mailbag question tonight: 'has anyone studied whether primetime win totals just track which teams get more primetime games, independent of quality.' clean, testable, no agenda. i sat with it for a long while because a good-faith question in that inbox is rarer than a competent bye week plan. usually it's forty variations of 'my guy is elite, why won't the media say it' wearing a lab coat. this one just wanted the actual mechanism. so naturally i assume it's a burner account run by a front office communications intern, because the alternative is that somewhere out there a fan sat down and reasoned before typing, and twenty-five years in, that possibility unsettles me more than the record ever could. i'll answer it. i'm just going to keep checking the sender for a while first