So you want to draft a quarterback...

Hooray, it's time for the NFL Draft! This year's pre-draft quarterback hype has centered around the two quarterbacks from last year's BCS championship game--Texas's Vince Young and USC's Matt Leinart--and Jay Cutler, the quarterback from the best Vanderbilt team in years (they almost had a winning season). Young is the best athlete and won the national championship in dramatic come-from-behind fashion. Leinart won the Heisman Trophy two years ago, and lead his team to 34 straight victories before losing to Young's Longhorns in the final minute of the Rose Bowl. Cutler had a great season at Vanderbilt and was a hit at the Senior Bowl and the NFL Combine. But, Young reportedly got a 16 on the Wonderlic test and didn't play much in college from directly under center and he doesn't have the best throwing motion. And Cutler can fumble, and he didn't have a winning season in college. You'd prefer a stronger arm in the NFL than Leinart has. Now, let's look at some numbers.

To rank quarterbacks, there is this thing often called the "quarterback rating." Its actual name is "passer rating," and this is more telling because it does not take into account any running by the quarterback, something that Vince Young excels at. It might be surprising though do discover that of all the QBs in the draft, Young had the highest passer rating in the NCAA last year. (He was third overall.) However, as you can see from this page, this thing called passer rating is defined differently in college and the NFL. So I decided to take the same raw numbers and compute the NFL passer rating for the top quarterbacks availible in today's draft. I then normalized the ratings by Vince Young's rating.

Col.    Quarterback                 Col.    VYNCR  NFL     VYN
Rank                                Rating         Rating  NFLR
3.      Vince Young, Texas          163.95  1.000  109.19  1.000
5.      Drew Olson, UCLA            161.59  0.986  114.04  1.044
8.      Matt Leinart, USC           157.74  0.962  107.64  0.986
11.     Kellen Clemens, Oregon      152.87  0.932  106.25  0.973
13.     Omar Jacobs, BGU            150.92  0.921  104.21  0.954
15.     Justin Holland, Colo St     148.63  0.907   94.97  0.870
17.     D.J. Shockley, Georgia      148.25  0.904  102.45  0.938
18.     Ryan Hart, Rutgers          148.14  0.904   98.09  0.898
19.     Paul Pinegar, Fresno St     147.63  0.900   97.58  0.894
20.     Bruce Gradkowski, Toledo    146.42  0.893   99.04  0.907
24.     Darrell Hackney, UAB        144.48  0.881   94.70  0.867
25.     Marcus Vick, Va Tech        143.29  0.874   92.77  0.850
26.     Paul Smith, Tulsa           142.62  0.870   97.98  0.897
39.     Brett Basanez, N'western    135.12  0.824   92.49  0.847
41.     Charlie Whitehurst, Clemson 133.47  0.814   87.10  0.798
43.     Josh Betts, Miami (OH)      133.2   0.812   88.43  0.810
44.     Brodie Croyle, Alabama      132.78  0.810   91.31  0.836
55.     Dustin Almond, So Miss      128.97  0.787   84.76  0.776
57.     Matt Kubik, La Tech         128.65  0.785   87.04  0.797
58.     Reggie McNeal, Texas A&M    128.57  0.784   83.26  0.763
61.     Jay Cutler, Vanderbilt      126.07  0.769   86.08  0.788
62.     Kent Smith, C Michigan      125.79  0.767   86.81  0.795
63.     Corey Bramlet, Wyoming      125.36  0.765   76.01  0.696
64.     Matt Bohnet, E Michigan     125.33  0.764   87.65  0.803
65.     Joel Klatt, Colorado        124.73  0.761   83.91  0.769
66.     Quinton Porter, BC          124.15  0.757   81.89  0.750
67.     Nick Noce, Arkansas St      123.4   0.753   77.89  0.713
71.     Jay Davis, NC State         121.24  0.739   74.00  0.678
76.     Brandon Kirsch, Purdue      118.35  0.722   75.44  0.691

Inaccurate Logo Warning

The Carolina Hurricanes have an alternate logo which features a hockey stick from which flies a square red flag with black square in the middle. It's about a quarter of the way down on this page. The problem with this is that the hurricane warning flag is two of these flags, one on top of the other. The single flag is just a storm and not a hurricane warning, according to this page. It seems to me that this is something that former Whalers should know. By the way, while you're on the NHL logo page, check out the third Whalers logo.

Death

"Delaware, they had a hanging problem that they were totally unable to deal with."--Fred Leuchter, Jr.

Tonight's double feature started with Uwe Boll's 2003 "film" House of the Dead. While he does seem to show some improvement from his earlier films, I am afraid I cannot recommend this film. There are very few films that I can think of that are based on a novel in which there are clips of actual pages from the novel in the film. I suppose this is the reason that Boll chose to insert clips from the video game that he was adapting into the film. Actual clips from the game of zombies being shot in the chest from the first person shooter. Perhaps this would mean something to me if I had actually played the game, but instead it just distracted me from the bullet-time battle roll call in the scene in which seven different "characters" get their time in front of the rapidly rotating camera, kicking, punching, slashing, shooting, and grenading the undead.

Then I followed with Errol Morris's superb 1999 documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. The timing of Netflix sending me this film was very interesting, concidering the arguments in the Supreme Court today concerning the method of executions. (Listen to Nina Totenberg read some of those arguments here.) In Morris's original cut of Mr. Death, the entire film was Fred Leuchter telling us the story of his life, how he grew up going to work with his father at the Massachusetts state prison and later developed a more systematic approach to first the electric chair, and then later gallowses, lethal injection machines, and gas chambers. He gives a fascinating account of how the states had just thrown together the chairs that they executed people without much study. When Delaware pulled out their gallows after not using for 30 years, it fell apart. If we as a society decide to use the death penalty, I think we do need to have someone like the person that Leuchter presents.

However, after showing his initial cut to a few friends, Morris returned to the editing bay and decided to add additional points of view. After Leuchter made a name for himself as an expert in creating execution machines, he was asked to use that knowledge in the defense of Ernst Zündel, who was being tried in Toronto for publishing false statements that would incite racial hatred with his Holocaust-denying book Did Six Million Really Die? The Zündel defense hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and look for evidence that there were no gas chambers there. Leuchter found no evidence and was therefore convinced that there could have been no Holocaust, and then afterwards his life fell apart. This is truly a fascinating film, especially University of Waterloo professor Robert Jan van Pelt's powerful yet simple critique of Leuchter's trip.

Errol Morris such a great filmmaker. The climax of his film The Thin Blue Line is nothing more than a shot of an audio tape recorder playing the confession that led to the release of an innocent man from prison in Texas. In Mr. Death, a simple rewinding the tape and asking us to remember the room that Fred Leuchter is in is so powerful. So maybe, just maybe, I will allow for the possibility that including a clip from the video game that inspired the film is a good choice. Maybe, but only if Errol Morris is adapting the game.

Normalized MLB opening day salary comparison

Since Major League Baseball, unlike the NFL or NBA, has no salary cap, a perennial discussion about how the large market teams can spend more or players than small market teams and therefore (in theory, although perhaps not always in practice) buy their way to a World Series ring. However, there is a factor that I rarely see addressed--cost of living factors. Of course, many players do not actually reside the city where they play, and teams spend the month of March either Florida or Arizona for spring training, and spend half of their time on the road, but still, I just can't help but think that the fact that $20 million has to go a lot further in St. Louis than it does in New York. Thus, I decided to use a cost of living calculator, to convert the opening day team payroll of each team to the neutral location of Chapel Hill, NC. Here are the results:

    Team (rank in USD)       Salary (USD)  Salary (CHD)
1.  Houston Astros (8)          92551503  117219559.48
2.  New York Yankees-x (1)     194663079  105753791.90
3.  Atlanta Braves (9)          90156876  105704043.83
4.  St. Louis Cardinals (11)    88891371  101872389.88
5.  Boston Red Sox (2)         120099824  100046603.88
6.  Chicago White Sox (4)      102750667   91087898.74
7.  Detroit Tigers (14)         82612866   88425099.39
8.  Seattle Mariners (13)       87959833   84955271.83
9.  Chicago Cubs (7)            94424499   83706796.80
10. Philadelphia Phillies (12)  88273333   83648917.84
11. Texas Rangers-y (17)        68228662   83392213.18
12. New York Mets-x (5)        101084963   82018168.14
13. Los Angeles Angels-z (3)   103472000   78630439.48
14. Baltimore Orioles (15)      72585582   75673632.69
15. Cincinnati Reds (21)        60909519   74855924.56
16. Los Angeles Dodgers (6)     98447187   73344602.00
17. Minnesota Twins (18)        63396006   70135678.48
18. Arizona Diamondbacks (22)   59684226   69568510.15
19. Milwaukee Brewers (23)      57568333   64975352.07
20. Cleveland Indians (24)      56031500   62235982.31
21. San Francisco Giants (10)   90056419   58082006.71
22. Kansas City Royals (25)     47294000   56413182.25
23. San Diego Padres (16)       69896141   55712543.84
24. Pittsburgh Pirates (26)     46717750   55597781.85
25. Washington Nationals (19)   63143000   52010588.77
26. Oakland Athletics (20)      62243079   47473887.90
27. Colorado Rockies (27)       41233000   45400525.17
28. Tampa Bay Devil Rays (28)   35417967   41211858.88
29. Florida Marlins (29)        14998500   15193164.50

x-The Yankees play in the Bronx, which was not an option, and so I chose Manhatten. The Mets play in Queens, which was an option.
y-The Rangers play in Arlington, TX.
z-The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim play in Anaheim, and so I chose Orange County.

(Note: The calculator does not have Toronto, home of the Blue Jays, who had a team payroll of US$71,915,000, or the 16th highest. Therefore, rank in USD reflects the rank among teams that play their home games in the US. John, can you help here?)

Hudson University Lacrosse Update

It's seems that soon after Detective Stabler arrests two members of the Hudson University Lacrosse team next season, one will be found to have a very specific and credible alibi. The other one however will soon be found to have been charged with gay-bashing during the last year. This second player will eventually be found to have raped the exotic dancer in order to prove to his teammates that he is in fact not gay.

"Without dreams we would be cows in a field"

When he first shows up in Fitzcarraldo, having rowed his boat for two days after the motor died, hands blistered and bloody, wearing a crumpled white suit, Fitzcarraldo begs to be let into Teatro Amazones because he had come so far. The usher relents and allows him to stand at the back. It is immediately evident, and I think would be so if I didn't already know the plot of the film, that this guy is pretty close to insane. While his actions prove it, what really sells it are Klaus Kinski. No one sane man can have the intense cold stare of his blue eyes, amplified by his crazy white hair. This man is crazy.

When he first shows up in Burden of Dreams, having had to cancel his initial attempt to film Fitzcarraldo due to the death threats and the rumors of the genocide waged by his film crew on the natives by the faction of the tribal council opposed to his filming in their territory, Werner Herzog, actually looks remarkably sane. His bushy hair and mustache look perfectly at home in the 1980. He's young and full of vigor. Do not let his looks fool you--this man is as insane as the subject of his film.

I think the first that I had heard of Burden of Dreams was that it topped Gene Siskel's list of the top ten movies of 1982. Odd for a making-of documentary about another film. But since then, I had wanted to see this film. And Fitzcarraldo, too, to be sure, but really only so as to be adequately prepared for Burden of Dreams. I had heard some of the troubles before--Jason Robards's amebic dysentary forcing him to withdraw after they had shot 40% of the film. At this time, Mick Jagger had to withdraw as well. The natives were restless, as was Klaus Kinski. But I suppose I was totally unprepared for Werner Herzog.

Plus, as an unexpected special treat, the Criterion Collection DVD of Burden of Dreams has the 20-minute film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the director follows through on his promise to Errol Morris on what he would do if Morris made his debut film Gates of Heaven. Les Blank made this film when Herzog took a break from filming Burden of Dreams for this meal (The first meal that he had cooked in over a year, he lamented.) and then returned to the jungle with Herzog to film him at work. In these two films, Blank presents such a fascinating portait of Herzog. See them.

With my $15.5 million...

Suppose I have $15.5 million with which to hire Major League Baseball players. I could either:

1. Hire San Diego pitcher Chan Ho Park (assuming I could borrow an addition $5,142, which I think is probably true considering I do have $15.5 million).

2. Hire the entire opening day roster of the Florida Marlins. Oh, and I'd have $501,500 left over for air fare to go see them play.

Chan Ho Park has a career record of 106-80. The Marlins (assuming no position players have a career decisions) are 172-172. But I assume there would be at least one of the Marlins available to pitch everyday.

After their off-season fire sale, the Marlins have a team payroll of $14,998,500. Chan Ho Park is one of 12 major league players who will earn more than the entire Marlins team. The highest paid Marlin is pitcher Dontrelle Willis at $4.35 million. Then pitcher Brian Moehler at $1.5 million. 17 of their 26 players make the league minimum of $327,000. Then third baseman Wes Helms at $800,000.

The second lowest opening day team payroll was the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at $35.4 million. In fact, on the Devil Rays and the Colorado Rockies ($41.2 million) fail to spend more than 3 times the Marlins. The median team payroll is about $72 million--nearly 5 times the Marlins. The top payroll is the Yankees (who have the three highest paid players) at $194.7 million, or nearly 13 times the Marlins, though only 6 of them make more than the Marlins all total. Twelve Yankees will make more than the Marlins highest paid player.

But in terms of income equality, the Marlins probably lead the way. I mean, think of Yankees starting second baseman Robinson Cano. He makes $381,000. The guys in the cubicals next to him make over 50 times his salary--1B Jason Giambi ($20.4 million), SS Derek Jeter ($20.6 million), and 3B Alex Rodriguez ($21.7 million)--and are the three highest paid players in the game.

Bad news/Good news for Hudson University Lacrosse

Maybe its crime rate is distorted by how every case is so well documented, but Hudson University does not seem to be a very safe place. Every year, there are cases like a girl being raped by the construction foreman at a new dorm on campus only to initially blame the campus ROTC, or the brash Hispanic math professor wrongfully accused of murdering one of his white female students in the university library. There are many other cases.

Lately, when there are high profile cases in the news, I often tend to view them through the prism of a writer for Law & Order. How can this case end in the most Law & Orderly fashion? And this is how I have been watching this Duke lacrosse team fiasco. In a headline truly ripped from L&O, the N&O has "DNA clears players, lawyers say; DA vows to continue Duke inquiry."

Casting

Good casting: Peter Bogdanovich as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, Dr. Malfi's therapist on The Sopranos.

Bad casting: Peter Bogdanovich as George Merritt, a Hugh Hefner-type magazine publisher/club owner in the episode "Sex Club" of Law & Order: Criminal Intent that I am watching right now. Although this episode is fictional and not intended to represent any real person, it is ripped from the headlines around Jack Ryan-dragging-Jeri-Ryan-to-the-sex-clubs scandal.

Okay, so maybe the problem lies in this show (and not Peter Bogdanovich, I'd cast him). Thet showt thatt wouldt castt Stephent Colbert ast at ant authenticatort oft raret bookst. It just doesn't work. But it should, I think. It has the right pedigree, and you can't fault Vincent D'Onofrio or Katheryn Erbe or Courtney B. Vance, and now Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra, it just doesn't work. Sometimes, I pretend it does, looking the other way out of deference to its TV family members. Is this a bad thing? Am I an enabler?