Author: Reid

Conservatives Debate About Social Media and the Public Square

The participants: Tim Miller and Tom Nichols, on one side, and Rameesh Ponnuru and John McCormack (from National Review), on the other. (David French comes in at the end as a sort of peace-maker.) I don’t comment on Twitter anymore, but I really wanted to weigh on the points made in this debate, so I’m going to do that in this thread–just to get it off my chest.

Tim Miller starts the thread by criticizing a recent Peggy Noonan op-ed (which I haven’t read). Her article condemns Trump now, but Miller finds this annoying as she didn’t vote for Biden (and refused to endorse him over Trump?). He wonders why she should have a prominent platform–why people should trust her judgment–especially if she doesn’t recognize (and apologize) for this error in judgment.

Ponnuru calls Miller “insuferable” for this position, and Miller responds by saying, Continue reading “Conservatives Debate About Social Media and the Public Square”

The Impact of Ball Control on Football Defenses

For a long time, I’ve believed that a team’s offense can have a significant impact on the performance of a team’s defense. Specifically, better ball control of a team’s offense–which involves running a lot of time and plays, as well as protecting the football–will lead to better performance by the team’s defense–or at least least better ball control would create better conditions to play good defense, while bad ball control would do the opposite.

To examine these claims, I’ve turned to stats like time of possession (TOP), totals and averages, and the number of snaps by a team’s offense and defense. There might be other metrics, but those are the ones I recently looked at. This will be a thread to discuss and analyze this topic.