If you look in the new Sports Illustrated (11/9/09) at the Faces in the Crowd section, they list Alisha Glass.  I couldn't find a link on their website, I saw it in the actual magazine.  They mention the 88-match streak.

 

Interestingly enough, when I did a search for Alisha Glass on their web site, I came across an article from '06 about Alisha, Megan Hodge and Blair Brown being the number 1 recruiting class for '06.  This quote caught my eye:

This class definitely has a target on its back, though. Many people believe it should equal the success of the 1996 class, which produced three four-year starters, won one NCAA championship and finished second twice.

Do you think they've done that?  Let's see: 

one first and two seconds

vs.

two firsts & favored to win a third for the first threepeat ever, called the greatest team ever, most consecutive matches won, most consecutive sets/games won, four returning All-Americans this year.

Here's the whole article: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/dave_krider/06/27/krider.notebook/index.html

Imagine Even Royster had a bunch of 20+ yard runs that put us inside the 10, but someone else usually scored.  Maybe Clark or Suhey run it in, or Clark throws TD's.  Even though Royster wasn't actually scoring, if he had enough long runs that set up scores, he would deserve the OPYA.

Well, if your willing to think outside the box & not be so closed minded about it ... you'd realize, with all his interceptions and fumbles, how many scores Pryor is setting up.  Why should it be limited to someone who only generates offensive scores for his own team?  I haven't looked at the statistics, but it seems like Pryor is really doing his part to help the other teams get a lot of points.  Shouldn't that count?

 </sarcasm>

Poll

Pryor deserves ...

19%

to barely win the OPYA for all the points from turnovers

22 votes

16%

to barely be benched

18 votes

63%

to be ignored

71 votes

111 votes | Poll has closed

ESPN Classic is showing "Something for Joey" tonight (Sunday) at 8:00 Eastern time.  For those of you that haven't seen it and have ESPN Classic, now you can finally see it.  Of course, if you have seen it and want to watch it again, you could do that, as well. 

I wasn't whether to do this as a fanpost or fanshot, but decided that there really wasn't a link or specific image to post so I went with the fanpost.  I really hope that by now I have met the seventy-five word minimum.

via assets.sbnation.com

As a public service to Pitt fans, I think we should come up with the best lame excuse for this yellow-out picture.  I bet some of you can come up with better excuses than what is listed in this poll.  Add yours as comments & if enough people reply to your idea, I will add it to the poll.  (I'm assuming I can add items later.  If not, we're stuck with what I came up with.)

 

Poll

The explanation for this picture is:

20%

Pitt scientists are working on a top secret invisibility project for the military. This picture shows how successful they are.

13 votes

41%

If too many people gather in one place, it would be too inviting a target for terrorists. If more people were in this picture, the terrorists would win.

26 votes

38%

There are more people attending the game, but they all just happened to go to the bathroom at the same time.

24 votes

63 votes | Poll has closed

I changed the spreadsheet.  There isn't any new data, but I added a function to calculate the values.  This makes the formulas on the spreadsheet simpler, but adds more processing behind the scenes.  What does this mean to you?  If you just want to see the deltas for the teams that were listed before, you don't need to get the new copy.  There isn't any new data.  If you want to be able to add more teams or other stats, it is much easier to do now.  There are notes at the bottom of the spreadsheet describing how to add things.

 

Thanks for all the comments on the original fanpost (http://www.blackshoediaries.com/2008/12/17/695763/comparing-how-teams-did-ag).  I realize this doesn't give you an exact comparison of different teams.  I'm hoping it could be a starting point for getting others to consider how distorting some straight stats are without a reference point.  If somebody wanted to play with the function to use standard deviations, etc. that would be great, but I'm not planning to do that.  By adding the function and simplifying the data on the spreadsheet, I hoped to make that easier for someone else to do.

 

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/delta.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/Delta.htm

I wondered how to make more sense of some of the statistics we see when people try to compare teams that don't play each other.  I thought it would be interesting to see how a team did compared to what that team's opponents averaged.  What I mean is that if a team averages 150 rushing yards a game against teams that average giving up 100 rushing yards a game, that is more impressive than averaging 175 yards rushing a game against teams that average giving up 200 yards rushing a game.  So, anyway, I did a first cut at a spreadsheet that compares yards passing, yards rushing and points for both offense and defense for some of the top teams.  I found the results interesting.  USC's defense is more impressive than I thought it would be.  I plan to make some changes to how I calculate the values to make it easier to work with, but I posted what I have so far.  Please reply if you have any questions or comments.

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/delta.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/Delta.htm

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.htm

East Carolina, Buffalo & Rutgers all showed up for the first time in the human polls since I started doing this, so they got added to my spreadsheet. 

Remember that I caclulate the number of human voters in each poll based on the total points.  So if you are playing with the values for teams, the total points has to stay the same.  If you add 20 points to one team, you must subtract exactly 20 points from one or more other teams.

As an Excel spreadsheet: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.xls

As a web page: http://home.comcast.net/~elihurozen/BCS.htm

Sorry this is so late.  I made some changes to my resume that is linked to by the spreadsheet & I wanted to get that up before posting this.  So, if you find yourself looking for a talented & experienced software engineer for an job in Massachusetts, be sure to check out my resume. Thanks.