📝 The Week That Was (January 13-17, 2025)

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

Jan 18, 2025

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.

🏈 Can the Lions Keep Detroit’s Sports Renaissance Flourishing? - Just a few years ago, Detroit was the Capital Of Bad Sports. Now they’ve become an above-average sports city across the major pro leagues, led by the Lions’ rise to Super Bowl favorite status.
🏈 The Expanded College Football Playoff Made This Year’s Bowl Season Absurdly Long - Yes, the college football season is technically still going — it won’t end until Monday’s championship between Ohio State and Notre Dame, taking place a record 38 days after bowl season began on Dec. 14, 2024.
🏈 Only One NFL Divisional Playoff Matchup Has Ever Been As Good As Bills-Ravens - With Baltimore and Buffalo on a collision course this weekend, I looked at how many Divisional games (or Super Bowls, for that matter) had featured teams with Elo ratings this high before.
🏀 It’s Cool That Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokić Are the Two Best Players in Basketball - Despite what you’ve heard about NBA homogenization, the unique approaches of basketball’s two best players prove that the league still rewards diverse playing styles.
🧊 Tiering 12 NHL teams' playoff odds: From fixable to broken - For ESPN, I grouped struggling NHL teams’ seasons into tiers of recoverability based on their current playoff odds.
🏈 The NFL's Playoff Favorites Are Even Scarier Now - Last week, I wrote a whole thing about the lower-tier NFL playoff squads who looked capable of upsetting the top teams. But basically all of those teams lost, which made the favorites’ odds even stronger on paper.
🏀 15 Takes: What We Love and Hate about NBA Trade Season - As part of
Royce Webb
’s round-up about trade season, I wrote about the difficulty of finding viable trades under the new CBA’s salary rules.
🔉 Wharton Moneyball: College Football Championship | NFL Playoffs | Neil Paine - I sat in as a guest co-panelist on the entire episode of Wharton Moneyball this week, mainly talking a little college and pro football.

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.