THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I’d say the opposite - the first three quarters kind of stunk, to me.  Too much defense, poor execution on offense.  Wes Welker and Kevin Faulk can go to sleep knowing they played well, but I can’t think of another guy on that team who could claim to have had a good game.

Even as a Pats fan, I thought the fourth quarter was pretty amazing.  The Patriots take the lead, but with that awkward amount of time left that’s both too much and too little… the “great escape”, as I’ve heard it called… no less than three through-the-fingers game-ending interception chances… two bombs to Moss where anything could happen.  If it was a 58 minute game, or a 62 minute game, we’d be talking about 19-0 right now.

From my perspective, it was easily the greatest Super Bowl of all-time.  I can’t imagine such a thing as a football game with “too much defense”.  I thought the 3-0 Steelers/Dolphins game earlier this year was a masterpiece.  So for me epic upset + great defense + 2 game winning type drives = best Super Bowl.  Plus, the competition is not that steep, at least in the space of my personal memory, which begins with Super Bowl XXV, my least favorite Super Bowl of all-time despite being a heckuva game.

This is what happens when you put the statisticians… in charge of sports.

This is what happens when you put bureaucrats in charge of sports. I don’t see a way around it without opening the door to arbitrary ad hoc decisionmaking by the authorities.

Or maybe it’s a North American thing, not bureaucrat thing. I’ll note that European sports have a more elastic attitude to timekeeping—not just in soccer, but they used to end boxing rounds not exactly at 3 minutes but whenever the final exchange of blows ended.

Yeah, the one second thing was ridiculous. But it’s still better to have rules that cannot be broken arbitrarily, especially when the reason for breaking the rule is merely aesthetic.

But, they DID break the rule.  They did not clear everyone off the field, did they?  It’s like telling Robin Ventura that his grand slam is not a HR unless he rounds the bases.  It’s a pure bookkeeping exercise with no effect to the game itself.

The coach himself shook hands with the other coach.  That’s the same thing as a boxer’s corner throwing in the flag.

This is my point: doing half the job (getting 22 players on the field) and not doing the other half (getting rid of the hundreds of people on the field) is pointless.

I just want to also say that coaches fight for every single second on the clock.  In this case, the coach was waiting for every single second to countoff.  He didn’t even want to be bothered with making sure that there’d still be 1 or 3 seconds still on the clock.  Couple that with his midfield run and shake, and that’s throwing in the towel.