📝 The Week That Was (January 20-24, 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.

• 🏈 What We've Learned Before the NFL’s Conference Championships - In preparation for the conference title games, I broke things down according to my Playoff Predictor odds while also peppering in a bunch of other research findings. (Did you know that Kansas City and Buffalo are just the sixth pair of teams to meet four times in a five-postseason span in NFL history, and the first since the Niners and Packers from 1995-98?)

  

• ⚾ How Much Should We Really Worry About the Dodgers’ Megateam? - With the baseball discourse consumed by talk of L.A. signing Roki Sasaki and Tanner Scott — in part because of other penny-pinching owners’ unwillingness to (at least in Scott’s case)² — I dug into the ways in which randomness guards against any baseball team truly becoming too dominant.

• 🧊 The Pittsburgh Penguins Are In Hockey Hell - Because they tried to extend their glory days a bit too long, the Pens now have the NHL’s oldest, most inflexible and (arguably) worst roster — and they can’t even sell their way out of it at the trade deadline.

• 🏈🏆 Ohio State Survived More Tough Tests Than Any Other Champion - The Buckeyes’ championship was a testament not only to their talent, but to the record-breaking number of great teams they defeated during the season.

• ✉️ Mailbag! LeBron's 3 HOF Careers, Planning For Ovechkin's Record, Hoosier Losses and Head-to-Head QBs - You had questions. I had answers!

  

• 🏀 First look at 2025 men's bubble teams ahead of NCAA tourney - I kicked off Bubble Watch at ESPN by breaking down each conference according to its teams’ Basketball Power Index NCAA tournament odds.

• 🏀 NBA Stats That Tell Stories (With Guests!) - As part of a collab with

  Quinn Everts
  and friends, I wrote about a couple of NBA teams with huge imbalances between their defenses and offenses.

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.

• 🏈 What does it mean that Ohio State lost to Michigan? by

  Rodger Sherman

• 🏈 Ohio State Lost So They Could Win and Jayden Daniels Is Just That Good by

  Michael Hendricks

• 🏈 The Truth About Playoff Aaron Rodgers and His Year: Mac Jones 2021 by

  Robbie Marriage

• 🏈 Why the NFL Loves the CFP by

  Brian Lennon

• 🏈 Let's address the NFL's trust crisis by

  Club Sportico

• 🏀 Piece of Harmony // Aligning team and player incentives in credit and blame by

  Dean Oliver

• 🏀 How long can you avoid the Regression Monster? by

  Will Warren

• ⚾ Is Time Money When It Comes To Free Agent Contracts? by Ben Clemens

• ⚾▶️ GUYS Episode 6: Lugs by Game Winning RBI

• ⚾▶️ The "He Played There?" Team by Foolish Bailey (Note: I expected this to be about guys who played for unexpected teams — it’s not, but remind me to write about guys who played for unexpected teams at some point.)

• ⚾ Forgotten Treasures: Chuck Carr by

  Paul White
  (Note: I have a simple rule: You write about 1990s Florida Marlins, you get a link in my round-up.)

• 🧊 ALEXANDER OVECHKIN / When the greatest goal-scorer in hockey history made his North American debut, an unknown playing in front of a couple of hundred folks getting out of the Prairie cold. by

  Gare Joyce

• 🧊 A Brief History of Advanced Hockey Stats by

  Nordiques Fan Corner

• 🧊 The NHL's Most Efficient Short-Career Scorers by

  Peter Merrill

• 🧊 The Theoretical Soundness of the Rick DiPietro Contract by

  GabArr

• 👀 When watching sports on TV how much action are we really getting? by

  Stephan Teodosescu

• 🔥 People Are Delusional About How Hot They Are // except for one group - hot women by

  Aella

• ✍️ Ten Years In A Crumbling Industry by

  Lindsey Adler

• 📰 TikTok Has Clarified the "Are Social Media Companies Publishers or Platforms?" Question by

  Jeff Maurer

Old YouTube game of the week

Star-Studded Veteran Teams Battle For AFC Crown! (Chiefs vs. Bills 1993 AFC Championship)

Music to play us out

“Gran Turismo vibe mix” by Various

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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

2. I’m not sure any other team was going to sign Sasaki, considering the Dodgers’ existing Japanese pipeline with Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.