Red Eyes, Luggage Carts, Can't Lose

Just something quick: the Big East released its 2013 conference schedule yesterday. It's an interesting exercise in realignment madness. I computed the distance between each school using this tool. This first table provided the total miles each team travels to get to its road games, along with its longest trip.

Evaluating MLB Signings, Part 2: Madness

Last time out, we asked how good the Napoli and Victorino signings were for the Boston Red Sox. Using J.C. Bradbury's method, we established that we need to do the following:
1. Figure out how much a win is worth,
2. Figure out how much an individual player contributed to his team's wins, and
3. Convert that number of wins into a dollar value.

Evaluating MLB Signings, Part 1: Methods

After their 2012 season went down in flames, the Boston Red Sox were active during the recent winter meetings, signing 31-year-old first baseman/catcher Mike Napoli to a 3-year, $39 million contract, and 32-year-old outfielder Shane Victorino to a 3-year, $37.5 million contract. The moves were modest when compared to past offseasons, but the question remains: will the Sox get value from their new acquisitions?

Site News: FoS at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

Quick update: I recently submitted an abstract to the Evolution of Sport section of the annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The conference, held in Boston March 1-2, is two days long and features a plethora of notable sports journalists, sabermetricians, and front office personnel.

And maybe yours truly.

I found out today that my abstract has been accepted into the second round. The next step is a video submission fleshing out my idea, which will be judged by the panel. If they approve, I get 15 minutes on stage at the conference.

I don't know how much of my proposal I can share, so I'll keep it under wraps for now. If it gets accepted, you can see it at the conference, or once they upload the video to their website; if it doesn't get accepted, I'll write it up and post it here.

Until then, I'm working on analyzing the recent Red Sox signings of Mike Napoli and Shane Victorino. Did the Red Sox overpay? How do these contracts compare to those of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez, which the Red Sox took great pains to pawn off on the Dodgers?

Wish me luck!

A Richly-Deserved Beating: CFB ATS Update

At the beginning of the college football season, I asked whether you could use a team's recent against-the-spread (ATS) history to predict how they would do against the spread this season. I came to the conclusion that

[T]he perpetually underperforming teams (like Tulane) and perpetually overperforming teams (like Boise State) are a function of luck* rather than some underlying market inefficiency.

Well, the season's over (except for the bowl games). Was I right?

The Big East and the Big Easy

News of the Big East's latest expansions burned up my little corner of the Internet yesterday. Being a Tulane fan, I was happy to hear my alma mater would be movin' on up to the Big East beginning in 2014.

Everyone else, of course, reacted with something between bewilderment and disappointment. To them, the Big East was the desperate drunk guy looking for someone to go home with at The Boot's last call, and Tulane...

GO HOME, BIG EAST. YOU ARE DRUNK.

— Pod Katt (@valleyshook) November 27, 2012

...hey, don't be mean. Tulane is cute and really fun, you guys.

Can't wait for the Tulane-Providence game at the Dunk. What the hell happened to Dave Gavitt's Big East?

— Fran Fraschilla (@franfraschilla) November 27, 2012

Aw, come on, Fran. Well, I'm from Rhode Island, so I'm excited.*

* - Seems like a strange matchup to pick, doesn't it? After all, Providence was IN Dave Gavitt's Big East. They named the floor at the Dunk after Gavitt.

Unusual homerism aside, let's take a look at some possible reasons why Tulane was added, essentially replacing Louisville (who left today for the ACC) and Rutgers (who left recently for the Big 10).

Thinking Out Loud: Replacement Referees and Home-Field Advantage

Home-field advantage, like the Cubs' curse and the substandard jumping abilities of Caucasians, is one of those sports truisms that has been accepted for decades as a given. The 2011 book Scorecasting investigated this phenomenon and ventured to explain why home-field advantage still existed in the era of free agency, chartered jets, and five-star hotels. Consider this slideshow, taken from the presentation given by the authors at the 2011 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:

The Real Reasons Behind the Home Field Advantage from Sloan Sports Conference

Bad Beats: The Predictive Power of Past Years' ATS Record

Last week, I used this space to complain about losing money to my friend Dave by betting against Tulane football.

Faaascinating, I know. But it gives me a chance to make an Important Point about the predictive value of statistics.

My confidence in my bet was based on the fact that, from 2003 to 2011, Tulane covered just under 40% of their games against the spread. Winning 60 percent of your bets would make the average professional bettor salivate, so I was happy to bet based on this big trend.

There were two things I ignored: first, that one game is the smallest of sample sizes, and second, that past results are no guarantee of future performance. The second point is the interesting one, so let's focus on that: if a team has done better/worse than average against the spread in the past, does that tell us anything about its performance against the spread in the future?

Protecting the Investment: The Stephen Strasburg Decision

When I heard that the Washington Nationals had shut down Stephen Strasburg for the season, I thought I had a nice article for Monday all sewn up. I could find pitchers who had had Tommy John surgery, plot their innings in their first full season after the injury, and compare that to their WAR or xFIP over the next five years.

But no, the Nationals insisted, this had nothing to do with his arm but rather his "mental state", so there goes that article.

By pinning the decision on Strasburg's mental state, the Nationals are short-circuiting any number of arguments with the "You-don't-know-what-we-know" card. It's a good card, with shiny foil edges, a limited-edition number on the back, and maybe a piece of a game-used uniform included. If it were an issue with his arm, you could use incomplete data to make quasi-flawed arguments about whether protecting pitchers actually did anything. But his mental state? How can you, mere mortal, possibly claim to know anything about what Strasburg is thinking or feeling? Or at least, how can you claim to know more than the people in the metaphorical trenches with him?

Bad Beats: Rutgers at Tulane, Sep. 1, 2012

I owe Tulane football an apology. It seems I underestimated this year's team.

When the opening line for the season opener against Rutgers was listed at 17, I immediately jumped on Twitter.

At work today: "Tulane is 17.5-pt underdogs in their home opener vs Rutgers!" "That's it? Take Rutgers."
— Bryan Cole (@Doctor_Bryan) August 9, 2012

Even when confronted with the one other Tulane football fan on Twitter, I refused to back down.

“@jbr1657: Rutgers didn't even score 17 at home against Tulane in 2010” // Forgot about this. Prediction: Rutgers 14, Tulane -6 #rollwave
— Bryan Cole (@Doctor_Bryan) August 9, 2012

And it seemed Vegas agreed with me, kind of: by the week of the game, the line had moved to 20, though the over/under still suggested Tulane's score would be a natural number.

Unsexy and I Know It

Bryan returns with his entry in the Grantland Fantasy Island competition. It didn't get picked, but it might just help you in your upcoming fantasy draft. Go nuts.

Nothing I write here will win your fantasy football league for you, because leagues aren’t won on draft day.

No, leagues are won with midseason pickups, by making sure you know the instant that rookie running back wins the starting job. And when his last-minute touchdown seals victory over your roommate, you sleep with one eye open and a frying pan in hand, just in case.

But at least you won.

They're Not Booing ... Are They?: The Return of Kevin Youkilis

Kevin Youkilis, "the Greek god of walks", started his professional baseball career as a relative nobody, a late-round flier that surprised everyone to become a hero of the 2007 World Series winners. Over time, though, his star dimmed thanks to injuries and less irritating replacements from Pawtucket. He was recently traded to the White Sox and returns this week to Fenway for the first time since the trade.

What better opportunity for "sources within the Red Sox organization" to besmirch his reputation with a classless character assassination?

Rise of The Machine: An Albert Pujols Update

One of my first posts of the baseball season was a look at Albert Pujols' home run drought. It took a grand total of like three days for Pujols to make me look foolish.

At the time, I used FanGraphs' player page to point out that Pujols was swinging at more pitches outside the strike zone -- from a career number of 21% up to 41%. Here's what I concluded:

Pujols just signed a $240 million contract, might be (understandably) feeling the pressure to earn that contract in a new city, and is pressing, going after pitches he normally would lay off, causing more strikeouts when he misses and a little weaker contact even when he connects.

Since that time, Pujols has seen 388 pitches out of the strike zone, and swung at 33% of them, right in line with last season's numbers. And wouldn't you know it: Pujols has hit 14 home runs in the last two months. That's a home run in 5.4% of those 261 plate appearances, closer to his career rate of 6%. It's also worth pointing out that Pujols' HR/FB rate over that time is 16.9%, a bit below his career rate of 19%. That means you should expect more home runs in the second half.

Baseball IIINNN SPAAAAAACE!

Baseball's All-Star break is the slowest time on the sports calendar. In fact, these three days are the only days of the year where none of the four major professional sports have games*.

* - Real games. Sorry, Bud, this one still doesn't count.

If you're really -- and I mean REALLY -- desperate for some action you can watch the Home Run Derby. There are two problems with this strategy: first, you have to deal with Chris "Uma" Berman, and second, it's really not that interesting. You'd think a bunch of professional baseball players trying to hit the ball as far as they can would be fun to watch but, let's face it: it gets old after awhile.

There are ways to spice it up, of course, like this clusterfuck the Reading Phillies came up with for the Eastern League All-Star Game.

Or! Or. You could put it on the moon.

WAR Stars

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the All-Star Game meant something. You hear this all the time from Werther's-loving, fedora-wearing, chair-rocking, old-timey sportswriters, so it must be true. It's not fair to call this narrative a "dead-horse": this is like some proto-horse ancestor, found primarily in cave paintings, that died out in the last Ice Age.

Pictured: Mariano Rivera's rookie season

These days, the players treat the game as a glorified exhibition game -- which it is -- and have some fun with it -- which they should -- while trying to protect themselves from injury -- which is just smart*, considering the size of their contracts, but for some reason is treated as sacrilege.

* - Ask Ted Williams, who shattered his elbow crashing into a wall in 1950, or Pedro Martinez, who pitched his arm off in 1999.

But I don't want to talk about that.

Euro 2012 Tournament Odds

The European Championship pits the best 16* international soccer teams on the continent against each other, producing better matchups than the World Cup and fun Eurozone debt crisis proxy fights. The 16 teams are divided into four groups of four. Each group plays a round robin, with the top two in each group advancing to a single-elimination tournament.

* - Okay, 14 best teams and 2 host teams. But even the host nations are pretty good: There's no North Korea losing games 7-0.

The group stage just finished, and the tournament is about to get underway. Of the eight teams remaining, who has the best chance of winning it all?

For baseball and basketball games, you can calculate the expected win probability for a single game from the two teams' Pythagorean records using the log5 method. For international soccer, you can use the Elo ratings to determine the expected win probabilities. The formula looks like this:
We = 1 / (10(-dr/400) + 1),
where dr is the difference in Elo rankings between the two teams.

Once you know the probability that a team wins its first game, you can compute the probability that team wins its second game using conditional probabilities. Like this:
P(wins first game)*(P(beats potential opponent A)*P(potential opponent A wins first game)+P(beats potential opponent B)*P(potential opponent B wins first game))

Keep doing that and you eventually get win probabilities for the entire tournament:

	Elo	Semis	Finals	Champs	Odds (x-to-1)
Spain	2110	83%	67%	44%	2.3
Germany	2063	85%	59%	32%	3.1
England	1950	61%	25%	10%	10.1
Portugal	1883	65%	18%	6.1%	16.4
Italy	1871	39%	12%	3.7%	27
France	1839	17%	9%	2.5%	40
Czech Rep.	1779	35%	6%	1.5%	68.3
Greece	1763	15%	4%	0.9%	112

And you're never going to believe this, but the teams with the best ratings are the ones with the highest chances to win. You can see that the probabilities depend a bit on matchups: France has only a 17% chance of knocking off Spain in the first round, but a 2.5% chance of winning the championship, whereas the Czech Republic has a 35% chance of beating Portugal but a 1.5% chance of making the finals, since they'd have a lower win probability against the remaining teams if they did advance.

Comparing the odds to the betting markets, it looks like Spain might actually be a good wager: if you believe this method, their odds to win are 2.3-to-1, but the books have them listed at 2.6-to-1. Practically everyone else is overvalued, but laughably so for Portugal (listed at 7.5-to-1), Italy (9-to-1), and France (12).

UPDATE #1: June 21, 4:45 p.m.
Here's what the odds look like after Portugal's win over the Czech Republic:

	Elo	Semis	Finals	Champs	Odds (x-to-1)
Spain	2110	83%	64%	41%	2.4
Germany	2063	85%	59%	32%	3.1
Portugal	1901	100%	29%	11%	9.3
England	1950	61%	25%	10%	10.3
Italy	1871	39%	12%	3.6%	27.3
France	1839	17%	7%	2.1%	47.6
Greece	1763	15%	4%	0.9%	117

Note that everyone else's odds change, despite not playing, because of the improvement in Portugal's ranking. Portugal now has an 11% chance of winning the tournament, leapfrogging England, who obviously still has to survive the semifinal matchup. France, a bad bet to begin with, becomes a slightly worse bet now that they have to beat both Iberian Peninsula teams to get to the finals.

UPDATE #2: June 22, 4:45 p.m.
Here's what the odds look like after Germany's demolishing of the Greeks:

	Elo	Semis	Finals	Champs	Odds (x-to-1)
Germany	2074	100%	70%	39%	2.6
Spain	2110	83%	64%	39%	2.6
Portugal	1901	100%	29%	9.6%	10.5
England	1956	62%	21%	8.4%	11.9
Italy	1871	38%	9%	2.7%	36.9
France	1839	17%	7%	1.8%	54.8

Germany are* technically the favorites by half a percentage point over Spain. But, again, Spain still has a first round match to play; with their odds somewhere in the 11-to-4 range (2.75-to-1), they still look like the best bet.

* - This always looks wrong to me, but everyone else does it. My least favorite thing about soccer.

UPDATE #3: June 25, 9:15 a.m.
Here's what the odds look like after this weekend's games, including the first upset of the knockout stages as the favored England side screwed up some penalty kicks to lose to Italy in a shootout:

	Elo	Semis	Finals	Champs	Odds (x-to-1)
Spain	2123	100%	78%	49%	2.0
Germany	2074	100%	73%	36%	2.8
Italy	1902	100%	27%	7.6%	13.2
Portugal	1901	100%	22%	7.2%	13.8

This is the last update here, but I'll still post updates on Twitter. Italy's odds are slightly better than Portugal's, just because Germany has a lower rating than Spain's. I do like the fact that every German game from here out (vs. Italy, then vs. Spain/Portugal winner) is another Bailout Bowl, though some of that has to do with the woeful state of the Eurozone.

The Pain from a Future Wound: Betting on Mad Men Season 6

In sports, futures bets are a popular way for casual fans to get in on some sweet season-long action and casinos to take advantage of the eternal optimism of Cubs fans. What's more, future odds for next season are up mere minutes after the previous season ends. And while you can't place many entertainment-related bets in Vegas, you can certainly place them online. With all that in mind, The Feats of Strength proudly presents the first lines posted* for the sixth season of Mad Men.

* - God, I HOPE they're the first lines posted. What is wrong with you people?

The Dutch Oven Overheats

Yea, and when the Philistines hath batted around in the inning, Maddux brother of Greg pulleth Holland and summoned yon reliever.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for Rangers starter Derek Holland. Just after Memorial Day, Holland made the anemic Seattle Mariners look like the '27 Yankees, giving up eight runs in less than two innings May 30. Just to prove it was no fluke, Holland labored through a five-inning start against the Oakland A's in the pitcher's haven that is the Oakland Coliseum.

The Rangers put Holland on the disabled list with a "fatigued shoulder" and blamed a stomach virus that saw "The Dutch Oven" drop some 15 pounds. But Grantland's Jonah Keri has the real story:

Tangled in the Rigging: Defending the NBA Draft Lottery

The NBA conference finals brings with it one of the best sideshows in sports: the NBA draft lottery, in which 14 grown men stand around awkwardly for half an hour to figure out how a bunch of ping pong balls bounced. We*, the viewing audience, are treated to a half-hour special containing some 15 minutes of talking heads speculating wildly, 2 minutes of commisioner David Stern reading franchise names, and 5 minutes of awkward interviews with team representatives. Fascinating.

* - Maybe "we" is the wrong pronoun; I mean, I didn't watch it.

But while the presentation of the lottery may not be especially compelling, the lottery itself sure is. The lottery teams (i.e., those that miss the playoffs) are ranked in inverse order of record, with the worst teams receiving the best chances of a high pick. So the team with the worst record has a 25% chance of winning the lottery, the second-worst team has a 19.9% chance of winning the lottery, and so on down to the 14th-worst team (the last team out of the playoffs) who has a 0.5% chance of winning the lottery. The whole list of probabilities for this year's draft is available here.

Some have argued (with varying degrees of seriousness) that the lottery system is rigged*, and point to the fact that the worst team in the league hasn't won a lottery since the Orlando Magic won and picked Dwight Howard in 2004. But I want to stress this again, because it's important: the team with the highest probability will still lose the lottery (i.e., not get the first overall pick) 75% of the time.

...I mean, uh, ALBERT PUJOLS IS AWESOME AT BASEBALL

"That one's for you, Bryan." (via)
I typed up my most recent article, investigating the causes behind Albert Pujols' home run drought, with a growing sense of dread. Visions of Pujols homering in his first at bat Thursday night hung over my frantic analysis like some baseball bat of Damocles. I watched Thursday and Friday's games with bated breath.

Considering the power Pujols has displayed throughout his career, the fact that he made it until Sunday afternoon was as good as I could have hoped for. Plus, now I get to write an easy follow-up post whining about my miserable luck*.

After the home run, Keith Law tweeted that he couldn't wait for the whiplash-incuding speed with which the narrative on Pujols would change. As a free service to those busy producers of the talking head panel shows on ESPN, we here at The Feats of Strength wish to provide a general recipe for a ready-made Albert Pujols discussion.

We're So Sorry, Uncle Albert

Albert Pujols would be very happy if we all just forgot about the last month of baseball.

Pujols signed a 10-year, $240M contract over the winter with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim*. The statistically-minded balked at the deal, which would pay him $30m in 2021, when Pujols will be 41 years old. Still, it wasn't hard to imagine that the deal could still be worthwhile, so long as Pujols crushed in the first half of the deal.

...Whoops. Pujols, projected by FanGraphs to hit 28 home runs this season, is still waiting for his first homer some 107 plate appearances into the season. That's the longest drought of the season, and naturally, everyone's asking, "What's wrong with The Machine?"

Bracket Showdown, Day 10: [Title Vacated]

With Kentucky's dismantling of Kansas in last night's national championship game, the first ever Feats of Strength Bracket Showdown has come to an end*. A comical 28 entries correctly put Kentucky on the final line. As I said on Twitter last night, I have never seen more experts pick the same team to win a championship -- and be correct -- in a long time. Then again, maybe I just haven't been paying attention.

Anyway, the Aluminum Pole for best performance** goes to Jerry Palm at CBS Sports, who picked 3 of the Final Four, both finalists, and Kentucky to win for a total of 146 points.

Congrats, Jerry; you've earned this.

Bracket Showdown, Day 9: Domeward Bound

RISD alumna and mascot-bracketeer Ashley MacLure illustrates the Louisville-Kentucky matchup.

No one, they say, wants to hear about your fantasy sports teams or your bad gambling losses. At the risk of losing my one reader, then, I'll refrain from complaining about the Ohio State Buckeyes, who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and cost me a shot at my bracket pool. Fortunately, I had the catharsis of the Bracket Showdown, so as the Buckeyes stood around bewildered on the Superdome floor, I grimly set to work tallying up the points from tonight's semifinals, drawing larger-than-usual X's through the incorrect predictions.

Let's move on, and see how our panel of experts fared in the Bracket Showdown. As usual, the rules of the showdown are here, and the updated scoreboard is here.

Bracket Showdown, Day 8: ...Step 3 = Kentucky.

After a weeklong vacation in Las Vegas, Bryan triumphantly returns to the blog with an update on the 36-entry Feats of Strength Bracket Showdown.

After two glorious weekends, four teams are headed to New Orleans to compete for the college basketball championship. Sixty-four other teams are not headed to New Orleans or, at least, if they are, will be mostly limited to drinking hurricanes on Bourbon Street. Let's look back at our Bracket Showdown and see how our contestants are doing. The full scoreboard is available in this Google Document.

Bracket Showdown, Day 2: Where the hell is Lehigh anyway?

"Sir, the possibility of St. Bonaventure winning the tournament is approximately 3750 to one!"

The first round of the tournament is in the books, and my bracket is in enough disarray that I can stop worrying about winning my office pool (which was never going to happen anyway) and start rooting for chaos. Let's go Mountain Hawks!

Anyway, let's check in on our team of experts and computer simulations and see how they're doing:

Bracket Showdown, Day 1: Barack, Chalk, Jayhawk

The greatest first day of the tournament I ever had was back in 2008. Between a series of brilliant thefts of other people's deductions and some good old-fashioned dumb luck, I actually got all 16 games correct. Like a pitcher in the middle of a perfect game, I refused to talk about it, but spent a good part of the morning going back to ESPN's bracket challenge page to admire the score.

It wasn't long, of course, before I got my first loss of the tournament. It was all downhill from there, and I finished somewhere between "mediocre" and "flipping coins" that year.

All of which to say that March Madness is not a mad dash, but rather some kind of mad marathon*. Still, it's never to early to jump to conclusions! Let's take a look at the scoreboard and discuss the results of day one:

Bracket Showdown: Just the FAQs, Ma'am

As the NCAA college basketball championship gets underway, The Feats of Strength will be hosting a showdown between dozens of brackets from college basketball experts, analysts, celebrities and more. Winner gets an aluminum pole -- very high strength-to-weight ratio*.

"No decorations. I find tinsel distracting."
Today, I explain the rules of the contest. What better way to do that than the ol' Frequently Asked Questions gimmick? Well, except that no one's reading this blog, let alone asking questions, so let's call it the "Fruitlessly Anticipated Questions" section.

Announcing the Feats of Strength Bracket Showdown!

The header on this blog might lead you to believe that actual analytics will show up on this blog someday. For a variety of reasons, that day is not today, and it's probably not tomorrow, either. As a cop-out, I'm taking a page out of junior high science fairs everywhere and seeing which laundry detergent works best* whose March Madness bracket predictions are best.

I've compiled 34 36 brackets from four categories: experts, celebrities, analytical systems and simulations, and a miscellaneous group of controls. The current list is below the jump.

EXPERTS
Nicole Auerbach, USA Today
Jay Bilas, ESPN
Jeff Borzello, CBS Sports
Dennis Dodd, CBS Sports
Gregg Doyel, CBS Sports
Jeff Goodman, CBS Sports
Andy Katz, ESPN
Tony Kornheiser, ESPN
Matt Norlander, CBS Sports
Jerry Palm, CBS Sports
Gary Parrish, CBS Sports
Peter Tiernan, CBS Sports
Eddie Timanus, USA Today
Scott Van Pelt, ESPN
Dick Vitale, ESPN
Michael Wilbon, ESPN

SYSTEMS
Massey Ratings
Ken Pomeroy
Prediction Machine
Jeff Sagarin
Nate Silver
Joel Sokol
Stat Junkies
Tiernan high-risk
Tiernan medium-risk
Tiernan low-risk
What If Sports

CELEBS
Common
LeBron James
Barack Obama
Rajon Rondo
LaMarr Woodley

MISC
CBS Users' Bracket
Harvey Dent (a.k.a. the coin-toss bracket)
Chalk (i.e., highest seed always wins)
Mascot fight

Not all brackets are currently available. As the missing brackets get uploaded, I will paste in the links here.

Details about the scoring system will be posted tomorrow. Check back after each round for an update and see who wins!

Now, I know what you're saying, O reader, because I've hacked into your computer and have a live feed coming from your camera. You're saying, "Wait, what the hell?", but before that, you were saying, "This isn't very scientific! What good is a sample size of one?" And that's true. But like I said, this is more fun than anything else. Everyone makes these predictions every year, and wouldn't it at least be nice to go into next March knowing who did the best last year? Nevertheless, Operation Frantic Googling may yet reveal some past predictions to add to our sample. Rest assured, we have our top men working on it.

"Who?" "Top. Men."
___________

*-I've seen like a hundred of these and the winner is always Tide. Always.

Thinking Out Loud: Point-Shaving Detection

Those knee-deep in the hoopla of NCAA conference championship tournaments might not have noticed, but Yahoo! Sports reported yesterday that Auburn guard Varez Ward was being investigated by the FBI for point shaving. Auburn, that upstanding institution of higher learning whose athletics program has always followed the straight and narrow before, joins an august group including Boston College, Northwestern, and (my alma mater) Tulane.

Of Course It's About the Money

When announcing the decision to release longtime franchise quarterback Peyton Manning yesterday, Colts owner Jim Irsay insisted the decision was not motivated by money. "In the end, before we ever go into any specifics, it's never been about money. It's never been about those tpe of things," he said.

I didn't see the press conference, but it seems he said this with a straight face.

For those unfamiliar with the situation, Peyton Manning's contract stipulated that the Colts owed him and his laser rocket arm $28 million if he were on the roster on March 8th. We are led to believe, then, that through some epic, earth-shattering coincidence, Manning was released March 7th.

Why lie about it? From a business perspective, the decision is reasonable, and the reasons for it were referenced time and time again in Manning's farewell press conference. Manning has had countless* procedures on his neck in the last year, and may never throw another pass in the NFL. Even if he completes his rehab procedures and suits up once again, the man has been in the league since 1998. Years upon years of vicious hits** take their toll after awhile. At this stage in his career, the great Peyton Manning is morphing into that 1995 Subaru wagon you had in college: no matter how many things you fix, the next breakdown is right around the corner.

The Irsay family is of course infamous for unpopular business decisions compounded by abysmal public relations, but Manning deserves a more honest send-off. With such transparent financial motivations, why not tell the truth? Why not say, "As much as we appreciate everything Peyton Manning has done for the Colts and the city of Indianapolis, this football team is at heart a business with the goal of winning football games. And it makes no sense from that perspective to pay eight figures to a 36 year old*** with a debilitating neck injury who may never throw another pass.

"It's not personal; it's strictly business."
______

*-countless (n): a number I can't be bothered to look up
**-Not including those leveled by bounty hunters.
***-Ok, 35 and 11 months.