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Here are some entries for the Hindsight is 20/20 Department:

• Maybe a college team that didn’t win its conference shouldn’t be in the playoffs ahead of the team that beat it and did win the conference.
• Maybe the Heisman should be awarded after the bowl games.
• Maybe we shouldn’t doubt the Packers, especially if Aaron Rogers makes a declaration as such.

Regarding the second point: maybe Lamar Jackson had a lackluster bowl performance because he’s not that good. Or maybe it was because LSU was looking to shutdown the Heisman winner. Or maybe it was because Jackson already won the Heisman so he wasn’t very motivated. There may be other reasons too, but all of them reinforce the idea that the Heisman should come later.

It is time once again to update Some Blog Site readers on the results of my Some Fun Site project to create a more accurate football prediction method.

The 2016 NFL season is over, and here are the most accurate methods for predicting regular-season game results:

• ITP: 62%
• MPWLS: 61%
• MPW: 60%

This is the first year that neither MPW nor MPWHFA have been the best predictors of wins. Since I didn’t change anything, I will chalk that up to a statistical anomaly. Or maybe I can blame the Rams for moving to LA.

(For the ideas behind the methods, please visit the Some Fun Site page.)

Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.
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Last time, we covered pass interference. Most of the other penalties don’t have so much of a discrepancy between offense and defense. For example, a face mask penalty is 15 yards against the offender no matter which side he was playing.

Today, I’m covering personal fouls. I agree with the league’s changes for this year in which players can now foul out. But there is one more change that should be suggested – the eye for an eye principle.

This would mean that any injury that resulted from a foul would cause the perpetrator to be suspended for as long as the injured player was out of commission.

Players do get injured playing football. I’m not proposing any injury gets this treatment – only injuries that happened because the opposing player did something egregious.

It sounds fair though – if you hurt someone such that he can’t play football, then you don’t get to play football until he does.

Good luck getting that through the committees though. Maybe a cap, such as a maximum suspension of 12 games, would help make it palatable.

Now that we’re midway through the NFL season, I thought it would be good to review some of the penalties and how their consequences could be re-worked. This is needed mainly because the penalties are skewed toward favoring the offense. To restore some balance to the game, we need to even up the penalties.

Pass Interference
If the defense commits a pass interference penalty (DPI), the offense gets the ball at the spot of the foul (as many yards as necessary) and an automatic first down. But if the offense commits pass interference (OPI), it’s only 10 yards and the offense gets to try again.

There are a couple of way to remedy this disparity.
A. Make OPI the same magnitude as DPI – the defense gets the ball at the spot of the foul and it’s first down for them. The spirit of NFL DPI is that it assumes the receiver would have made the catch. Why not do the same for OPI?

B. Apply the yardage only – whatever the spot of the foul was, walk the offense back that amount. Similar spirit as the original rule – punish the offender the amount of the foul.

C. Make OPI an automatic 4th down. Since DPI is automatic first down (drastically favoring the offense), OPI should match it (drastically punishing the offense).

D. Make it 10 yards plus loss of down. I think this is the most palatable change because it’s not so drastic. It’s not the most even, but why should the offense get to retry the down on which they fouled?

People have associated Bill Belichick’s apprentice as someone else – usually Tom Brady. But I thought the hoodie and the scowl make Michael Phelps the more likely candidate.

I have mentioned this topic before (in my PSA about pedestrians and traffic), but another incident happened so I feel like writing about it again.

The main argument for having pedestrians travel in the opposite direction of traffic (i.e. facing oncoming cars instead of going with them) is for situational awareness – being able to see the nearest danger.

But this time I was driving instead of running and realized another reason for it – it’s better for drivers too.

In this case, I was driving up a hill on a dirt road. The jogger was on my side of the road, going the same direction. Being a conscientious driver, I was going to move into the other lane to go around her. But this was a dirt road, which is about 1.75 lanes wide. So if I swerved at all to go around her, I would be in the other lane. Directly and completely facing oncoming traffic.

And that was the problem. Because we were near the top of a hill. So I couldn’t see if there was oncoming traffic. Anyone who has read Bill Peet books (specifically Jennifer and Josephine) will know that one of the worst things to do just before the top of a hill is to swerve into the other lane. So I idled along behind the jogger until we crested the hill and I could see that there was no oncoming traffic.

What was the problem? Her presence in my lane unnecessarily delayed me.

If she had been in the other lane, like she was supposed to, then I could have travelled at a decent speed (faster than the 4 mph that I did while trailing her) without bothering her. It would cost her nothing to be in that lane instead of this. She would be safer from traffic. And she could have gone jogging without wondering why some car is following her very slowly.