In Plaxico Burress’ interview with Jeremy Schapp the other day, the disgraced NFL wide-receiver replied to Schapp’s question of, “Why didn’t you have the gun in the holster?”, with the beautifully simplistic and succinctly accurate reply of, “Bad judgment”. Burress should get 3-4 months knocked of his sentence for coming to realize that.

Yesterday I was reminded of Bad Judgment, with Rick Pitino, head coach at the University of Louisville, married father of 5. Coach Pitino went and banged Karen Cunagin Sypher, in a restaurant, with his assistant coach as the lookout, 6 years ago. Who is she? Apparently she is someone that is really into Louisville basketball. This brings to question Pitino decision making on 3 accounts.

1. As the Head Coach of a major basketball program, Pitino is someone that needs to show parents that their kids should play basketball for him, that sponsors should give him money, and that alumni should continue to give buckets of money to him and his team. Why is he banging broads in public? To quote Plaxico Burress, “Bad Judgment”. If you were the father of a kid that was being recruited by Pitino, are you letting Coach into your house? You might think twice, because when you go to refresh everyone’s lemonade glass, Coach is going to be basketballs deep into your wife.

2. Not inviting his assistant coach to get a piece from the buffet is flat out wrong. To top it off, he makes the assistant coach stand lookout?!?! Pitino implicates the assistant coach by making him stand there, and then doesn’t even let him get in on the action. That is no way to keep unity on your coaching staff. Bad Judgment.

3. The chick ends up being loony. Go figure! We all know so many ’sane’ girls that have nail-banging sessions on a restaurant table. I am not complaining, I am just saying. Watch Fatal Attraction, its a documentary on that type of ‘lady’. Anyway, Cyphers tries to get money from Pitino, blah blah blah, she gets arrested for extortion and lying to the police. It sure seems like her arrest is very much deserved. However, and according to Syphers, during the time she was attempting to extort money, Pitino’s words to her were along the lines of “your boy’s will end up in cement”, “you will end up in cement”, “your whole family will be in cement”. Now, I don’t know what to think. Is Syphers just pulling out blatant Italian mob stereo-types, or is Pitino a stereo-typical Italian mobster? Personally, I believe that Pitino would say something like that. I also don’t believe he would actually do, or have done for him, any of those methods of silencing people. But, I do know that he likes to scream and yell, and he is a little man. Pitino reacted angrily to the release of the Syphers police interview where she makes these claims. In a hastily called press conference Pitino angrily stated that its all a lie, a fabrication. He also brought up Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death and scolded the sportswriters for not covering the death of Kennedy. Acting like an idiot at the press conference you call to defend yourself against accusations from a crazy person that has zero credibility is Bad Judgment.

Today’s Wagers Made Using the Recognition Heuristic or something that attempts to apply this most basic of heuristics. What dooms this experiment is that I am not ignorant enough. When you stop laughing at me I will explain what I mean. The Recognition Heuristic says that while complete knowledge is better than zero knowledge when making a decision; neither is as beneficial as partial knowledge.

I applied the Recognition Heuristic to this week’s wagers at the Money Line level. To use this heuristic for with Spreads you first must answer the question ‘Who will win?’ before you can answer the question ‘Will the team I have decided will win cover the spread?’. With Spreads, the ultimate decision is not about the winner of the game. So this week I made it about the winner of the game.

Now, there isn’t a lot of value in betting Money Lines in football. Granted, there are the instances of huge dogs to winning,, but there is a reason the money line is so big, it is massively unlikely. Conversely, wagering on a huge favorite may ‘guarantee’ you a win, but you must risk so much for so littl in return. However, when parlayed you can create some bang for your buck. Answer this question. Do you think you could pick 50% of the winning NFL teams each week? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. I do remember playing office pools where only winners were picked, and I remember routinely winning 10-14 games. Perhaps my memory favors me too much, so I am not relying on memory, instead I will begin to chart. Charting is awareness my friends, and awareness is the key to it all.

My NFL wagers this week are:
- 7-Team Parlay risking .5% of my Original Investment (OI) to win 10.17% of my OI. All money lines.

- 14-Team Parlay risking .5% of my Original Investment (OI) to win 452.72% of my OI. All point spreads.

- 14-Team Parlay risking .5% of my Original Investment (OI) to win 295.75% of my OI. All money lines.

I am of the firmest belief that Just Paying Attention (JPA) is sufficient to achieve mediocrity. When JPA is accompanied by Hard Work (HW), Success (S) then becomes more probable. Pr(S) = JPA x HW⁴

Pr(S)
0 – 20: Don’t forget anything is possible.
20.01 – 45.00: You never know.
45.01 – 55.00: There is a chance.
55.01 – 65.00: One that got away
65.01 – 80.00: Count on it
80.01 – 89.99: if it doesn’t happen, reevaluate
90.00 +: no reason it shouldn’t happen, if it doesn’t more than 77% of the time, then stop everything!

How do you interpret the above? How do you define JPA, HW and S? Is HW to the fourth power adequate? over-hyped?
What situation or situation type is this being applied to?

I would love to know your ideas and thoughts. Please post your responses as a Comment to this post so that others can learn from your perspective. If you are shy and don’t want your response public, then please Click Here and email your comments to me.

thedean@deanbrowski.com