Here’s a stat that stands out in hindsight:

The legendary 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl Shuffle defense gave up an average of 4.4 yards per play during their 16 game regular season, versus a league average of 5.0 yards per play.

The 2015 Denver Broncos defense also gave up an average of 4.4 yards per play. But the league average had grown to 5.5 yards per play.

Actually, the famous Bears defense only ranked 4th in the league in 1985 on this measure, behind Lawrence Taylor’s New York Giants at 4.2 yards per play. In contrast, this year’s Broncos were 0.5 yards per play better than 2nd place Seattle and 3rd place Carolina. That’s the biggest advantage over 2nd place in this decade.

It’s interesting to compared yards per play given up to turnovers (interceptions plus fumbles recovered). The Broncos were eighth in the league, forcing 27 turnovers in 2015, while the Carolina Panthers led the league, forcing 39 turnovers.

My guess is that the yards per play given up stat might be one of those that correlates less with past performance than you might think relative to its predictive value.

In contrast, turnovers matter a lot in explain past winning. But turnovers are a small sample size stat, so luck plays a sizable role (especially on what % of fumbles get recovered, which appears to be pretty much random. Good defenses typically cause more fumbles, but which team recovers the fumble appears to be pretty random: everybody in the NFL scrambles like a madman for a loose ball, well, except for Cam Newton in the 4th quarter [presumably he was hoping the ref would call it an incomplete pass if he just stood there and sulked).

In contrast, the yards per play stat has a big sample size (Denver played defense on 1033 plays during the regular season). So it yards per play might be a better stat looking forward while turnovers are important to explaining the past results.

But I haven’t actually looked into this.

For years, I’ve been using Peyton Manning as an illustration in various discussions of epistemological and forecasting questions (such as the Pinker-Gladwell contretemps of 2009) because Peyton and Tom Brady are the only two football players I’ve paid consistent attention to in this millennium. I’ve repeatedly used Manning to illustrate that accurate forecasting is both hard and not impossible.

Recently, I hinted that Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos weren’t going to win the Super Bowl because Peyton’s decrepit, which turned out to be true, but he won anyway.

So there.

Anyway, I want to thank Mr. Manning for providing so many useful examples for so many years.

A 26-year-old movie that offers a surprisingly direct insight into dynamics of the Republican nomination race is Joe Dante’s 1990 horror comedy sequel Gremlins 2: The Next Batch.

I recall it as being pretty funny, especially the publicity hound billionaire Daniel Clamp, owner of Clamp Center. The moviemakers started off intending Clamp to be the deplorable bad guy, but he winds up helping the kids from the original movie save the day.

Dante told Lou Lumenick of the New York Post recently:

“It was pretty obvious from the name who we were talking about,” says Dante, “though Clamp is also part Ted Turner, since he runs a cable empire as well. Clamp was originally supposed to be the megalomaniac villain of the piece, but he was so oddly endearing, he ended up becoming a semi-heroic figure.”

Via Robert VerBruggen in Real Clear Policy, from the Journal of Criminal Justice:

WAS THERE A FERGUSON EFFECT ON CRIME RATES IN LARGE U.S. CITIES?

David C. Pyrooz*

Scott H. Decker

Scott E. Wolfe

ABSTRACT

Purpose: There has been widespread speculation that the events surrounding the shooting death of an unarmed young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri—and a string of similar incidents across the country—have led to increases in crime in the United States. This study tested for the “Ferguson Effect”on crime rates in large U.S. cities.

Methods: Aggregate and disaggregate monthly Part I criminal offense data were gathered 12 months before and after August 2014 from police department data requests and websites in 81 large U.S. cities. …

Results: No evidence was found to support a systematic post-Ferguson change in overall, violent, and property crime trends; however, the disaggregated analyses revealed that robbery rates, declining before Ferguson, increased in the months after Ferguson. Also, there was much greater variation in crime trends in the post-Ferguson era, and select cities did experience increases in homicide. Overall, any Ferguson Effect is constrained largely to cities with historically high levels of violence, a large composition of black residents, and socioeconomic disadvantages.

Reported robbery had been falling steadily (mugging is so 1973), so the post-Ferguson rise in robbery was kind of bad relative to the pre-Ferguson trend line:

And then there’s homicide. The researchers broke their sample of 81 cities up into 27 cities where homicide rates declined after Ferguson, 27 where they went up modestly, and 27 where they went up alarmingly:

One interesting aspect is that Hispanics don’t seem to have paid any attention whatsoever to the Black Lives Matter agitation. The lowest % Hispanic populations are found, on average, in the cities with the big increases in homicide. A year ago the news media tried to launch a Latino Ferguson involving a police shooting in remote Pasco, WA. From the NYT:

Killing in Washington State Offers ‘Ferguson’ Moment for Hispanics

Pasco Police’s Shooting of Rock Thrower Draws Comparisons to Michael Brown Case

By JULIE TURKEWITZ and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. FEB. 16, 2015

But, unlike how Ferguson has gotten blacks to shoot blacks in some cities, Pasco fizzled in terms of agitating Hispanics to shoot each other.

Another Republican debate is coming up tonight, Saturday Feb. 6, at 8pm EST on ABC.

Also, I hear that Saturday Night Live tonight, with Larry David hosting, might have a sketch about Merkel’s million (or maybe not, lots of things no doubt change at the last moment).

And then there’s the Super Bowl tomorrow. I was trying to figure out who would win and I came up with these numbers:

2014 Super Bowl

Peyton Manning’s Age: 37

Manning’s regular season touchdown passes: 55

Manning’s regular season interceptions: 10

Final score: Seattle Seahawks 43 – Manning’s Denver Broncos 8

In contrast …

2016 Super Bowl

Peyton Manning’s Age: 39

Manning’s regular season touchdown passes: 9

Manning’s regular season interceptions: 17

Final score?

From the New York Times:

Why the Film Academy’s Diversity Push Is Tougher Than It Thinks
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES

FEB. 5, 2016

LOS ANGELES — Roughly 87 percent are white. About 58 percent are male. As many as two-thirds are at least 60 years old.

As the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences scrambles to address an outcry over a lack of diversity among its membership, a close look of its largest group, the actors branch, shows that ending the imbalance within its ranks might be more difficult than, say, predicting the annual Oscar winners.

The academy is typically reluctant to disclose the identities of its members and does not regularly provide demographic information about them. There is no set standard for membership and no consistency when it comes to how many people from the film industry are invited to join each year.

But an examination by The New York Times of the actors branch — whose more than 1,100 members control acting nominations for the Academy Awards — revealed the basic racial outlines of the group. Using public and private databases, The Times compiled data on nearly 1,100 acting branch members. Along with the white members, about 6 percent are black, under 4 percent are Hispanic and less than 2 percent are Asian. Women make up about 42 percent of the branch. A spokeswoman for the academy confirmed all of those percentages.

Roughly 87 percent are white.
42 percent are women.

Of the 25 actors invited to join the academy last year, three were black and seven were women.
The academy has stated that its aim is to double the number of minorities in its overall membership by 2020. Yet, as it tries to remake itself by recruiting younger and more diverse members and jettisoning those no longer active in the business, it is confronting new challenges. There are protests that it is being unfair to older actors, worries that it could simply be creating different diversity issues in the future and criticism from those within its ranks who do not want to use categories like race, age or gender as any kind of organizing principle.

Over the next five years, the academy would have to annually add about 14 black actors and at least nine actors who were either Asian or Hispanic to double the number of acting branch members in those ethnic groups. That would account for almost all of the slots if it invited 25 actors, which is how many were offered membership last year.

The late Abe Vigoda did his part for Diversity (finally)

To attain gender parity among actors in five years, the academy could more than triple the number of annual admissions, to 80, while adding three women for every man. Assuming a typical annual attrition rate of about 26 people (largely because of death), the branch membership would be about 51 percent women by 2020, but women would then far outnumber men among the younger members.

There were 6,261 academy members throughout its various branches according to an annual tabulation it released on Dec. 14. Its official actors count — 1,138 voters, plus 126 academy retirees, who do not vote — may have been trimmed by recent deaths like that of Abe Vigoda.

Who else will step up to the plate and make the Ultimate Sacrifice for Diversity?

Perhaps the Academy could sponsor a (posthumous) Abe Vigoda Award to encourage members whose deaths would pave the way for greater Diversity?

Abe and some other white guys trying to act

On the other hand, Abe was 94 so his enthusiasm for the Cause was perhaps not as unquestionable as would be demographically necessary to achieve perfect Diversity any time soon. (In fact, one can picture Abe greeting each new year by cackling, “Those bastards want me dead. Well, screw ‘em, I’m still here!”)

Die Young, Stay Pretty, Serve Diversity

So maybe it should be called the James Dean / River Phoenix Award for Service to Diversity?

Since Death isn’t doing its job fast enough, the Academy is also pursuing Disenfranchisement.

The academy is trimming its rolls, largely to limit voting rights to those who are active in the business. Last month, the academy said it would begin a year-round membership recruiting effort aimed at diversity, while also culling members who have not worked on a film for 10 years and have not been active during three separate decades since joining the academy.

The not late Angie Dickinson

But it’s starting to dawn on the Brain Trust that, unlike Death, Disenfranchisement discriminates more against actresses than actors. Funny-looking character actors tend to have longer careers than lovely actresses. For example, Abe Vigoda earned a credit in a 2014 movie, which would have kept him eligible to vote through age 103, while Angie Dickinson hasn’t had a movie credit since 2004.

Already, however, there has been negative reaction.

“This is not the way to go about things,” Angie Dickinson, an actress who may be losing her vote under the new rules, said in an email. Ms. Dickinson, 84, whose career includes movies like the original “Ocean’s 11” in 1960, added that she had sent an angry missive to the academy.

“My message to the academy was just this: I, Angie, voter, wrote them: I VOTE FOR PERFORMANCE . . . . NOT RACE.” …

It also appears that a reduction in the current voting members could result in more women losing their voting privileges than men, at least in the actors branch.

Based on credits on the IMDbpro.com database, which tracks both previous work and films in process — but is not fully complete or without error — more women, about 150, than men, about 135, on the academy membership list examined by The Times appeared to be in a position where their active status might be examined by the academy.

To build on my latest Taki’s column, “Alexander Hamilton: Honorary Nonwhite,” about the war over which Dead White Euro-American Male to kick off the currency to make way for some (not very galvanizing) woman from American history, the current hit musical Hamilton about a heroic Latin American / West Indian immigrant Treasury Secretary rapping his way to America’s financial stability on world bond markets is not the only Broadway musical of this decade about a man on the money.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson ran 120 nights on Broadway in 2010-11, closing at a loss.

Judging from this highlight clip, the musical portraying the 7th President as a foul-mouthed emo rockstar had artistic problems: e.g., electric guitars and Broadway usually don’t go together well, and the notion of Andrew Jackson as Fall-Out Boy is not one of those slap-your-forehead ideas that you can’t imagine why you didn’t think of yourself.

But, while Hamilton is portrayed in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit show as the unquestionable hero of the nearly all nonwhite production of Hamilton, Jackson was seen in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson as at best ambivalent … or an “American Hitler.” From Wikipedia:

Near the end, the play reviews Jackson’s legacy and the views attributed to him. Some believe he was one of America’s greatest presidents, while others believe him to be an “American Hitler.” The final scene shows Jackson receiving an honorary doctorate at Harvard. He reflects upon his achievements and his questionable decisions. The show telescopes out and we get a bird’s-eye view of Jackson’s damning legacy and our collective culpability (“Second Nature”).

Sounds like a rousing closing curtain.

From Time Magazine:

Beyonce as a Bollywood Star Is Not Cultural Appropriation

Those criticizing her are continuing the racist obscuring of African presences in South Asia

by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Natassja Omidina Gunasena

Feb. 2, 2016

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, a Public Voices Fellow, is associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where Natassja Omidina Gunasena is a doctoral candidate.

As fierce Sri Lankan and African-American feminists who have never supported white celebrities cash-cropping cornrows, white yoga teachers wearing saris and bindis, or other forms of cultural appropriation, we’re here to tell you: There’s no reason to be mad about Beyoncé portraying a Bollywood star in Coldplay’s new video “Hymn for the Weekend.” In fact, her role offers viewers a rare opportunity to see how much and how beautifully blackness is part of South Asian culture.

The Ben Mor-directed video following Coldplay singers on a cultural tourist jaunt to Mumbai received immediate criticism for cultural appropriation on U.S. social media. Arriving via taxi, the band gazes out the windows and finds fire eaters, incarnations of Hindu dieties and posters for Bollywood films.

The video is actually a pretty good evocation of India as Sensory Overload Central, a point made by writers from Kipling in the first chapter of Kim to Salman Rushdie.

One of these posters features a film star played by Beyoncé, and Coldplay enters a theater to watch a film where she sings and dances on screen draped in a pink flowing sari and lavish gold jewelry.

Beyoncé is the hard-working American Creole of Color singing star.

Of course, Beyoncé’s giant blonde wig/weave in this video could be cited as an example of biological appropriation. A joke in the video might be that much of the hair worn by African-American women is harvested at a Hindu temple in India, as seen in Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair. On the other hand, at this point in her career,Beyoncé is likely far beyond wearing cheap Indian hair and probably instead gets her weaves harvested in Eastern Europe.

For example, Twitter user @nyunouis wrote: “Yikes that video with Coldplay and Beyonce is soooo disappointing…. why can’t they film without appropriating culture.” And @kissmyazka asked: “Are we gonna discuss how Beyonce dressing up as an Indian woman for the Coldplay video is cultural appropriation, or no?”

Bollywood cinema, like any other, has its share of stars who aren’t native to South Asia. Think of light-skinned superstar Katrina Kaif, born in Hong Kong to a white British mother and Indian father.

The typical Bollywood actress looks Mediterranean, maybe Lebanese, or Persian at least.

Or consider Sunny Leone and Amy Jackson, also light-skinned and of Canadian/British heritage? If they can be Bollywood stars, why can’t we imagine Beyoncé could be one?

After all, Beyonce owns more blonde wigs.

Oh wait: Is it because Beyoncé is black?

If so, then those folks critiquing Beyoncé’s role in the video are continuing the racist obscuring of African presences in South Asia. You can read about Afro bloodlines in South Asia, yes, but you can also see it in the brown-skinned, curly-haired peoples of Sri Lanka and Southern India.

And while most women in both countries are darker than Bey herself, Bollywood star Sonam Kapoor, who has a cameo in the video, is noticeably lighter-skinned than Beyoncé. This is not an attack on Bollywood’s leading ladies but a question about what beauty and belonging looks like in South Asia.

In fact, while folks in the South Asian diaspora point fingers at Beyoncé for her inauthenticity, others have expressed how empowering it is for them to see a dark-skinned woman portraying a Bollywood star.

“Beyoncé in a sari makes me tear up because I never had images of beautiful darker-skinned women in saris growing up. Because this is a healing image for me,” Shwetanaryan posted on Tumblr. “Because I had relatives clucking over how unfortunately dark I was since I was tiny… Because she’s doing what Desi pop culture still doesn’t for darker-skinned Desis, and given that how is it harmful on net for her to wear a sari, and who is it harmful to?”

So here’s a challenge: Go back to the video to think about what part of outraged reactions justly call out cultural appropriation, and what part perpetuates colorism and anti-black racism. Because all of these make our lives as women of color harder, and we’re here to resist them all.

Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism is that the most heartfelt journalistic extrusions will be demands for how society must be re-engineered so that, come the Revolution, the writer herself will be considered hotter-looking. Maybe Professor Tinsley hasn’t quite worked out all the details of how Beyoncé being exempted from criticism over how she chooses to play dress-up rubs off on poor Professor Tinsley in any concrete fashion, but, you know, Hope and Change!

We must keep hope alive.

The Black Autumn on college campuses seems to have withered, due to cold weather and college administrations doing their damndest to convince the top black protestors that they’ll be able to get diversity jobs on campus so they won’t have to leave their racist environs for the rest of the world, ever.

From the New York Times:

After Racist Episodes, Blunt Discussions on Campus
By JOHN ELIGON FEB. 3, 2016 385 COMMENTS

Scott N. Brooks, draped in a dapper shawl-collar sweater, looked out on the auditorium of mostly white students in puffy coats and sweats as they silently squirmed at his question. Why, he had asked, does Maria Sharapova, a white Russian tennis player, earn nearly twice as much in endorsements as Serena Williams, an African-American with a much better win-loss record?

Because Sharapova’s prettier, has blondish hair and longer, thinner legs? Because female consumers more want to buy stuff that holds out the promise that they’ll look more like Sharapova than Serena?

“We like to think it’s all about merit,” said Dr. Brooks, a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, speaking in the casual cadence of his days as a nightclub D.J. “It’s sport. Simply, the best should earn the most money.”

Or maybe the most endorsement money goes to the female athlete who takes fewer artificial male hormones?

In any case, only two women make the Forbes top 100 highest paid athletes. Serena makes $13 million per year in endorsements, which is only half of Sharapova’s $26 million, but a lot more than most other female athletes. On the other hand, Serena makes about twice what quarterback Tom Brady, who has won four Super Bowls, makes in endorsements, and she makes more than ten times what Clayton Kershaw, the best baseball pitcher of the 2010s, makes in endorsements.

In the current Forbes list, the top five beneficiaries of endorsees are Roger Federer (white), Tiger Woods (caublinasian), Phil Mickelson (white), LeBron James (black), and Kevin Durant (black). Blacks would seem to do fine overall.

If you want to get it into the details, black men seem to do extremely well from endorsements, black women less so. Could this have something to do with blacks being more masculine on average?

Fortunately, college students know enough not to bring up suggestions like that. They know that if they just sit there with blank looks on their faces, eventually the racial haranguing will stop and they’ll be allowed to leave.

Maybe tennis is not as popular here as overseas, one student offered. Dr. Brooks countered: Ms. Williams is a global figure. As the room fell silent, the elephant settled in. Most sat still, eyes transfixed on the stage. None of the participants — roughly 70 students new to the University of Missouri — dared to offer the reason for the disparity that seemed most obvious. Race.

The new frontier in the university’s eternal struggle with race starts here, with blunt conversations that seek to bridge a stark campus divide. Yet what was evident in this pregnant moment during a new diversity session that the university is requiring of all new students was this: People just don’t want to discuss it.

The racist episodes that rocked the Missouri campus last fall, leading to resignations by its president and chancellor, set administrators here and around the country on frantic course correction efforts. They have held town halls to hear students’ complaints, convened task forces to study campus climates, adjusted recruiting strategies and put in place new sessions on implicit bias and diversity, like the one Dr. Brooks spoke at, held in mid-January.

More an introduction to the diversity on campus than an instruction manual for navigating it, the session featured eight professors who spoke about their teaching and research that related to race and culture. One presented a campus survey showing how Missouri students’ attitudes broke down based on their race (for instance, about 63 percent of black students identified as liberal, while only 38 percent of whites did). Another discussed myths about Islam and offered a few surprising facts (the country’s oldest mosque is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa). Yet another talked about cultural appropriation (Mexican-themed costume parties can be offensive).

And then there was Dr. Brooks, a 43-year-old African-American who teaches “Race and Ethnic Relations” and challenged the students to think about race through the prism of sports. He offered a gentle explanation of the Williams/Sharapova discrepancy: “Maria is considered a beauty queen, but by what standards of beauty? Some people might just say, ‘Oh, well, she’s just prettier.’ Well, according to whom? This spells out how we see beauty in terms of race, this idea of femininity. Serena is often spoofed for her big butt. She’s seen as too muscular.”

Here’s the most popular comment on this article:

Dave Boz Phoenix AZ 18 hours ago
The anti-intellectual nature of this browbeating session is disgusting in any setting, but especially in a university. It is obvious that this is not a “discussion” but a demand to submit to a correct set of opinions and answers. The facile and unsupported notion that a black athlete can only receive fewer endorsement offers because of racism is just one of the ill-thought out examples that indicate that this not a learning but an indoctrination session. The students know that they’d better not try to have a “discussion” or the browbeating will get worse. This is not a session or an environment for the purpose of learning; it is to make the students submissive and to encourage them to adopt the university’s approved thought process: “Submit. Conform. Obey.”

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