Now I can pay attention to football...

Though my passport from the Red Sox Nation has faded in a decade away from Boston living, I still feel gutted by the just completed September swoon.  Nate Silver beautifully quantifies the epic level of the Red Sox collapse this year.  Even as he notes that the estimate is not at all mathematically rigorous, it's a twisted kind of fun to have a numerical narrative building to the claim of "about one chance in 278 million of all these events coming together in quite this way."  For even casual Red Sox fans, those numbers are believable in our gut.

Looking for the silver lining on this cloud, I now plan to see whether I can get the Random Walker Rankings for the 2011 college football season running soon...