There is nothing to analyze in here right now except wild speculation about what things might evolve towards out near mid February. The pattern is pretty much shut the blinds for a while. Yes my post was somewhat trolling, but there was a legit point in there that its going to be so warm, at least it looks like now, that even if we did get lucky with a perfect synoptic setup within the larger pattern it wouldn't do us any good. That is a TRUE shut the blinds pattern.
As for the elephant stuff, I'm not trying to start that argument again. But I don't think its totally true that in the past we had a lot of patterns where the whole CONUS was so torched that there was absolutely no hope of snow no matter what the storm track or amplitude of a wave was. I saw plenty of "how in the world did we get 5" of snow in THAT" kinda storms when I did my case study of every Baltimore snowstorm. I think there was a time when we could luck our way into a snowstorm even in a bad pattern once in a while if we got a perfect track wave, but that was when warm periods were warm not scorched earth torches.
1998 was the best example of that kind of thing...but there is a matter of degrees...all those perfect track rainstorms in 1998 had some snow mixed in not too far NW of the cities. My area got 20" that year from like 2-4" of slop in each of those. And some higher elevations in WV got absolutely buried in every one of those. Lately its all rain even in some of those places. We aren't even getting all that close to snow even in a perfect track lately when the pattern is bad.
Some people don't agree with me on this. And that is fine. It is what it is and our opinions don't matter anyways.