regressing Page 36 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Hidden Victims Of The NFL's Concussion Crisis
Late last fall, as the NFL playoff picture began to take shape, I was summoned to the psychiatric ward of my hospital. As an HIV specialist, I routinely encounter patients with mental health issues who have trouble taking their medications, but when I read the page requesting my consultation, I noti...
What Makes A Stanley Cup Champion? More Hockey Interactives To Explore
Continuing our industry-leading coverage of interactive hockey infographics, the charts above are a selection from an excellent piece of data viz by Dark Horse Analytics, which explore the relationship between payroll/attendance/offense/penalties and team performance....
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....
Cool Chart: A's Skipper Bob Melvin Is The King Of Platoons
Over at Sports on Earth, Jack Moore created this great graphic to demonstrate just how crazy A's manager Bob Melvin is about platoons. The green rectangles represent consecutive games in which the same hitter held the same spot in the batting order, with blanks showing a change from the previous gam...
Here's A New Stat To Figure Out The Best Scorers In The NBA
Field goal percentage is misleading. We know that, because if it wasn't, Tyson Chandler wouldn't threaten to break 70 percent every year, and Reggie Evans would produce a literal black hole in each of his box scores, which would consume their immediate surroundings and we'd have no idea what happene...
Chart: How Does Your NFL Team Stack Up On Offense and Defense?
Over at Advanced NFL Stats, Brian Burke has put together a great visualization plotting the offensive and defensive performance of the league's 32 teams. It's nothing too complicated—basically a NYMag Approval Matrix for football—but it reveals a lot about the state of the NFL through Week 5....
Who The Hell's On The Ice? Cool Interactive Explores Hockey Line Changes
It's hard enough to follow the puck in televised hockey, so forget about tracking the many, many on-the-fly line changes. Luckily ShiftChart, a sample of which you see above, is here to do the work for you. ...
What's More Improbable: The Jaguars' +28 Line Or An 11-Inch Penis?
The murmurs began last week, before the Broncos put up 51 points against the Cowboys and the Jaguars lost second-overall pick Luke Joeckel to injury. And when the dust of Week 5 had settled, sure enough, the betting line for Jaguars at Broncos was set at 28 points, which is a lot....
When Should Dallas Have Allowed Denver To Score A Touchdown?
Once Demaryius Thomas crossed the line to gain at the Dallas 14 yard line with 1:50 to play, the Dallas defense should have intentionally allowed the TD. With 2 timeouts and 1:40+ to play, they would have had a better chance of winning than allowing Denver to choke the life out of them and kick an e...
The Injury History Of Everyone On The Field When Jake Locker Got Hurt
Four seconds into the play above, Jake Locker took an awkward double hit from Muhammad Wilkerson and Quinton Coples and had to be carted off the field with a hip injury. If anyone could sympathize, it was, well, everyone else on the field....
Infographics: Every NFL Offense's Production, Visualized By Position
Instinctively, you know every team has strengths and weaknesses. You see it in the box scores and the advanced metrics, but when the teams line up, a shitty running back doesn't look impossibly different from Adrian Peterson. So, here's a visual aid. Every NFL offense, visualized by how each of the ...
What Really Went Wrong With Rob Gronkowski's Arm Surgeries?
Hours after the 2013 Super Bowl, Rob Gronkowski danced on stage at Encore, the kind of Vegas club you pray your friends never drag you to. As I watched the inevitable TMZ video—Gronk body-slammed a pal onstage—I was less interested in Gronk Gronking than in the black cast encasing his left forearm. ...
Because Smart Shouldn't Be Stupid, We'll Be Regressing
Science lies at the heart of nearly every sports story of any consequence—the mysteries of brain damage, the seasonal hysterias over performance-enhancing drugs, the progression of sports analytics from the interstices of the common box score to the movement of the human body, the number of non-alc...
What If The NBA And MLB Played An NFL-Style Season?
A big part of the NFL's appeal is all that "any given Sunday" stuff—a team like the Chiefs can come out of nowhere and look like world-beaters, while a team like the Giants can spend the first quarter of the season playing like the last reel of Horse Feathers. A lot of this uncertainty can be attri...
Are Thursday NFL Games Actually As Terrible As They Seem?
It's conventional wisdom that the Thursday night NFL games, whether because of the short break or the quality of the teams involved, are crap. The conventional wisdom's not always right. Over at Sports on Earth, Aaron Gordon dove into 13 years' worth of games to puzzle out the truth....
Who Is The Most Pompous Sports Pundit? A Scientific Investigation
Of all the stupid rhetorical plays columnists use—issuing thundering imperatives, positioning their banal opinions as the exact midpoints between varieties of unyielding madness, championing their cronies' worthless businesses as examples of the disciplinary power of markets, etc. etc.—the funniest ...
Study: NFL Teams Have No Idea What They're Doing In The Draft
Today the Philadelphia Inquirer profiles Cade Massey, a professor at Penn's Wharton School of business. Already with a study under his belt arguing that the conventional wisdom of the Draft Value Chart is all wrong, Massey was contracted by an unnamed NFL team to study the history of the draft for m...
How Far Did Rocky Go in His Training Run in <em>Rocky II</em>?
Originally published in Philadelphia magazine....
Brandon Marshall Is Better Than Drew Brees, And Other Fantasy Truths
Fantasy football may not have all the blood and sweat and violence and trauma of the game as it's played on the field, but there's at least one way in which it's just like the real thing: as John Madden put it, "usually the team that scores the most points wins." How you get those points may be ver...
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....