That's the way the ol' ball bounces

[CowboyMcCoy]

that really had nothing to do with working on tip drills the guy didnt know he had the ball in his hand till he looked down and saw it there. when you are suprised that the ball is in your hands it is not 'by design'

 

[AsthmaField]

that really had nothing to do with working on tip drills the guy didnt know he had the ball in his hand till he looked down and saw it there. when you are suprised that the ball is in your hands it is not 'by design'

Lol, thank you. He never saw the ball until it hit his gut and stuck to his jersey like velcro.

By Design? If you call trailing the open receiver by 5 yards and running until the ball magically bounces off his heel and cradles directly into your breadbasket, by design... then I suppose it was.

Damn good planning by the Giants secondary coach.

 

[GimmeTheBall!]

How many bad throws and how many fumbles?
How many blown assignments in the secondary and how many penalties and how many dropped passes?
And how many bad strategems?

Wait. I feel woozy. Need intelligent stimuli. . . . will be back after cage fighting prelims . . . .

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Lol, thank you. He never saw the ball until it hit his gut and stuck to his jersey like velcro.

By Design? If you call trailing the open receiver by 5 yards and running until the ball magically bounces off his heel and cradles directly into your breadbasket, by design... then I suppose it was.

Damn good planning by the Giants secondary coach.

Genius. No one could have anticipated such a play and actually practiced it to the level of perfection that Kenny would actually look surprised just to throw off the public that they did have that play in their defensive repertoire.

Real men of genius, for certain.

 

[MarionBarberThe4th]

Crayton w/ the 100 yard PR for TD....

 

[Doomsay]

Is it just me, or have we had an inordinate number of unlucky breaks this year? I'm not talking about bad calls or lack of execution. I'm talking about things like the ball bouncing off Witten's shoe directly up to a Giant defender. (and yes I know it was a poorly executed pass, however it's one in a thousand that the ball would bounce directly to the defender.)

Or Manningham not catching a pass cleanly only to have it fall right on top of him while he's on his back in the endzone. Or the bad punt in one of the games that bounces about 30 yards towards our end of the field after it first touches the ground.

How many of these unlucky breaks can you count that have went against us vs lucky ones that went for us?

This isn't a complaint thread or a blame thread. I'm just wondering if my perception is right or wrong that we seem to have been snake bit so far this year over and above the mistakes we've made.

As other have said, that Giant game was crazy. I do think that we've also had some luck go our way in terms of balls being blown dead and some of those balls thrown to Miles last game. Had we had one bit of luck vs. NY, our season might look very different now.

 

[Fletch]

"Luck is the residue of design." -- Branch Rickey

There's a reason why defensive players work on tip drills, only this time it was tipped by a foot instead of a hand. Give credit to Phillips for being alert and having good hands.

... and for having a four-leafed clover shoved up his ***!

 

[Fletch]

that really had nothing to do with working on tip drills the guy didnt know he had the ball in his hand till he looked down and saw it there. when you are suprised that the ball is in your hands it is not 'by design'

Yeah, but bbgun started his post with a quote by 'Branch Rickey Bobby' which obviously means that he knows more than us Layman about deferentiating luck and bad luck from skill (tip drills).

 

[Shinywalrus]

It usually evens out over the course of the season.

I don't know about that. Certainly over the course of several seasons.

The best stat for this is fumble recoveries - while forcing fumbles is unequivocally a skill, the variability of how often a team manages to recover fumbles forced against it and which it forces is extreme. The exact same team of players, in one year, may force, say, 20 fumbles, but recover 20% of them. The next year that same team, with the exact skill, frequently recovers something like 70 or 80% of them. Statistically it's just not a skill thing.

It's one of the closest expressions to a "that's the way the ball bounces" kind of concept, it's game changing, and it doesn't necessarily even out over the course of a season.

That's why one of the best predictors of success the next year for a losing team is a very low fumble recovery rate in the previous year. It's not that they're getting better, it's that the randomness factors of games are mean reverting.

 

[HoosierCowboy]

meh, you make your own luck.

that's a contradiction--you make things happen through skill and preparation but sometimes the breaks just go against you--when we went 13-3, we got a lot of breaks

anyone else notice during the Texas-OU game that the every time Texas fumbled, it was a great play by OU defens but when OU fumbled, Texas got a break. They were making the distinction between break and "making luck" but biased toward OU