nerds Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Have Any Of These Dang <i>Jeopardy!</i> Nerds Watched A Single Game Of Basketball?

Get a load of last night’s Jeopardy! contestants, who knew all sorts of rivers and peace treaties, but not this. Erin and Jamie wisely kept quiet and let the clue pass them by, but customer service representative Kris buzzed in with his spectacularly wrong answer. ...

Jayson Werth Has Me Feeling Nostalgic For The Sabermetric Wars

After 15 seasons as a big leaguer, Jayson Werth is out of baseball this year, which has given the 39-year-old an opportunity to pick up a couple of age-appropriate hobbies: reliving past glories in pick-up games, and hating on the newly powerful generation directly behind his. In Werth’s case, his q...

Alex Trebek Hilariously Shits On <i>Jeopardy!</i> Contestant And Her Whole Crew For No Reason

Man, Trebek really looked at her, took a breath, then dropped the hammer....

Brook Lopez's <i>Star Wars</i> Experience Was Kind Of A Bummer

A lot of the fun in going to see a world attention-grabbing movie on opening night is getting swept up in the pomp. If you’re a Star Wars nerd, like Brooklyn Nets center Brook Lopez is, you want to be able to feed off the collective energy of the other nerds in attendance when you go to a midnight s...

And Now, The Only Comic-Con Story You'll Ever Need

It’s the early 2000s, and I’m working at a bar across the street from the convention center where Comic-Con is held. At the time, Comic-Con was big, but the locals hadn’t embraced it and its multitude of people who can recite every episode title of The X-Files in sequential order, the way they have ...

Nerds On <i>Teen Jeopardy</i> Save Sports Category For Last

"Pro Sports Teams" was a category on Teen Jeopardy this evening and none of the contestants wanted anything to do with it. The rest of the board slowly vanishes while the Sports column remains menacingly unselected. ...

A Complete Breakdown Of The Year In Touchdown Celebrations

Geoff Foster of the Wall Street Journal has done the lord's work. He went back and watched every touchdown celebration that occurred in the NFL this year for the purpose of creating a comprehensive audit of how NFL players decided to get down after scoring....

How Statistically Unlikely Was The Patriots Comeback? (Spoiler: Very)

How unlikely was Tom Brady's game-winning pass to Kenbrell Thompkins? Unlikely enough to make this Win Probability chart for the Saints look like it got stabbed in the heart with a spear. ...

The Liter Bowl: The First NCAA Football Game To Use The Metric System

On September 17, 1977, Carleton College and St. Olaf College played the Liter Bowl, the first NCAA-sanctioned game to use metric measurements, and probably the dorkiest piece of football ever put together....

Everybody Is A Nerd, According To David Price [UPDATE]

David Price had a rough outing yesterday, giving up seven runs in seven innings and losing Game 2 to the Red Sox. He didn't take the media criticism well....

Kill #killthewin: The Fight Over Stats In Baseball Has Gotten Stupid

Television is the worst. Look at what's happened to the MLB Network's house numbers guy, Brian Kenny, who's spent the season preaching to the choir by beating horses to death right in front of them. It's fucking awful....

What I Learned From A Year Of Watching <em>SportsCenter</em>

Thirty-three years and more than 50,000 episodes on, SportsCenter is less a television show or a convenient way to catch up on the day in sports than a great mechanical contraption gone awry, its parts moving independently not just of one another but of any obvious directing intelligence. ...

Measuring The Ridiculous Physics Of Disney's <em>Hercules</em>

Two years ago, our friends at the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective applied their usual rigorous statistical scrutiny to a series of basketball movies. We pick up the idea again with this analysis of Hercules, by Anthony Zonfrelli and Dmitri Ilushin....

You're all right, Rex Ryan:...

Ryan Zimmerman Thinks You Are All A Bunch Of Nerds

From Thomas Boswell's column in today's Washington Post:...

Mariners Manager Says Sabermetrics Made Dustin Ackley Suck

The Seattle Mariners optioned once-promising second baseman Dustin Ackley to Triple A yesterday because Ackley has been having a miserable season at the plate. But what's to blame for Ackley's .205 average and .266 on-base percentage? Mariners coach Eric Wedge has a theory, and it has to do with all...

Here's A Dude Doing Homework At The Nats Game

Goddammit, guy....

Here's How Playing Basketball Looks Through Google Glass

Here's Noble Ackerson, a so-called "Glass Explorer," trying out his Google Glass in a gym session yesterday. The view sure looks a lot like a dude wearing a mounted camera like a GoPro while he shoots hoops (there has to be an option to record the "robot view" eventually, right?), but if this make...

We Need To Talk About The Harvard Band

This picture is art. I can't stop looking at it. It almost made me happy for Harvard, in some demented, twisted way—that is, until I looked up the Harvard athletics band, to find more about those wondrous facial expressions, and found this informational paragraph:...

“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...