📝 The Week That Was (October 21-25, 2024)

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

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.

• ⚾ A Dodgers-Yankees World Series Doesn't Prove Money Buys Championships - As baseball’s two most valuable and biggest-market franchises meet for the 2024 title, it might be tempting to think money suddenly buys a trip to the World Series. But is that true — or did MLB’s October crapshoot just happen to land on a pair of famous teams for once?

• 🏀 What's Next After the NBA’s Era of Parity? - With the NBA season tipping off this week, I noted how the league’s recent run of six different champs in six seasons changes our usual preseason narrative of wondering if a bunch of teams can FINALLY win:

  

• 🏈 Football Bytes: When the Franchise QB Goes Wrong - In the wake of Deshaun Watson’s season-ending injury, I interrogated the longstanding premise that teams need to do anything possible to get a Franchise QB™. Also, let’s take a moment to appreciate the ageless greatness of Derrick Henry.

• 🏁 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoff Odds and How Joey Logano changed the entire trajectory of the 2024 Cup Series season - I wrote a couple of stories off of my NASCAR playoff forecast model, focusing on Logano’s shock win at Las Vegas and the ripple effects it created.

• 🏀 Ranking Liberty's WNBA 'Revenge Tour' against other titles - After the New York Liberty won their first WNBA title on Sunday, I looked at how they compared to other historical “Revenge Champs” across sports — teams who lost the championship, then came back and won by going through the team that beat them.

• ⚾ Baseball Bytes: Breaking Down the Yankees-Dodgers World Series - Before Game 1 of the World Series, I highlighted the key matchups that will determine who wins the 2024 Fall Classic.

• 🏒 The Goons Return (featuring Gare Joyce!) - In the latest installment of

  A Couple of Goons
  , North America’s finest semi-annual hockey podcast,
  Walter Hickey
  and I chatted with
  Gare Joyce
  about the young 2024-25 NHL season and he shared some stories from covering the league!

• 🏒 2024-25 NHL Goals Above Replacement Player Ratings - I restarted my GAR rankings for the new NHL season this week — goalies are currently dominating because the best ones tend to rise quickly in small samples!

Some interesting things I read/watched this week

At the request of reader Ori, I’m going to be organizing these by sport from now on, with miscellaneous items at the bottom.

• 🏈 The Trent Dilfer Debacle, a case study in why you need to believe in yourself by

  Read Rodge

• 🏈 There Is No Solving Physicality in Football by

  Michael Hendricks

• 🏈 That Time JaMarcus Russell Was a Good QB by

  Robbie Marriage

• 🏈 The Most Impactful Punts of the Last 25 Years by

  Peter Merrill

• 🏈 Now Introducing: The University of Eastern Colorado Bighorns by

  Griffin Olah

• 🏈 Carolina losing streaks by

  Bless your chart

• ⚾ Ranking the World Series of the 2000's by Game Winning RBI

• ⚾ Expanded Playoffs Have Not Impacted World Series Matchups by

  Sean Beney

• ⚾ ¡Viva Fernando! by

  Paul White

• 🏀 You have to be right // And you have to be right a year early by

  Henry Abbott

• 🏀 On Why You Can't Draft a "Generic" President or Player by

  Ethan Strauss

• 🏀 Follow The Money: A Team's Payroll Is The Ultimate Bull$hit Detector by

  Marc Campbell

• 🏀 Bring on the chaos wave by

  Tom Ziller

• 🏀 New Tool: Player Skill Projections by

  Evan Miyakawa

• ✍️ How to Substack by

  Read Max

• 🎬 The Joker's On You by

  Joseph Holmes

• 🗳️ The Election and the Economy by

  Nicholas Pardini
  (Note: I’ve found Nick’s YouTube videos very interesting — check out these three about the economics of sports.)

• 🗳️ The Secret Formula That Predicts Every Election (It's Wrong) by Monsieur Z

• 🌪️ Why We'll Never See Another EF5 Tornado by June First

• 🏖️ I Reviewed ALL of Baywatch Season 1 (this show is insane) by Allison Pregler

From the Vault

The NYC Ticker-Tape Parade Belongs To The U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Now (Jul. 10, 2019)

In honor of the Liberty’s ticker-tape parade this week, I dug up this old 538 story where I wrote about the fun — and weird — history of those parades over the years.

Music to play us out

Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks - “Walkin' One And Only”

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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