📝 The Week That Was (October 7-11, 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.

• 🏈 QB U: Are Quarterbacks Losing Their Heisman Trophy Grip? - For an award that is almost always dominated by quarterbacks, this year’s Top 2 Heisman favorites are not QBs. Plus, I pay tribute to Navy’s suddenly lethal offense, led by stat machine Blake Horvath.

• 🏒 Who’s Ready to Dominate the NHL in 2024-25? - With the NHL season dropping the puck stateside this week, I broke down the Elo ratings and dove into some of the biggest questions of the new campaign.

• 🏁 Who’s in, who’s out? Breaking down odds for playoff drivers fighting to survive Roval, with eye on Logano versus everyone else - Back writing at NASCAR.com, I ran my usual Cup Series playoff forecast model and unpacked all of the scenarios for each driver headed into this weekend at the Charlotte Roval. (Hint: All eyes will be on Joey Logano as a potential spoiler for the drivers currently above the cutline.)

  

• 🏀 The Liberty Look Like New York’s Next Champ — And the Yankees or Mets Could Be Next - Ahead of Game 1 of the WNBA Finals (which New York promptly lost by blowing a massive lead at home, smh), I wrote about how the Liberty could give New York City its first major pro sports championship since 2011 — and why, between the WNBA, MLB, NBA, NHL or even the NFL, some NYC team is bound to end the drought soon.

• 🏈 Football Bytes: The 49ers *Are* Fine, but Will They *Be* Fine? - Back when everyone was panicking about the 2-3 San Francisco 49ers (before they won at Seattle on Thursday night), I wrote that S.F. was a lot better than its record indicated — but that the team still had work to do to gain ground in the playoff odds.

• ⚾ Baseball Bytes: On the Razor’s Edge - After 2 games of each MLB Division Series, the matchups were all locked up at 1-1. So I went through my thoughts on the postseason to that point, then highlighted an impressive playoff performance by Fernando Tatis Jr.

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 NFL's Most Boring Teams by

  Mike Tanier

• 🏈 The science of Brandon Aubrey by

  Zach Schonbrun

• 🏈 For Aaron Rodgers, this is the beginning of the end and Q&A: Ron Wolf relives the greatest reclamation project in NFL history by

  Tyler Dunne

• 🏈 Life, Liberty, Football // Streameast’s crusade to rescue fans from the prohibitive costs of watching live football by

  William Miller

• 🏈 What Are We Doing Here? // On Iowa, expectations and goalsetting in the new Big Ten by

  Patrick Vint

• 🏈 Why does locker room access matter? by

  Brian Moritz

• 🏈 How to Convert 3rd and Long by

  Bobby Peters

• ⚾ Why Do Great Relievers Seem So Bad? and Emmanuel Clase's 33 Unearned Runs by

  Sam Miller

• ⚾ Once Again, Baseball's Fine by

  Michael Hendricks

• ⚾ Ranking the World Series of the 1980's by Game Winning RBI (which is quickly becoming one of my fave YouTube channels)

• 🏀 Overthinking the Celtics // On the weight of seeming invincibility by

  Tom Ziller

• 🏀 19 unlikely-but-plausible predictions for the 2024-25 NBA Season by

  Mike Shearer

• 🏀 2024 Team Preseason Projections by

  Evan Miyakawa

• 🏀 Does Preseason Matter? That Depends On Your Belief In Chance by

  Jacob Sutton

• 🏀 The Blueprint: How To Be A Successful Movement Shooter by

  Marc Campbell

• 🏀 Where Andrew Bynum At? by

  Nam Tran

• 🏀 2024-25 Milestone Watch and Combinatorics // Using game scores to assign a win-loss record to each player in a given game by

  Justin Kubatko

• 🏀 The H.U.M.A.N. poll...revealed! by

  Ken Pomeroy

• 🏟️ Why Stadiums’ Life Spans Keep Shrinking by Karin Shedd/The Hustle

• 🧠 What Every Youth Sports Parent Should Know About Concussions by

  Melissa Jacobs

• 🗳️ Six paradoxes of democracy by J.J. McCullough

• 🎮 "Astro Bot" by Team Asobi All video games are made to be played, but few are made to be playful by

  Chadwick Matlin

• 🌀 Rapid Intensification // An ode to the nation's hurricane hunters by

  Jessica Weinkle

• 🎬 Quantifying 'The Kevin Bacon Game': A Statistical Exploration of Hollywood’s Most Connected Actors by

  Daniel Parris

• 🎬 Top 10 Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movies by Underrated Cinema

• 📉 You're Probably Not Popular, and Why That Helps People by

  Joseph George
  (Note: Oddly connected to the Kevin Bacon one above…)

• 🎵 A STRANGE But Perfect Beatles Song by Rick Beato

• 🎹 What Are Cush Chords? by Open Studio (Note: If you are a musician — or even just a wannabe like me — Adam Maness and Peter Martin from Open Studio are a MUST watch.)

• 👀 Can experts save the public from error? by

  Dan Williams

Old YouTube game of the week

1994 - Eagles at 49ers (Week 5)

Music to play us out

Robben Ford - “Help the Poor”

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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