📝 The Week That Was (September 9-13, 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.

• 🏈 NFL Passing Was Down in Week 1. What Does That Mean for the Rest of the Season? One of the biggest stories of the NFL’s opening week was the league’s lowest net passing YPG since 1996. What does that tell us about the rest of the season?

• ⚾ What Could Break MLB Contenders' World Series Hopes? - Baseball’s postseason is right around the corner, and that means it’s time to look at what weaknesses might trip up each aspiring World Series contender.

• ⚾ Baseball Bytes: How Francisco Lindor Went From Overpaid Bust to MVP Contender - Before this year, Lindor was something of a villain to Mets fans. But now he’s the heart and soul of their surprising playoff hopes.

• 🏈 Football Bytes: Let’s Overreact to Week 1 NFL QBs! (From Previous Seasons, That Is) - I started a little spin-off “Bytes” column for football — the first subject of which focused on how much we really tend to learn about QB seasons from NFL Week 1.

• 🏁 How bad is the playoff damage for Kyle Larson and Chase Briscoe? - After the opening race of the NASCAR playoffs, I re-ran my playoff prediction model to see where each driver stands — particularly Briscoe and Larson, who finished last and second-to-last (respectively) in Atlanta.

  

• 🏈 QB U: When the Stars Aligned for This Week’s Top Matchups - In this week’s QB U column, I looked at the best combined seasons for the teams in this week’s top matchups — and whether they faced each other while at their peak.

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 Media's Hypocrisy Never Quits by Freddie deBoer

• 🏈 Josh Allen and the Most Harmful Play in NFL History by

  Robbie Marriage

• 🏈 The NFL's future Shohei Ohtani: Travis Hunter by

  Joseph Ferraiola

• ⚾ I Dream Of Fewer Broken Wrists by

  Sam Miller

• ⚾ 18 Players Who Have Hit 4 Home Runs in a Game by

  Matt Musico

• 🏀 Analytical Mailbag: Paolo's Plus/Minus by

  Joseph George

• 🏀 Broken Records and Showdown: Reggie Miller vs. Ray Allen by

  Justin Kubatko

• 🏀 Agents of Chaos: 3 Western Conference Teams With The Most Unpredictability by

  Jacob Sutton

• 🏀 Ring Chasers: Mitch Richmond’s Quest to Be an NBA Champion by

  Nam Tran

• 🏒 How to track hockey games by

  Thibaud Chatel

• 🏒 What Hockey Habits and Indicators Correlate to Future Success? by

  Greg Revak

• 🏒 How Early Can You Tell If a Player Will be an NHL Star? by

  Justin Giampietro

• 🏒 NHL EDGE: Skating Speed, Part 4 by

  Aaron Knodell

• 🏁 Modeling Formula One: Generating DFS Lineups for Tournament Contests by

  Noah Lombardozzi

• 🎧 House of Strauss: Michael Moynihan by

  Ethan Strauss

• 📺 The Standoff Reshaping Sports: Carriage disputes by

  Pablo Torre

• ⛸️ The Ice Rink In The Mall by

  Jeremy Markovich

• 🌍 The Ocean Death That Created Civilization by

  Tomas Pueyo

• 👀 CIA Director Dishes by

  Ken Klippenstein

• 🟦 Democrats Should Speak to the Cultural Aspect of Immigration by

  Jeff Maurer

• 🗳️ Kamala Harris's Problem of Definition by

  Noah Millman

• 🗳️ The Electoral College bias has returned with a vengeance by

  Nate Silver

Old YouTube game of the week

Giants at Broncos 2001

Music to play us out

Pharoah Sanders - It's Easy to Remember (Live in Marciac, 2004)

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Filed under: Weekly Round-up

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