After today's disgraceful loss to Pittsburgh (not that losing to the Steelers is a disgrace but five turnovers and sloppy play is), the Pats have two realistic shots at the playoffs, but only if they run the table in their four remaining games.
That feat is possible. The Pats next visit Seattle, who's awful, and the Raiders, who are awful. Then they host Arizona, which benefits from a weak division and is a game the Pats should win. The end-of-season matchup is a biggie at Buffalo against a respectable team in a place that's always tough to play. But it's a game that can be won.
But that's not enough. The Pats need help to get in at this point and that help can come in one of two ways:
1. AFC East. The Jets are a game ahead of the Patriots so New England needs Gang Green to lose another game before the season ends. Ah, but it can't be just any game the Jets lose. It has to be a divisional game. That's because in case of a tie, the second NFL tie-breaker in a divisional race (after head-to-head, which is 1-1, so that won't break a deadlock) is record in divisional games. The Pats are 3-2, the Jets 3-1. If the Pats beat Buffalo, which they absolutely have to do to play in January, that'll make New England 4-2. If the Jets win their remaining divisional games, against the Bills and Dolphins (both at home), the Jets win the tie-break with a 5-1 mark. So the Pats need New York to lose an AFC East game to come down to 4-2.
The next tie-breaker is record in common games and that breaks in the Pats' favor, thanks to Denver's win over the NYJ today. The Pats are 6-2 in common games, the Jets 5-3. If the Pats win out (and all four of their remaining games are against common opponents) that mark jumps to 10-2. The Jets could do no better than 8-4 (remember, to get to this tie-break the Jets had to lose a divisional game, which is also a common opponent).
HOWEVER, there's a spanner in the works and its name is Tuna.
If Miami wins its four remaining games, which would include a season-ender against the Jets, the Fins end 11-5. If the Jets win their other three games, that would create a three-way tie between New England, New York and Miami at 11-5. Under that scenario, the first tie-breaker is record against the other two teams. That would be: NE 2-2, Mia 2-2, NYJ 2-2. Second tie-breaker is record within the division. That would be: NE 4-2, Mia 4-2, NYJ 4-2. Third tie-breaker is record in common games: That would be NE 10-2, Mia 10-2, NYJ 8-4. So finally we knock out the Jets. Fourth tie-breaker is record in conference games. That would be: Mia 8-4, NE 7-5.
SO, the plot thickens. The Pats need to win out. They need the Jets and Dolphins to go 3-1 or worse. And they the need Jets to lose to Miami or Buffalo. And if the Jets lose to the Dolphins, the Pats need the Dolphins to lose one of their other games (their remaining opponents are Buffalo, Kansas City and San Francisco).
Ideal scenario for Pats to win the division: Win out, have Jets lose to Buffalo and win the rest of their games, including Miami. That way NE finishes 11-5, NYJ finishes 11-5 and Miami finishes 10-6. And the Pats win the tie-break with the Jets.
Confused? Wait. There's more.
2. Wild Card. Right now the Colts and Ravens are the prime competition for wild card berths. Forget the Colts. They're 8-4, a game better than New England, and they beat the Pats head-t0-head. They'll have to go 2-2 the rest of the way to fall behind New England and that isn't likely. The Colts have two wins in the bag -- their next two games are against the Bengals and Lions and their combined 1-22-1 record. Indy finishes with two toughies -- at Jacksonville and home to Tennessee. But figure the battle-tested Colts can win one of those and finish no worse than 11-5, which is the best the Pats can hope for.
Overcoming the Ravens will be hard, too, and here's why. They sit 8-4, one game better than the Pats. They didn't play head-to-head, so the first tie-breaker between New England and Baltimore is record in conference games. Right now the Pats are 7-5, the Ravens 9-3. So if my run the table theory holds true, the Pats finish 11-5, 9-5 in conference games. The Ravens have to lose their two remaining conference games, home to Pittsburgh and home to Jacksonville, to go 9-5 in conference games. Losing those two would also put Baltimore at no better than 10-6, so an 11-5 Pats team finishes ahead. So, basically, the Pats have to finish ahead of Baltimore. If the Ravens go 11-5, that means they won one of their two conference games and finish with a better conference record and go to the playoffs ahead of the Pats.
Got a headache yet? You could skip trying to absorb it and reach a reasonable conclusion: No playoffs in Foxborough this year. The Super Bowl loser jinx strikes again.
-- MJM
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The New Bangalore Union Leader?
An industry we thought couldn't possibly be outsourced is being outsourced:
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 29, 2008
PASADENA, Calif.
I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself “Thomas Edison.”
The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”
Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.
“Everyone has to get ready for what’s inevitable — like King Canute and the tide coming in — and that’s really my message to the industry,” the editor and publisher said. “Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering.”
I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.
“In brutal terms,” said Macpherson, whose father was a typesetter, printer and photographer, “it’s going to get to the point where saving the industry may require some people losing their jobs. The newspaper industry is coming to a General Motors moment — except there’s no one to bail them out.” He said it would be “irresponsible” for newspapers not to explore offshoring options.
He said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.
So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.
He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.
“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”
A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.
I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”
Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?
At first the reaction to covering Pasadena from 8,000 miles away and 13.5 hours ahead was “absolutely brutal,” Macpherson recalled. Journalism professors keened and Larry Wilson, the public editor at The Pasadena Star-News, called it “nutty.”
But then in October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.”
Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews’s papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, “If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” and said after the speech, “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”
Macpherson feels “vindicated,” but also “conflicted” about the idea of having an American newspaper industry fueled by Indian labor. “I mean, I am an American too,” he said. “I had two ancestors in the Revolutionary War. My mother was in the Daughters of the American Revolution.”
It’s not easy being a visionary, he said: “I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that’s a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you’re nuts.”
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 29, 2008
PASADENA, Calif.
I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself “Thomas Edison.”
The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”
Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.
“Everyone has to get ready for what’s inevitable — like King Canute and the tide coming in — and that’s really my message to the industry,” the editor and publisher said. “Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering.”
I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.
“In brutal terms,” said Macpherson, whose father was a typesetter, printer and photographer, “it’s going to get to the point where saving the industry may require some people losing their jobs. The newspaper industry is coming to a General Motors moment — except there’s no one to bail them out.” He said it would be “irresponsible” for newspapers not to explore offshoring options.
He said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.
So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.
He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.
“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”
A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.
I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”
Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?
At first the reaction to covering Pasadena from 8,000 miles away and 13.5 hours ahead was “absolutely brutal,” Macpherson recalled. Journalism professors keened and Larry Wilson, the public editor at The Pasadena Star-News, called it “nutty.”
But then in October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.”
Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews’s papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, “If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” and said after the speech, “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”
Macpherson feels “vindicated,” but also “conflicted” about the idea of having an American newspaper industry fueled by Indian labor. “I mean, I am an American too,” he said. “I had two ancestors in the Revolutionary War. My mother was in the Daughters of the American Revolution.”
It’s not easy being a visionary, he said: “I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that’s a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you’re nuts.”
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