nate-silver - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights



Nate Silver Tackles The Canadian Stanley Cup Drought
In nine days, we will celebrate(?) the 20th anniversary of Montreal's '93 championship, the last time a Canadian team hoisted the Stanley Cup. Today in the Times, Nate Silver takes a stab at the most jingoistically painful futility in professional sports....

Still Filling Out Your NCAA Tournament Bracket? Consult Our Handy Expert Metabracket
Presenting your 2013 NCAA Tournament Metabracket. Click the annotations to see which teams Nate Silver, Joe Lunardi, Seth Davis, Barack Obama, Matt Norlander, Jay Bilas, and Luke Winn picked to advance through each round. (Click the "Next" button in the lower right corner to see the Sweet 16 and onw...

“Are You A Nerd?” And Other Questions We Asked Our Fellow Nerds At The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference
Last weekend, I went to the sixth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Attendance has gone up every year, and it gets harder and harder to get a feel for who actually goes to this thing: Why were they there? Were they still all sabermetrics geeks? High-powered businessmen? To find out, I di...

Nate Silver Argues That The Breakaway Big East Teams Have A Chance To Rid Themselves Of Unsightly Football Baggage
News came down today that the Big East's non-FBS football schools have officially decided to leave the conference, a decision made by unanimous vote and one we've been expecting for a few days. It's easy to feel a little fearful about the Big East's basketball powers (sans UConn) striking out on the...

Skew Yourselves: Nate Silver Is Here To Answer Your Questions
Nate Silver—the baseball analyst/metapollster/scary math witch who has given us both the PECOTA player forecasting system and the indispensable FiveThirtyEight blog—is in the discussion below, awaiting your questions. Go buy his book, The Signal and the Noise. We predict that you'll like it. ...

MLB Hot Stove Apathy: The Real Secret Variable That (Almost) Predicted The Presidential Election
The "Redskins Rule" failed to pick the winner for second time in three presidential races, so it looks like everyone will have to pick a new random sports thing as their favorite election-prediction oracle. Instead of just choosing some random team's game, we decided to go to the sports site that re...

Nate Silver's Braying Idiot Detractors Show That Being Ignorant About Politics Is Like Being Ignorant About Sports
In case you haven't been hanging around the benighted corners of the political internet lately, there's an idiotic backlash afoot against Nate Silver, the proprietor of the FiveThirtyEight blog who made his name as one of the sharpest baseball analysts around....

The Curse Of Dopey "Curse Of The Bambino" References, And Other Dumb Things About The Red Sox's Stretch Run
Harvey Araton of the New York Times, reporting from Baltimore, sets the new/old standard for witless hackery today:...

Some Sweet, Sweet Charlie Weis Love, And Other Unconventional Sports Crushes
Once upon a time, a site called The Black Table had a regular feature entitled Waxing Off, in which women gathered in an online roundtable to discuss issues of the day, and also to make fun of Will Leitch's shoes. And so we got to thinking: With so many great female sports bloggers out there, why no...

Stat Nerd Better At Predicting Elections Than Predicting The NL East
If you're a seamhead, you know Nate Silver as the Baseball Prospectus geek who has probably forgotten more about algorithms than you and I will ever know. He invented the PECOTA projection system, which predicted Tampa Bay's first 90-win season way back in February when the Devil Rays were still the...