📝 The Week That Was (September 2-6, 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.

• 🏈 The Kansas City Chiefs Are Chasing a 3-Peat — Here's How Other Teams Tried (And Mostly Failed) Before Them - The big talk before the NFL season opener was about the Chiefs’ bid to earn the first Super Bowl 3-peat. So I went back to research at all of the back-to-back champs, and looked at how Year 3 went for them.

• 🏁 What happened when we simulated the 2024 Cup playoffs 10,000 times - At NASCAR.com, I ran 10,000 simulations of the Cup Series playoffs to determine the favorites — and tracked what each playoff driver needs in order to move forward.

  

• 🏈 Time to Fire up the Cowboys’ Eternal Hype Machine Again - A new NFL season means renewed hope for the Dallas Cowboys to win appear in their first Super Bowl since 1995 — but also another opportunity to have those hopes dashed. And at this point, would this franchise have it any other way?

• ⚾ Baseball Bytes: Seriously, How Are the White Sox This Bad? - My MLB column featured a taxonomy of 110+ loss baseball teams (including the dreadful ChiSox), plus the possibly anticlimactic postseason race and Marcell Ozuna’s unprecedented comeback season.

• 🏈 2024 NFL Elo Ratings and Projections📈 - I first pubbed this a few weeks ago, but I started updating the interactive off of Thursday night’s KC/Baltimore game.

• 🏈 QB U: Remembering Some Guys from Texas, Michigan and the Rest of the Week’s Top Matchups - This week’s QB U column featured a look at the best — plus the most underrated — season by a quarterback at the schools in this week’s top CFB matchups.

• 🏈 2024 College Football Quarterback Stats & Rankings 📈 - This week, I created a landing page for my schedule-adjusted college QB Points Above Replacement metric, which I’ll be updating all season.

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 First Game In Brazil Signifies A Shifting International Strategy by

  Huddle Up

• 🏈 The 'Big' Nickel is back by

  MatchQuarters

• 🏈 The Suburbs // How NFL stadiums moved out and lost their way and Spill Your Own Guts // Dabo Swinney, Clemson, and the fine line between adaptation and anachronism by

  Michael Weinreb

• 🏈 The Most Powerful League in the World: NFL Case Study by

  Andrew Petcash

• 🏈 Six Stories Not About College Football by

  Overdistance
  (Note: I missed this one the first time around, but it’s really poignant and you should read it.)²

• 🏈 The Deshaun Watson Question by

  Go Long

• ⚾ The Diamondbacks Didn’t Exist. Then They Won the World Series. by Foolish Baseball

• ⚾ How J.D. Drew Became the Most Hated Player in Baseball by WalkoffStudios

• ⚾ Why, Exactly, Is Bunting (Mostly) A Thing Of The Past? by

  Here's the Pitch: the IBWAA Newsletter

• ⚾ Educating Twitter: Josh Donaldson and Cooperstown by

  Lost in Left Field

• ⚾ T10YL - 2014 MLB Trade Deadline, Part 5 by

  Trades Ten Years Later

• 🏀 Triple Crown Score by

  Statitudes

• 🏀 Niching Down: Role Players' Biggest Improvement Needs For 2024-25 by

  Jacob Sutton

• 🏀 WNBA's Race for the Bottom: Lottery or 8th Seed? by

  Richard Cohen

• 🏀 One-Time NBA All-Stars // Dana Barros by

  Kelly Dwyer

• 🏒 A new conduit for empathy // Where does grief fit in fandom? On Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau, Aaron and Drew Gordon, and the body keeping score by

  Katie Heindl

• 🏒 Forget the Youth, Older NHL Teams Win Stanley Cups by

  The Hockey Writers - NHL Stuff

• 🎵 Don't Look Back In Anger: Britpop and cultural stagnation by

  Posting Alone

• 📼 We Need Video Stores Now, More Than Ever by

  Obsolete Media

• 📊 How Dating Apps Contribute to the Demographic Crisis by

  kyla scanlon

• 📊 Will the polls lowball Trump again? Plus, the mistakes I made in the “data journalism” era by

  Nate Silver
  (Note: This one contains some “inside baseball” that lines up with my experience at FiveThirtyEight.)

• 💰Can this extremely loud man make you rich? by Good Work

Music to play us out

Hirotaka Izumi - Amoshe (1988) - Explorer

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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

2. Also, anything that references the snowy 2000 Independence Bowl in Shreveport, LA (yes, it was snowy!) gets an automatic link from me.