Overnight Open Thread (9-5-2012)

Have a gazillion things going on so tonight's ONT will be minimal. Entertain yourselves as usual (but in a non-fapatory way please).

Also get yourself tested if you've been in the VI, MS, or DC.

Best Cat Video of 2012

Is Henri 2, Paw de Deux as voted at the Internet Cat Film Festival.

Better NFL Stats To Watch

Here are four metrics that give a better idea of how strong a team is than the usual ones tossed out by sports analysts.

Football's Pythagorean Theorem

In a Sentence: Point differential is a better indicator of future winning percentage than winning percentage itself.

How It Works: Created by Bill James for baseball and modified for football in the early '90s by current Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, the Pythagorean theorem (or "Pythagorean expectation") is a formula that translates a team's points scored and allowed into an "expected" winning percentage. That formula isn't exactly for the faint of heart:

Points For^2.37 / (Points For^2.37 + Points Against^2.37)

As an example, let's take the 2011 Chiefs, who went 7-9 while scoring 212 points and allowing 338. Our formula is 212^2.37 / (212^2.37 + 338^2.37) = 0.248. That's the Chiefs' expected winning percentage from their point differential, and if we multiply it by 16 games, we get a total of just 4.0 wins. The Pythagorean theorem suggests that the Chiefs outperformed their true level of performance by three full wins.

Teh Tweet!

Yahoo group. That is all.

Tonight's post brought to you by menus:

I'll have the cockie leekie, brill and some brawn along with a tankard of lager please.

Notice: Posted by permission of AceCorp LLC. Please e-mail overnight open thread tips to maetenloch at gmail. Otherwise send tips to Ace.

posted by Maetenloch at 08:49 PM

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