I thought it was time for Pete to go and I love Pete. But this was the first year I felt he lost the team. That Pittsburgh game was that bad.
It’s felt so much like the Dennis Erickson years.
Pete is 72. I’ve known dozens of 70+year old people and fully believe that the only people that believe 70 year olds should run things are 70 year olds. You can have all the energy in the world but that brain is still losing neurons every day.
You don't know the right people in their 70s.
The statistician I most admire in the world (and I've been calling him that since before I knew Dennis Lindley had died) is 77, and even though he technically retired several years ago, he's still extremely active in theoretical-statistics research. Every time I talk to him, I learn something new or get a completely new way of looking at something. His body is failing him - he has serious problems in a hip and now in one of his eyes, so it's now very hard for him to read and write, but his ability to think about probability theory and statistics is still at a level few will ever achieve even in their 20s and 30s. So he's pretty much the opposite of what you said about Carroll. The guy only published one paper in 2023, largely because of his physical issues, but he published four in 2022, nine in 2021, and five in 2020.
The physicist I most admired in the world was Leo Kadanoff. I consider him the greatest physicist I ever met, even though he never won a Nobel Prize and I've met several who have. I guess I should mention that when Ken Wilson won the Nobel in 1982, he expressed surprise that Leo was not honored along with him, and that what he did was basically to carry Leo's ideas forward. Leo died at age 78 in 2015. He was still producing significant theoretical-physics papers well into his 70s.