was. If Valbuena is the alternative, at least. Valbuena vs Stewart is an interesting discussion. Valbuena doesn't have as high of a ceiling, but probably has a better chance of reaching his ceiling. And with Stewart only having 2 years until free agency compared to Valbuena just hitting arbitration (will Valbuena have 3 years of service time after this year or will he be a Super 2?), I personally would rather take the chance on Valbuena. They're practically the same age as well (Stewart is 7 months older).

The question becomes does Valbuena become the likely starter for 2013? His main peripherals look solid. He has the best BB/K ratio on the team. His ISOP of .150 is fine. His defense is good. The only thing holding him back from being an above average 3B starter is a .248 BABIP with a 20.1 LD percentage. What makes that BABIP harder to waive away is that his career BABIP in the majors is .267 in just over 1000 PA's, and his minor league BABIP is decently low for a future major league player (.317). So does he have something in his swing that causes that low difference between LD and BABIP, or is it mostly statistical variation? I think the front office would like to find that out over the last month.

This is what I would love. Lots of strategy potential and a high likelihood of a drive to end the game to try to tie/win. If the players don't want to play more than 1 OT in the regular season, I'm perfectly fine with that. That would probably still leave less than 10 ties a year. That's still a lot less anticlimactic than sudden death is, which has some exciting finishes but is usually pretty boring. If the holding/contact rule were implemented, I could easily see teams choosing to rush nobody on every 3rd and long and effectively making it impossible to throw. Running offenses would become much more valuable as well, which would both increase injuries once again and also lead to the subjectivity he's hoping to avoid (the main one being whether the player holding is still in the tackle box or not). I can't see that rule ending well.

Still have some hope for him. He dramatically increased his walk rate this year, but a jump in his strikeout rate negated some of those gains. He has been much better in the second half of the year which might suggest suggest the new instruction is taking hold. Less homeruns but more doubles. He's still only 21, so he has some time to develop. The main question with him has always been upside which is still highly questionable, but he's getting closer and closer to being a somewhat safe 4th OF prospect.

like this? http://espn.go.com/mlb/freeagents/_/type/dollars Let's try some trivia to test some assumptions. If we were picking out the ideal FA target, I think most would agree that the player would still be in their prime, and would sign a multi-year deal to give the team some control, but wouldn't sign for an insane length to hamper future flexibility. So here's a question, in the last 6 years, how many free agents under the age of 30 have signed multi-year contracts? How many when you exclude international signings? None because most players don't get to free agency until they're 29 or 30 years old unless they're international signings. Close. Domestic: Reyes, Fielder International: Darvish, Chapman, Nishioka, Wei-Yin Chen 6 instances in 6 years, with 2 of them being mediocre internationals, and 4 of which came this past offseason. ESPN lists their current ages on the free agent tracker, which is why most of the examples seemed to occur this past offseason. For example, Crawford was 29 when he signed his contract. A quick glance shows about 10 players who were signed under the age of 30 in 06.

I'm still wondering where all the money went this year. The 2011 Cubs spent around $160 million between the big leagues, the draft and IFAs. Add up this year's payroll, draft, IFA, organizational changes and infrastructure, and I'm still coming up way short of $160 million. Depends on how you spread out the money. The Cubs committed around 40 million in IFA money this year. How much is being put on this year's budget versus other years is completely unknown. How much of the 8 million investment in the Dominican Academy is on this year's budget is unknown. They've fired quite a few people and expanded the front office at the same time. That's going to cost a little extra. They've made quite a few technology improvements throughout the system, which is going to add some initial cost. Basically the only two things we know for sure are payroll+draft. Those two are somewhere in the 118-120 million range combined. Do the others add up to 40 million extra? Probably not, but there's enough there that it easily could depending on the accounting of it.