Analyzation of the unexpected

Tonight on a frozen field in Minnesota, the Chicago Bears clinched the 2010 division title. Had I been a bookie, I would have lost a lot of money expecting them to win at the most 6 games and made odds reflect that opinion.

How did this happen? They stayed healthy unlike the last couple of seasons where players were getting injured constantly. They have also benefitted from timely injuries to key oppponent players.



The large X designate all pro players who were out. The positions in the other column represent key all pro players who were not in the lineup.

The 4 losses came against teams that were healthy and did not have a key player get hurt during the game.

Score radio personality Dan Bernstein said it best early in the season: The Bears are a team that is decent enough to win a division title if all the pieces fall into place. In 2010, that most definitely happened.

crunching numbers

This year the yahoo fantasy league added points against to the stats and made them retroactive to the previous years in the league. This allowed me the ability to more easily examine the points scored against players in a season and discovered an error I made about 2007 in a post I made in August.



One more point against per game than I initially determined in 2007 and I included 2010.

I also discovered that my 2007 season was not the worst as far as points scored against than expected:



Though I did not even have the worst schedule in 07 what bothered me was that I by far had the most points scored and deserved a fate similar to the one I had in 2010. The person who set the record this year had the worst total in the league.

Sith lord fantasy football

I have noticed that with many things in my life my best performances happen when I am angry including bowling, golf, and Scrabble. I am guessing my anger overcomes my nerves and gives me focus. Of course there are times when the anger created problems rather than success.

In 2007, I had the best team by far in the league but only finished 6-8. I lost one game and a playoff berth by making a wrong decision about an injured player which I made hung over in Akron, OH at 9AM after a very memorable party the night before.

The pattern of 4 people in the league having injured, inactive or bye week players in their lineup against one other team really got me upset. When they played my team with a fully active lineup, they would have their high score for the year. In the last week, one team purposely held players out of his lineup to prevent me from making the playoffs. Had I not woke up on the day of the 2008 draft violently ill in an Indianapolis hotel room and had to stop twice on I-65 to vomit, I probably would have started a fight.

I decided to instead take out my anger on the league. In 2009, I won my division title and league championship and last Sunday clinched the division title once again having the best team. Here is the standings: (I deleted the names of the other teams.)



For the 4th straight year, my opponents are scoring more against me than the rest of the league but by only 1 point per week this year. That is why my record is at my personal best 10-3. (I am playing the person who held players out of his lineup in 07. Right now, everyone on my team is on the bench.)

When I won the league title last year, I was not real excited being more satisfied from exacting revenge than happy. I am feeling the same way now. After the worry about losing the two weeks before clinching the division title I am comtemplating my resoning for continuing and considering no longer playing just like I did with Scrabble four years ago.

Rockin like Weird AL

On his website, Weird Al Yankovic was asked about his music appearing in either Guitar Hero or Rack Band and though he was interested stated neither Activision nor Harmonix (comanies that produce the game series) were interested.

Earlier in the day I was asked about his parodies appearing in the game and I stated that since the music was written by other people it would be very difficult to obtain the rights to produce the parody version. Personally I would really enjoy if either Hardware Store or Albuquerque (my two favorite original Weird Al songs) or any other of his original songs made the game but most people only know the parodies and would not care for his original material. In a post in November 2009 I explained that about half his released material are original songs and I doubt either company would put the effort into creating them for the game.

That got me thinking .... How many songs available for Rock Band have been parodied by Weird Al and how many have appeared in his polkas? The answer is 48 total. I turned the results into a chart:



In his song Bedrock Anthem, Weird Al parodied both Under the Bridge and Give it Away and since they both are available in the game, I counted them both. Also, Enter Sandman (available in a polka medley) and Give It Away though appearing on the disk for Rock Band and Rock Band 2 respectively were among 10 songs that were not allowed to transfer to the hard drive to play in Rock Band 3 due to licensing issues.