The Week That Was (February 23-27, 2026)
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.
📝 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.
⚾ The Strike Zone We (Think We) Want - With MLB moving toward the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge system for 2026, I dug into some of the contradictions it introduces to the game.
🏀 Miami of Ohio Is Undefeated, Unprecedented... and Still Uncertain - Undefeated or not, Miami will either earn an autobid out of the MAC tourney, or be one of the most unique NCAA tournament at-large bids ever.
🏒 Team USA Finally Got Its Golden Breakthrough Against Canada - By beating the Canadians in Sunday’s gold-medal Olympic men’s hockey final, the U.S. took its final step outside the shadow of its neighboring rivals on the ice.
Related: 🥇 I updated my medals-versus-expected tracker with final numbers from the 2026 Winter Games:
🏒 My 🔥Burning Questions🔥 for the Stretch Run of the 2025-26 NHL Season - With the NHL returning from the Olympics — and the longest planned mid-season break in league history — I wrote about the key themes to watch down the stretch of the schedule.
🏀 The Celtics Are Thriving Without Jayson Tatum. That’s Why His Return Could Get Complicated. - Counter to worries that they might fall off without their best player from a year ago, Boston has held up pretty well — and built new offensive load-paths — which makes the prospect of Tatum coming back at some point an interesting dynamic.
🏁 Why Connor Zilisch is Shane van Gisbergen’s biggest road-course threat - Who can possibly stop SVG along his march toward a record sixth consecutive road-course victory? Well, maybe let’s start with the kid who has actually beaten him head-to-head more often than not.
Related: My 🏁 2026 NASCAR Cup Series Driver Rankings 🚗 are LIVE as we head to Circuit of the Americas this week.
🏁🎙️ Podracing: The Sweetiest of Speedies - In this week’s episode of Podracing, Tyler Lauletta and I paid tribute to yet ANOTHER Tyler Reddick win — he’s 2-for-2 to start the year — and another wild finish to get him there. Then we talked about my story on NASCAR’s budding Connor Zilisch-SVG rivalry, and we broke down the rest of the drivers to watch this weekend in Austin:
🏀 Men’s Bubble Watch: Tracking which teams will make (or miss) the NCAA tournament - A reminder that I am also running Bubble Watch for ESPN! With the help of my NCAA tourney forecast-model consensus tracker, we’re keeping tabs on the teams who are fighting to stay on track for at-large bids before Selection Sunday.
📊 Chart(s) of the week:
Here were my favorite items of the week from Scoreboard, my daily newsletter for Sherwood News…
🏅 How Italy and Japan overachieved the most at the Olympics…
🏀 On the NBA’s MVP favorites possibly not playing enough to be eligible…
🏀 On Magic City and visiting players coming down with the good old “Atlanta Flu”…
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👀 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 or endorse what’s linked here… but that’s also sort of the point.
🏅 The Countries That Fell Short at the Winter Olympic Games by Jadrian Wooten and Analyzing Success in the 2026 Winter Olympics by ritmica (Note: These are both cool complements to my own expected-medals tracker!)
🏈 A way-too-early projection of the 2026 NFL season by Neil Greenberg
🏈 If the Las Vegas Raiders Don’t Trade Down From the First Overall Pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, They’ll Regret It by Freddie deBoer
🏈 Malik Willis should make north of $30M per year. Here’s why. by Tyler Dunne
🏈 Blathering Heights (Scouting Combine News ’n’ Notes) by Mike Tanier
🏈 Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) Metrics For NFL Players by Ray Carpenter
🏀 The same, only different // Wins-above-bubble equivalents. by Chris Gallo
🏀 This team plays defense like NOBODY else by Jordan Sperber
🏀 Kevin Durant: face of the NBA Internet Era by Molly Morrison
🏀 Are the WNBA’s 9-Figure Losses What They Seem? by Annie Costabile
🏀 The Undefeated Team College Basketball Doesn’t Want by Michael Weinreb
🏀 Not the year to tank // The 2026 NBA draft is a trap by CoachThorpe
🏀 the anonymous account got houston right and paris left a manual by bang!
🏀▶️ I asked Steve Nash (!) how to master the Pick-n-Roll by Thinking Basketball
🏀▶️ The Strange Story of N64’s Only College Basketball Game by The Touchback
🏒 What would the standings look like if the NHL used the Olympic points format? by Stephan Teodosescu
🏒 NHL Trade Deadline Primer: The four types of players that will ruin the good thing you have going and NHL Trade Deadline Primer: Are you a playoff team in need of a goalie? Well that is too bad by Adam Gretz
⚾ Inside The Atlanta Braves 2025 Earnings Report (And Why A Sale Might Be Coming) by Joe Pompliano
⚾ The secret market dictating World Baseball Classic rosters by Eben Novy-Williams
⚾ There Was an Amazing Matchup Today // One of the best pitcher vs. hitter matchups ever. by Baseball Spreadsheets
⚽ In Europe national teams > clubs. Why not double down on that? by Nikola Vuković, CFA
🏁 F1 2026 Rules: A Simple Guide for New Fans by Formula Reports
🤠 Country Music Always Comes Back by Chris Dalla Riva
▶️ Old YouTube Game of the Week
Tim Duncan vs. Stephon Marbury | 1996 ACC Championship - Wake Forest vs. Georgia Tech
🎵 Music to Play Us Out
Corona - “The Rhythm of the Night”
Filed under: Weekly Round-up
Thanks yon