regressing Page 23 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
These Beautiful Charts Show How Well Your NBA Team Spreads The Ball
In another cool application of SportVU technology, Andrew Bergmann of the Hangtime blog on NBA.com has put together some beautiful charts showing how often different NBA starters pass to each other....
Redesigning The Madness: Is there A Better Format For The NCAA Tourney?
March Madness is surely the most exhilarating playoff system in American sports. We love the tournament—but it also isn't perfect. Which got us to thinking: Is there a better way to organize March Madness?...
Can Real-Time Gambling Odds Tell Us Which Games Are Most Exciting?
The best part of the best sports tournament in the world starts in half an hour, as a field of 64 gets pared down to just 16 teams over the course of four days. That's a lot of games, so how do you know which ones you should be watching?...
Everything You Need To Know About Getting A Vasectomy For March Madness
There's a widespread (if unverified) belief that vasectomies increase substantially during March Madness. If you're going to be stuck at home icing your testicles, the thinking goes, why not schedule it around a week you're already blowing off work for the tournament? ...
What Are The Best Upset Picks In The First Round?
You may have noticed that the "expert brackets" we put together are mostly chalk, because they're picking the single most likely outcome of each individual game....
Is A No. 11 Seed Actually Among The Best Teams In The Country?
One of the quirks of college basketball is that we get to see only a brief audition of each team before the NCAA tournament begins. By the time the NBA playoffs start, there are 82 games' worth of data on each team, and each of those consists of 48 minutes. At the college level, teams entering the t...
Your Last-Minute Bracket Cheat Sheet: What All The Smart People Say
The "first" "round" of the NCAA tournament is underway, and the deadline for bracket submissions is fast approaching. To help you out with your last-minute picks, we took a look a seven March Madness/college hoops models, and used them to build out seven different "expert brackets."...
Is Being Cursed To A "First Four" NCAA Game Actually A Blessing?
The NCAA men's Division I basketball tournament starts tonight in Dayton with two games, as it has since 2011, with another two tomorrow night. The "First Four"—imagined as a parallel to the Final Four, even though the former features eight teams and the latter, uh, four—has traditionally been seen ...
Why The NCAA Needs To Pay Former Players, Not Just The Current Ones
The continuing debate about whether high-level collegiate basketball and football players should be paid seems to be moving in the direction of these athletes receiving some form of compensation above their scholarship. In the last year we have seen steps towards forming a college athletes' union, ...
How Have The Weights Of NFL Positions Changed Over Time?
Craig Booth—who previously made those NFL height/weight charts—just released a great series of graphics showing how the median weights of various positions have changed since 1950, based on data from Pro Football Reference. Booth isn't the first to visualize this sort of trend, but the inclusion of ...
Is Using Drones At Sports Events Actually A Crime? Should It Be?
Last month, the Nationals were seen using a four-rotor drone to take publicity photos. The FAA took issue. "No, we didn't get it cleared, but we don't get our pop flies cleared either and those go higher than this thing did," a team official told the AP afterward. Which pretty neatly sums up the FAA...
These Cool Interactives Will Help Guide You To Bracket Success
Over at The Power Rank, Grantland's Ed Feng has put together a nice interactive bracket with his tournament predictions, based on his own ranking system. If you go to his site and click on individual teams, you'll see the odds that they advance through various rounds. If you click on individual game...
So Close, ESPN Data Team
You usually can't calculate free throw percentages in your head, but 680/1,000 is pretty easy. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable explanations for why this happened—maybe the counting and rate stats update at different speeds?—but still, whoops....
Which Pundit's NCAA Tournament Bracket Should You Copy?
The March Madness brackets is fresh off the presses. Which of the so-called experts has a bracket worth using for your office pool?...
No, The Odds Of Picking A Perfect Bracket Aren't 1 In 9.2 Quintillion
Thanks to the Warren Buffett-backed Billion Dollar Bracket, more than ever before, outlets are reporting that the odds of picking a perfect bracket are "1 in 9.2 quintillion." This figure has been cited by The New York Times, USA Today, Slate, Bleacher Report, CBS, and Rick Reilly, among others, and...
Jeff Ma & David Frohardt-Lane: What's Sports Betting Really Like?
By now, it's almost a given that public discussion of sports betting will result in nothing of real value being said. It can be entertaining, but is typically vague, or cagey. But not today! We have Jeff Ma, who hosted Sloan's gambling panel, and David Frohardt-Lane, who participated, to give you so...
Just How Serious Is Joel Embiid's Injury?
The Kansas Jayhawks open up the Big 12 Tournament today against Oklahoma State, and they'll be without freshman center Joel Embiid. Embiid, who's spent much of this season somehow keeping pace with comparisons to Hakeem Olajuwon, has reportedly been diagnosed with a spinal stress fracture. The impli...
How Will The 2014 World Cup Ball Swerve? An Aerodynamic Test
There are now only a few months to go until the biggest sporting event of 2014—the FIFA World Cup in Brazil—and questions are being asked. Will the stadiums be ready? Are the airports ready for the crowds? But one matter rises above all others, and may have an impact on the destiny of the cup itself...