📝 The Week That Was (February 10-14, 2025)

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.

• ⚾️ Why is MLB "Likely" Headed For A Lockout? - After a report that an MLB lockout was looking “likely” after the 2026 season, I dug into the reasons why that might happen — including the single biggest factor in the mix.

• 🏈 A trio of Super Bowl-related pieces:

  • The Chiefs Ran Out of Magic Against Philly - In an era of mostly close Super Bowls — which would have seemed to favor the drama-addicted Chiefs — the Eagles bucked that trend by simply blowing out the 2-time defending champs.

  • The Eagles Rewrote Kansas City's Super Bowl Script - Building on my previous post, I pulled win probability plots from recent Super Bowls to compare the paths that last Sunday’s game could have taken at different points — and which one it actually ended up following.

  • Vegas Can't Quit the Chiefs - Finishing my Kansas City trilogy, I meditated on why the Vegas books immediately reinstalled the Chiefs as Super Bowl favorites for 2025 despite their good-not-great metrics and the ass-kicking they had literally just got done receiving from Philly.

• 🏒 Who Rules Best-on-Best International Hockey? - In honor of the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament replacing this year’s NHL All-Star break, I ran SRS-style power ratings for each country in previous competitions featuring NHL players.

• 🏁 The five types of first-time Daytona 500 winners - Using a little cluster analysis under the hood, I broke down first-time Daytona winners since the late 1980s into five groups based on their age, previous experience and performance ratings according to…

  • … 🏁 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Driver Rankings 🚗 - I revamped my driver rankings system slightly for 2025, basing them on a rolling/updating method that predicts Driver Rating for any given race.

  🏁🎧 Two Super Bowls In Seven Days - This week on

  Podracing
  ,
  Tyler
  and I got silly comparing Cup Series drivers to NFL teams (Kyle Larson = Josh Allen and the Bills?), we got serious breaking down Daytona, and we got degenerate with our DraftKings picks and their love for Todd Gilliland.

• 🏀 Programming Note: Be sure to check out ESPN’s Bubble Watch to find my ongoing analysis of teams vying to make the NCAA tournament,² and consult the NCAA Tournament Meta-Forecast 📊 for the big picture across a bunch of different models.

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. I don’t always 100% agree with what’s linked here… but that’s also sort of the point.

• 🏈 So When Are We Allowed to Ask the Patrick Mahomes Question? by Freddie deBoer

• 🏈 The Philadelphia Eagles didn't only win Super Bowl LIX... they pumped life into the sport itself. by

  Tyler Dunne

• 🏈 2024 Chiefs: The NEW Luckiest Team in NFL History by

  Robbie Marriage

• 🏈 The Philadelphia Eagles and the Power of Fuck You by

  Ryan Nanni

• 🏈 Sploosh. // They're the Eagles. The f**king Eagles. No one likes them. They don't care. And they just obliterated a team most of you hate even more. by

  Mike Tanier

• 🏈 ‘No answers’ for Chiefs as Eagles dominate Super Bowl LIX, Loss on Mahomes? by First Things First

• 🏈 Paltry parity Part I and II by

  Josh Hermsmeyer

• 🏈 Can We Truly Identify Combine Snubs for the NFL Draft? by

  Arif Hasan

• 🏈 What if we had Transfer Fees for College Football? A stupid hypothetical scenario. by

  Sickos Committee

• 🏈 An NIL Agent Explains How The Sausage Gets Made by

  Split Zone Duo

• 🏈 An Economic Approach to Roster Management, Part 2 by

  Parker Fleming

• 🏈 I Call Him the "White Lamar Jackson" by

  VP

• 🏀 What does the NFL have that the NBA is lacking? by

  TrueHoop

• 🏀 Can Texas A&M's brand of ugly win in March? and Yes, the 2025 NCAA Tournament is still tracking to be historically strong...with some caveats by

  Will Warren

• 🏀 WAB goes mainstream by

  Chris

• 🏀 Signature Significance: Donovan Clingan by

  Jared Dubin

• 🏀 The Core of Every Player Development Plan by

  Marc Campbell

• 🏀 The Miami Heat Big 3 broke video game basketball by Kofie

• 🏀 From Wiggins Island, With Love: A Fond Farewell to Our Dude Andrew by

  Daniel Hardee

• ⚾️ Reintroducing the Simple WAR Calculator by

  Lewie Pollis

• ⚾️ A Breakout Pick for Each MLB Team by

  Thomas Nestico

• ⚾️▶️ The Yankees Scored the Most Runs EVER in the 1960 World Series... and Lost by tgags123HD

• 🏒 SIDNEY CROSBY AT 37 / Don't try to tell him it's winding down by

  Gare Joyce

• 🏒 Revisiting Scorekeeper Bias and Score/Venue Adjustments for Hits by

  Aaron Knodell

• 🏒 Connor Bedard — Canada’s next hockey hope — isn’t yet an NHL star by

  Ben Wylie

• 🏒 3 Teams With Flawed Offseason Strategies Are Now Getting What They Asked For by

  The Hockey Writers - NHL Stuff

• 🏒 Who are the Jets and what do they need to win: Part 2 by

  Garret Hohl

• 🏁 The F1 Content Loop We've Chosen by

  Cristina Lee Mace

• 𝕏 Twitter or Bluesky? How about neither. by

  Nate Silver

• 💰 What Everyone Gets Wrong About Gambling on Sports by Extranet Shaquille

Neil’s Substack Throwback of the week

Old YouTube game of the week

1993 NBA All-Star Game

Music to play us out

“Willin'” by Little Feat

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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

2. Now with bug-free odds from the ESPN Analytics model!