kearly":3cht7uf2 said:
Their line won't get 52 sacks every season though.
So true, but that's not what impressed me so much about the Rams D-line. It's their ability to constantly create pressure and wreak havoc even without getting sacks. That week 17 game was terrifying. Our O-line isn't great, but they looked like high school chumps against the Rams D-line.
Kearly":3cht7uf2 said:
Sorry Roland, but thinking that body clock doesn't and hasn't had a significant impact on present and past outcomes is birther level silliness. Also, the 3% you cite is just the Seahawks, in a relatively small sample size (keep in mind too- Seattle has been a mostly terrible road team over that span, 10am or not). What Cartire showed was a chart that involved several teams in a much larger sample that had very clear results, much larger than 3%. You can't just dismiss a body of data because a very small piece of it disagreed. That would be like saying the Mariners are not a terrible offense because they've had the AL's best offense in July.
Also, you really need to stop cherry picking the stats you like and then discarding the ones you don't by labeling them outliers- especially when those stats you incorrectly label outliers agree with the larger body of evidence more than your favored stats do.
Whoa. Ok, for the first time ever, I'm going to seriously combat your opinion. I almost always agree with you on any given topic, but I'm going to attempt to justify my thoughts here, and I'm very curious to see your response. First of all, body clock is a very real thing, but it takes more than 3 hours for there to be a significant difference. I'm basing this off of my own experience. I lived in Miami for a few years and have flown back to visit friends several times from Seattle. That is a long-ass flight; the longest you can do in the continental U.S. A 3-hour difference is nothing. I've laid out my case for this before, but basically, it's NO different from the habit people have of either staying out late on a Friday night or having to wake up abnormally early for an appointment, or what have you. There isn't some mystical, magical force the Earth imparts on you when you change 3 time zones. Sure, you spend 7 hours on an airplane and you gain 3 hours flying to Miami, but so what? You land where the local time is 10pm instead of 7pm. You go to sleep a bit later because your body still feels like it's earlier, and you wake up a couple hours later, nice and rested. So
what?
If you
believe you will have jet lag, your body will manifest symptoms. This is a well-known medical phenomenon. The subconscious is very powerful; more so than most people realize. As I said previously, even if it works, that doesn't change the fact that it's a placebo. Argue all you want, but I've flown plenty, including a good # of times across 3 time zones, and jet lag in a 3-hour time zone change is basically nil, and CERTAINLY it's gone after a day. If you want to discuss the effects when flying across 10 or 12 time zones to Europe or whatever, that's a different story and takes days to fully adjust to. Most teams flying across the country fly on Friday, so they have two full days to get used to it. You are trying to tell me there's still a considerable difference after being in the new time zone two and more days later, and I'm flat-out saying no way.
As far as cherry-picking stats, we're talking about 40% of them being against your argument. That is getting close to half. A tiny difference with the Seahawks, a flat-out objection to your statement with the Chargers since they WON more 10am road games than they did 1pm road games over a decade-long period, and then three large ones that support your argument. 2 out of 5 don't support it, which is 40%. How is this me cherry-picking stats? Most of the teams sucked during much of this period, and I specifically said poor teams tend to amplify problems and elite teams tend to hide them. If even one starting player on offense or defense believes they'll have bad jet lag, (thereby causing it) that could be enough to swing some of those games. We can call the Seahawks and Chargers outliers instead if you want, it really doesn't matter, because the overall average difference for all 5 isn't that big. It's big for 3, nearly nonexistent for 1, and flat-out contradictory for the other. If you want to argue this, we should calculate strength of schedule for these games. Perhaps the 3 that had worse records faced twice as many winning teams on the road at 10am as they did at 1pm, for instance. That could EASILY account for a big discrepancy, since coincidentally, the 3 biggest discrepancies are all teams that largely sucked for the period in question. Certainly, I don't think either one of us is proven to be correct without knowing that data.
Kearly":3cht7uf2 said:
Now, the one thing you are right about is that drawbacks tend to hurt better teams less. The Chargers did relatively well in early games because for most of the last 10 years they've won a ton of regular season games, and did so with great offense- which generally isn't impacted much by early starts.
The Chargers had a winning season in exactly 6 of the 12 years used in the ESPN article. (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010) They had some good years for sure, but winning in only half of them is far from a dynasty powerhouse, let's just say. They won more games than they lost over the total 12-year period though, so they were a good overall team for this time frame.
Kearly":3cht7uf2 said:
You look at the teams that bucked the 10am trend over NFL history and they generally were either very good and/or had very good offenses. So Seattle is a good bet to buck the trend this year. But that doesn't mean it isn't a disadvantage that must still be overcome. (Though for what it's worth, Seattle finished 11-5 with FO's #1 offense last year, and was still miserable in 10am starts.)
Miserable at 10am starts? I did just check FO, and here's what they list. We only had two games on the road in which our total team DVOA was a negative value. Weeks 1 (@Ari) and 12. (@Mia) Our worst DVOA game was at Arizona, which was a 1pm start. The other, @Mia, was a 10am start. (-16.8% and -3.1%, respectively.) So, our worst road game per FO was @ Arizona. We had 4 10am road games, 3 1pm ones, and a 5pm one, which makes this easy to average. Our average total team DVOA for 10am starts was 18.375%, and for 1pm/5pm road starts was 20.4%. To say our 10am starts were miserable per FO is inaccurate, because the other 3 10am starts (weeks 4, 8, and 13) had DVOAs of 12.8%, 23.4%, and 40.4%, respectively.
Kearly":3cht7uf2 said:
Who knows, maybe the Seahawks are just that damn good and they got 5-0 in their 10am starts this year. I'm open to that. But let's not pretend that it isn't a significant extra disadvantage that will be a challenge to overcome. Someone else said it perfectly- in the first half of 10am starts it's like the other team is on performance enhancers because of body routine.
10am's an excuse for the weak-minded. (Not referring to you as weak-minded, I mean weak-minded teams/players.) If you have other evidence to present to support your assertion, let's see it. If all 5 of those teams on the ESPN article had followed the same trend as the worst 3, I'd be deferring to it assuming they faced approximately equal-strength opponents in 10am games as they did in 1pm games, which we have yet to establish; but that's not the case. Only 3 out of 5, or 60%, follow this trend. The other 40% do not, so you really cannot draw a correlation from that, IMO.
I hope you don't feel like I'm attacking you or being a jerk. I've got nothing but respect for you, and I still do. I just heartily disagree on this particular topic.
