📝 The Week That Was (August 5-9, 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.
🏈 Will a 12-Team Format Finally Free Penn State from Playoff Purgatory? - No team was closer to making the College Football Playoff during its four-team era without actually getting in than the Nittany Lions. Does that drought end with the new 12-team field?
🏁 Paths to success: How drivers on playoff bubble can achieve their goals and 🏁 How drivers fighting for regular-season title can hit their goal - For NASCAR.com, I ran 10,000 simulations of the rest of the Cup Series regular season, tracking which races and matchups are most important to both drivers on the playoff bubble and contenders for the regular-season title.
⚾ Baseball Bytes: Can We Trust the Cleveland Guardians as World Series Contenders? - I rolled out a new concept for a semi-regular MLB column, in which I pull out three items from my spreadsheet(s) that grabbed my interest. The first edition revolved around whether the Guardians are frauds, if the Red Sox are secretly good and just how bad the White Sox are.
🥇 Who's Pulling Ahead — or Falling Behind — in the Olympic Medal Race? - In the middle of the Olympics, I looked at how each country was doing relative to what we would expect (based on how they usually do in each type of event).
🏈 Who Are College Football’s Unexpected New ‘QB Factories’? - Because I had burgeoning QB programs on the mind with college football coming up, I decided to recalculate my college QB value metrics and look for the teams that have suddenly starting yielding productive quarterbacks after years of dormancy.
Some interesting things I read/watched this week
🏈 Husker Do (1995) // Tim Walz, the '95 Huskers, and that place where nostalgia meets progressivism. by
👀 Nike's New Cruelly Beautiful Direction by
⚾ With Another Lost Season for Mike Trout, a Sobering Parallel Emerges by Jay Jaffe
🏀 Are rookies getting better on defense? by
⚾ Hitter Motivation: Do Hitters Perform Worse On Bad Teams? by
🏈 What Is Happening to PFF? by
⚾ What’s the Bit with Witt’s Split? by
🏀 Analytics Preserve Honesty by
🏀 How many U.S. States could win gold? by
🏀 The Maple Method: USA Needs to Copy Canada Basketball's Youth Development Strategy by
⚾ The case for using MLB players at the 2028 Olympics and How will MLB play games in the Vegas heat? by
🏀 NBA Inside Stuff Review - Allen Iverson, Warp Speed! by
❗ The Rise of Neotoddlerism by
🏈 Tight End University's Next Valedictorian 🎓 by
(I cross-posted this one, but I would recommend everyone check out VolumePigs’ stuff if you are looking for something at the intersection of my type of analytical storytelling and fantasy college football content.)
Useless factoid of the week: WNBA 3-point shooting
Before Caitlin Clark, there was Ruthie Bolton: the former Auburn standout still holds the WNBA rookie record2 for most 3-pointers made per game, 0.2 ahead of Clark. (For now — we know Clark has had quite a penchant for breaking records this year.)
Old YouTube game of the week
LSU vs. Wisconsin (Aug 30, 2014)
Music to play us out
Little Feat - “On Your Way Down (2023 Remaster)”
Filed under: Weekly Round-up
I’m at neil[dot]paine[at]gmail[dot]com.
Granted, Bolton was only a rookie because the WNBA didn’t exist until 1997 — she was already 30 that season, part of the group of incredible women’s players (Cynthia Cooper was another) who were college stars but hadn’t gotten the chance to shine professionally in the U.S. until the late 1990s.