📝 The Week That Was (November 11-15, 2024)

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

Nov 16, 2024

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

Stealing a bit from Will Leitch’s newsletter format, here are the things I wrote or podcasted about during the previous week, sorted in descending order by quality, popularity and/or current relevance.

🏈 Football Bytes: Can the Chiefs Keep Winning Ugly? - K.C. has the least impressive statistical resume of any 9-0 team. Does that matter? Plus, a truly insane stat on the Falcons’ kicking game.
🏒 Seven unexpected trends defining the NHL season so far - For ESPN, I dug into seven surprising storylines in the first month or so of the 2024-25 NHL season.
🏈 The College Football Teams Who Are Overachieving — Or Falling Short — In 2024 - In a season of surprising successful teams, I looked at which ones exceeded their previous 5-year baseline of performance (on offense, defense and overall).
🏁 Joey Logano Won the Championship Format in Front of Him - There was a lot of complaining after Logano won the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series title, given that he was the worst statistical driver of the elimination-playoffs era over the entire season. But does that tell the whole story?
🏀 Basketball Bytes: The Thunder Roll, Despite An Offensive Cold Front - Oklahoma City remains one of the NBA’s most impressive young title contenders… but they’ve done it this season with an overwhelming defense and an oddly mediocre offense so far.
🧊 Hockey Bytes: Washington Wake-Up - The Washington Capitals are pulling off one of the NHL’s most surprising rebuilds on the fly, winning with aging stars (like Alex Ovechkin) but also a younger core of fresh talent.
🏀 Surprise, Surprise! 16 Writers on the NBA's Early Plot Twists - My one-sixteenth of
Royce Webb
’s roundup focused on the Warriors’ reign atop the NBA being far from over.