UMFan83

Caleb continues to be so perplexing. He can go from looking nearly unplayable to making elite play after elite play in an instant. His talent is so tantalizing and his issues seem fixable but at the same time we have yet to see him play a truly elite game from start to finish outside of maybe Dallas this year and Jacksonville last year.

I have a feeling this might be the end of P4 conference championship games, or at least them counting in the playoff rankings. If the ACC misses out, Bama misses out, BYU misses out, etc because of conference championship game losses its going to cause a lot of discussion.

The sad thing is, they were one of the premier brands in professional sports and they completely squandered it. Even if they get good again we are like 3 generations removed from Jordan and most people under 40 have no recollection of him on the Bulls.

Otherwise known as a ‘source’? 😂

Based on that simulator site I linked to earlier, 99% of the simulations I've run have 4 points enough to advance to the knockout rounds and most sims have at least 1-2 teams with 3 points advance. Who knows if it will play out like that in real life but it seems like a win and a draw should be enough to squeak in but even more than previous WCs, there's a bigger advantage to winning your group since you will likely play a mediocre 3rd place team in the round of 32

Toughest of the playoff groups by ELO

USA vs Paraguay in our first match. And now we get a UEFA playoff team right? Not good.

Not ideal but it guarantees they draw one of the minnows in pot 4 right

Australia!

entertaining but I refuse to give him any credit especially after an hour of shamelessly glazing him.

He already had to be escorted to his drawing spot because he seemed to be wandering aimlessly.

Omg I can’t watch this FIFA/Trump disgusting slobberfest. Just get to the horsefeathers draw

Playing around with this draw and tourney simulator with the WC draw tomorrow: https://worldcupsimulator.com/tournament.html?autoSimulate=true Best I could do for the US is have them win a group with Italy, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia, then beat Algeria 3-2, Belgium 2-1, Netherlands 3-1 before falling to Argentina 1-0 in the semis.

As little credit as I give AKME this seems like a 'we're breaking up with you' type of message. There's no way Giannis, who wants to leave Milwaukee because they're not a contender, is going to want to come to the Bulls in their current state and current reputation. Furthermore, Chicago is one of the last places Milwaukee would want to trade him if they do trade him. It's just not going to happen regardless, so AKME floats that out there as a way to publicly support his ****** core.

I would say 1970-1991 was a fairly rough period for them. Maybe not complete incompetence but they only made the playoffs twice, had 4 winning seasons and never had a long term QB solution. Of course most of us weren't alive or were kids during this era so we didn't get to experience most of it. But I do remember the Packers being a meh organization when I started watching football as Favre was just getting there.

Yeah we will enter Week 14 as the number 1 seed in the NFC but a Bears loss, Seahawks win over Atlanta and Rams win over Arizona and the Bears drop to the 7 seed.

It's super disappointing that I didn't really see any development or improvement from Bryce all season. You can plainly see the talent that's there, but for whatever reason he hasn't been able to take advantage of it. Hopefully another offseason will make a difference.

Back to reality...it was a fun 4 years. Michigan seems pretty far away from relevance.

Playing around with the playoff simulator earlier today it’s hard to find scenarios where the Bears miss the playoffs at 11-6, especially with the Lions loss yesterday.

Ehh we'll see (or we won't see if OSU wins like they're supposed to). I think the fact that the committee moved Michigan up 3 spots this week after a blowout win over a bad Maryland team was telling and put them in a more advantageous position to move into the field if they beat the number 1 team. They have no bad losses (they lost to the CFP number 8 and 17 teams on the road). Their wins were mediocre but they do have a road win over a pre-Raiola injury Nebraska and a 17 point win over Washington who is currently 15th in SP+ (though the committee probably doesn't rely too much on this as they aren't in the CFP field right now). A win over OSU would really boost their resume IMO and put them right on the cut line. Honestly I haven't done a deep dive on the resumes of the teams UM would have to jump to get into the field since the entire scenario relies on Michigan beating Ohio State so if they can do that I'll look into it more lol. Edit: Also the close wins over bad teams is really just a 2 week stretch of scraping by Purdue and Northwestern. They only beat MSU by 11, but it's a rivalry game, on the road, and MSU had a garbage time TD to turn it from a laugher to a comfortable win. Outside of that they blew out 2 bowl bound NC opponents (albeit their names are New Mexico and CMU lol), won a close road game vs Nebraska, then blew out Wisconsin and Washington. Of course I'm just playing my role as an annoying UM fan here, but that's how I see it 🙂

What do you do about Conference championship games in this new era? Asking because in the event Michigan beats Ohio State this weekend, I'm actively rooting for scenarios where Michigan does not make the Big Ten championship game. Without making it they are probably a bubble team, maybe 60/40 to get in. If they make the championship game, they would then have to go beat the number 1 team in the country for the second week in a row to make the CFP, because I doubt they make it with 3 losses. Obvious answer is don't lose 2 games in the regular season, but still any model where you have teams wanting to avoid playing for a conference title seems wonky. Would it make sense to lock the CFP teams in before the conference title games and only use those games for seeding purposes?

Yep…if only our LB corps was not depleted now lol.

Also, the Playoff Machine is active for this year now: https://www.espn.com/nfl/playoffs/machine Gonna mess around with some scenarios today but its nice to be able to use it and not have to come up with convoluted scenarios like "Bears win out, Lions lose four games, Green Bay collapses into a giant sinkhole, and the Bears get the 7 seed"

Ugh. I mean absolutely make sure Jaylon is 100% before returning rather than rush him back in a game we're going to be decided underdogs, especially because last time he made it 3 quarters before hurting himself again. But I'd also love to see the best possible defense we can put out there against the defending SB champs

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