Pats' Playoff Odds

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

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.”

Leave it to a film critic to sort this out

Matt's turned us on to Alan Mutter's "Newsosaur" blog, but this entry from the man who -- with his former rival, the late Gene Siskel -- made a half-hour show of movie reviews possible, is also great reading on the celebrity-obsessed culture we have:

Roger Ebert: Death to film critics! Hail to the CelebCult! (click for link).

-JDE2

Number Four, (or Two, if you're in Oshawa)

Any chance I get to mention Robert Gordon Orr isn't a bad thing, unless it's referring to the thieving agent who robbed him (and other players) blind.

Orr's junior league team, the Oshawa Generals, retired his number last night.

Two questions jumped out at me about this story: (1) What took the Generals so freakin' long to retire the number of one of the five greatest players ever? and (2) Is Bobby Orr really 60 YEARS OLD? Wow.

-JDE2

Ah, memories. . .

Allow me this diversion from the bad news of the day to something incredibly frivolous: Remember when there were only three broadcast networks?

That's when stuff like "Battle of the Network Stars" aired. The show pitted stars from the three networks in "athletic" competition. I most vividly remember the "Simon Says" battles.

Bill Simmons at ESPN remembers, too. Here's his take on the joy of a recently discovered YouTube video featuring a match race between Robert Conrad and Gabe Kaplan.

-JDE2

Does This Irritate Anyone Else?

I need a good liberal (I'm counting on you, Maureen!) to explain why this is OK, because it frosts me no end:

Obamas Pick Sidwell School, Ending a Washington Guessing Game

By RACHEL L. SWARNS
WASHINGTON — After a school search that set off weeks of frenzied speculation among parents in the nation’s capital, President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, announced Friday that their two daughters would attend Sidwell Friends School, the pricey and prestigious academy that has educated generations of this city’s elite.
The Quaker-run Sidwell, which was established in 1883, has educated the children of two sitting presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. And there was an added bonus: grandchildren of Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who are friendly with the Obama girls, attend Sidwell.
The Obama family had considered two other private institutions, Georgetown Day School and Maret School, for their girls, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.
But Sidwell has long been described by some as the Harvard of Washington’s private schools. Its tuition runs as high as $29,442 a year.
“A number of great schools were considered,” said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. “In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now.”

Now, far be it from me to criticize any parent for sending their kids to a private school because they think it's the best fit for their kids. I send my own children to a Catholic school, at a not inconsiderable cost, because I believe it's the best fit for my kids. I couldn't possibly afford the school the Obama kids are going to, but the president-elect can, so good for him.

What bothers me is when rich liberals like the president-elect engage in windy oratory about the glories of public schools -- and then refuse to send their own kids to them. Of course they made the decision they thought was best for their kids. Any parent would. But many parents can't. And liberals like the president-elect seem to think that's OK. So the rich get richer. Class divides never get bridged and bright DC children who don't happen to be named Obama or Biden or Bush or Rockefeller go to underfunded schools that can't provide the challenge those kids need.

I don't mean to sound too harsh on public schools. I have no objection to them. Hell, I went to them. But the model doesn't work. Wealthy public schools in wealthy communities cater to wealthy families that can afford to offer things that poor public schools in poor communities that cater to poor families can't. Wouldn't we be better off to shake things up, perhaps go to a charter school model? The Irish system intrigues me. The Irish government doesn't run schools -- churches and secular education groups do. The government just pays the bills. The result is smaller schools, more parental involvement, a scholastic identity shaped around values rather than community or class, and higher overall achievement. Rather than gut public schools, I'd like to see them unleashed so they can reach their full potential.

Who knows? Maybe then the Obamas would consider sending their kids to one.

-- MJM

How on Earth Could This Be Unexpected?

Story today on jobless claims. Observations after the text:

WASHINGTON – New claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to a 16-year high, the Labor Department said Thursday, providing more evidence of a rapidly weakening job market expected to get even worse next year.
The government said new applications for jobless benefits rose to a seasonally adjusted 542,000 from a downwardly revised figure of 515,000 in the previous week. That's much higher than Wall Street economists' expectations of 505,000, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.
That is also the highest level of claims since July 1992, the department said, when the U.S. economy was coming out of a recession.
The four-week average of claims, which smooths out fluctuations, was even worse: it rose to 506,500, the highest in more than 25 years.
In addition, the number of people continuing to claim unemployment insurance rose sharply for the third straight week to more than 4 million, the highest since December 1982, when the economy was in a painful recession.
The financial markets fell on the news. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped about 160 points in morning trading, and broader indexes also fell.
The jobless figures come as the Senate is expected to vote Thursday on legislation that would extend unemployment benefits. The White House said President George W. Bush would quickly sign the bill.
The measure would provide seven additional weeks of payments to those who have exhausted their benefits. Those in states where the unemployment rate is above 6 percent would be eligible for an additional 13 weeks beyond the 26 weeks of regular benefits. Benefit checks average about $300 a week nationwide.

So, the numbers were a surprise to Wall Street analysts? The same baboons who drove Lehman, AIG, Bear Stearns and countless other institution either to liquidation or the arms of a government bailout? Haven't the views of Wall Street's vaunted analysts been thoroughly discredited by now?

The galling thing is that these "analysts" are still pulling down enough coin to choke an elephant while doing a positively Julio Lugo-like job. Meanwhile, good workers everywhere who are strong performers in their professions are looking for work.

It's capitalism gone mad. Markets are supposed to reward success and smarts. Our markets are rewarding failure and boobery. No wonder we're in this fix.

-- MJM