Oakland Raiders: Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum, We Really Should Have Won

"Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." The Baltimore Ravens are named for the poet Edgar Allen Poe who was born in America and had his early education in England. Poe's poem, The Raven, is a favorite in American literature classes. It's a poem about a bird; its a poem about depression, I believe. The Oakland Raiders are named for a more fierce and aggressive presence. The Raiders are the pirates who sometimes have a bird on their shoulder. The Raiders were established years before the Ravens. The Ravens started in 1996, and it is one of the youngest NFL teams. Two others, the Carolina Panthers and the Jacksonville Jaquars are one year younger than the Ravens. And here is my poetic chant: Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, Last Sunday we should have won! Not exactly as good as Edgar Allen Poe, but I made my point! Huh? There are so many "what ifs" this season. Many variables are at play in the game of professional football. Injuries took their toll on the Oakland Raiders, and we ended up tumbling down the beanstalk like the giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk." When you look at the numbers for wins and losses, there were as many "swings" in the curve for the Raiders as there were for the Ravens. The bird flew back and forth; the pirate stumbled up and down. Now, to use a regression curve to measure the overall direction the season was going for both the Raiders and the Ravens, we see that the slope of the regression line for the Raiders is positive. The slope for the Ravens, is, surprisingly, going downward, or decreasing. From a statistical standpoint, if we extrapolate and imagine that the season is longer than 16 weeks, then the Ravens would have been headed downhill, according to the statistical model. I know what you are saying, but I see the good in it all. Defintely, we can conclude that we had improvement and an upward movement near the end of the 2009 season, although a sec...

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