📝 The Week That Was (Dec. 30-Jan. 3, 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
Here are the things I wrote or podcasted about during the previous week, sorted in descending order by quality, popularity and/or current relevance. (This week was a little light again with the New Year’s holiday 🎇🍾)
🏈 Nobody Wastes Their QBs Like the Bengals 🐅 - With the Cincinnati Bengals needing a fairly unlikely sequence of events in order to make the playoffs — despite getting an awesome season from Joe Burrow — I ran through their history as the franchise that squanders great QBs like no other.
🏀 Many of the NBA’s Problems Are Structural to Basketball - After pondering some NBA problems recently, it occurred to me that a number of them can be traced back to one simple truth of basketball: skill triumphs over luck more than in other sports.
🏈 Why Lamar Jackson’s MVP Case Has Been Swallowed Up by Narrative - Focusing on Lamar Jackson’s play this year, I wrote about the strange psychology of MVP voting (not just in the NFL), and how a defending multi-time MVP with the best numbers of his career can somehow be a heavy underdog to win again.
🧊 When Might Ovechkin Catch Gretzky Now? - Remarkably, the broken leg that Alex Ovechkin suffered in mid-November hasn’t derailed the Great Eight’s chance of chasing down Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goals record this season. I dug into when he might break the record, depending on his scoring pace.
🏀2024-25 NCAA Tournament Meta-Forecast 📊 - Here’s a silly/fun little toy I put on the site — in the spirit of things like BracketMatrix, this tracker aggregates men’s NCAA tourney model odds from a variety of sources to arrive at a consensus estimate of each school’s chance at the Round of 68.
🏈 On Notes, I’ve been updating these 📈 College Football Playoff Predictor 📈 odds based on simulations using each team’s Simple Rating System scores:
Some interesting things I read/watched this week
A collection of articles (with a heavy focus on my fellow Substackers), videos and other media that I enjoyed and/or found thought-provoking over the past week.
🏈 In the NFL, Resting Good, Tanking Bad by
🏈 The key to getting to (or winning) the Super Bowl: the No. 1 seed by Harry Enten
🏈 Does Defense Really Win Championships?? by
🏈 How to disguise your quarterback as your punter by
🏈 The Chicago Bears Have Made Loss History by
🏈 The story behind 'Straight Cash, Homie' by
(Note: This is about the legendary Randy Moss quote, not the legendary repository of random jerseys…)🏈▶️ The Mystery of the Football Game in Die Hard by NPG I Sports Investigation (Note: This is my kind of content!!)
🏀 The Inconvenient Numbers On basketball as feelings as numbers as basketball. by
🏀 (Relatedly…) The Kings Are One of The Unluckiest Teams in The NBA. Is It A Wake Up Call? by
🏀 Is The NBA's Culture Being Flattened? by
🏀 The ESPN Bontemps Straw Poll by
🏀 Signal Calling: Narratives surrounding Cooper Flagg are underbaked by
🧊 A Deeper Dive Into "Three-Point Games" by
🧊 2024-25 Season Spotlight: Adrian Kempe by
🏁 A Year in Favorites by
⚽ Theory of Soccer: Options have Value by
🗳️ The wild story of Jimmy Carter’s first election by
✍️ ANNUS HORRIBILIS IN REVIEW / Not exactly a best-of. by
💸 Five possible reasons China's productivity slowed down by
Old YouTube game of the week
The Snow Bowl (Notre Dame Football vs Penn State, 1992)
Music to play us out
“Good Thing” - Zedd (with Kehlani)
Filed under: Weekly Round-up
I’m at neil[dot]paine[at]gmail[dot]com.