📝 The Week That Was (December 16-20, 2024)

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

Dec 21, 2024

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.

Programming note: Since we’re coming up on Christmas and New Year’s, and internet traffic is always down anyway with people being away from the office on vacation, I’ll be slowing down the posting a little bit over the next couple of weeks. I’ll still update the various models/stats daily, and post some stuff (when the fancy strikes me), but we’ll be back with a more regular pace of posts in 2025.

In the meantime, I’d like to wish a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of my wonderful subscribers, without whom this Substack would not be possible. Thank you for a great first (full) year of the newsletter, and here’s to an even better sophomore campaign! 😊🎄🎁📈

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.

🏀 When Did “The Nerds” Start Ruining Each Sport? - My contribution to the NBA-ratings-decline discourse was to look at the measurable history of analytics changing different sports’ play styles — and why it seems to have made more difference in the NBA and MLB than the NFL.
🏈 It's the Chiefs, Bills, Eagles, Lions (and Maybe Vikings) Versus the Field - Four teams — five if you add the Vikings — are dominating my NFL Elo forecast right now, so I dug into why each might win Super Bowl LIX… and what could stop them along the way.
🏁 How Red Bull (Sort Of) Lost Its Grip on F1 - It was an oddly big December week for Formula 1 content, between the news that Checo Pérez was leaving Red Bull and this Huddle Up story on McLaren’s resurgence. Amidst all of that, I wrote about Red Bull’s stunning midseason decline and how it fits within the longer-term rise and fall of different F1 powers.
🧊 Hockey Bytes: Lightning Strikes Back - The Tampa Bay Lightning were supposed to be a former dynasty on the downturn earlier this year; instead, they’ve been one of the NHL’s top teams in 2024-25. Plus, the U.S. 4 Nations Face-Off team is real good.

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.