TMQ watch: January 29, 2013.

Ah. The week between the championship games and the Superb Owl. Also known as “the silly week”, in which people look for things to fill space. And TMQ is no exception. This week’s column after the jump…

TMQ continues to harp on the whole Harbaugh sibling rivalry theme, referencing both “The Lion King” and “Antigone” in the very first sentence of his column, as well as birth order theory and childhood trauma theory. We will admit that we haven’t paid much attention to coverage, since we lost interest after our teams were eliminated from play (and we do not have cable TV). But has any of the coverage made more than a passing reference to “sibling rivalry”? Has anyone been harping on it the way TMQ has? Serious question.

TMQ picks Baltimore to win. As best as we can tell, the current line has San Francisco favored by 3 1/2 to 4 points.

College quarterbacks are virtually free, while NFL quarterbacks represent a significant economic investment. We are curious where these free college quarterbacks come from, and also where the University of Texas can find a few good free ones.

Did Bill Callahan throw Super Bowl XXXVII to get revenge against Raiders management? We admit that we had not heard that theory before TMQ brought it up (if it was on FARK, we missed it), but wouldn’t better revenge be winning the Super Bowl and immediately leaving for another team?

This year’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback Non-Quarterback Non-Running Back MVP is NaVorro Bowman of San Francisco. Runner up is Marshal Yanda of the Ravens.

“Geography often means nothing to Hollywood.” The flip side of TMQ’s coin here is: how would you like to watch Jack Bauer spend 40 minutes driving across town in real time? Perhaps with some commercials for the new Ford Focus with Ford Sync and Sirus/XM radio? William Goldman has made the point repeatedly that things like movie geography are actually time-saving narrative conventions. Given TMQ’s fondness for movies, it seems odd that he is either unfamiliar with or willfully ignorant of Goldman’s writing.

Your columnist is going to go all squishy and propose that the reason the record-scoring-total NFL teams failed to win the Super Bowl is psychological.

Between this and the sibling rivalry thing, we can’t decide which is worse: TMQ playing astrophysicist, or TMQ pretending he’s Siggy Freud. (Easterbrook’s degrees are in political science and journalism, by the way.)

Playoff scoring is up, but not that much. Does anybody at the NYT fact-check the “Frequent Flyer” column? “The United Nations website has no mention of her name in the past decade.”

Not only did burning cheese close a highway tunnel in Norway for five days: “Toxic gases were slowing the recovery operation, officials said.” Cheese burns? Flaming cheese releases deadly fumes?

Well:

  1. Cheese contains fats and oil, Gregg, so, yes, it most certainly can burn.
  2. “Flaming cheese releases deadly fumes?” Uh, maybe. Certainly you’d expect things like carbon monoxide to come off of flaming cheese; we doubt breathing the combustion products of flaming cheese would be a good thing.
  3. More to the point, though, Greggles; cheese isn’t the only thing in tunnels that can burn. The flaming cheese fire could easily have set fire to other things; paint and plastic coatings inside the tunnel, insulation on wiring inside the tunnel, insulation between walls of the tunnel, upholstery in other wrecked vehicles, etc. etc. etc. All of these things can give off toxic fumes.

TMQ might want to read some books about fire safety between now and next season.

There’s a lengthy discussion of the new NCAA eligibility standards:

In August 2016, the requirement changes again, to a minimum GPA of 2.3 in core courses (preposterously, the NCAA calls it a “2.300” minimum) with at least 10 of the credits completed before senior year. For many aspiring athletes, especially boys who don’t take school seriously, the upcoming 2.3 core GPA rule will be a rude shock. So will the new SAT math-and-English minimum of 1080. An awful lot of boys whose lives are athletics are going to find it hard to make a combination of 2.3 in hard courses (art, photography, web design don’t count as “core”) and 1080 on the SAT.

TMQ sees this as a positive reform. But:

A high school student with a core GPA of 3 (excuse me, of 3.000 according to the NCAA) can receive an NCAA scholarship with an SAT of 620, which is third percentile. Third percentile is awful — barely better than leaving every answer blank. Thus, the NCAA thinks a high school student can do well in school (the 3 part) will do terribly poorly on the SAT (the 620 part).

Are we going to see a rash of high school students who got excellent GPAs; and then, after their college/pro career ends, it turns out they can’t read, and were just being given good grades for the sake of the athletic department?

(TMQ also argues that it is unlikely that, say, a high school student with a GPA of 2.0 could score a 1010 on the SAT. We’d argue to the contrary: the SAT is coachable, unlike a high school core curriculum.)

Another cosmic thought from Gregg Easterbrook. “The gamma-ray storm of 1,200 years ago doesn’t appear to have caused much harm…” Question: why do you suppose that is? The world was less densely populated in 800 AD? The world relied less on technology that would have been disrupted by a gamma-ray storm?

You know, we thought we’d seen the last of TMQ and “Last Resort” last week. But no.

Does a United States strategic missile submarine really carry infantry weapons and “battle rattle” for every member of the crew?

We are not familiar with the load-out of the average nuclear submarine, but it certainly does not strike us as implausible that one would carry at least a few submachine guns, as well as the sidearms issued to officers (assuming the Navy still issues sidearms to officers).

I don’t think I want to be aboard a submarine on which crewmembers have cigarette lighters.

A gentleman always carries a knife, something to make light, and something to make fire. We don’t think we’d want to serve in any military where TMQ makes the rules.

When the mega-babe lieutenant stripped off her fatigues for a love scene, she was wearing a black lace bedroom bra. Do women serving aboard submarines really pack lingerie from the Victoria’s Secret catalog?

We are not women, but we can think of several reasons why a woman on a submarine might pack something from the Victoria’s Secret catalog:

  • She finds it comfortable.
  • It reminds her of home, and she finds that comforting.
  • It makes her feel good about herself.
  • It reaffirms the feminine aspects of her personality while she’s working surrounded by men.
  • There’s not a lot of fabric there, which makes it easier to pack into small spaces and pack more of them, too. As opposed to, say, something with more fabric that takes up more space.
  • She wants to wear something nice if the crew gets shore leave.

Perhaps the women, or the submariners, or the woman submariners in our audience would care to comment.

In the 2008 season, 27 percent of NFL challenges were successful. The figure has risen steadily to this season’s 52 percent.

We’re not sure if we have a right to complain about TMQ stepping on our turf with his “Coaches’ Employment Office” item, so we’ll let it slide. This time. We’re watching you, Easterbrook.

…every program in big college football, except one, outscored the Kansas City Chiefs on a points-per-game basis.

That’s it for this week. We figure there’s probably two more TMQ columns to go: the Super Bowl wrap-up, and the bad predictions column. Remember to drink your Ovaltine and turn the dial back here next Tuesday. Actually watching the Big Game is strictly optional.

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