Rich

I will hand it to the CFL, in one tweet they were actually able to unite the Winnipeg and Saskatchewan fan bases.

Actually, I was one of these posters, so I find this stat to be intriguing, and would really like to know the details behind how he calculates it and what he is looking at. My criticism has been around the feeling that we are taking too many field goals when touchdowns should be scored. I'd like to know his sample size that he compares "to average". Is it just this season? If it includes prior seasons, how far back does it go. One of the problems with doing this in the CFL, is your sample size to generate your numbers is much smaller than the NFL.

I'm not sure exactly how he does his stats, and what his definition of expected is, but I've done some reading / research on some of the advanced analytics that some NFL sites have been doing. Basically what they do, is for every play, they take your down, distance, time remaining in the game, and score, and compare it to the league average of how all teams have done in those situation. For example, if you are down by a touchdown in the 4th quarter, on your side of the field, it is 2nd down and 7 to go, how many times have teams converted the first down, how many times have teams punted. On that drive in that situation, how many teams have gone on to score, etc. What is the average expected success of that play. And how do you compare to that average. So if we are 14 points above expected with Nichols, it means we are out performing the league average in those (overall) situations by scoring 14 more points than what teams typically score in the situations we've been in. Under Willy, we were -11 points. So given the down, distance, score, etc, we were not scoring as much as league average in those situations. I don't know how many conditions (ie. field position, down and distance, point in the game, etc) he takes into account in his analytics.

Some interesting stats from Derek Taylor. I believe the expected in this case would be expected in terms of league average based on field position, game score, etc. Defence definitely playing better since Nichols went it.

These guys look like they are in church....

Buff doesn't want to deal with the media part of the job. Still a huge leader in the room.

Games played since 2014: Durant: 18 Collaros: 28

You're right, thought it was a new tweet because it was at the top of his timeline, but it looks like he just pinned it.

http://www.bluebombers.com/2016/08/31/bombers-add-ol-alex-mckay/

This is from the 2006 census, but farm area shouldn't change drastically over the years. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/agrc25j-eng.htm http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/agrc25h-eng.htm Alberta has 21M hectares of farm land, Manitoba has 7.7M hectare of farm land. Saskatchewan has 26M. I would guess that part of the reason that Manitoba has much less is because of the large area that is taken up by lakes.

What do you know, I guess that article was on to something... Local media scooped by Fox Sports.

http://www.cfl.ca/top-performers/

The whole point of an arbitrator though is to be independent of both parties. If they were on the CFL payroll, then ultimately they would report to Orridge, and would defeat the purpose of the appeal.

Things are heating up as we enter the second half of the season, we now have a 3-way tie for 1st and another 4 people in 2nd, just one pick out of 1st. Note that this is an early week, all picks must be in by Wednesday @ 6:30 PM.

Alberta posts have been moved to here:

I think they will keep doing what they are doing until they are down by two scores or more in a game. Right now, the game plan is to keep things close, don't give up any turnovers, and capitalize on other teams mistakes.

There is also a group of posters on this site who feel that any criticism of Nichols is somehow an endorsement of Willy. I'm tickled pink that we've won 4 in a row and I'm not at all clamouring for a return to Willy, but where would you rank Nichols in terms of starting QBs in the league? At this point, I'd have to put him in the bottom third. Nichols has been a very good game manager, he hasn't shown to be a QB who can put the team on his back and win. The field position that the D and ST have given this team has been a huge part of our success. Part of this may be play calling. I wonder if the game plan has been to be conservative on O because of the D and ST. But at some point, the D won't be able to cause 5+ turnovers in a game and the O is going to have to pick up the slack on their own. I'd really like to see what Nichols can do if they opened things up a bit and got a little more aggressive. We might get to see that when some of the receivers return. But in the meantime, I am absolutely loving watching this team, and this defense is an absolute joy to watch.