📝 The Week That Was (September 16-20, 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: Arch Manning Has Entered the Chat - This week’s college football column focused on Arch Manning’s first career start for Texas, plus Bryce Young adding to Alabama’s NFL QB troubles, and Josh Heupel’s legacy at Oklahoma.

• 🏁 Denny Hamlin’s First Cup Series Championship Rides on a Coin Flip - For this week’s NASCAR playoff forecast, I focused on Hamlin’s precarious odds to advance from the Round of 16 and eventually ditch his title of the greatest driver to never win a championship. (Note: This piece also ran at NASCAR.com.)

• ⚾ Baseball Bytes: How Juan Soto Adapted His Swing to Yankee Stadium - Soto was never a pull hitter before 2024, so it was an open question how much he’d take advantage of Yankee Stadium’s RF porch. Well, consider that question answered.

• 🏀 WNBA rookie rankings: Caitlin Clark beats out Angel Reese - Yes, that’s right: Finally, we checked in on the WNBA Consensus Wins leaders after Clark’s rise to No. 1. (She ended the season nearly a full win ahead of Reese.)

• 🏀 New WNBA Records Still Need Context - With even more all-time single-season WNBA records falling in 2024, I looked at how many would have held up if previous eras played today’s 40-game schedules.

• 🏈 Which Teams’ Quarterbacks Do Better Elsewhere? - The downfall of Bryce Young prompted many to point out the Panthers’ history of mismanaging QBs, so I looked to see which teams had the biggest recent differential between how their QBs do with their franchise versus others.

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.

• 🏈 NFL Passing Game Officially Dead? by

  Unexpected Points
  and Why Are All the Quarterbacks Bad Now? by
  Ethan Strauss

• 🏈 Kickstart My Heart (1974) by

  Michael Weinreb
  and Kickers are taking over the NFL by Brett Kollmann

• 🏈 League of Extra Ordinary Quarterbacks by

  Mike Tanier

• 🏈 The Pac-12 Lives by

  Michael Hendricks

• 🏈 How did Cal Twitter enter the zeitgeist of college football culture? by

  Avinash Kunnath

• 🏈 NFL Positional Spending in 2024 by

  Troy Chapman

• ⚾ The greatest performance in MLB history by

  Blake Harris

• ⚾ Could Shohei Ohtani Pitch in the Playoffs Next Month? by

  Molly Knight

• ⚾ 10 Mets players fans love to loathe by

  MetsRewind

• 🏀 Is Adrian Wojnarowski Actually Retiring? by

  Ethan Strauss

• 🏀 One-Time NBA All-Stars: Antonio and Dale Davis by

  Kelly Dwyer
  (Note: I would recommend reading all of Kelly’s “One-Time NBA All-Stars” series — they have been great trips down memory lane for this fan of ‘90s and 2000s bball.)

• 🏀 In a Box: The 1990s by

  Justin Kubatko

• 🏀 The Era of Collective Competence for NBA coaches and general managers by

  Tom Ziller

• ☹️ Charlotte is the saddest major sports city by

  Tom Haberstroh

• 🎙️ Did Frank Sinatra Really Perform at My Grandma's High School? by

  Chris Dalla Riva

• 🎞️ Why Does Editing Work? by

  Rough Cuts

• 🗳️ Mad about the Electoral College? Blame California. by

  Nate Silver

• 📊 What people die from, what they Google, and what the media covers. by Our World In Data (h/t Gurwinder)

• 📲 Gen Z Has Regrets by Jonathan Haidt and Will Johnson (h/t

  Chris Dalla Riva
  )

• 🏛️ Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome by Lex Fridman

• 🎵 Tube Grooves: Ten Favorite Themes from 1970s TV Shows by

  Dan Epstein

• 📷 Not an article, but TimeGuessr is a really fun game where you are presented with a photo, and you must guess where and when it was taken.

Chart of the week: 50-50, 40-70… or just do Barry Bonds stuff?

Old YouTube game of the week

Vick & the Dream Team Visit ATL! (Eagles vs. Falcons 2011, Week 2)

Music to play us out

SEASIDE LOVERS - X's And O's

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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