Announcement/Apology

Late last night, I was planning on writing a post of some sort when I returned from picking up a friend at the airport. However, upon returning to my house, I quickly determined that half the kitchen floor was covered in water, flooded from a clogged faucet. Needless to say, the next hour and a half was spent cleaning up this aquatic wonderland formerly known as the kitchen, only to discover that a large portion of the basement was also filled with water.

Why is this a big deal to you, the gentle reader? Well, you see, the connection for my home wireless network, among other things, is downstairs. And some of the computer stuff got wet, forcing the unplugging of said equipment in order to dry it out. The network may even have to be reinstalled; thus, I will be without home internet access for at least a short while. Thus, posting on this blog will be difficult.

So, if I post sporadically for the next week or so, you'll know why. The cynical among you may be saying to yourself "Dan's gonna go a week without posting-- isn't that what happens anyway?" And to that I say, Hush! What I plan to do is type things up in Word on my laptop at home, and then save them and post them in the mornings when I get to work. Hoepfully, that will suffice for the time being, until everything gets sorted out and my basement stops resembling a mild swamp (or perhaps a brackish pool of oil, but that image could just be in my mind due to the fact that I just began to read The Prize, by Daniel Yergin).

Just wanted to let you know.

-- One quick thing, though: With the NFL draft only six days away, I thought this was rather appropriate. It is an economic analysis of the NFL draft and the value of the picks and what not, written by two scholars from the business schools of Duke and University of Chicago. When I first heard about/found this paper, I thought that it was the perfect thing to blog about, combining my love of sports with academia. I figured that I'd read the article and then write a large comment on it.

Then, I read the paper and remembered one thing: The only economics I ever took in college was Economics 101. The reason I never explored economics further was because I got a C+ in said Economics 101 (of course, a large portion of the blame there could be laid at the feet of my professor, who was an Argentinian man who barely spoke English and refused to follow the path of my $95 textbook, making that a useless purchase as well as nigh-impossible to study for tests unless you somehow were able to make sense of the chickenscratch on the board, but I digress).
The reason I remembered this was because, well.... I didn't really have a clue what these two professors were driving at in this paper. Oh sure, I understood some general points, and I think I understood their basic premise... but they lost me with all the tables and graphs and economic jargon. So yeah, that being the case, it's obviously extremely hard for me to write an intelligent critique of this paper and whether the ivory-towered academic analysis jives with the blood and guts business of quarterbacks and linebackers.

So, I leave it here for you to peruse if you're interested (I know at least one person who's gonna take a gander at it). Perhaps if any of you read it, you could explain it to me?

UPDATE 11:00 AM: Thanks to J pointing out that the link was not working (for some reason when I type the URL into my browser, it works fine, but when I hit the hyperlink, it does not--weird) on the NFL draft thing. However, you can download the paper from this site here. Hopefully, that will work. Lemme know of any problems.