Recent content by Zombie Wakefield

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    Greatest play in Patriots History?

    We've covered the clear front-runners, but I would like to show Vince Wilfork some love for one of the most memorable plays in football history. It wasn't an important play, nor did it have any greater significance, but I would argue it was the single most fun play in Patriots history: The...
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    Giants-Patriots: We're on to New York.

    Adding on to this, I compared the league-wide IG rate versus Tom Brady for the past 5 full years (2014-2010), and it looks like we're not being homers about this -- Brady definitely gets called for IG at a higher rate than the league at large, 1 IG penalty/119 incompletions versus 1 IG/188...
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    The Sports Fanatacism Is Fundamentally Dumb Except For When I Do it Game Thread

      From what I've read, the impact of crowd noise is a general intimidation factor that pushes referees to call more penalties in favor of the home team. There was a research paper demonstrating this for (the other kind of) Football in the UK (link), but I would imagine the concept applies to any...
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    Patriots waived WR Kenbrell Thompkins

      Out of curiosity, I looked into this question over the 2002-2013 time frame. To keep things simple, I only looked at total receiving yards as a general measure of "production." All yard #s are courtesy of pro-football-reference.com, player source from memory of from wikipedia (I must have...
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    Patriots Select OLB Jamie Collins at #52

    Regarding the whole "injury-prone" label, I would argue that the opposite is true. Playing in the NFL makes you injury-prone, because the NFL is one massive injury factory. Players are constantly taken out of commission, and the superhuman "injury-resistant" players are the rare ones.   A quick...
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    Sports On Earth

    Good article from Mike Tanier yesterday on the Raven's deep-ball passing attack: http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40971108 Speaking as someone who has only a basic understanding of defensive coverage schemes, I thought he did an excellent job explaining the different defensive gameplans by...
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    TMQ Thread

    For the record, I was referring to Archer, not Archer.
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    TMQ Thread

    I love that episode. I can't use of hear the word "facile" now without thinking of Archer and the ballistic performance of grapes.
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    TMQ Thread

    Not trying to threadjack here, but I've heard anecdotally that referees tend to swallow their whistles more in the playoffs and have more of a "let 'em play" approach. If that were the case, aggressive defenses would get away with more borderline calls and suffer fewer of the inevitable...
  10. Z

    Joe Posnanski: Lord of Lists

    As a bonus from that same article, Pos demonstrates why he's a better sportswriter than Peter King:
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    Why Do I Continue to Read Peter King?

    All I can imagine is that Peter decided for the sake of narrative that he needed one "rising star" for his list, opened up the year-by-year NFL all-purpose yards leaders, saw Sproles' name there for 2011 and stuck him in (I'm probably giving him too much credit for research here, though). Plus...
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    Why Do I Continue to Read Peter King?

    And of course there's the fact that football players are professionals who take pride in their work. Is there any other profession where people are chastised for beeing *too* successful at their job? Boss: "Great job with your work on the Fluxbridge Account, Johnson -- our company now has...
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