📝 The Week That Was (August 12-16, 2024)

A roundup of what I wrote, read, watched, etc. over the past week.

In this space on Saturdays, I do a weekly round-up of sorts: Sifting through what I wrote that you might have missed during the week, what I’ve been reading and watching myself, and some other fun things that have been going on. Let me know what you think about the format in the comments (or email me!¹), and if there are running sections you’d like to see on a regular basis.

What I did this week

Stealing a bit from Will Leitch’s newsletter format, here are the things I wrote or podcasted about during the previous week, sorted in descending order by quality, popularity and/or current relevance.

• 🏀 What's next for WNBA?: Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Aces, more and Caitlin Clark Is Poised for a Huge Stretch Run - The WNBA is finally back from its Olympic break (shameless plug: check out my updating forecast and stats here). So for ESPN, I broke down the big stories to watch over the rest of the regular season, and here at Substack I dug deeper into the factors pointing to a big stretch run performance for Caitlin Clark. (She’s off to a good start!)

• 🏈 Ex-Pac-12 Teams Will Face Some of The Worst Travel Distances in Power-Conference History - With college football about to return, I quantified exactly how insane the upcoming travel schedules will be former Pac-12 teams in their new conferences. I genuinely feel sorry for UCLA with this series of trips coming up:

  

• 🏈 Back for More: The Best Returning QBs in College Football for 2024 - Another college football story! I ranked all of the QBs coming back this year based on their 2023 schedule-adjusted Points Above Replacement — in addition to looking at which schools lost the most QB production.

• 🏁 It’s Time for NASCAR to Scrap the Win-and-in Playoff System - In the wake of Austin Dillon wrecking everyone in sight to win at Richmond last Sunday, I made my case that NASCAR’s playoff system needs to stop prioritizing wins so much. (The subsequent decision for Dillon’s win to not automatically clinch him a playoff spot helps some, but doesn’t really fix the underlying issue that one win shouldn’t matter more than the entire season.)

• 🏈 Ranking seven new NFL head coaches, who is best situated to win? - At ESPN, I ran a regression model to give us a baseline 5-year wins expectation for the situation facing each of the seven coaches taking over new NFL teams, using factors such as previous performance, team age, QB track record and more. Who is set up for the most success based on historical trends?

• ⚾ Baseball Bytes: We Really Did Not Know This Year’s Top Rookies - In my MLB column, I looked at the huge differences between who we thought would win Rookie of the Year and who the actual favorites are. (Plus, some quick hits on the Brewers atop the league and Grady Sizemore’s early HOF potential.)

• 🏈 What Might the End of “Chargering” Look like with Jim Harbaugh? - It’s no secret that the L.A. Chargers have found a lot of ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over the past few years. With Jim Harbaugh taking over as coach, I looked at how teams who lost so many close games tend to do in future seasons.

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

• ⚾ Beware the Six-Inning Minimum by

  Lewie Pollis

• 🏈 2024 Pre-Season College Football Rankings and Does Success in the Transfer Portal Lead to Success on the Field? by

  Sean Beney

• 🏈 Quantifying NFL's 2024 Quarterback Competitions by

  Kevin Cole

• 🥇 Why America's Olympic Pipeline Might Start Leaking by

  David Epstein
  (H/T
  Alexandra Sizemore
  )

• 🥇 Fewest World Records Ever - Humans Have Athletically Peaked by Michael MacKelvie

• ⚾ Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Is a Superstar Again by Leo Morgenstern

• 🎮 Just how dominant was Pablo Sanchez in the Backyard Sports series? by

  Kofie Yeboah

• 🏀 The 13 most and least consistent NBA stars of the 2024 season by

  Mike Shearer

• 🎧 Kat Rosenfield on "Cat Ladies" by

  Ethan Strauss
  and
  Kat Rosenfield

• 📚 Welcome to the River by

  Nate Silver

• 🏁 Enough is enough by Brock Beard

• 🏀 The Lost Basketball Empire by

  Austin Cornilles

• 🏈 “Today, I do not apologize.” Jim Harbaugh, Richard Nixon, and the erosion of American morality by

  Michael Weinreb

• 🏀 Analytical Thinking, Amir Johnson, and Steven Adams by

  Joseph George

• ⚽ Why geography helps Bayern Munich dominate the Bundesliga by

  Stefan Bienkowski

• 🏀 The Phenomenal College Basketball Life of Fran Dunphy by

  Javon Edmonds

• 🥇 The science of ping-pong by

  Zach Schonbrun

• ⚾ MLB The Show LIES About Pitch Speeds - How Fast They ACTUALLY Are by Jarodactyl

• 🏒 Soundtrack Review: NHL 07 by

  JFresh

• 🥇 I Have Uncovered an Olympics Mystery... by Hank Green

• 💃 Raygun Shows Why We Should Pay Attention to Pipelines by

  Jeff Maurer
  and 'Devastated' Olympic Breakdancer Plays the Victim by Dr. Todd Grande (Yes, I had to consume content around the Olympic breaking controversy this week…)

From the Archives

I was reminded by

Paul White

that this week marked the 30th anniversary of the 1994 MLB strike, which ended up wiping out that year’s postseason. Back in 2019, I partnered with Out of the Park Baseball to use their game engine and simulate out the rest of the ‘94 season (including playoffs) 1,000 times, tracking how often a bunch of the classic “what-ifs” of that season ended up happening:

• ⚾ Would The Expos Have Won The 1994 World Series?

Music to play us out

Huey Lewis - “Old Antone's”

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

1. I’m at neil[dot]paine[at]gmail[dot]com.