📝 The Week That Was (September 9-13, 2024)

A roundup of what I wrote, read, watched, etc. over the past week.

Sep 14, 2024

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.