The Daily Dose/February 3, 2018
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Notes from around the Human Experience…
TO THE ARCHIVES WITH YOU!: In the upcoming Sunday Bottom Ten – our hilarious new feature based on the Bottom Ten’s that run during football season – you will see a figure, the Average Margin of Victory (AMV) of an NFL game this past season. This figure was not easily arrived it.
Dry, Technical Matter: We wanted to know the AMV of victory for an item concerning Thursday Night Football, which will be ranked in the Sunday Bottom Ten this week after the NFL announced a deal with FOX TV to carry it for the next five seasons. Players hate these games and they are often lousy to watch. To illustrate how lousy these games are, we calculated the AMV for all 17 Thursday NFL games this past season, which came out to 12.5 points, which didn’t really prove our point like we had hoped. We calculated this figure a couple-three years ago and seemed to recall it being a bit higher, but that is neither here nor there.
We wanted to compare the 12.5 figure to the AMV for the entire 2017 NFL season. So we did some searching thinking it’s the second decade of the 21st century, the Internets should be able to fork over the figure in fairly short order.
Fly In The Ointment: Shows what we know. There were some places had the AMV for a portion of the season, or past seasons, or that had variants thereof (these were usually found at sports betting sites) that we didn’t really understand, but nowhere could we find the AMV for 2017 NFL regular season games. We are enthusiastic and able researchers here at The Daily Dose and this surprised us, especially since you can find the average caloric intake for males over the age of 37 in Chad if you know where to look.
Please Pass The Dry, Technical Matter: We actually greeted this development with a small amount glee because this meant we would be obliged to figure it out for ourselves. It wasn’t particularly difficult but it was pretty labor intensive, taking a couple-three hours to figure out that 2017’s 256 NFL games yielded a cumulative margin of victory of 3,202 points, producing an AMV of 11.8 points per game. We thought the difference between the Thursday Night Football AMV and the 2017 AMV would be greater, but what do we know?
If Dry, Technical Matter Is Inevitable…: We’d hate to see other results of this seminal work go to waste, so here are some other figures. One or two might even be interesting:
- The median AMV figure – the figure were half were above it and half below it – was 12.5, by coincidence the Thursday night AMV
- The highest AMV came in Week 10 (15.1) and lowest in Week 5 (7.9)
- You might think the AMV might be higher the last part of the season, when teams are saying screw it, let’s go home, but the AMV the last three weeks was right at the season average, 11.8. By contrast, the AMV for the first three weeks, when everybody still has a shot, was a bit higher at 12.4
- The midseason actually produced the highest AMV as weeks 7-10 produced an AMV of 13.5.
ON THIS DATE! ON THIS DATE! The Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes the first colony to issue paper money in what would become the United States on this date in 1690. Known as bills of credit, later shortened to bills, they were originally printed to help pay for soldiers in the French and Indian War.
The Day The Music Died: Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. Richardson, professionally known as the Big Bopper, and their pilot Roger Peterson are killed in a plane crash in north-central Iowa on this date in 1959. Holly was tired of the long rides in cold busses between shows and had decided to charter a plane. Valens won a coin flip with Tommy Alsup for his seat on the plane, while Waylon Jennings gave his seat to Richardson because Richardson was sick.
3…2…1…Touchdown: Man lands on the moon for the first time as the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 touches down on the lunar surface on this date in 1966. Later, it would send back the first photographs from the surface of the moon. Luna 9 had been launched on January 31.
Previously, the Soviets had been the first country to reach the moon at all when Luna 2 crashed into the moon in 1959.
FunFact: The Luna program last reached the moon in 1976 when Luna 24 landed, dug out some lunar soil samples and returned them to Earth. The Russians are planning further unmanned Luna missions in 2019, 2020 and 2022.
Quotebook: Mackenzie was a good guy, but he was a guy after all, not an image on a stained glass window. – William Irish, After-Dinner Story
Answer To The Last Trivia Question: The 61 years between the ratification of the Twelfth and Thirteenth amendments to the United States Constitution is the longest such interval between the ratification of consecutive amendments.
Today’s Stumper: Who was the last country to land a spacecraft on the moon? – Answer next time!!
