* A very satisfying and well-played game. Both defenses were stellar, Denver’s seemed to be dominating Brady more than New England was stopping Manning but it came down to the last few seconds anyway because Brady somehow always finds another level when he absolutely must. The only reason the Patriots lost was that Gostkowski’s missed PAT early on forced them to go for 2 at the end of the game and the pass was tipped (a superb defensive play, the pass was on target and without the tip the game would have gone to overtime).
Brady threw one bad INT but he was under extreme pressure the whole game and took many hits without ever losing his poise. Those two 4th down conversions on the final drive were awesomely well executed against irreproachable defense. And Gronkowski is looking like the greatest tight end ever and the best non-QB in the NFL by a wide margin, there has never been a player like him.
Manning played very well and I hope he wins the Super Bowl so he can retire on top.
* My Patriots didn’t get it done. I don’t know why they lost those last two games of the season to mediocre teams, but Belichick has some explaining to do. Denver is a hard place to win and the Patriots had no business losing home field in the first place. If this game was in Foxboro New England would have won.
I’m rooting now for Peyton to ride into the sunset with his second Super Bowl win. Fascinating matchup – good ole boy at almost 40 versus the young, black and brash Cam Newton.
* Brady’s offensive line was a sieve against a great Broncos defensive effort, and so his numbers look awful (3INTs, a QB rating of 54.something, final INT on the 2-point conversion at the end that cost them the game).
Yet stepping back, you realize Brady’s performance wasn’t his fault (for the most part) and the loss wasn’t on him. His O-line let in so many rushers he started trying to rush plays and got happy feet, which caused a lot of bad throws and the INTs. He got cracked more than once HARD and didn’t have much time at all to make a pass (generally speaking, the more time in the pocket a QB has to make a decision, the better).
And his kicker blew that game. A missed extra point forced the going-for-2. Brady made a risky play on the 2-point conversion because if he didn’t release then the game was lost anyway.
And the running game was nonexistent—their best runner was done for the season, and they had to hire a joker off the scrap heap just to fill the space that the Orange Crush D just stonewalled. So that explains why Brady was throwing so much despite the handicaps and he racked up 300 yards—the Pats simply had no options besides Brady getting the ball at shotgun (to give him an extra second to survey the field) and releasing quickly.
All this is to say that “Player A v. Player B” doesn’t work in football and can’t be judged under most circumstances unless the two players are a DB and a WR and the D is playing 1-on-1 the entire game and said DB is ALWAYS on said WR man-to-man. And that never happens.
* I can remember back in the 2000 Republican primary, Bush was the non-intervention candidate, while McCain was the intervention candidate. Bush explicitly ran on non-intervention and campaigned against nation-building.
Do these primary campaigns really tell us much?
* Cruz now has a better rating than Trump from NumbersUSA.
I much prefer Trump on the issues (and not just immigration), but I’m starting to think Cruz is a safer bet. He’s beating Hillary in the polls while Trump’s getting slaughtered. I’m not super optimistic that either would actually do anything about immigration, but in any event you have to actually win the election first.
And if (when) Trump loses, it will be universally blamed on his immigration stance, whereas if Cruz loses they’ll still blame immigration but also the gold standard, the abortion/rape thing, and so on. So it would be a lot less damaging.
* 23% of today’s NYT wedding announcements are men marrying men.
* There’s a saying, “Africa always wins,” which means that incompetence, violence, corruption, etc. , will defeat any effort to change Africa for the better. The same can be said about Atlantic City or any other city in America with too small a white percentage of the population.Whites accounted for 16 percent of the city’s population in 2010.
So, “Casino Has Great Night,” but last year Bally’s Atlantic City closed its doors. In the end, Atlantic City always wins.
* The EMH is somewhat on the right track but errant because it is not just information that points to the future value of a stock, but the correct analysis of that information. It would be a lot better if weasel words such as “tend to be” could replace “is”.
For a given stock or asset, there is a limited set of people interested in that particular stock, with different information that they are privy to and different biases and analytic ability to operate on that information. For a particular asset, it may be that the information is sitting there staring everyone in the face, but no one has the intelligence or experience to analyse it the correct way. Or they do analyse it correctly but second-guess themselves and follow the herd. Or maybe Buffett in his prime has found the stock, but has his broker nibble away at it to avoid adjusting the price much. In any of those situations, an astute person who looks at the information correctly will be able to earn a good return.
I half wonder if EMH gets so much traction because it teaches otherwise smart people that “these are not the droids you’re looking for”. Although for the average Joe the EMH is a great rule.
* A finance professor of mine in college was fond of saying, “There are always more Cadillacs parked behind the casinos than in front.”
* “The Big Short” as the anti-EMH book/movie.
