TMQ Watch: January 20, 2015.

We’re grumpy. Apparently, this is a day ending in “Y”. Let’s just jump right into this week’s TMQ

…the NFL teams left standing tend to be the ones that can deal with weather.

Or, to put it another way, “In driving rain, pro football is played.” Also, 603 words down.

Chicken-(salad) kicking. We’ll come back to that. TMQ’s Superb Owl prediction. We’ll come back to that.

Stats.

Stats Of The Title Round No. 1: Seattle became the first repeat conference champion since the 2003-04 Patriots.

As for the defending champion Seahawks, at 3-3 after Week 7, they hold only a 38 percent chance of reaching the playoffs this season and just a 1 percent chance of repeating as champions.

Just saying.

Sweet: more New England trickery. Sour: Green Bay. Mixed: Green Bay – Seattle. Hanging in there: personally, we prefer hanging upside down to hanging by the fingertips.

Next week’s TMQ will review the critical role of bottomless pits in contemporary cinema. If you’ve got a favorite bottomless pit, tweet it to me @EasterbrookG with your name and hometown.

What’s the last bottomless pit you can think of in contemporary cinema? Maybe “300”? Please feel free to tweet EasterbrookG: after all, we’re not your father, and this is the most boring week in sports.

The opera isn’t over until the fat lady Seattle Seahawks sing.

1,100 words on tax policy and the states. Really. Our eyes glaze over. Central thesis:

Washington is financing the states, while local government is more overstaffed than federal. The structure of American fiscal politics is based on a fairy tale of lean states and cities, and bloated Washington. In many respects, it’s the other way around.

In 2012, Texas and New Jersey, home to Washington-denouncers Perry and Christie, were handed nearly $51 billion combined by Washington, or about 30 percent of the states’ total revenue that year.

It would be nice to see this broken out between Texas and New Jersey, rather than a combined figure. It would also be nice to see how much the citizens of New Jersey and Texas paid out to the federal government in the form of taxes that year. It would also be nice to have breakfast at Brennan’s in New Orleans.

Headline: “Rule Changes For Safety Have Improved The Game”. Substance: “…increased penalties against the secondary and new rules protecting the economic value of quarterbacks have increased NFL passing yards and touchdowns.” Question: does that actually make the game “better”?

Speaking of better, are non-profit universities actually any better than for-profit ones?

…the not-for-profits are in most respects tax-exempt, rolling in money while not pulling their own weight in taxes. This makes it seem the for-profit universities are acting in a socially responsible way by paying taxes, while the not-for-profits are building walls of special privilege around lavish pots of money.

More:

The University of Phoenix surely does not provide top-tier education…

[Citation needed.]

Winning the Heisman does not mean you’ll have a successful career as a NFL quarterback. As a matter of fact, “Of the Heisman quarterbacks currently in the NFL — Johnny Manziel, Robert Griffin III, Sam Bradford, Carson Palmer and Cam Newton — none has a winning career record.”

Why is society losing respect for books?

[Citation needed.]

(More generally, we agree with TMQ’s point that non-fiction books should be better vetted by publishers. But:
a) That’s a trope that TMQ hammers on every year, and it has gotten old.
II) Tying this to the whole “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven” controversy is weird; how, exactly, do you vet the recollections of someone who claims to have experienced a near-death event? You could, perhaps, check their medical records just to establish that they were injured and how severe the injuries were. But in terms of vetting that they had an experience where they went to heaven, had lunch with Jesus, and came back…?
3) More generally, the whole “Boy” story is just…weird, especially if you follow the coverage on Pulpit and Pen. Did Alex Malarkey really make up the story? Is this just part of a messy divorce battle? And what is the doctrinal role of Christian booksellers?)

So New England beat Indianapolis. And how about those Authentic Games?

Authentic Games Final Standings: Six weeks ago, the Authentic Games metric forecast a Denver-Arizona Super Bowl. I said I didn’t trust the metric this year — though last season, in early December it forecast a Denver-Seattle Super Bowl — and my gut said New England-Seattle.

So if you didn’t trust the metric, what good was it?

The metric didn’t start forecasting New England-Seattle until three weeks ago. It ends by clearly endorsing the two Super Bowl entrants.

So after an entire season, your metric collapses to pick two out of four possible teams? What good was it?

If it didn’t, I’d be back to the drawing board.

We encourage TMQ to give the drawing board another try.

Adventures In Officiating:” New England (answers to Solder), New England (helping the runner), Green Bay (“Green Bay should have been able to set Seattle back to second-and-45.”). It appears TMQ’s column went up before this story broke; perhaps he will actually have something to write about next week.

New York City has 1,830 coffee shops. Or one coffee shop per 4,300 people, approximately.

“Single Worst Game Of The Season — So Far”: Green Bay – Seattle. Why “So Far”? Since we only have the Super Bowl left, shouldn’t this be the single worst game of the season, period? Or does TMQ think there’s a chance the Superb Owl will be worse? Anyway, TMQ thinks Green Bay was too conservative.

That’s a wrap for this week, folks. Next week, the Superb Owl interregnum. And maybe some shrinkage jokes? We shall see.

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