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I’ve mentioned before that CBC’s coverage of the Olympics is better than NBC’s. These last few days of watching the Olympics makes me glad I live in an area where I get CBC over the air and can choose non-NBC coverage.

Even the boys have caught on that CBC is the way to go. When hockey is on, it’s all hockey – no studio interviews, no special-interest stories between events, no social or political commentary. We’ll be watching the Olympics on CBC and during a break in the action we’ll flip over to NBC. Half the time, NBC has people talking about the Olympics, so we’ll flip right back to CBC, where they’re actually showing the Olympics.

I thought maybe the football game winner prediction metrics might be useful to gain insight into who should win the Super Bowl.

But I could find no correlation between those metrics and the NFL champions in previous years. I went back over the last 7 years. I could have gone back farther, but after the first seven there was nothing to go off.

In 2012 and 2014, the NFC didn’t win any of the 4 categories I was checking, but they won the Super Bowl. Other years, it was mixed among the categories.

For what it’s worth, the Eagles won all 4 of the categories this year. Which means the Patriots should win.

Okay, okay, it is 2018 at this point, but the results are headlines as 2017 because they match with the 2017 predictions made in 2016 for the 2017 season. Also, the results are not all-haiku, just the predictions were. A more accurate title would be “Results for the All-Haiku Predictions made in 2017”.

Before the bowl games commenced for this past college football season, I made some predictions. Here, for your reading enjoyment, is the tally of those predictions. Note that the results are not in haiku form, in contrast to the predictions.
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It is time once again to update Some Blog Site readers on the results of my Some Fun Site project to create a more accurate football prediction method.

The 2017 NFL season is over, and here are the most accurate methods for predicting regular-season game results (wins-losses):

• MPW: 66%
• MPWHFA: 63%
• MYW: 61%

No new prediction methods this year. Either no one could find a better method, or they did but they have moved to Vegas instead of commenting on this blog.

And if you think you have a formula that can predict the winner of an NFL game better than 63.3% of the time, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

(For the ideas behind the methods, please visit the Some Fun Site page.)

My main memories of Dan Marino are of him in commercials for Isotoner gloves. It wasn’t until a couple years after that association was cemented that I learned he used to be a quarterback. But that doesn’t matter – if I see a picture of him my first thought is of Isotoner gloves.

Which I suppose means their advertising worked. Kind of. I never bought their gloves, but I certainly remember their ads.

And that brings me to today. I’m betting that the kids around the age of my youngest are going to remember Peyton Manning as the Nationwide guy.

And no, I will not buy Nationwide insurance either.

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.
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The College Football Playoff committee has produced this year’s selection of teams, which means that a lot of people are unhappy.

In my case, I should be happy, because the team from down south is not in the playoffs. But the committee didn’t learn its lesson from last year.

And that lesson, that I mentioned last year but apparently the committee didn’t read, is that they shouldn’t place the 3rd-best team from a conference into the national championship playoffs.

One could argue that Alabama is the 3rd-best team in the SEC. And yet they have been selected as the 4th-best team in the country. Why not Auburn, the team that beat them and won Alabama’s division?

I’m not going to go on an Alabama conspiracy theory – I just think the committee is taking the wrong things into account.

They favor minimal losses over conference championships, and I take the opposite view.

I thought the debate in the committee would be between Ohio State and USC – both two-loss conference champions. I personally would have chosen USC, because OSU already lost to Oklahoma so we have an idea of how they would have done in the playoffs.

I like the idea of teams playing significant non-conference games, and I think the committee’s direction undercuts that. If they are going to reward minimal losses and ignore conference championships, it’s in teams’ best interests to setup a favorable schedule.

Plus, with the limited games, there is limited cross-conference comparison, so it’s hard to tell if a two-loss PAC-12 champion is worse than a one-loss Big-12 champion. Maybe the PAC-12 is tougher this year. Maybe Oklahoma would have another loss if they had to play Notre Dame. Now we won’t know until after all the bowls are done if USC should have been the fourth team in the playoff.

I do hope that Clemson will blow out Alabama, to give yet another sample point to the committee that a team that did not make its conference championship game should not make the national championship playoff.

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