NFL Divisional Weekend: Saturday Previews

Last week, we saw one incredibly exciting game (Packers-Cardinals), one end of an era (Eagles-Cowboys; I don't think the Eagles will be thought of as a playoff regular going forward, particularly if continued skepticism of Reid-McNabb leads to losing one of them), one defensive slog (Jets-Bengals), and one defensive whuppin' (Ravens-Patriots). This week looks like it'll be very different: the divisional round has a lot of strength vs. strength matchups, and I wouldn't be surprised if the result is a lot of one-sided games, determined from the outset by whose strength is... stronger. Anyway, on to previews.

ARI @ NO 4:30pm ET

Week 12 was the high-water mark for the Saints. They had come off a 38-17 win against the Patriots. In that game, Tom Brady threw two interceptions and no touchdowns. The Patriots never converted good field position into points (Welker had a forty-one yard punt return; zero points) and their two touchdowns came at the end of eighty and eighty-one yard drives. Drew Brees threw as many incompletions as touchdowns (five). I can't imagine there were many people the following Tuesday who really expected a non-Saints team to represent the NFC in February.

That would have been pretty reasonable, on the whole. The New Orleans story up until that point was an explosive, unpredictable offense based on the zany principles Sean Payton cooked up. That offense was complemented by an unforgiving, turnover-forcing pass defense, led by Darren Sharper's remarkable ability to return interceptions for touchdowns. The challenge for opponents, essentially, had been being content to be run-heavy even while the Saints offense could respond, seemingly automatically, with a touchdown drive where Drew Brees (with the assistance of a two yard run by Pierre Thomas) goes 4/4 for 74 yards.

Then the Washington game happened: a game the Saints could have lost if Washington had had a kicker worth anything. Let's put this in perspective: the Saints never sacked Jason Campbell. Our man JC threw only one interception. Drew Brees was forced to throw the ball forty-nine times. Early on, the Saints tried running on third and short and failed; then they switched to passes that nfl.com lists as "short middle," and Washington figured that out. This was the game that the Saints' weakness was revealed: drop enough men into coverage, and they can't do a thing. (Here's another wrinkle: this game could well have been lopsided in favor of Washington if not for the Brees interception that Meachem stripped to return for a touchdown and if not for a bizarre muffed punt by Washington.)

So the Saints had a weakness, but the news didn't spread quickly enough. They barely beat Atlanta in a game that saw Brees have a fantastically efficient day (to the tune of 31/40, 3TD). Would this game have gone differently had Atlanta played more like Washington defensively? Maybe. Then the loss to Dallas, and the Saints looked just mortal.

I think this result was prefigured by the Saints-Eagles game in Week 2, which featured Kevin Kolb at quarterback racking up 391 yards. Why this wasn't a cause for concern: the Saints still won by twenty-six. Also, Kolb threw three interceptions, one of which was returned for a touchdown. So were the Saints in this game bad at giving up yardage compared to how good they were at keeping it from it becoming points? Yes, essentially: both touchdowns were due to big plays (DeSean Jackson catch, Ellis Hobbs punt return), though there were two field goal drives of over sixty yards. Forcing turnovers help that.

But this is Kevin Kolb. And, indeed, this defensive hiccup came back later in the season. Over the whole season, the Saints gave up 31.01 yards per drive, good for twenty-second in the league (Kansas City: better. Seattle: better). Their defense was, indeed, buoyed by their ability to produce turnovers (third in turnovers per drive, with 13.9%). (Both of those statistics, by the way, are thanks to http://footballoutsiders.com.) That fell apart in their Dallas loss (no turnovers, and 439 net yards, 43.9 yards/drive) and their Tampa Bay loss (two interceptions for a swing of at least ten points, but 439 net yards, 48.8 yards/drive, and Tampa Bay, everyone: Tampa Bay and a rookic quarterback in one of his first starts). That's what I see here: New Orleans can't force turnovers as once they could, particularly not against playoff teams. And that will come back to bite them against Kurt Warner.

I come to the Cardinals, and I have little to say that hasn't already been said: we saw what they could do against a thought-fantastic pass defense last week, and I shudder to think what they might do against a once-fantastic one. Now, of course, last week was a statistical anomaly: the Cardinals caught their fair share of breaks, in which a defensive back chose to play inside instead of outside technique, or shaded his coverage to the left instead of to the right, or whatever. So I don't think that they'll put up another forty-plus offensive points, even against a defense that I think is worse than Green Bay's. (It certainly doesn't have the linebackers.) The last thing you want to give Kurt Warner is time to throw, and the Saints will have little choice but to do just that. The Cardinals don't operate well when they're just dropping men in coverage, as we saw last week; if Aaron Rodgers can read you, I bet Kurt Warner can too. So it'll be an exciting, high-scoring game, but I'll pick the upset here. Arizona by ten.

BAL @ IND 8:15pm ET

This game happened during the regular season, much like the whole damn wildcard round. That game was all manners of anomaly: Peyton Manning made bad reads and forced throws, the Ravens tried to run Ray Rice out of passing sets, nfl.com tries to get me to click "WATCH HIGHLIGHT" on each of the game's six field goals.

It's tough to draw inferences directly from that game, and it's probably not a great idea. The Ravens offense knows what it is now, and what it is is running Ray Rice. The Colts won't be able to stop him any better than the Patriots did; indeed, they'll do a worse job: the Patriots have about a 0.2 yard edge over the Colts in adjusted line yards, per FO. (Also, Rice's style doesn't match up well against the Colts: they can stop smaller backs much more effectively than larger backs.)

Strangely, the Colts would be predicted to do better defending passes to Rice; they're eleventh, versus the Patriots' twenty-sixth, against passes to running backs, though they give up comparable yardage. This, even though the Pats didn't give up a Rice catch last week. So I guess it's possible that Flacco loses this game, too, by throwing an interception into triple-coverage again.

Flacco's mechanics are not going to be the best this game, due to injuries. The Baltimore offensive line prevented Mathis and Freeney from getting a sack last time; they may well do it again, but giving Flacco time might simply not be worth it: the secret to this game for the Ravens is the ground game.

Let's be honest about what will happen when the Colts have the ball: Peyton Manning will complete passes frequently and drive down the field easily. The Ravens don't have the pass rush they did in the past, despite what happened last week. And the only way for a pass rush to be particularly effective against Manning is when it is very, very fast: the '05 Steelers beat the '05 Colts in the playoffs because Manning didn't have time to get to a hot read with any kind of accuracy (and because that rush could come quickly without sacrificing much in terms of coverage; the Steelers six-blitzed three or four times, but other than that got fast pressure with four man zone blitzes). So Manning will, in all likelihood, have almost as much time as he wants to scan the field. And the Ravens have such a depleted secondary (Frank Walker and Domonique Foxworth are starting) that receivers will be open.

Really, this reminds me of the Indianapolis-Miami game. Indy moves the ball at will, but only holds it for fifteen minutes. Miami gains about four yards a minute, takes eighteen plays to move fifty yards, whatever. Forty-five minutes of ball control, and a loss because Indianapolis can match Miami's pace. That's the thing with time-of-possession: if your offense is just as skilled as your opponent's, then it usually means diddly to get a high ToP. It doesn't mean diddly if:

1. The reason you have a high time of possession is because you have more possessions, via turnovers. So your equally talented offense turns more possessions into more points.
2. You have the offensive flexibility to stop running the ball all the time and start passing once the defense gets winded
3. Your ball-control offense doesn't get a high time of possession by running a bunch of eleven play drives that end in punts because they go thirty-nine yards. Drive conversion into points is still the name of the game, and if your offense doesn't have a good selection of plays that can work as a guaranteed one or two yards, then it cannot run the ball more than half the time or it will fail to score points on that drive. If you fail to score points and end up behind in the score, then every second you run off is also one you needed to come back.

The Ravens obviously lack the second criterion. They might have the first. I think they have diverse Ray Rice plays to satisfy the third criterion, but the Colts are good against running backs. I really don't see this working out any better than it did for Miami.

I wish the Ravens could win this one, just because a Ravens-Jets AFC Championship would be literally unwatchable by anyone but me (and I like watching football alone or with Hannah or my parents, not with crowds). And I think there's a fine chance that they pull it off. I just think that's only a bigger chance than the no chance at all most people give them. I'll pick Colts by fourteen.

Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic painter who did mostly landscapes. He was serious about doing landscapes. Gerhard von Kügelgen decided to be a mensch and give us a portrait of our man CDF to show us just how serious about landscapes he is. Yow.

One of CDF's most important contributions (besides his work on the concept of the sublime) was the idea of an inherently emotional (in the sense of emotion-containing or emotion-inducing) landscape, which he called die romantische Stimmungslandschaft because he was German.

Anyway, CDF's work shares with Turner's several aspects that work for me: a really good sense of the play of light and air and fog. The overall effect is frequently exaggerated; the man is, after all, a Romantic. But even so, the image is more believable for it: even if it wouldn't fit in with the mundane world, it carves out its own space, its own world, all the more definitively.

Some of his paintings include Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which I could be tempted to discuss later, and The Cross in the Mountains, his first major painting, which is a panel for the Tetschen Altar, by which name it's better known. It's notably the first depiction of the crucifixion on an altar to depict it as a landscape.

CDF managed to execute some paintings after having suffered a stroke. Give the man an award, ladies and gentlemen. Those paintings were of course very dark (one: Seashore by Moonlight, and I'll leave it to you to decide if it's gloom or trepidation that that painting makes me feel; in either case, wow), and Wikipedia reports with stunning analytic insight that "symbols of death" appeared in his work from this period. Yeah, well, I can't say I blame him.

Let me show you what I mean about his use of light and air with The Abbey in the Oakwood. Some monks are carrying a coffin towards the gate left behind in the ruins of an old Gothic church. And holy god, look at the effect.

The way the dull brown glow lifts up from the ground, reaching toward the horizon, the way it's met by the remains of the daylight: it's a sunset without a sun, without the bright colors playing. It's a dying sunset, a sunset to remind anyone of autumn. (Also, I like how the color in the sky is slanted to match the motion of the monks. It's a small touch, but a neat one.)

e. e. cummings

I think that people read Cummings for a good reasons: he experiments with punctuation and line breaks in original ways, for example. I think he's not read nearly enough for the way he plays with meter and rhythm. This poem also has a tone that sounds almost playfully wistful; it's as though he's consciously evoking feelings of sentimentality and nostalgia.

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer's lie,

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man.

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two,

peels forever out of it's grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn't:blow death to was)

—all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die,the more we live

I particularly love the description of just what this wind (or, in the final stanza, this "dawn of a doom of a dream") would be doing: the "blow x to y" expressions. The latter's set up early on to be a diminished form of the first: a king becomes a beggar; a queen becomes hollow, merely appearances, just a "seem." It's quite easy to see how "death" is a more momentous thing than "was." The diminishings in between, I think, are where the real crux of the poem lies. In what respects is time "lesser" than space? Or, since that seems wonky, why does the persona feel that way?

Also, it seems (to me, at least) that the first two stanzas are explicitly about the seasons (particularly the final two lines of each stanza). Why isn't the third? Where does it depart, besides the invocation of something besides a "wind?"

The Red Wedge of Culture

I would be remiss not to mention the blog KЛИHOM, which is run by fellow quizbowler and friend of mine Andrew Hart, with posts made by around a dozen other quizbowlers. It's been dormant since roughly July, but it's going to be making a comeback shortly. The content that's already there is pretty exciting, too: some very knowledgeable people talking about art, literature, philosophy, music, history, and so on.

Essentially, it's this blog plus eleven other contributors. So please, do check it out!

10 ways to make organic chemistry easy

Here are ten tried and true ways to keep organic chemistry from being the headache it is for so many students. With these (and some enthusiasm) you might start to see the beauty of the subject for what it really is.

1. Always draw out mechanisms. Draw out mechanisms for every step of your retrosynthesis, even though you don't have to do so to answer the question. You'll never forget another mechanism, and you'll get a much more intuitive understanding for generalizations of the chemistry.
2. Don't worry about the hypothetical lab chemist you're directing in your retrosynthesis. It's possible that the path that you pick requires him to run five columns; that doesn't matter. What's important is that your chosen sequence of reactions works, and never mind the yield.
3. Categorize reactions by the type of bonds they make and the type of reagents (acids? bases? organometallic catalysts?) they require.
4. Make a notecard of protecting groups and the conditions required to install them and remove them.
5. In retrosynthesis, draw out trial disconnections across any bond type that you know how to make. If you're given fragments you must include in the synthesis, draw out every pattern that could have those fragments included (this is a lot if the fragments have only two to four carbons, and very few if they have a dozen). This is exhausting work, but as long as you haven't forgotten a reaction you've learned about, you'll get the question right eventually. Over time, you'll be able to eliminate less feasible patterns on sight, to the point that you need to consider seriously many fewer trial disconnections.
6. Determine what functionalities in given fragments must necessarily be included in the product. If a given fragment has a carbonyl unit, remember that that oxygen (or any other heteroatom there) might not appear in the final product if there's any chance the Wittig reaction would come in handy.
7. To practice mechanism questions, pick a named reaction at random from http://organic-chemistry.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/Named_reactions. You haven't learned it, but see if you can guess at the underlying chemistry? Generally the mechanism will be given on at least one of those sites, so you'll have something to check against.
8. For box problems, make sure the final product you drew isn't sensitive to the reaction conditions. For example, if you draw a product that has an ester hydroxylated somewhere, and it's in a rather acidic or basic solution as of the reaction's last step, how do you know it won't cyclize? (Hint: it very well might.)
9. If you're stuck on a retrosynthesis problem, do another one. In solving the second, you might discover an absolutely canonical sequence of reactions that you could apply to solve the first.
10. Work really hard. You won't gain an intuition for how a complex reaction or series of reactions works until you do many problems involving it. Work REALLY hard.

New layout!

Do tell me what you think. I figured this worked a little better because it allowed me to make a pseudo-three-column layout. I am usually horrified to mix prepackaged code with my dialect of HTML, which usually causes trouble, but I went with it and now my left column is split by an ol' fashioned table. Hooray! I feel almost... almost... competent.

Post to come later today, I promise you.

Enjoy some Larkin!

I am terrible at finding the painting I was intending to post about tonight (currently it's at "green dress prominent, other drab people near walls, dancing, may include the name of a dance in the title"; help me, people!), so here is some Philip Larkin.

Fiction and the Reading Public

Give me a thrill, says the reader,

Give me a kick;

I don't care how you succeed, or

What subject you pick.

Choose something you know all about

That'll sound like real life:

Your childhood, your Dad pegging out,

How you sleep with your wife.

But that's not sufficient, unless

You make me feel good -

Whatever you're 'trying to express'

Let it be understood

That 'somehow' God plaits up the threads,

Makes 'all for the best',

That we may lie quiet in our beds

And not be 'depressed'.

For I call the tune in this racket:

I pay your screw,

Write reviews and the bull on the jacket -

So stop looking blue

And start serving up your sensations

Before it's too late;

Just please me for two generations -

You'll be 'truly great'.

I think this poem is lovely. One of the things that makes Larkin a great poet is his willingness always to use the word that has the right meaning, the one that sounds right (and when the two don't converge, the poem changes): the reader pays "your screw" and writes the "bull on the jacket."

The members of the "reading public" are satisfied by pleasantries, yes, and also by the second-order pleasure of seeing coherence and logical consistency: tales that wrap themselves up neatly without loose ends, compositions that neatly return to the key they started in. It's actually the latter that is most necessary for the "reading public" (or else they'd reject Shakespeare's tragedies and Friday the Thirteenth alike).

Larkin doesn't take liberties with his precisely chosen language to provide either of those. Sometimes the realities of the human experience are jagged, rough, disconnected; sometimes they stray off, never to return to center: Larkin's poetry captures that harshness when it's appropriate. Read some.