📝 The Week That Was (August 19-23, 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.

• 🏈2024 NFL Elo Ratings and Projections📈 - In anticipation of the NFL season, I rebooted my continuation of the old FiveThirtyEight Elo ratings for 2024. And with the help of the nflseedR package for R, I was able to deliver improved season simulations with odds of making the playoffs, winning the division, winning the Super Bowl, etc.

• 🏈 The Golden Age of Running Backs Ruined the Running Back - Prompted by a few random deep-dives on Pro-Football-Reference, I wrote about just how amazing the top crop of mid-2000s RBs were… and how their downfalls mirrored that of their position overall in the years to follow.

• 🏁 Daytona has earned its reputation as a place where anything can happen - As NASCAR makes its way to Daytona International Speedway for the penultimate race of the 2024 regular season, I looked at just how predictably unpredictable the track has been throughout history.

  

• ⚾ Baseball Bytes: Aaron Judge's Impossible Progress - My weekly baseball column focused on Judge’s improbable ability to keep raising the bar for himself — plus items about the pitchers who tell us early when they're "on", and rookies hitting for the cycle.

• 🏒 What History Says About the Maple Leafs’ Tavares-Matthews Captaincy Swap - The Maple Leafs made an uncommon captain swap last week, switching the “C” from John Tavares to Auston Matthews… while Tavares is still on the team. I looked for similar historical situations and broke down how they usually worked out.

• ⚾ Is MLB's Superteam Era Facing Its Kryptonite? - Coming off a decade of dominant squads — a record four teams won 100+ games in both 2019 and 2022 — the theme of MLB’s 2024 season has been a return to parity. I tried to put that within a little bit of historical context.

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

• ⚽ Could America’s Best Athletes Save U.S. Soccer? by

  Austin Cornilles

• 🏈 INTO THIN AIR: Why It’s (Nearly) Impossible to Win Three Straight Super Bowls by Michael MacCambridge (

  Go Long
  )

• 🏈 House of Strauss: Warren Sharp on the NFL by

  House of Strauss

• 🏃‍♀️ Don't Run A Marathon by

  Alexandra Sizemore

• 🏈 Memphis Football: The Program of the Future by

  VP

• 🏈 The art of the bridge quarterback by Football Doesn't Matter

• 🏁 Modeling Formula One: Getting to the Forecast by

  Noah Lombardozzi

• ✍️ "Screen journalism" and Substack by

  Brian Moritz

• 🎮 How Sega Sports Created Their Own Downfall and Gave EA an NFL Monopoly When NFL2K5 Faced Madden 2005 by GTV Japan

• 🏈 Is NCAA Football 2002 A Look Into the Future of EA Sports College Football? by The Touchback

• 🏈 Predicting the 1924 National Champs by

  Football Archaeology

• 🏀 No, 40% of transfers are not uncommitted by

  Ken Pomeroy

• ⚾ Would Forcing Starting Pitchers to Go At Least Six Innings Make MLB Games Better? by

  Molly Knight

• ⚾ LARRY WALKER & THE 1994 EXPOS / What might have been & what could never be by

  Gare Joyce

• 🏀 Championship Points // Putting championships won by each NBA franchise in context by

  Justin Kubatko

• 🏀 The Distributor Special: Three Young Offensive Engines To Watch In 2024-25 by

  Jacob Sutton

• 💻 Narrative-Driven Predictions: Explaining Our ChatGPT-4o-mini Experiment in Election Forecasting by

  scott cunningham

• 📽️ Perhaps Movies Should Make Sense by Freddie deBoer

• 🏈 Not a specific story, but check out the work done by

  CFB Depth
  at their site — it tracks depth charts (with player ratings!) for every team in FBS, which is wild.

Old YouTube game of the week

Jerry Rice's ICONIC Monday Night! (Raiders vs. 49ers 1994, Week 1)

Music to play us out

Anthony DiLorenzo - “ABC College Football Theme (1998)”

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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