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Odds and ends

By Odysseus

Mav has posted his season preview, and it's not pretty.  Money graph:

As this site has been saying for a long time, this season
is the season that three years of poor recruiting and
roster management by Karl Dorrell and his staff will begin
to manifest itself.  While the problem will only get worse
in 2006, when most of the last remnants of the pre-Dorrell
era will have used up their eligibility, fall practice has
already begun to reveal the Dorrell Era for what it is - an
era of limited talent, no depth, and, ultimately, the
systematic dismantling of a once-proud football program.
 Read it.  There will be a test.  

Over on the Fun Zone, Mav and Kawai shred the latest bits of Blindo propaganda, provoking this response:

blindos don't need examples. They abhor facts. For them, proof is "our staff works hard", "our staff is made up of good teachers", "our staff are nice people", "our staff are highly trained and qualified", "KD is a Bruin", "KD is classy", "KD is a good dresser", "the team has good chemistry", and "the team plays hard".

Don't insert facts into this discussion. They react very violently.

On a related but different subject, in the New York Times, David Leonhardt has a piece about baseball in the uncivil war between the statisticians and the scouts, or what he describes as "the equivalent of a theological dispute about whether baseball is a game of mystery or of data, of statistics and analysis or of intuition and human instinct."

The entire article is interesting, but bottom line is pretty much:

Academic research, however, is pretty much on the side of statistics. Whether diagnosing patients or evaluating job candidates, human beings vastly overestimate their ability to make judgments, research shows. Numbers and analysis almost always make people better.

I commented on football saber earlier, but this is more related to Blindos and those who look at the statistics and conclude that Dorrell is a bad coach.  That's why they're Blindos.  There is no statistic, no fact that could change their mind.  We, on the other hand, would be persuaded by a good season by Dorrell.  Some Blindos will never be convinced that Dorrell is a bad coach, even if he has a season reminiscent of Lavin's 2002-03 season.

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