math Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Q&A: John Urschel On NFL Analytics, Two-Point Conversion Cowards, And <i>That</i> Math Problem
John Urschel spent three seasons as an offensive lineman for the Ravens. He’s also a candidate for a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT—a pursuit he began in 2016, during his final season in the NFL. He’s also written a book, Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football, that’s being released today by Peng...
Sacramento Kings Use Their Free Time To Get Everyone To Argue About The Order Of Operations
Today the Sacramento Kings and De’Aaron Fox invited everyone into their shared mind palace when they asked what the answer to this seemingly simple math equation. The result was chaos, and it nearly broke the Deadspin staff, although to be fair, basically any meaningless argument can break the Deads...
God Help Me, I'm Rooting For The Warriors Now
The bleak doom of all good things in this terrible psycho-capitalist hell-society we have made is to be processed and metabolized into an inert clot of blind, gray, mindless nano-goo by precisely the kind of antiseptic, hyper-rational, ahuman actuarial math on display here:...
How To Mangle A Survey, By Darren Rovell<em></em>
If you merely scanned today’s Darren Rovell ESPN article on a new survey of NFL fans, you might be forgiven for coming away believing that fans are leaving in droves, turned off by the national anthem protests inspired by Colin Kaepernick. If you bothered to actually read the damn thing, you know t...
No, Paying NCAA Athletes Won't Cost Them Money
Few things get me as angry as seeing people oppose a reform because of unrealistic concerns about imaginary unforeseen consequences. Pick a problem and propose some way to make it better, and some concern troll will immediately pop out from behind a curtain to say that there is some remote chance of...
What Makes A Dunk Contest Champ?
I used to say that the dunk contest was dead. The days when the NBA’s elite players competed were long gone, I said, along with lots of basketball fans. Most of the modern dunks are rehashes of old ones. The event has plateaued. ...
This App Will Do Your Math Homework For You
I’m not that far removed from my last math class, and I was pretty good at it back then, but I barely remember what the equations in this demo video are trying to express, let alone how to solve them. But this is the future, and retaining what you learn isn’t important anymore. ...
ESPN Aired A Mathletics Competition And It Was Amazing
Today’s Mathcounts national championship for middle-school mathletes aired on ESPN3, and it was definitely the best live sports anyone could be watching at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. Edward Wan, a Washington seventh-grader, took home the title....
A Brief But Amusing Math Lesson From Kyle Lowry And DeMar DeRozan
The Toronto Raptors played in London last week. During a post-practice media scrum, shooting guard DeMar DeRozan was asked asked about his strong offensive performances in the previous two games he’d played in London. That’s when a hum-drum interview suddenly became very entertaining....
Introducing: The Shabazz Assist
Two years ago, Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry introduced the Kobe Assist, a new statistic that "proves that missing shots is sometimes just as valuable as making them." Goldsberry's analysis was interesting, but it left out a key component: the dunkpass. You see, Goldsberry examined what percentage o...
Christmas Songs, Ranked
Hark! The herald bloggers rank the Christmas jams. O come, let us rejoice them....
Pete Prisco Very Adamantly Does Not Understand Probabilities
The most impactful decision in tonight's heinously boring Thursday Night Football contest between St. Louis and Arizona came with 6:10 left in the game. St. Louis, down 12-3, had 4th and goal on Arizona's 1-yard-line. In a situation where the Rams needed both a touchdown and a field goal to win, Jef...
Stephen Hawking's Mathematical Guide To Winning The World Cup
Stephen Hawking, for whatever reason, spent some time digging up soccer stats for Paddy Power that could help nudge the English side to a World Cup win. It's fascinating, mostly for the premise of Stephen Hawking being mixed up with Paddy Power. ...
Darryl Sutter's Math Will Make Your Brain Hurt
Here's Kings coach Darryl Sutter speaking at practice today, transcribed by LA Kings Insider and brought to our attention by Robert P. of Jewels From The Crown: ...
The Cowboys Are Going To Lead The League In Geometry Exam Scores
College boy Jason Garrett wants his team to spend some time in training camp brushing up on the Pythagorean theorem. His explanation is remarkably logical!...
NFL Net Anchor Says He Is Bad At Math, Then Makes Horrible Math Error
Today, draft day, is, we trust, a busy day at the NFL Network. No time for lots of things. But no time for math?...
Leonard Cooper, <em>Jeopardy</em> Folk Hero, Still Could Have Lost When He Wrote "I Just Won $75,000"
Everyone is rightly lauding Leonard Cooper, the winner of the Jeopardy Teen Tournament, as America's coolest high schooler. When Final Jeopardy came around, Leonard didn't know the answer. So he wrote something much better. He wrote,...
H, Y, and Z Are Your Money Letters: How To Beat Scrabble's Flawed Points System, Using Google-Powered Math
This week the director of research at Google, a fellow named Peter Norvig, published on his blog the results of a fascinating deep-dive into the English language. If you're at all interested in letter frequency or word frequency, you owe it to yourself to at least skim Norvig's post. Essentially the...
Who Was On The Ballots Of The Hall Of Fame Voters Refusing To Go Public?
For just the second time, the Baseball Writers' Association of America has given its voters the option of having their Hall of Fame ballots made public. Of the 569 voters who cast ballots, only 108 chose to reveal who they voted for. (Of course, many more discussed their selections in their own colu...