How Democrats Lost the Plot – And Could Lose Democracy

Among certain segments of the indigo blob, there’s a pall hanging over the election. No matter what happens today, we may be in the dying days of American democracy as we’ve known it.

At least in 2016 and 2020, Democrats entered the election nervous about the possibility of a Trump win but assured that the polls suggested that, at the very least, he was more likely than not to lose – that surely the American people would ultimately see what a charlatan he was, how antithetical to democracy he was, and reject him. Even when that optimism turned out to be ill-founded in 2016, it seemed to be because the Clinton campaign bought into that optimism too much and became more concerned with running up the score in deep blue states than making sure they’d actually win in the places where it mattered in the electoral college. Joe Biden’s win in 2020 allowed for that optimism to seem vindicated, that America had survived four years of Trump and could now start to heal, to move on from the threat Trump represented to everything America stood for.

There’s little such grounds for optimism in 2024. Where before polls seemed to show a clear Democratic advantage, now they seem to show a toss-up – and given how much the polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, if that repeats itself in 2024 it could result in Trump getting a near-mandate, maybe even winning the popular vote. Where models break down the percentage chances of each candidate winning, they’d given Trump a slight edge until after I started writing this post – Nate Silver had him with as high as a 55% chance of winning until Saturday morning, and right now both him and the site he founded have it as a razor-thin race with no advantage even detectable for either side (though the Economist has given Harris as much as a 56% chance of winning). Democrats had some reason for optimism for a Harris victory even before the recent momentum in her favor – motivated voters not captured in polls’ likely voter models, right-wing pollsters “flooding the zone” to make Trump look like a bigger favorite than he is, and nonpartisan pollsters trying too hard to pull the race into a dead heat, on top of Harris having the general vibes (specifically larger crowd sizes) in her favor. But even if Harris were to come out on top, Trump and his supporters would surely cry foul and claim that the “deep state” was manipulating the results in her favor, and we’d get a rerun of the events of January 6, maybe even worse.

Fueling Democratic anxiety more than anything else is the sense that it shouldn’t be this way, that none of Trump’s runs for the White House should have come within a thousand miles of success, that Trump’s terribleness and the superiority of the Democrats are so obvious that the fact that any of the three have been remotely close has tarnished their faith in America. They can point the finger at all sorts of reasons why that’s not the case – Russian interference, America being racist, mainstream media outlets “sanewashing” Trump, social media outlets (especially Elon Musk’s Twitter) putting their thumb on the scale for right-wing propaganda, billionaires pouring money into Trump’s coffers. But even with all of that, if America were a functioning democracy, if democracy were as clearly superior to all other systems and Americans valued it the way my generation was taught they were, and the Democratic Party was even halfway competent, Trump would be swept away in all three of his elections in an electoral landslide of the sort Democrats haven’t benefitted from since Johnson over Goldwater in 1964 – with Trump perhaps capturing Deep South and some other rural states, but Democrats winning every state not completely dominated by the “deplorables” making up his base. The choice that preserves American democracy is not the automatic choice of anyone with the slightest grounding in reality, and that’s something that Democrats have refused to fully wrestle with.

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Cantonmetrics: 2025 Coach and Contributor Semifinalists

Offseason Snapshot | Player Quarterfinalists

This week, as part of its revised selection process, the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s committees to advance candidates in the Coach and Contributor categories reduced the number of candidates from 12 or 25, respectively, earlier in the month to nine “semifinalists” in each category. Each committee will meet virtually later this month to choose one finalist in each category to advance to the full selection committee this January, who will compete with each other and three senior candidates for up to three slots for induction. As such most, if not all, of these candidates won’t be inducted this year and may not be inducted at all, but we can still see who the Hall of Fame voters consider most worthy among the candidates in each category, who might be likely to be chosen by the committees in future years, and look at the relevant honors and argue over who should be inducted. 

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 8

We’ve reached an odd point in the season: on paper there’s a decently clear divide between the good or at least mediocre teams and the bad ones, and there are enough bad teams, and feisty ones among them, that they can beat up on each other and catch some teams on a bad day and form an amorphous mass with no clear separation. There are a whopping eight teams with two wins, seven of them at 2-6, but only two, the Titans and Panthers, with only one win and three teams at three wins.

Not all of these teams are created equal; the Dolphins, our one 2-5 team, lost Tua Tagovailoa for much of the season to this point to yet another concussion, while the Browns just stunned the Ravens in their first game with Jameis Winston at quarterback, suggesting losing their $230 million signal-caller could prove to be the best thing to happen to their season. The same could be said for the three-win teams; the Cowboys may be entering a season from hell, while the Rams seem to have suffered nothing worse than “going through the entirety of the best division in football in their first seven games” and picked up a win over the previously-5-1 Vikings at the end of it. With the Bengals, on the other hand, it’s not clear which is the case; it had looked like they might have righted the ship, but then they suffered a blowout loss to the Eagles that had previously seemed to be in their own disarray.

I bring all this up because it makes putting together the graphics on this post difficult if there aren’t four games outside the featured windows involving only teams with three or more wins. For this post I’ve largely emphasized the divisions with the weakest leaders, the NFC South and West, where the teams below .500 are closer to the playoffs than other teams that might seem to have achieved similar levels of success (or lack thereof). That mostly means the Saints, but I’ve also tried to put some spotlight on the Browns in case they go on a run with Winston (certainly the networks airing their featured-window games I mentioned last week hope so).

(As an aside, it’s odd that WordPress’ block editor involves making images completely separate blocks from the surrounding paragraphs, yet images that are aligned to the side no longer force those paragraphs below them on mobile, even if there isn’t enough space for even a single word when it tries to wrap the text around the image. I’ve converted the bulk of the rest of the post to use the classic editor to attempt to get around this, but it’s clunky and doesn’t seem to work well if I save the post as a draft and attempt to come back to it later.)

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
  • Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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Cantonmetrics: 2025 Quarterfinalists

Offseason Snapshot

Starting this year, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is naming at least 50 modern-era players (more if there’s a tie for the last spot), narrowed down from the nominees named in September, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as candidates for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so at least 90% of the players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most might not be inducted at all, and this list was determined by a “screening committee” separate from the main group of Hall of Fame voters so there isn’t necessarily any correlation with what Hall voters are thinking. Still, it’s useful to see what players the screening committee members see as potentially induction-worthy, and we can look at their relevant honors and argue over which players are worthy of induction.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 7

I talked about this last week, but the Cleveland Browns may well have given up on their season – and put the NFL in a very difficult spot in the process, one that could make a mockery of the goals driving flex scheduling.

Last season the Browns went 11-6 and made the playoffs, but did so largely on the back of Joe Flacco, now with the Colts, not their $230 million starting quarterback Deshaun Watson, who played respectably enough (getting the Browns out to a 6-3 start) but was injured in Week 10 against the Ravens and never returned. Despite the sexual assault allegations against Watson and the quarterback that actually led the Browns to the playoffs leaving town, the NFL saw fit to give the Browns four primetime appearances, though they at least put three of them during the flex period.

Well, this year, Watson has looked like a shadow of what he looked like in Houston, making his massive contract look like one of the biggest lemons in NFL history and spawning calls among fans to start backup Jameis Winston, and the Browns have only been able to muster one win all year. Last week they traded Amari Cooper, Watson’s best weapon, to the Bills, seemingly content to tank the season and figure out how to go forward next season – and that was before Watson tore his Achilles this past Sunday, ending his season (and it says a lot that both Browns fans and football fans more generally actually cheered his injury). You wouldn’t think the league would want to feature a team like that in marquee primetime windows if they could help it – yet they may be stuck with all three of the Browns’ games in flexible windows.

Start with Browns-Broncos on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a game I wasn’t sure was a good choice to schedule for Monday night in the main flex period but more because the Broncos weren’t expected to be good than the Browns. Thanksgiving weekend typically means a paucity of good games as the Sunday slate loses two more games than normal, including the high-value Cowboys, to the holiday, and now loses a third to Black Friday. Still, the Sunday slate does have multiple games that can be flexed in, with two CBS games involving teams with non-losing records: Eagles-Ravens as their lead doubleheader game, plus Chargers-Falcons. But the Chargers and Ravens are slated to play on Monday night the previous week in the “Harbowl”. The NFL never schedules teams to play in the same primetime window in consecutive weeks (the Thursday after Thanksgiving aside) and even when flex scheduling was limited to SNF only flexed teams into that situation very rarely and in exceptional circumstances; I certainly don’t think they’d be willing to do that for Monday night where there’s already a rest mismatch. Yet if the league doesn’t want to flex in either the Chargers or Ravens, Cardinals-Vikings might be their only option to so much as involve two teams at 3-4 or better.

What may be harder to replace is Browns-Bengals on Thursday night Week 16. The NFL has tried to prop up Thursday night as much as they can, allowing teams to play two short-week games and introducing Thursday night flex scheduling, but the rules surrounding the latter preclude most games from being moved to Thursday night, and Amazon may be stuck with the sort of underwhelming game that typified TNF in the pre-Amazon era.

The real problem, though, is Dolphins-Browns the following week on SNF. This is the week where five games get set aside for a possible move to NFL Network’s Saturday tripleheader, leaving relatively few games to be pre-scheduled for CBS and Fox’s Sunday slate, and enough of those games are divisional matchups where the first half of the rivalry isn’t being played on their respective conference’s regular network, inoculating them from needing to be protected, that there are a grand total of three games on the CBS and Fox slates that are eligible for a flex, meaning only one of them actually can be flexed in – and all three have been singularly disappointing. Any of the NFL Network games can be flexed in, as was the case with Trumps-Giants a few years ago, and the starts of Washington and Denver have been surprisingly strong enough to justify featuring them, but putting an NFL Network game on NBC means NFLN itself has to dig deeper into the Saturday-eligible pool to fill out the tripleheader, potentially putting a truly dire team on their air.

Last year we saw how the new guarantees CBS and Fox get could have such an effect as to overwhelm the expansion of flexing to Monday and Thursday nights and make any flex incredibly difficult. Now we’re seeing the consequences of it: games and teams that would seem to be shoo-ins for flexes, truly dire situations involving relatively low-wattage teams the league and networks wouldn’t want to feature, and they may be stuck with them.

(Note: If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, do not attempt to rephrase the comment and re-submit it. I’m still using an antispam plugin that’s supposed to require me to approve each commenter once before their comments will go up automatically, but in practice has required me to approve every single comment. I’ve made some changes to the active plugins in hopes that it’ll clear up any plugin conflict preventing it from working properly, but I may end up just ditching this plugin for another one.)

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
  • Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 6

All right, let’s start the Flex Schedule Watch for real this time! I wrote most of this post this morning but held off on posting it to see if there would be a change in the Week 8 schedule, and sure enough Bears-Windbags will switch places with Eagles-Bengals and the showdown of big-market star rookie quarterbacks will now be the main late doubleheader game. As I explain below, I may have screwed up a little last week in a way that underestimated the chances for certain games being flexed out, but I still don’t think they’re particularly likely – and our best chance for a flex may well come from Thursday night. This despite the fact that the Browns may well almost be trying to get flexed out of their primetime games.

I’m hoping I’ve gotten things arranged such that your comments should only need to be approved once, but if not I’m going to have to try another anti-spam plugin. I’m also finding the post is getting smushed on mobile as text is no longer automatically clearing the images; if I can’t find a solution for that I may have to adopt another format next year.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
  • Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played, that is, Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count either. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 5

Note: This post does not incorporate the result of the Thursday night game.

I’ve got a brand new computer that’s barely two days old and I’m ready and raring to go for another year of the Flex Schedule Watch! Aaaaaaand I forgot that I was only going to start it in Week 6 going forward. Whoops. Well, consider this a test (or at least a way for my work on the graphics not to go to waste) as I’m still finding myself needing to approve comments more often than I’d like despite updating WordPress, so I might have to go hunting for an anti-spam solution that actually means I don’t have to approve each person’s comments more than once, because I generally don’t look at people’s comments or even see that there are any needing approval until I sit down to work on a new post, and I wouldn’t want to drive people away by having the rate of commenting accidentally die down (even if the level of sanity presented by the comments… tends to vary).

(Also, part of the original assumption behind starting in Week 6 was that protections would come in five weeks in advance based on how Thursday night flexing works, but then we got evidence last season that they could come in later, although with some caveats. At one point I suggested not even starting the Watch until Week 8, which I’m not sure I could have actually followed through on. I think next year I’m going to go ahead and start Week 6 if I remember to, partly because that marks the exact one-third mark of the season, partly because there’s still a lot of uncertainty even from week to week this early on, as seen by a number of the write-ups below being very brief.)

I’ve seen some scuttlebutt about Jaguars-Eagles Week 9 being flexed out because the Jags are just so terrible that obviously they should be flexed out – never mind that we thought the same about the Bears last year and it didn’t happen. After that, I became convinced the early flex would only ever be used if a star player is injured, not because a team is simply bad on their own. As Mike North said in the aftermath, “it’s hard to say anybody’s season is over in Week 8, 9, 10”, so the league will give teams, even those as bad as the Jaguars, every opportunity to show they aren’t as bad as they might look through five or six games. I’m not sure if this scuttlebutt has died down since the Jags won a couple weeks ago and removed the possibility of them entering the game at 0-8, but put me down as being skeptical of a flex happening, certainly not if the Jags win one of their two London games. (The fact that Trumps-Giants seemed to have the most support as a flex option, but the Giants are now below .500 and seem decidedly mediocre, doesn’t help.)

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
  • Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, last year some Week 18 games (see below) had their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none were scheduled for primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played; Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count but their Peacock game that night does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

Read more

Cantonmetrics: 2025 Preliminary Nominees

Offseason Snapshot

Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and honors, and argue over which players are worthy of induction. 

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Assessing the Impact of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s New Selection Process

On Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the biggest change to its selection process since the introduction of the semifinalist stage in 2004 – if not longer.

Last year’s selection process saw some head-scratching moves at each stage of the process. The list of preliminary nominees, once numbering fewer than 100, ballooned to 173, yet still saw some head-scratching omissions, with Eric Berry, a member of the All-Decade Team of the 2010s, probably being the most glaring. The list of semifinalists wasn’t too bad, but then the finalists saw the inclusion of the highly marginal resumes of Fred Taylor and Rodney Harrison, seemingly putting them in line for almost certain induction. What attracted the most attention, though, wasn’t anything to do with the modern-era selections, but the selection committee rejecting the senior-candidate bid of Art Powell – the first time a senior candidate had been rejected in 12 years – as well as coach/contributor finalist Buddy Parker. Some of the changes the Hall made should address the odd list of nominees we saw last year, but the changes later in the process aren’t necessarily related – and might make the actual issues the Hall faces worse.

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Diagnosing Democracy, Part II: How the Democrats’ Crisis Explains Democracy’s Crisis

Note: Despite the title of this post, I’m probably not going to continue with this series; I originally intended for Part II to involve the ongoing back-and-forth over the latest flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but when I sat down to prepare to write it I realized I was too far removed from some of the minutia of the debate from October and November. I now intend to rework some of what I originally intended to say into a larger project that might not see the light of day until closer to when it’s completed. This post will partly cover some of the same ground as Part I, but not so much so as to keep from justifying making it part of the series. Also note that this post was mostly written by Saturday morning/afternoon, before the shooting at the Trump rally.

Since Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance at last month’s debate, the Democrats have been in a state of simultaneous panic and paralysis. Initially, what few Democrats were willing to go on the record stood by Biden as the party’s candidate, but a steady drumbeat of anonymously sourced stories casting doubt on Biden’s ability to serve as President now, let alone the next four years, culminated last week in actor George Clooney writing an op-ed explaining his experience with Biden at a fundraiser and making the case to replace him. Despite Biden proclaiming that he’s not going anywhere, elected Democrats up to and including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have intimated that he still has a decision to make. More and more Democrats are convinced that Biden cannot possibly defeat Donald Trump in November if he’s the nominee, and are becoming desperate to nudge him out of the race.

But it’s not clear that they have any better alternatives. Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be both the most natural, straightforward choice to replace Biden and the one least likely to alienate the party’s key constituencies of Blacks, women, and Black women, is deeply unpopular in her own right, tremendously disappointed in her attempt at a presidential run in 2020 to the point of dropping out before any contests were held, and before the debate, was one of the loudest defenders of Biden’s mental acuity, raising concerns that nominating her would simply shift the nexus of controversy from “Biden isn’t mentally fit for the job” to “Harris tried to sell the American public on someone not mentally fit for the job”. (Indeed, if it weren’t for Harris’ baggage renominating Biden might not be so fraught – though by the same token, neither would replacing him with her.) Most other candidates that have been floated – Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer – are fairly milquetoast white-bread Democrats whose national appeal is relatively untested and that might not be able to overcome the extent to which their selection would alienate Blacks, and might still have to answer for the Democrats’ initially sticking with Biden. Any of them would have to overcome the fact that they weren’t selected in a traditional open primary process, regardless of what schemes the Democrats come up with to simulate one.

An attitude I’ve seen on Twitter is that Democratic politicians and celebrities like Clooney and Jon Stewart, and donors like Abigail Disney, are privileged enough to be relatively fine in a second Trump reign, so can afford to take the risk of replacing Biden, but ordinary people can’t. But there is no risk-free option here. Replacing Biden would expose the Democratic Party as weak and present a nominee that doesn’t necessarily have the confidence of the base, but not replacing Biden would not only mean sticking with a candidate that was already an underdog before the debate in large part because of people’s concerns about his age and mental acuity (concerns that now might not be completely surmountable no matter how well Biden does the rest of the way given what’s been reported and where he might be in four years), and hoping against hope that he doesn’t have any more “senior moments” between now and the election that would underscore those concerns (or even devolve to the point that they’d have to invoke the 25th Amendment and effectively run Harris anyway), but send the message that the Democratic Party doesn’t care what the people whose votes they need think about their nominee, that they will take what the party gives them and like it. Sometimes doing nothing is the riskiest path of all.

No matter what the Democrats do, they are staring at the prospect of, more likely than not, losing the election to Donald Trump, possibly even in the popular vote, allowing him to entrench his imperial, fascistic vision of the presidency and the GOP to enact their Project 2025 and Agenda 47 plans, potentially resulting in the last competitive presidential election for the United States as we know it. No matter where you are within the Democratic coalition, so long as you’re in it this is an unfathomable outcome. Democrats have loudly complained that the media is spending too much time on Biden’s age and not enough on Trump’s own mental deficiencies and destructive agenda. The idea that the American people would seemingly vote for fascism over democracy because democracy’s defender is too old seems outrageous.

But if it were to happen, it wouldn’t be because of Biden’s age and mental acuity alone. Rather, those things, and the way the Democrats have handled them, have ultimately underscored what it is that has made Trump so consistently popular in the first place.

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