regressing Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Can Sports Show The Way To Smarter Voting?
Electoral reform is coming to America. This year in MLB, a simple first-past-the-post voting system will no longer determine all-star starters. Fans will instead select three finalists in a Primary Round and then vote from among those finalists on a single Election Day....
These Are My Two Favorite Weird NFL Stats
1. Washington has not had a single lead change all season. I did not even conceive that such a thing was possible, but in every single Skins game this season, the team that has scored first has never relinquished that lead, and has gone on to win....
Which Teams In Each Sport Have The Biggest Home-Field Advantage?
Michael Lopez is the Director of Data and Analytics for the NFL, and is a statistics professor at Skidmore College. He runs the site StatsbyLopez, and in a series of posts is breaking down the findings of a forthcoming paper he’s written with a couple of colleagues. And this, my friends, is the good...
Major League Baseball's Statcast Can Break Sabermetrics
“On a historical basis, a decade from now, we’ll be looking back saying, ‘That was the highest route efficiency that’s ever been captured in baseball.’”...
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. ...
It's Time To Once Again Help Prove That Average Fans Are The Best Scouts In Baseball
One of the best off-field developments in baseball this year was MLB bringing in pseudonymous saberist Tom Tango to work with their Statcast data, the product of player-tracking technology that promises to unlock such mysteries of the game as the relative values of positioning and reaction time, and...
This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming
Tonight three legends of swimming—Michael Phelps, Chad Le Clos, and László Cseh—turned in identical times to share silver in the 100m butterfly. Last night, Simone Manuel tied for gold with Canadian Penny Oleksiak in the 100m freestyle. Modern timing systems are capable of measuring down to the mill...
Why Athletes Don't Need An Empty Bed Before Competition
The following is excerpted from This is Your Brain on Sports....
The Cubs Might Have Screwed Themselves By Screwing Kris Bryant
This Wednesday, the Cubs play the Pirates in the NL wildcard game. The game is in Pittsburgh, but it’s worth noting that the Cubs finished one win away from hosting it themselves. The slimness of that margin should send Cubs fans back to April, when their front office decided to detain Kris Bryant f...
Why Daily Fantasy Is Such A Problem For The NCAA
Of course it makes sense for the NCAA and its major college football conferences to oppose having their athletes participate in Daily Fantasy contests like those hosted by FanDuel or DraftKings. The ten conferences that make up the NCAA’s Football Bowl Division (FBS) are major sports leagues, sellin...
The NFL's Dumbass Deflategate Science Report Is A Feature, Not A Bug
Last night, a mountain of documents and transcription emerged from Tom Brady’s late June appeal hearing before Roger Goodell. It’s been a circus, with a series of insults, emails, and sneaker requests to Tom Ford pouring out of the file cabinet, but the testimony most relevant to the case circles ba...
Does Jimmer Fredette Have A Chance In Hell In San Antonio?
Every so often, as the last dregs of NBA free agency congeal into place, a name floats across the ticker that gives a little shock of Oh, what ever happened to ... ? pause. Last night, it was Jimmer Fredette signing on, with minimal guarantees, to be a San Antonio Spur. And, begging your pardon, con...
The Rays Hope To Save Their Pitchers With New High-Tech Cameras
Yahoo’s Jeff Passan is reporting that the Tampa Bay Rays, a team that has always been at the forefront of baseball’s analytical revolution, have installed a new high-tech camera system at their home ballpark that they hope will help them save their pitchers from injury....
LeBron Has Been A Damned Statistical Marvel In The Finals
There’s a way to look at Steph Curry’s stat line as an artifact of not just box score accounting, but his style. If you look closely, there are traces of the visceral experience of watching Steph double axel around a screen and fire up a three from the hip in arcane statistical whimsy, like fast bre...
The Warriors Had No Idea If Steph Curry Had A Concussion Last Night
Steph called it the scariest fall of his career. “You’re in the air for a long time,” he said after the game, “not knowing how you’re going to hit the floor, knowing that it’s inevitable.” Curry’s taken harder hits—and come away with worse symptoms—but that second-and-a-half or so of unexpected flig...
Here's A Thingy Tracking NBA Teams' Nerd Ratings Through History
FiveThirtyEight has a cool interactive up today by Nate Silver and frenemy of the program Reuben Fischer-Baum, calculating the Elo ratings throughout history for every team in the NBA. I’m a sucker for Elo ratings, so I love this. I’m also a sucker for the shitbag Knicks, so I pulled up their chart ...
How Title IX Actually <i>Makes </i>Money For Some Schools
It’s pretty common to hear that Title IX creates a huge financial burden on colleges such that even if a school is lucky enough to be making millions on football or basketball, federal law mandates that a certain amount be spent on women’s sports. Leaving aside how this story implies schools are bei...
Basketball's Most Influential Pick-and-Roll Turnover Ball Handlers
Today, Politico shared a list of bloggers ranked by influence by a proprietary survey conducted by an analytics firm called StatSocial. This seems useful, in its way. Similarly, Deadspin would like to share some data from Synergy Sports, a sports analytics firm. Here is a list of NBA players, ranke...
Darren Sharper's "Penis Monitoring" Is Evil, Retrograde Bullshit
A casual observer might take note of Darren Sharper's pending plea agreement in rape charges spread across at least four years and four different states for any number of the obvious reasons—this is, after all, a case involving a former NFL All-Pro being revealed as a serial rapist. One of those rea...
Why Soccer's Most Popular Advanced Stat Kind Of Sucks
Here's some free advanced soccer analytics: .095....