I think it's faulty to say that just because something unlikely happened, that saying it was an unlikely event was wrong.
Palmer did end up getting injured/falling off the pace that he set last year. It just took 15 games instead of right off the bat. The defense wasn't as effective as it was the prior year. The running game stepped up.
Just because you flip a coin three times and it comes up heads each time doesn't mean that suddenly the world has shifted and your model isn't correct.
Of course it isn't correct. Unlikely doesn't mean squat. They made a decision to write an article where they guessed based on a model with incomplete variables. They put their validity on the line for a model that cannot think, hear, listen or adjust to reality.
A model isn't correct unless it captures reality 100 percent of the time. Otherwise it's a guess. 0 or 1.
The world didn't shift because the world was not contained in the model.
If you flip a coin three times it can come up heads-heads, tails-tails, heads-tail, tails-heads. That's the point. Nothing can tell you what it is going to turn up as at any given time. In fact, sometimes it needs to be flipped again because it doesn't rotate, and conceivably, it can land on it's side as well.
I point this out, because in this world we suspend our minds and follow models in many places incorrectly, and like Grantland did, they used their faulty methodology to promote an article that clearly didn't know what was going to happen, but they pretended to.
2008. It wasn't a 1 percent failure, it was a 100 percent assured occurrence. Just like the next one won't be seen coming because people follow quackery to numb their mind to reality.
Yes it's a tool, but most of the time it's completely misused, and relied on when it shouldn't be. Too many people blindly follow the model and the opportunity cost is... they didn't see the obvious. It was obvious before this year that we had a great team. They doubled down on stupid because they got it wrong for 2014 as well. That's two years in a row they didn't follow their eyes and went by the numbers, and they were made to look stupid both times. This only happened because of the blind belief in faulty methodology. When the 2014 quackery didn't work, they found another way to try... and it in 2015 didn't work.
Life isn't a coin flip, and definitely not a model. The greatest power of models is the Power of Suggestion and a place for people to rally around if they are all convinced and made confident in it.
