5 Things on a Friday: Bowl Predictions & Other Stories

Hey folks.  Happy Friday.

Let’s get it on!

College Football Preview: What to Watch this Weekend

Army plays at Oklahoma at 7 pm on Saturday on Fox Pay-Per-View.  The game costs almost $60.  Considering that the Sooners are favored by more than thirty points, I’m gonna say it’s probably not worth the price of admission.  Which sucks because Army plays these games almost solely for the purpose of putting its brand in front of a larger national television audience.  With the game relegated to PPV, that effort now seems wasted.  

What can you do?

My wife says we’re going to some kind of fall festival on Saturday afternoon.  The Alpaca Gnomes will be there.  But a week without Army Football is like a week without air.  Sure, there are other games, and after we get back from watching the Gnomes, I’ll probably watch at least one of them.  But none of the ones I’m listing below will have me screaming at my TV.  These are just the games that I’ll be following.

All times, channels, and betting lines are per ESPN.

5 Things on a Friday: Not Going Back to Korea

Happy Friday, folks!

3 Things on a Thursday: Baseball & Remembrance

The Yankees won a game last night.  They crushed it, in fact, beating the Chicago White Sox 12-3.  This is important because we’ve now seen the Yanks’ ostensible ace Masahiro Tanaka pitch two quality games in a row, a thing he’s not been much apt to do this year.  At the same time, nearly half the Yankees’ starting roster has headed over to the Disable List (DL), leading the Bronx Bombers to field a team that looks more like last year’s AAA roster than last year’s roster from the Big League club.  Seriously, the team right now is half rookies.

And yet, I am cautiously optimistic that the Yankees’ woes, which started with their disastrous West Coast road trip almost two weeks ago now, are coming to an end.  Though the team is something like 4-14 over their previous eighteen starts, their run differential has remained positive throughout the skid, such that their predicted wins (P[wins]) score remained fully six games better than their real record over that same time period.  To put this another way, the Yankees have never stopped hitting, and their starting pitching hasn’t slumped appreciably despite losing CC Sabathia to a hamstring injury during that fateful West Coast road trip.  The Yanks’ bullpen has instead blown a bunch of close games late, but this isn’t necessarily a trend you expect to see continue over the long term.

At least, that is what the statistics suggest, assuming I’m reading them right.

#StartSpreadingTheNews Yankees win Great start By Tanaka⏱ nd 👹 1st mlbhit with 4rbis and 🕵🏻with 1st mlbhit and 1rbi .... WHAT A GAME!!

— Sir Didi Gregorius (@DidiG18) June 29, 2017

And again, what does any of this have to do with my running 3 Things on a Thursday this week?  Nothing at all.

Sports Modeling: Long Answer to a Short Question

The sacred shield of the NFL.

My buddy Joe and I have been planning a shared project for later this summer, a combined preview of the coming NFL season.  Regular readers and/or USMA classmates will hopefully remember Joe's blog, A Hoosier on the Potomac.  As of this writing, the plan is to alternate previewing divisions over the course of four weeks, doing two divisions per week.  As a Giants' fan, I've drawn the NFC.  Joe, a Colts fan, is doing the AFC.

We spent most of our recent exchanges talking about formatting, but I'll spare you that stuff.  However, the bottom half of my last email to Joe got into a discussion of sports modeling and betting lines, and since Joe didn't know about that stuff, I should maybe reprint what I wrote to him here by way of prepping you for the series itself.  I've started using a lot of betting terminology in my write-ups, but it was maybe a mistake to assume that everyone knows what the Hell all of that means.

By the way, I think we have a pretty good project.  I am totally excited about it.