📝 The Week That Was (March 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.

• 🏀 Is Winning the SEC Tournament Really Harder than Winning the National Championship? - This narrative has been floating around this week — and don’t get me wrong, the SEC is tough. But Jason Lisk and I dug into why it’s harder to win six NCAA games than three SEC games (if you’re a top seed).

• ⚾️ Don’t Forget About These Good Baseball Players On (Possibly) Bad Baseball Teams - Baseball is maybe the sport where great individual seasons don’t equate to team success. So I looked at the 2025 projections to find the players most likely to have a stellar year on a not-so-stellar team.

• 🏒 The Dallas Stars Have Leveled Up — Now It’s Time to Win the Cup 🏆 - After snagging Mikko Rantanen in the deal of the deadline, the Stars are out of excuses to not finally cash in on their Stanley Cup potential.

• ⚾️▶️ Interview: Out of the Park Baseball 26 with Rich Grisham - I caught up with Rich, the Director of Business Development at Com2uS, about his company’s new game (OOTP 26), the history of sports simulation games, and where the genre might be headed.

• 🏀 Duke Is Peaking at the Perfect Time — And the Numbers Back It Up - Before Cooper Flagg got hurt — what a jinx! — Jason, David Hess and I looked at where this year’s Blue Devils rank among dominant recent MBB teams, putting their recent hot streak in particular context.

• 🏁Bell, Byron pull away from pack, setting stage for budding 1-2 rivalry - At NASCAR.com, I wrote about Christopher Bell as the No. 1 driver in the Cup Series — no surprise, following his third straight win — but also William Byron as a very close No. 2, perhaps setting the stage for a season where the top two do battle all year long while the rest just watch.

  • 🏁🎧 Raise Hell, Praise Bell - This week on

    Podracing
    ,
    Tyler
    and I talked about Bell’s win streak, the budding rivalry between Bell and Byron, an ode to Kevin Harvick at his peak, and a preview of the first “normal” track of the season this weekend at Las Vegas.

• 🎧 Hang Up and Listen: UNC’s March Sadness and The Slow Roll of Women in NASCAR - I was on the venerable Slate podcast (for the first time in about 10 years, lol) to discuss the NHL trade deadline, the unfortunate demise of 538, and my story about women in NASCAR.

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

• 🏒 Other Programming Note: I’m updating my 🚨 Ovi Tracker 🚨 after every Washington Capitals game to estimate Alex Ovechkin’s chances of tying or breaking Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goals record, by any particular date, over the remainder of the 2024-25 regular season.

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.

• 🏈 His Year: Ryan Tannehill 2019 by

  Robbie Marriage

• 🏀 Nikola Jokić vs. MVP Voter Fatigue by

  Patrick Hunter

• 🏀 The One Rule To Save The NBA by

  Marc Campbell

• 🏀 Waiting for a Miracle (1995) // The best thing college basketball has going for it is under subtle threat by

  Michael Weinreb

• 🏀 When the Garden Was Air Jordan's by

  Christian Red

• 🏀 The Coolest Basketball Data Visualizations Ever Made by

  Beyond The RK

• 🏀▶️ Duke JJ Redick was a Video Game Nightmare by Kofie

• 🏀▶️ The Complete History of 'NBA Street Vol. 2' by Ringer NBA

• ⚾️▶️ GUYS Episode 10: Underrated 80's Guys by Game Winning RBI

• ⚾️ How Worried Should We Be About the Yankees? by

  Molly Knight

• ⚾️ 1998 Orioles by

  David Harris

• 🏒 NHL EDGE: Quantifying Even Strength Playing Styles Using Zone Time by

  Aaron Knodell

• 🏒 Should NHL teams risk icing to shoot for the empty net? by

  Sean Shapiro

• 🏒 How Hockey’s Golden Age of Goalie Goals Explains the State of Sports by Ben Lindbergh

• 🏒 What Do We Need to Measure Goalie Puck Handling Outcomes by

  GabArr

• 🏒 Nathan MacKinnon Part I and Part II by

  Gare Joyce

• 🏒▶️ Eric Tulsky Breaks Down the Mikko Rantanen Trade to the Dallas Stars by Daily Faceoff

• 🏒▶️ The Strange True Story of Gretzky's Stint in St. Louis by The Blueline Hockey

• 🏁 The official greatest driver in the world* by

  Rodger Sherman

• ‼️ An Olympian Is On The FBI's 10 Most Wanted List by

  Madeline Hill

• ❤️ Reflecting On 9 Years Of FiveThirtyEight Memories by

  Galen Druke

• 🎥 The Oscar Bait era is over. The Oscar Chum era is here by

  Numlock Awards

• 🎮▶️ Why aren't there any games about the Korean War? by Kritical Kevin

• ✈️▶️ The FAA is in Crisis by Xyla Foxlin

• 📝 "Ten Years of Useless Labor" by

  Jon Repetti

• 🌐▶️ State of The Dead Internet by Jules

Neil’s Substack Throwback of the week:

Old YouTube game of the week

2002 - UConn vs. Pitt (Big East Final)

Music to play us out

Diana Ross, “It's Your Move”

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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