haha yepppp. or someone will be a 6:1 fav in a game and he'll say 'yea they should win, but this is football, anything can happen and i wouldn't be surprised if they lost. i have it at about a 60/40'. ok, so you're gonna bet thousands on the underdogs then, right?

id say rose is closer to top guard than amare is to top pf. griffinnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

better than cowherd imo (especially in the gambling department)

i think a lot of why schatz does that 50/50 - 60/40 talk is because he probably saves his real analysis/predictions for premium(paying) members on his site.

and cowherd is just an imbecile. anyone who gives any stock to any of his picks/analysis is herpderp status imo

not very lol imo.. top five player over the next years.

Worst part of the Simmons article was when he said this in defense of Ray Allen's all star case.

Millman isn't that bad IMO. Since a ton of people bet sports here he's obviously lol but to casualfan.jpg he's probably fine. As others have said he has a very nice job also.

Schatz is the one that annoys me a lot and is just boring to listen to.

Schatz/FO confirmed awful

He seemed to switch to the 50/50 bs after the SB 42 podcast where he and Simmons spent like an hour blowing each other on how awesome the Pats were and how many points they were gonna win by.

On last week's podcast Schatz was super butt-hurt over Jets fans being mean to him.

Also when he was directly asked whether he liked the Packers or Bears. He said that the computers like the Bears, but he likes the Packers.

schatz is the worst. he's just a slimy tout even when he's not talking about gambling

i get the sense that he's somehow a true believer and thinks footballoutsiders actually does good w

rofl

Simmonssssssssssssssssssss

ha ha ha oh wow

Am I missing a joke where the guy who runs FO is shockingly a believer in what FO does?

I think there's some reasons that Schatz isn't great, but none of them are actually articulated in this thread, and it seems more like people being shocked that the stathead guy is saying stathead guy-y things on the podcast.

live chat today

the half-point worries me though. I'd feel better about taking them if they were -3.

he's such a f'n sharp

Not really. I'm a premium member. We get DVOA picks both versus the spread and straight up, the full DVOA database and splits, a FF answering service, and a discount on ESPN Insider.

There's really nothing precise about it. It's only a bunch of added content if you need the fantasy/gambling picks or you like to mess around with the DVOA splits.

i haven't listened to the particular podcast, but the general criticism of football outsiders is that it has followed a business model established by baseball prospectus - it has rushed to essentially copyright ideas without worrying about whether or not these ideas are true or valid. because tearing down its own concepts might affect the brand, you won't see it happen there - you'll instead see a defense of why the kansas city chiefs were actually the best team in football through week 8, instead of why DVOA sometimes gets some stuff wrong and isn't perfect.

klosterman podcast next week apparently. yay!

Right, those are the valid reasons to hate on FO. (and just in general some of the people there are giant droolers the minute you hear them talk about anything that isn't hard numbers football) I just don't get hating on a stathead for hedging on a pick or something.

that's pretty good. i also liked the one from the other day, i think it was from the Millman discussion, where they were guessing lines for different SB matchups depending on who wins this weekend.

Simmons: what do you think the line would be for that one?
Other Dude (in case it wasn't actually Millman, and i'm running him down for no reason): hmm, i'd say like 4 points.
Simmons: really? i think it'd be more like 6.
Other Dude: yeah...well...somewhere between 4-6, yeah.

reminds me of:

"What time you got?"
"Oh, no. I don't wear a watch."
"What do you do?"
"Well, I tell time by the sun."
"How close do you get?"
"Well, I can guess within an hour."
"Tsk. Well, I can guess within the hour, and I don't even have to look at the sun."
"Yeah."
"Well, what about at night? What do you do then?"
"Well, night's tougher but it's only a couple of hours."

Everything he does around gambling now is an offshoot of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Odds-Season-Th.../dp/0306811561

which is actually really good. You'd think, though, that spending a season around Alan Boston would make him a little more knowledgeable about sports betting. Or maybe it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

Seems you are missing the point, but think you are knowledgable about gambling, so don't know if it is intentional and I'm just missing the joke or not. He said the points between 4 and 6 are dead numbers therefore they really have pretty similar opinions about the game. The difference between 4 and 6 is actually slightly less than the difference between 3 and 3 1/2 (at least for the two games this week). I think Millman is a clown too, but when I heard this exchange, I thought nothing of it. If someone was guessing the line and said they think it would be either 3 or 3.5, I don't know if I would call that precise, but would seem pretty reasonable to me considering its just a freaking guess.

fwiw I agree with you, but Millman is such a dbag that it's hard to take him seriously and give him the benefit of the doubt.

Read that book. Was a very good read.

I'm hating on them for their downright misleading and shameless promotion of their "advanced metrics".