2006 Point & Laugh at the taterskins thread

[MDS]

I've never been happier that a 6-8 team beat a 5-9 team. I hate the taterskins.

[bowzer]

"So special on comcast sports said last year the taterskins invited him to come in for a visit and he did and he ran a 4.3 40 and impressed the coaches and they told him to be ready if anyone went down. And they just said he is running a 4.1 40.

not that i care about this or whatnot... i just never heard about this before. anyone hear about this before?"


taterskins are getting desperate....

[The BIGSTUD]

Bubba on rankings of NFC East offensive lines:

I think in the NFC East you could make a case for any one of them to be the best

not even close


1. Skins
2. Giants
3. Eagles
4. Pokes

[General_Failure]

The Giants are awesome. Sure. How could I not see it before?

[Rome]

Thats the guy TK writing. Art is on "leave" since his old lady is preggo again.

Great.  Just what the world needs. . .  more farging taterskins trash.

[MURP]

pointing and laughing

[phattymatty]

anyone see jackson stiff arm taylor on that game winning TD?  that was great.

[MDS]

I thought they turned it around. Wha ha happened?

[Sgt PSN]

I thought they turned it around. Wha ha happened?

They did a 360. 

[Beermonkey]

Snyder runs away with Unsportsman of the Year honors.

Snyder even canceled an announced interview with Extremeskins.com, the fan Web site that he owns, for reasons that were never disclosed. It's a shame that interview never took place, given some of the questions proposed to the owner by Extremeskins members. Take, for example, the suggested query of one CowboyzBSuckaz: "Mr. Snyder, with the state of the taterskins cheerleaders being extremely Sexy, do you ever just want to take one, lay them on your Bentley, and rail them?"

Classiest fan site in the NFL! Just ask them.

[Beermonkey]

If was able to find a link to the aricle written by the AEI economist, which was referenced in the article in the above post. Nothing we really didn't know already. 

AEI: Patriots vs taterskins

Football teams have a relatively simple economic problem to solve. They have to fill their rosters with players, and have to pay the entire collection of players an amount fixed by the league. They can add players in two main ways: sign veterans as free agents or hire new players out of college in a league-wide draft. Veteran free agents get a salary set in the free market. Most draftees receive a relatively lower salary set by collective bargaining. What they are paid depends on the round in which they are drafted.Economics has a very clear prediction for optimal team behavior. Firms should load up on draft picks, especially from the inexpensive late rounds. Every team has the same cumulative salary to pay, so, to outperform the other teams, you must receive higher value relative to salary from your players than your opponents receive from theirs. If, for example, you select a Pro Bowl (all-star) receiver in the fifth round of the draft, that player may well receive a salary one-tenth that of a veteran Pro Bowl receiver of roughly equal talent who has had his salary set on the market. So your team gets a huge surplus.

It is nearly impossible to derive surplus from the veteran free-agent market, since you are paying market wages. While injuries and emergencies might require some veteran signing, the draft is the only place to build a winning team.

So economics would predict that teams would uniformly put an enormous effort into perfecting their drafts, and avoid sinking excessive dollars into costly free agents. In fact, this model predicts very well the behavior of one team, the New England Patriots. Their head coach, Bill Belichick, who received his undergraduate degree in economics from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, has been an artist at squeezing value-added out of his draft picks, and has won three of the last five Super Bowls.

This economic brilliance was on display in September, when Belichick traded disgruntled receiver Deion Branch to the Seattle Seahawks for a first-round draft pick. The Seahawks gave Branch a $39 million contract, guaranteeing that they would achieve little value-added at that position. So Belichick burdened the salary cap of a rival with a fat obligation, and took home a valuable draft pick for his own team.

Belichick keeps winning because so many others in the league behave so strangely. Two economists, Cade Massey of Yale and Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, studied years of draft history and found that teams make systematic errors that reflect a serious economic illiteracy. Coaches and general managers place too high a value on the top few picks, and too low a value on picks a bit further down.

The Washington taterskins are perhaps the leading exemplar of this tendency toward irrationality. Last spring, for example, the taterskins gave up key draft picks for high-priced veteran players. An especially silly trade gave the Jets three taterskins' picks: in the second and sixth rounds this year and in the second round next year. The trade left the taterskins with only one pick in the first three rounds this year.

To compound this error, the taterskins filled their roster with mediocre, high-priced veterans, dropping $35 million on safety Adam Archuleta, $32.5 million on defensive lineman Andre Carter, $31 million on wide receiver Antwaan Randle El, and $25 million on wide receiver Brandon Lloyd--none of whom has ever been in the Pro Bowl.
The problem for economics is that teams like the taterskins continue to exist, and are not driven out by competitive forces. They confound our ability to model for two reasons. First, it is impossible to conceive of what foolish thing the taterskins might do next. Second, their behavior can alter the decision framework for the fully rational teams. If the taterskins are going to bid up the prices of all wide receivers, for example, then a team like the Patriots has to adjust (as they did) and load up on cheaper pass-catching tight ends.

The taterskins are not driven out of business because there is a high demand for football in Washington, and the NFL has a monopoly. A wisely run team cannot enter Washington and compete for taterskins fans.

Results like Massey's and Thaler's have revealed unusual irrational behavior, not just in the NFL but throughout the economy. Why? Because many firms exist in areas that are walled off from competition by regulation, by patents, or by their own large scale. Since the entire economy is just the sum of such pieces, its ebbs and flows will, as Newton long ago concluded, forever be a mystery.

Economics will always be helpful at identifying the answers to narrow questions, like how firms on average respond to a change in tax policy. But, as for a unified theory of everything...better forget it.

[MDS]

The media is at it again....

[SD_Eagle5]

The media is at it again....

Wrong, it's the mediots

[Beermonkey]

Not sure if this is official yet, but let's pretend it is.

Broncos | Lelie trade produces pair of draft choices
Wed, 27 Dec 2006 07:12:17 -0800

Bill Williamson, of the Denver Post, reports the Denver Broncos will receive the Washington taterskins' 2007 third-round draft choice and a fourth-round pick from the taterskins in 2008 as compensation for trading WR Ashley Lelie to the Atlanta Falcons in August.

[ice grillin you]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpAgtya5lMU