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From someone who regrettably didn't see most of his starts during the season, were the pickoffs by Hendricks during the playoffs just a tiny sample size, or is he really one of the best in the league at that? He had at least two of them and maybe three of them during the postseason, which seems usually like a whole season's worth for a pitcher.

He was hurt quite a bit last year. The games he played I saw a lot of criticism, but I wasn't watching closely enough to know if it was warranted or not. His release is probably the biggest bit of caution. The release only saved the team 2.5 million against the cap, while the Colts have plenty of money and don't exactly have a deep CB group. And their new GM is unproven but well respected. Teams make mistakes all the time and he still could be good, but those are not good signs.

Makes perfect sense. Makes no sense to me. I have no problem turning off a regular season game that's running late, or catching a couple minutes or couple innings mid-game. I guess I'm just too much of a completionist. If I invest into something, I like to finish it. I can watch just the end of something, but it's difficult to watch the middle and then go to sleep not knowing what the end was.

I am not a fan of this rule btw. Extra inning games are interesting and bring fascinating strategy into play. And the stakes are always high because one swing of the bat can swing the game at any time. They are often the most memorable and fun games of a regular season. Trying to end them early robs a little of that. I saw a fascinating suggestion (on a comments thread no less) that would never fly because it destroys one of the fundamentals of baseball rules, but IMO it would fix some of the issues. Make games 7 innings of 4 outs each. The gametime would be similar, but there would be more scoring. There would be more interesting situations with people on base. And an underrated thing is that it would swing the pendulum back towards contact a little bit, at least on the hitters side. It's a lot easier to string 3 singles together and score a run when you have 4 outs than when you have 3. The biggest issue is pitchers health. Are they healthier because they are sitting down less times, or are they less healthy because they have more innings where they may throw 35-40 pitches? Like I said, it would never fly, and maybe it shouldn't because in some ways it's a fundamental change. But the result would still be baseball IMO.

I really think focusing on length of the game is missing the point compared to just trying to improve pace of play. There is something genuinely more enjoyable about watching someone like Mark Buehrle (or Kyle Hendricks) pitch compared to that asshat from the Dodgers. The fact that hitters are told to prioritize OBP and lengthy at bats and pitchers are told to go after strikeouts isn't as aesthetically pleasing, but it's a genuine strategy so I don't think you can do anything to avoid that at this point. I can't personally say any of that matters to me or I've ever thought "oh, Buerhle is pitching this game I gotta watch because it's going to have such great flow!" And this whole time/pace of play thing is to get more viewers or retain viewers, nothing more, nothing less. Like I said if you like baseball you are going to watch a game pretty much regardless of the length of the game. I'd find it hard to believe people are watching less for the sole reason of games going 10-20 min longer or there's some magical time that they are trying to get it down to that if they hit it a lot more people are going to be jumping in to watch. That doesn't mean if there's egregious things making games run longer that can easily be changed they shouldn't do it, but trying to invent rules that have nominal effects just doesn't matter to me and at the end of the day isn't brining any new asses in the seats. I will fully admit I'm probably one of those people MLB is trying to get. I follow the team all season, but during the regular season I don't actually watch very many games anymore. Games for me start at 8:05 normally. If knew they were going to be done normally at 10:30, I have a reason to flip on at least the last few innings. But I know games are often going to stretch on well past 11, and that's getting too late for me on a typical night. I don't want to start watching a game just to turn it off before the end, so I just avoid it altogether. For big games that's a different story, I was up until 2:45 am for the Giants playoff game. But there are rarely big games in a baseball regular season. Pace of play is a massive issue as well. When there's anticipation and tension because the stakes are high, the slow innings can be great. In a random regular season game, it can be painful.

I've never liked the OT rules very much. I especially don't like that the impact is so different for different types of teams. If you have two great defenses playing each other, the coin toss isn't very important. But when you have two great offenses, it becomes much more important. My solution would be to have a 10 minute period followed by 5 minutes of sudden death. Whoever didn't get the ball first in OT gets the ball first in sudden death. You're incredibly likely to have at least two possessions. There's strategy on whether you want the ball first in OT or want to defer that to a possible sudden death. And it doesn't involve the players playing that much more than they already are.

Seems to me this will make it easier for the 8 best teams to make it through to final 8 as potential cinderellas will be knocking each other off along the way. Interesting but flawed teams who stand a chance at upsetting the best teams will find it harder to get to the final stages as they will be beat by some weaker teams that really don't have a chance of a major upset. Yeah, I think it will be more likely that the weaker teams will get weeded out sooner, because you'll have the top 16 teams seeded (rather than the 8 currently) and will avoid most "group of death"scenarios. That means that the top teams will likely go through on top of their groups and have easier routes through as weaker teams advance. I agree in some ways, but I see these two scenarios. If they don't do any differentiation among the top 16 seeds, it makes it more likely that two of the best teams in the tournament could meet in the round of 16 even if both teams win their group. Second, with only two group games, it only takes one bad game to finish 2nd or even a risk of being 3rd in your group. You don't necessarily need a group of death anymore to have potential of at least not finishing 1st in the group, and if they don't finish 1st you could see two top 10 teams meeting in the round of 32 (one group winner versus the 2nd place of the next group). So while I think the odds are greater of a top 8 team making it out of their group, I think their chances are smaller of making the quarterfinals than they were before. They have to win two win or go home games instead of one, and one of those games could easily be one of the other top 8 teams. The teams that it help most are the 9-16 teams. Their chances of getting out of the group get better as they will now be the best team in the group, and they have an almost 50% chance of avoiding a top 8 team until the quarters even if all the top 8 teams advance.

As a casual fan of soccer I really like this. There will be quite a few more games with win or go home stakes than there is now. There will be more Cinderellas crashing the final 8. The variety of teams will be bigger from year to year, so it will be fun to watch a bunch of different countries. I think those outweigh more blowouts and an easier qualification process. They need to figure out how to do tiebreakers after only two group games, and also how to keep the knockout bracket from having too different of paths to the final. But overall, I am excited for the new format.

Now THIS makes no sense. The GMs job is to identify the best prior to the draft. It's literally the most important job a GM has for an NFL team as far as player acquisition goes. And you're the one that keeps saying I'm saying take a QB in the top 5 just to take a QB in the top 5. I've repeatedly said the Bears need to identify the best one and find a way to get him. If they determine the best one will be there in the 2nd round, fine. But they'd better be right about it. After all, jobs are at stake if they aren't. If they determine there's only 1 and he goes with the 1st pick, then that's another issue. But there better be a plan B. I think the argument is that evaluating QB's is really, really hard. You have to go back to 2008 to find a QB that was A) drafted in the first round and B) not drafted #1 or #2 behind another QB that was drafted #1. Here's the list since then of other first round QB's: Mark Sanchez, Josh Freeman, Tim Tebow, Jake Locker, Blaine Gabbert, Christian Ponder, Ryan Tannehill, Brandon Weeden, EJ Manuel, Blake Bortles, Johnny Manziel, Teddy Bridgewater, Paxton Lynch And just for comparison's sake, here is the list of 2nd-4th round QB's during that time period: Pat White, Stephen McGee, Jimmy Clausen, Colt McCoy, Mike Kafka, Andy Dalton, Colin Kapernick, Ryan Mallet, Brock Osweiler, Russell Wilson, Terrelle Pryor, Nick Foles, Kirk Cousins, Geno Smith, Mike Glennon, Matt Barkley, Ryan Nassib, Tyler Wilson, Landry Jones, Derek Carr, Jimmy Garoppolo, Logan Thomas, Tom Savage, Garrett Grayson, Sean Mannion, Bryce Petty, Christian Hackenburg, Jacoby Brissett, Cody Kessler, Connor Cook, Dak Prescott, Cardale Jones So that's 13 QB's in the first list and 32 in the second list. But if I was picking QB careers right now, it would be Wilson, Dalton, Carr, Cousins, Prescott, and probably Kapernick before I got to anybody on the first list. Obviously that's a self-selected sample and if we went back just one more year we would have players like Ryan and Flacco added to the first list. But even if we add them, the first list isn't any better than the second. And if it isn't, why use the draft capital?

When I think of the regular season, this is the first game that comes to mind for me. I love games that go way outside the box like this. I had absolutely no idea if a pitcher in this game could earn both the win and the save if his appearances on the mound were broken up by another pitcher, and that was fun. Of course the Cubs blowing the game open really helped too!

Maddon kind of did that though when talking about Chapman's game 6 usage. He brought up the injuries to Rondon and Strop and basically said that it was a bad part of the order and he didn't trust anybody else. That Maddon interview was a long interview, and he only acknowledged two mistakes. He didn't have a reliever up in game 6 in case the Cubs pushed the lead from 5 to even more. Then he essentially blamed David Ross for Chapman's performance in game 7. He seemed to think that Chapman's stuff was fine, but Ross just called for too many fastballs in the 8th inning.

I'm just a little surprised that he would try to argue that Champan wasn't worn down in game 7, that the only reason he threw almost exclusively sliders in the 9th inning is because Montero was catching him, etc. Could he believe that? Maybe. But it seems hard to believe when his fastball velocity was down in game 7, his sliders were in terrible locations even in the 1-2-3 ninth, etc. If he had come out and said that they tried to push their best as far as they could, and even if Chapman wasn't his best that night he did just enough to get people out, I could at least buy that even if he didn't admit a mistake.

Well, for one, you have non-conference games that are 1/4 of the season that have absolutely no effect on the main way to get into the playoff. It's hard to get much interest in games that only matter if the top team gets upset and needs an at-large spot 10 weeks later. Plus, you end up subdividing what is already a very small sample size. When you only have 9 games to decide from, tiebreakers and which teams miss the strong teams in their conference or have them at home instead of on the road become very important factors. There's a large emphasis on luck to who makes the conference championship game. The relative lack of parity in college football helps mask some of that, but that's still a pretty big departure from what the hope of any playoff system has been in the past.

It's strange that it happened this year after the exact same situation happened in college earlier this year (Oklahoma State-Central Michigan). If OK State upsets Oklahoma, it might be the difference between them making the playoff or not. I tend to be in favor of overturning a case like this where the refs simply did not know the rule. But I understand the slippery slope argument that football rules are complicated enough that it could lead to at least a few times per year where lesser things were challenged for the same reason. Obviously this rule was missed twice in the same year for example.

lillard? nah. lebron, curry, durant, harden, kawhi, paul, westbrook, harden, davis, griffin, and maybe kyrie is the top 10 in some order jimmy's somewhere between 10-15. i'd put derozan and lillard in that group. KAT will assume top 5-7 status by year end IMO I'll give you Kyrie and Kahwi, those are the 2 guys in my group of 4 that I wouldn't take Butler over. But Griffin? Paul? I honestly never been a huge Griffin fan, made a lot better by Chris Paul. Paul is still pretty good, but he's getting up there in age, I think Kyrie's better and he's at the bottom on my top 10. Either way, I think we're both talking about Butler pretty close to the top 10. I'd put him right at 10. I'll be a homer (not really, since the consensus of ranking sites has him in the top 10) and suggest Paul George should be in this conversation. George and Butler are actually a fascinating head to head comparison because they are so similar of players. Butler's been better at getting to the rim while George has been better behind the arc, but other than that their games match up fairly well.

Houston has the strangest Group of 5 bowl bid case ever. 2 losses, but 2 wins over top 10-15 teams. I have no idea how the committee will stack them up next to an undefeated Western Michigan and a 1 loss Boise State. As for the playoff, we seem to be one unexpected loss away from tons of scenarios opening up. Maybe it requires two more as a Clemson or Washington loss just makes it really easy for two Big 10 teams to get in, especially if Ohio State isn't in the championship game. Edit: I did not realize that since Houston is unlikely to win their conference, it doesn't matter if they are ranked higher than Western Michigan or Boise State because it's a conference champion who gets that bid.

Derrick Rose of the NFL wait, what? no Didn't Derrick Rose win the MVP? RGIII is the (injured QB who keeps getting injured) of the NFL just like a lot of other guys. RGIII's rookie season by some statistical measures was considered one of the best 40 seasons ever by a QB. It's not an exact comparison, but it's fairly close.

what's also funny about that poll is that hendricks is cool and good and all but he's so objectively boring in every way (especially compared to any of his teammates) that it's hilarious for him to even get a lot of votes, let alone win in a landslide. basically what i mean is i would be less shocked if a terrible but fun player were winning...like kawasaki, if he'd been on the team more, or something. hendricks being very good but not one of our 4-5 best players plus also being boring and on the same team as a bunch of fun cool guys should be a virtually perfect recipe for very few votes. He's so unique though. I think that's what makes him the most popular. You watch him and you can count on one hand the number of people you've seen in your lifetime that you've seen with his repertoire and his success level. I think that is also a major link with the next two on the list. Baez is incredibly unique (his tags, his avoiding tags, swinging with reckless abandon) and Bryant is just so good that while he's fairly conventional he still draws lots of anticipation for his at-bats.

I can't imagine how mad the Oklahoma State coach must be. He makes the right decision (to throw the ball away with no time left on 4th down) and the officials call intentional grounding and incorrectly give Central Michigan that untimed down that they won the game with.

San Diego managed to go 4-12 last year with Rivers playing all 16 games to give one example.

2003 was painful for obvious reasons, but I think 2007 was a little more soul-crushing, personally. I still can't get over the fact that Lou pulled Z after 6 innings (I think 85 pitches) in a tie game in Game 1 because he wanted him sharp for game 5. He was pitching great and you win the game you are playing in first. And it doesnt help that Marmol immediately gave up a HR to the first batter he faced to break the tie. I still think that was the right move. He actually pulled him early so that he could bring him back on 3 days rest in game 4. The Cubs had a good back end of the bullpen, and the Cubs really didn't have a 4th starter by that point. Marshall I believe was at his innings limit by that point, Marquis had a 5.73 ERA in the second half of the year, and Trachsel had just been terrible. 1 inning of Zambrano even in a big leverage spot was not worth having Marquis pitch vs having Lilly pitch a second time in the series. Obviously it ended up working out the worst way possible.

but using 11 PA to say someone doesn't deserve the MVP is...bad. Oh, sure. But I think the general point (that he may or may not have been trying to illustrate with the tiny sample size stat) is still valid. Bryant has been the second worst clutch player in baseball this year and that has helped make him only 73rd in WPA.

I can't fault anyone who uses clutch stats as part of deciding on awards. A clutch stat is a very helpful descriptive stat to show how a player contributed to his team in that particular year, even if it should be completely dismissed for predictive purposes. And at least it is descriptive of what that player actually did unlike traditional more team based stats like wins or RBI's.

I don't find it boring at all, but yes I know the fan "outrage" over it being boring is what led to making a change. I doubt this leads to any more fans actually watching games when this strategy would normally be employed. But hey, angry twitter fans got their way. I think you underestimate how many people get turned off by the slowness of the end of an NBA game. My wife is definitely a sports fan...loves hockey, plays fantasty football, and is a huge Cubs fan...but can't stand watching the NBA most of the time because of the interminably long ending of games/halves. And I get that. I think it's a legit argument to discuss whether or not this rule change will make an actual impact in that regard, but presuming that it does, I think it will definitely lead to more people tuning in...at least to the end of games. This wouldn't really change the very end of games. The last 2 minutes already had this rule, and that's the time of game that fans complain takes forever. There are other solutions that could help that, but I don't think this one will make much if any difference to that particular issue.

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, basketball has always evolved to do what it can to make it more entertaining to watch and the hack a shaq stuff made games very boring. On the other hand I do think having a player on the floor who can't shoot should be exploitable in someway. It is a little agitating when a professional basketball player has such a hard time shooting. It already is exploitable. That player provides no spacing, and they can be fouled every time they get passed the ball. That's already a bigger detriment to have on the floor than players who lack other skills like passing or rebounding. The reason the rule was instituted originally in the last 2 minutes of a game was because players were trying to chase Wilt Chamberlain around the court trying to foul him. It wasn't basketball anymore so the rule was changed. It wasn't extended to the entire game because nobody could imagine fouling anybody before then. Now 55 years later this exact same situation popped up, and this is at least a step in the right direction. We should try to make the results of fouling an actual penalty as much as possible. That's what it was designed for. Fouling at the end of games is just done to increase variance. It's expected result is still a penalty (in terms of points) to the team fouling. Hack a shaq is not a penalty anymore. When you add not a penalty to not really basketball being played on those possessions, that's a bad combination.