regressing Page 13 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

How Much Did Paul George's Injury Affect The Pacers' Title Chances?
Even as Paul George laid on the parquet of the Thomas & Mack Center, being treated for the stomach-turning break to his right leg, degenerates were just waiting until enough time had passed 1. to talk about it coldly without being Twitter-shamed and 2. for the lines to open up again. Once they did, ...

Map: Which Countries Have The Slowest Elite Runners?
Everyone knows Jamaica tends to produce the best sprinters and Ethiopia often has the best distance runners, but how do other countries' top runners fare compare to the best in the world?...

Which MLB Team Helped Its World Series Chances The Most At The Deadline?
This year saw just about the best you can hope for from baseball's trade deadline: huge deals, sweeping misinformation, an old man setting his laptop on fire. But how much has the landscape actually changed? Baseball Prospectus examined how World Series odds changed for MLB teams before and after th...


How Not To Reform The NCAA
There will be no new release of an EA NCAA Football game this year. The man most frequently blamed for this is a former UCLA basketball star named Ed O’Bannon, who had the temerity to sue the NCAA and EA for using his image without asking permission and without negotiating to pay for it. ...

Lacrosse Bros Smoke More Weed Than Any Other College Athletes
Buried in a stupid NCAA research blast about substance vice among young people and college athletes' relative virtues, you'll find this chart, which is hilarious. ...

Map: Which States Actually Show Up To Their Minor League Baseball Games?
Here's a map of minor league baseball attendance last season, made by Redditor rbhindepmo. The data comes from marketing analyst David Kronheim, who has put together baseball attendance reports since 2009....

Tyron Smith Isn't A "Cowboy For Life." He Just Got Screwed.
Yesterday, Cowboys left tackle Tyron Smith signed an enormous eight-year extension, valued at $110 million over 10 years. Today, Dallas is telling everyone that it guarantees Smith will be a "Cowboy for life." As we know by now, the numbers in NFL contracts are bullshit. But this is outrageous eno...

Colin Kaepernick And Russell Wilson Get The Most Out Of Completions
Passing in the NFL comes in any number of flavors, but the general trend has been an emphasis more efficiency, higher completion percentage, and overall, shorter passes. Peyton Manning and Tom Brady and all those guys. But Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson don't have time for all that. ...

MLB Reaches 2,000,000 Strikeouts
This past weekend Danny Salazar recorded the 2,000,000th strikeout in MLB history. Given it took MLB until 1976 to reach 1,000,000 strikeouts, why did the league's second million strikeouts come so much quicker than its first?...

NCAA Head Injury Lawsuit Settled With $70 Million Brain Evaluation Fund
The NCAA has settled a class-action lawsuit by agreeing to set up a $70 million fund to evaluate current and former NCAA athletes in a variety of contact sports for brain trauma. Unlike the NFL's maligned but needed settlement that's still evolving, this seems at first blush like an OK deal for NCAA...

Barry Bonds Was An Alien God Who Destroyed Space-Time To Bring Us Joy
Today is Barry Bonds's birthday! The greatest player in baseball history is turning 50. Here is a list of scarcely believable facts about his career, accompanied by videos of him performing impressive feats of speed and strength:...

How Frequently Does <em>The New York Times</em> Use "Fart," "Poop," And "Butt"?
This here is a tool that looks up the frequency of words used in the New York Times, both in the percentage of and how many total articles the word appeared in. We put it to terrible use. ...

Hockey's About To Get The Bullshit "Anti-Concussion Helmet" Treatment
Virginia Tech thinks hockey helmets are bullshit, which is more or less true. In turn, it wants to look at the differences between hockey's helmets and football's recently evolved versions, and bring the concussion-stopping advances to hockey. This is pretty much bullshit. ...

The Pitch Counts The Best And Worst Hitters Swing On
All hitters approach the plate differently depending on where they sit in the count. But great hitters and poor hitters differ in how often they swing in certain situations. Using TAv as a measurement, Baseball Prospectus took a look at how swing rates differ between the best hitters and worst hitte...

What's Karl Marx Doing In These Arguments Against College Athlete Pay?
Bob Bowlsby is a man with a very influential job. He is the commissioner of the Big 12 conference, one of the so-called power conferences that helps set policy for major college football. He also harbors a belief that is most commonly associated with pre-20th-century economics, and has really on...

Introducing The Three-Point Line Benefited Big Men Most
After the NBA introduced the three-point line in 1979, it would have been be intuitive to assume that guards, who shot a disproportionate amount of the new and more efficient three-point shots, benefitted most from it. But a new study from the Journal of Sports Economics claims that after the three-...

We Really Need More Of This In NBA Advanced Metrics
ESPN Insider is doing something funny with its advanced nerds at the Las Vegas Summer League: The stat guys are talking shop with the players. ...

You’re Probably Starting Your Ultramarathon Way Too Fast
It's a well-accepted approach in sports that the fastest way to a finish line is with negative splits—i.e. to get faster as the race progresses. In the ultrarunning community, this approach more resembles a sacred mantra than a mere guideline....