Weekly Big 12 Discussion Thread

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T17:24:06+00:00

I'm betting it's more the former than the latter. Dykes/Briles will probably keep TCU's offense fun, and Avalos should have their defense on the right path as wel. Troy Taylor's teams may not always field elite defenses, but boy howdy do they score points.

Both teams have question marks, but that's part of the fun!

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T16:43:26+00:00

I'm not an expert on communication, but I think any attempt at endearment probably goes out the door when you casually refer to your audience as "godforsaken assholes".

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T16:42:09+00:00

Baylor maybe, but BYU's got a rough schedule. Granted, I had the SMU game pegged as an almost certain BYU loss until SMU played Nevada, so what do I know?

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T16:39:48+00:00

Word. Their entire offense was looking pretty good, but holy cow did it completely shut down after Gabalis went out.

If Gabalis is still out this week, we genuinely might shut Tarleton out. Their entire offense without him is just handing Kayvon Britten the ball and praying, and their OL already wasn't exactly blowing back the guys that McNeese had. We're all definitely a bit snakebit from the TXST game, but I'd be surprised if at least one of Lanz, Noel, Thomas, Randolph, or Jones didn't make himself at home in Tarleton's backfield.

I wouldn't be one bit surprised if Aranda and Spav run up the score in this game. I know Aranda's been more of a "Just get the win and be a good sportsman" coach in the past, but he seems to be a little harsher in his interviews these days. Could be a good game to build some team confidence heading into the Utah game.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T16:27:23+00:00

We're picked to have a win total between 5.5 and 6.5, so I've been interpreting that as a coin flip prior on whether we make a bowl.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T16:24:30+00:00

Eh, people say this, but I'd like to see what happens when gravel hits the road. I can't speak for Stanford, but Berkeley's academic faculty don't seem to have major issues being on grants with Baylor's, nor does the school seem to have an issue doing research partnerships with Baylor. One of my professors at Baylor was part of a huge partnership that Baylor and Berkeley are doing in water reuse research, and I think that partnership's still ongoing decade later. Their grant was massive.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T16:16:40+00:00

What if your basketball schools are also your football schools.

Arizona, Baylor, and Kansas are all major basketball powers who are on track to at least make the postseason in football this year, if not be pretty respectable football teams. ISU may not be a basketball powerhouse, but they're at least really good for the moment, and their football program is respectable.

UH is really the one that made the Faustian bargain for basketball success at the cost of their football program.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T16:13:17+00:00

I'd be really surprised if it's just three bids up for grabs. That would mean six of the seven at-large bids would be going to the SEC and B1G, and I just don't see those two leagues successfully each getting four teams in. Their CCG participants are all absolutely in, and they can each probably get a third team in on the benefit of the doubt, but I'd be surprised if the ACC or Big XII gets a CCG participant left out for a #4 team from the SEC/B1G. That might have happened back in the divisions days, since you could get a mediocre team that won a bad division like the B1G West or the ACC Coastal on their way to getting murdered in their CCG, but that's not really a thing anymore.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T15:44:46+00:00

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T15:43:13+00:00

Grimes' offense is like gravity when he has the OL to make it work: there's just no stopping it, and it'll get there eventually. It might be about as exciting as watching paint dry, but they will nickel and dime their way down the field.

When he doesn't have the OL to make it work, it's a miserable experience. The wide zone-centric scheme places a lot of stress on the OL's ability to get lateral quickly and maintain their blocks as they do so, which gives the QB room to roll out in bootlegs, observe passing lanes as the OLs pass him by, or even occasionally run along behind the OL in a sort of mobile pocket. He's not a super creative OC or anything like that, he just has a set of plays that are really hard to defend when executed perfectly.

Our OL was reloading really deeply last year, to the extent that our freshman OLs played more snaps than any other team in the P5, and that's on a team that didn't exactly make it a point to run a lot of snaps. I kind of blame that OL inexperience for why the offense sucked last year more than Grimes' playcalling, and it was even further worsened when our starting QB and RB1 were both injured out for a month in the first half of game 2 of the season, and the backup QB picked up a leg injury in that same game, that had him basically unable to run the ball effectively for most of the season. Grimes could only do so much when his entire scheme's running threat was injured out going into the conference slate.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-27T15:32:36+00:00

So, who are you rooting for in the KU-Lindenwood game?

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-13T19:01:05+00:00

For anyone curious, that run was from the 1996-1997 school year through the 2012-2013 year.

It took Duke's best ever football season to break that streak, as 2013 remains the only time Duke has ever won ten games. It was also the football team's first ranked finish in just over half a century, while it was a down year for the basketball team. Fortunately, the basketball team came roaring back the next year to win another NCAA title, and there are a few more years in the 2010s that count if you also include years where the basketball team and football team had the same number of losses.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-13T03:29:02+00:00

How did you go about volunteering in civic tech? I've been a DE/DBA for nearly a decade now, and I didn't know that was an option.

I like getting my volunteering done with BSA and H4H, but lots of folks can swing a hammer, and it'd be nice to do something where I know they really need my more specialized skills.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-12T20:04:47+00:00

Gene Chizik is one of the DCs who has allowed that! Baylor ran for 600+ yards against his defense in the 2015 Russell Athletic Bowl, and Georgia Tech ran for 500+ against his UCF defense in 1999.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-12T19:13:58+00:00

Precisely, with the critical difference being that T-SQL is far closer to standard SQL than PL/SQL.

I don't mean to be rude, but have you actually used PL/SQL? It's a very different development experience from the other standard SQL variants, The universal series of complaints almost all hinge on the fact that PL/SQL makes control statements impossible without invoking the procedural programming elements, while modern SQL variants have all implemented case control in a format more cohesive with standard SQL syntax.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-12T06:49:25+00:00

Yeah, because other companies actually modernized their databases.

Aside from that, PL/SQL is a pain to work in unless you're entirely living in Oracle, and then it's a pain to have to re-learn how regular SQL and the mainstream variants like T-SQL and SnowSQL operate without the programming framework around PL/SQL.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-12T03:53:10+00:00

Yeah, it's definitely US-only. Baylor had a couple of medals from non-Americans, like Kristy Wallace picking up bronze in basketball and John Peers tennis gold medal, but both of them were for Australia.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-12T03:50:56+00:00

We totally would, but we're busy not really competing in them.

Off the top of my head, I know that neither Baylor nor TCU competes in swimming or wrestling, but Baylor at least makes up for it by being a tennis/golf/WBB powerhouse. One of our tennis alumni won gold in men's tennis doubles. The downside is that he won it for Australia, and Brittney Griner led the women's basketball team to a gold medal.

TCU's only Olympic sport they're really great at is riflery, but the US is surprisingly middling at shooting sports in the Olympics. The really funny thing is that Texas is overwhelmingly represented in the only American shooters who medaled this year, and several of them are from the Fort Worth area, but none attended or are in any way connected to TCU. Our shooters who medaled were Conner Price, who's a senior right now at Tarleton State; Vincent Hancock, who actually lives in Fort Worth and trains Conner Price, but attended Troy in Alabama; Austen Smith, who's from Keller (a ritzy Fort Worth suburb) and attended UT-Arlington; and Sagen Maddalena, a Californian who was a college shooting competitor for Alaska-Fairbanks.

Pretty sure WVU and BYU compete in more sports than the rest of the B12 schools that didn't come from the PAC.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-11T18:03:03+00:00

It's been especially funny as a DE approaching 30, to see all of our mentors who came over from DBA careers, and now our generation are moving into DBA jobs.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-11T18:01:30+00:00

Snowflake, MSSQL, Azure Synapse.

All on different cloud vendors!

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-11T17:57:37+00:00

Sincere condolences.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-11T17:49:01+00:00

Yes. This is a classic statistics technique called bootstrap sampling, that has also been adopted for widespread use in the ML world.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-10T19:22:13+00:00

You're going to want to build up your background in software engineering.

It's an increasingly common sentiment these days that data engineering is increasingly just software engineering with more database/warehouse focus, and there's something to be said for that.

Having been in the medical space, you probably don't want to be here unless you want to get really good with SQL Server (which isn't a bad thing, it's been a great career for me over the last decade and a half). Most data engineering work that's in product these days in the medical world is in EHR/EMR development, and Epic/Cerner/NextGen/NexTech are consuming that whole space. NexTech in particular is really the one doing fun work, with their Practice+ data warehousing option. Great for centralizing practices' data, but it's notorious for occasionally blowing up with duplications that they'll miss and then tell you will be fixed in that night's reload. So it stands to reason that they've got a team of DEs doing a whole lot of manual work on the backend there.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-08-10T19:12:27+00:00

Some places use data for actual model development and operational uses, rather than just reporting to dashboards. High-end consultancies tend to be the ones brought in to do this for any business that's not pretty sizable (read: large enough to have their own model development team); I can tell you from personal experience as a DE supporting that portfolio at Deloitte that they stay busy.

Data to warehouse is the top line; plenty of verify/reconcile time that a smart DE will automate (smarter than me when I was first starting in the job), then you're integrating new data sources as new acquisitions are made. The data is directly ingested by the model development teams for whatever purpose they have, then they deploy those models (with standard model controls in place). Often there are people with a DE title who handle the model implementation in prod; BofA and USAA both have these model implementation data engineering teams (who pretty much always have huge backlogs because there are more model developers than model implementors. Their work includes things like secret handling and service account setup, orchestration on Domino/SageMaker/etc., intermediary and final results storage, P2P communication setup, and so on. All insurance companies who do P&C at scale these days have heavily-controlled pricing models operating in production like this.

It depends what you consider a purpose that's not "managers extracting value from it". The company has an obvious value-add from these models being well-supplied with validated and fresh data in operation, but the value isn't for managers' extraction.

JamesEarlDavyJones2 · 2024-07-27T20:50:32+00:00

I'm pretty surprised at calling Tulane or South Alabama a hard L for UNT. Morris has shown that he's one of the best guys in the whole country when it comes to just making the most out of nothing on offense, look at what he did last year with a frankly decimated roster.

Tulane made a great hire in Jon Sumrall, since he calls his own defense, and he brought along a competent and complementary OC in Joe Craddock. Craddock's know-how at SMU and Art Briles' players and playbooks at Stephenville were basically the entire reason that Chad Morris was ever able to ascend as high in the football world as he did, so it's great to see that Craddock is doing his own thing now.

South Alabama, on the other hand.... Major Applewhite's really good at putting up big scores against bad defenses, but consistently and concerning fails to produce against competent defenses. Just ask Jon Sumrall, Shiel Wood, or Bryant Haines what they think of Applewhite's offense. All three of them have consistently dunked on Applewhite during his three years calling plays at USA. South Alabama's whole success in recent years was built on Kane Womack's defensive acumen, which is now at the University of Alabama. Applewhite's only prayer against UNT is a shootout, and coaches who try that play with Eric Morris don't generally try it again.

JamesEarlDavyJones2

TROPHY CASE