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The Official Scenario for the Dolphins to get into the Playoffs

Its obviously extremely unlikely for us but it'll be cool if Pitts wins this week. When was the last time we had a must win week 17 game? Just having a must win will be a good learning experience for everybody involved with our team.
 
Yep. If the bengals steelers fins all finish 8-8 we r in. There are only two scenarios I don't see happening come in week 17, and thts the browns beating the steelers and us beating the pats

---------- Post added at 03:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:25 AM ----------

Yea I just hope Cleveland comes prepared week 17 lol plus we need to play like complete legends in order to beat the pats.
 
Yep. If the bengals steelers fins all finish 8-8 we r in. There are only two scenarios I don't see happening come in week 17, and thts the browns beating the steelers and us beating the pats

---------- Post added at 03:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:25 AM ----------

Yea I just hope Cleveland comes prepared week 17 lol plus we need to play like complete legends in order to beat the pats.

Hell we gotta beat the Bills first
 
Updated the original post to reflect the Jets loss to the Titans. Not much changed except the Jets now just need 1 loss, any loss, instead of needing to lose specifically to the Bills.
 
man those two loses against Arizona and the Jets really came back to hunt us :(
 
Would be so sick if everything unfolds perfectly for us and the Jets spoil it by going 8-8 also.
 
Its obviously extremely unlikely for us but it'll be cool if Pitts wins this week. When was the last time we had a must win week 17 game? Just having a must win will be a good learning experience for everybody involved with our team.

2008 to answer you question.
 
I will raise you one KDawg.....

The Jests game. I said it when it happened that game would be a killer come years end. You just cant lose games at home to inferior teams. The Jests are one of the worst teams in the league. Playing them in Miami is one of the easiest games on our schedule. The blown kicks by Crapenter as well as Tannehill playing like dog**** in this game cost us dearly.

With just that win, we would be much better off in these scenarios right now. But, couple it with NOT the Arizona game, but the PATS GAME!!!!!

HOME DIVISIONAL games. You gotta win them. Our defense handed us this game on a silver platter. Yet AGAIN in a divisional game, Tannehill played like complete dog****, costing us the opportunity to win.

Had we won those 2 games, not only would we be 8-6 right now and in the drivers seat for a WC, we would control our own destiny to WIN THE DIVISION! The pats would be 9-5 right now had we beaten them. If we had beaten them and the Jests AT HOME then we could win the last 2 to take the division.


The bottom line is we have to play better in the division. You cant lose at home in the division. You cant lose road games to trash teams like Buffalo. Hell, we couldve beaten Buffalo on the road too if Tannehill had not played like dog****. Tannehill has been trash in every divisional game this season. The only one we were victorious in so far was the game Matt Moore lead us to victory in NY.

This team simply isnt a playoff caliber team. The defense is certainly playoff caliber. The offense MUST get better in order for us to compete. We MUST get some talent on that side of the ball and Tannehill simply has to play much better if we are going to win.

You are absolutely right. The Fins have to win inside of the division if they expect to reach plateau's that they haven't seen in 40 years. But you also can't lose to garbage QB's like Kolb and Sanchez, along with mediocre teams with less than average QB's like the Bills and Titans. There is no shame for a team with a young QB like this losing at home to the Pats by 7, losing on the road to a damn good San Fran team, on the road to a stellar Andrew Luck and on the road at Houston . . . but if we lose this week to the Bills, at home . . . and go 0-3 in home divisional games . . . yea, that sticks out more than anything else. It just can't happen.
 
Do we really want to make the playoffs at 8-8 and get crushed first round again??? Making the playoffs in 08 set us back in my opinion by getting a later 1st that Ireland wasted on Vontae Davis. I would rather see improvement by Tannehill and the rest of the team. We really need a strong offseason to set us up for the future. I'm not saying lose for better draft picks so don't bash me. If we can go 7-9 with a rookie QB, rookie HC, and rookie DC, then I would be pleased with that. Now if we had pulled out the O.T. wins against the Jets and Zona, I would love to sneak in at 9-7. Let's be patient with this coaching staff and I think it will pay off.

What set us back was our coaching staff not trusting Henne. Whether they were right not to or not is up for debate (I know Henne isn't a good player, but there's no denying that Sparano and Henning didn't handle him properly) but the fact that they didn't trust the starting QB is a huge issue. If you don't trust the starter, get somebody you can trust because otherwise you are telling your QB not to make mistakes, which makes them overthink and leads to mistakes.

As for the Vontae pick, hindsight is 20/20. It was a huge need at the time. Clay Matthews would've been nice, but we had Joey Porter coming off an 18.5 sack season, Matt Roth coming off a good season, resigned JT, and signed a kid from the CFL named Cam Wake. Turns out JP, JT, and Roth would all end up in the dog house (JT with Parcells, the other two with Sparano). Vontae was the best CB on the board, and we had lost Andre Goodman in FA. Everything about Vontae screamed he could be an All-Pro CB (and early on he looked like he would be) it just turned out he had a bad work ethic.
 
The Dolphins will beat the Bills.


Just like someone on this board said "The Dolphins WILL beat the Colts. I'm not worried about the Colts. We should already be focusing on the Titans." How'd that one work out for us?
 
Somebody get Nate Silver on the phone...

He's really screwed up political betting odds. I seldom get any value, to the point it almost doesn't pay to look. Previously, you had offshore sites merely hang a number that sounded good to them. It was the Joe Scarborough philosophy, if you will. Subjective incompetence.

Far too often the favorites would be exponentially lower than rightful. The sites would see polls indicating a 3 or 4 point edge and somehow equate that to a football game, where 3 or 4 points equates to 60 or 65% likelihood. As Silver has demonstrated, a 3-4 point edge in politics in the late going is more like a 95+% edge. Many of us knew that all along. It was a gold mine for more than a decade. I really should have taken greater advantage than I did. I still shiver at some of the laughable numbers that were out there, like the 2006 Connecticut senate race where one major site used Joe Lieberman as only a -160 favorite against Ned Lamont in the general election. That price literally should have been -2000 or greater. Lamont won the Democratic primary narrowly over Lieberman but that had no relationship to the demographics in a general election, where independents and Republicans would favor Lieberman heavily. The GOP nominee was a token joke, guaranteed not to get many votes. My Excel model had Lieberman by 10, and that's roughly where it ended up. I guarantee the perspective of that race, and therefore the betting odds, would have been dramatically different if Nate Silver had been up and running at the time.

I started betting politics in the early '90s and won a 16-man betting pool in 1996, using primitive versions of some of the same concepts Silver is using. I had a PAN (Partisan Adjustment Number) for every state. That gave me a big leg up on my competitors. Quickly I became in tune with every state in terms of the partisan realities, like the percentage of self-identified liberals and conservatives in each state. That's a huge untapped variable, IMO, one that Silver himself does not allow enough weight. The self-identify number is more rigid and meaningful than Party ID. Once my parents' health declined about 5 years ago I stopped devoting much time to the political models, and I rarely post on political sites anymore, but it is fun to follow a little bit leading to election day.

Silver's followers on the original 538.com site got a bit annoyed with me in fall 2008 when I corrected a blatant error Silver made in one of his threads. He couldn't figure out why Obama's odds were so low on Intrade. It was clearly driving him nuts because he expected his percentage to align with the market odds, the so-called wisdom of the crowd. I was commenting regularly on Mark Blumenthal's great low traffic site Pollster.com at the time. There were only a couple dozen comments under those Pollster threads, despite the awesome content Blumenthal was providing. I mentioned that Intrade was notorious for scalping, in other words people betting both sides to guarantee a profit. Take 60 and give 40, that type of thing. Silver and Blumenthal are big buddies. Blumenthal was contacting me regularly via email. Silver obviously saw that "scalp" comment because immediately he wrote a long article on 538 saying the Intrade mystery had been solved, that it was arbitrage wagering. That's the British term for scalping, i.e. manipulation to guarantee a profit. Turning the bookie edge on your side. The problem was, Silver's lead example was very poor, in fact ignorant. He emphasized that it was like betting both sides of a football game with no risk, taking 6 points on one side and giving 3. Something like that. The numbers he used might not have been exact. Silver was spotlighting the wrong type of wager. There's no risk in scalping a money line, like taking +250 and giving -200. But there certainly is risk in giving -3 -110 and taking +6 -110. You're going to lose the vigorish unless it hits the range of 3 and 6. Trust me, I've been juiced out in short term samples while playing middle. You might have 40 or 50 in a row fail to fall. Anyway, I posted too arrogantly on Blumenthal's site and suddenly a bunch of Silver worshippers started attacking me, even though my point was 100% valid. Eventually some of them figured it out. These days Blumenthal's site is under the Huffington umbrella and Silver is at New York Times. It made sense for them financially but there's no intimacy or shared knowledge. Silver no longer responds to commenters, nor does Blumenthal. However, Sam Wang does. His site is excellent, and relatively low number of comments. Wang uses some of the same ideas as Silver, heavily invested in state polls.
 
I honestly never heard of the guy before he moved into political forcasting, but he definitely caught my attention with his 2008 predictions. So as a betting man, would you say he has influenced the betting lines on elections? I mean, since he's gone public, people could just piggy back on Nate Silvers work and dilute the payouts right?
 
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