What I Learned From the 344 Posts I Wrote in 2025
I categorized every post I published in 2025 by type and sport to see what I actually spent the year writing about — then picked out the stories that mattered most to me.
Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone! You know, the end of any calendar year is always a good excuse to step back and think about what you did over the previous 12 months. And in my world, that means combing through my archive of Substack posts to build a spreadsheet that classifies all 344 posts I made here in 20251 by category, sport and various other attributes. So what follows is a quick look at the results of that exercise — plus highlights from my favorite pieces of the year.
Let’s start by checking the breakdown of posts by type. For each entry, I categorized it as either:
Regular explainers/takes - These are the bread-and-butter daily posts, like these ones about Cal Raleigh’s career year and the Brewers’ on-the-fly retool.
Historical deep-dives - Probably my favorite story type; posts where I dive into topics like the U.S.-Canada hockey rivalry and the history of women drivers in NASCAR.
League / sports trends - In these, I unpack some kind of big-picture trend or other structural feature of sports, like which games swing the win probability most in a best-of-7 playoff series or how the value of different positions has evolved in the NFL draft.
Previews - This is a little bit of a catch-all for anything I write looking ahead to a season, playoffs or other future competition, often based on the forecast models. (Think of a post about NCAA Tournament favorites or my MLB postseason curtain-raiser.)
I also included Podcasts / Interviews — chiefly Football Bytes, but also things like my conversation with the Data Golf founders — the Round-ups and Ratings / Forecasts dashboards, plus that one Mailbag I did. (I know I should do more of those!)
Here’s how it all shook out over the past year:
After excluding the weekly round-ups and forecasts, the regular takes represented more than one-third of my output on the year, with historical dives and trend pieces taking up about one-fifth apiece and previews sitting around 15 percent. Is that a good mix? I’m still not completely sure — even after surveying you, the reader, it can be tough to strike the right balance between the daily explainers focused on more timely topics and the bigger-picture or historical pieces. Let me know what you think of this breakdown in the comments below.
Now we’ll shift over to looking at how things broke down by sport in 2025, excluding the round-ups and forecasts, dropping various leagues into broad categories (CFB and NFL both count as “football”, etc.) and using “multiple” for posts that crossed sport lines:
Unsurprisingly, football, baseball and basketball make up the Top 3, though I was a bit surprised hockey wasn’t closer to making it a Top 4. (I suspect that would have been more the case in previous years — perhaps something to work on returning to in 2026!) It should also be noted that football is propped up a bit by Football Bytes; toss out the weekly podcasts, and baseball would rank No. 1 (at 28 percent), followed by basketball (25 percent), football (23 percent) and hockey (14 percent).
While I was going wild with the sport-by-sport breakdowns, I thought it might be fun to look at it by month as well, just to see the ebb and flow of seasonality in the posting schedule:
My most active month of posting overall was October — hello, Sports Equinox — with representation from all the Big Four sports (plus plenty of “others”). But it wasn’t the only month where all of the sports had posts! It’s also fun to look at which sports maintain some amount of posting all year round; basketball is the only one that I posted about at least once every single month, since I will not have devoted a dedicated blog to baseball in December 2025. ⚾☹️
Trends I tracked in 2025
Over the course of those 344 posts, you and I traversed through what I hope were the main themes of the sports year, from the perspective of a spreadsheet jockey such as myself.
We gave credit to Ohio State’s journey through the most difficult national-title path in the most drawn-out College Football Playoff ever. We covered the Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl rematch — and Philly stopping K.C.’s magic in its tracks. We wondered how the Lakers keep getting away with deals like the Luka Trade. We tracked Alex Ovechkin’s pursuit of Wayne Gretzky’s goals record. We watched Florida navigate a difficult path to their own national championship on the men’s hardwood. We saw the Oklahoma City Thunder strike for an NBA title, possibly ushering in the dynasty that finally ends the league’s Parity Era — and the Florida Panthers cement a dynasty of their own.
In golf, Scottie Scheffler’s dominance had us thinking of Tiger Woods’ prime. As the summer turned to fall, we witnessed the Dodgers outlast the Blue Jays in an epic World Series that ran parallel with a NASCAR finale that made us question the very meaning of a championship. We weathered a wide-open NFL regular season, waited on chaos to come for the CFP selection, and reveled in silly bowls, historic kickers and old QBs coming out of retirement for one last ride. We may have found the NBA’s next great rivalry by year’s end.
We also tracked bigger stories off the fields and courts. Gambling scandals were a persistent cloud hanging over the sports world in 2025, as were tanking efforts that warped leagues into bizarre versions of what we grew up loving. The competitive imbalance of payrolls in baseball could set up a nasty labor fight this time next year. (The WNBA is already in one of those.) And the Clippers’ alleged salary-cap circumvention scandal would have been worse if not for that franchise’s penchant for complete postseason irrelevance.
I didn’t get everything right along the way — far from it, in fact.
I posted about the Lions continuing Detroit’s sports renaissance… right before they lost in the playoffs. I downplayed how inevitable the Dodgers’ megateam was pretty much all year. Too few of my dark-horse NCAA tourney teams made noise. I jumped on the Yankees’ torpedo-bat hype train too quickly. I wrote about 10-seeds’ lack of success in the NBA play-in right before a 10-seed (Miami) finally advanced. I argued for the Winnipeg Jets as Stanley Cup favorites, then did a version of the same thing with the Milwaukee Brewers later in the year for baseball. I said the NHL’s Final Four was the most balanced ever — both series wrapped in 5 games — and wrote that the NBA playoffs belonged to a bunch of teams who mostly lost in Round 2. I went on an astrology kick. I thought Caitlin Clark would have an improved second WNBA season, and said ringless MLB franchises had a good chance to win the World Series. I called the Miami Dolphins “the NFL’s Most Underrated Mess” and Bill Belichick’s UNC “a sleeping giant”.
But despite all of that, I’m still really proud of the work I did at this Substack in 2025. And before I get to my favorite posts of the year, I wanted to thank you all for reading and supporting my work, through all the chaos and unpredictability of the sports calendar. I was a fixture in the “rising” list of sports Substacks for a lot of the year, and that was because of your generosity and belief in the power of data-based journalism in sports. This past year was the closest I’ve ever come to realizing the full vision of what I always wanted this type of sportswriting to look like, and I couldn’t have done it without your help. So thank you. ☺️
A few of my favorite posts from 2025
I will leave you for the year with some the posts I thought were the most interesting, was the happiest about — or otherwise the most proud of — in 2025 (in chronological order), as we look ahead to another great year of content in the next 12 months ahead:
Filed under: Football, Baseball, Basketball, Hockey
Including this one.
Thanks for the articles! Always a good read. And if you want to talk more hockey, that's A-OK in my book. PLUS, NHLers return to the Olympics! That should be a few more stories right there. (And I, for one, also can't wait for the curling competitions.)
Happy new year Neil and congrats on the top work throughout the year, love the content!
My preference would be to cut down on NFL and prop up more hockey. But then again through your Substack I've gotten myself interested in an exotic sport like baseball, so maybe I just need to give it more time and get into NFL as well.. :)
As a side note I'm not the biggest fan of your 'The Week that Was' posts, but I kind of see their purpose.