regressing Page 37 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Where Do Singers Screw Up The National Anthem?
Earlier this month, before the first game of the Canadian Hockey League's Memorial Cup, singer Alexis Normand joined a long list of people who have brutalized the U.S. national anthem in front of a large, tense crowd....

How Will A Meniscus Tear Affect Russell Westbrook?
We learned today that Oklahoma City's Russell Westbrook will undergo surgery for a torn lateral meniscus in his right knee. This is great news for Western Conference hopefuls and bad news for anyone who loves basketball: We still don't know how long he'll be out, and the NBA playoffs without Westbro...

How An Achilles Tear Affects NBA Players (Or, Why Kobe Is Screwed)
Kobe Bryant, your favorite high-functioning sociopath and mine, tore his Achilles tendon Friday night during a win against the Warriors. We've been hearing about "torn Achilles" for years now, but for most fans, the operational definition of the injury remains ambiguous. You hear a player has torn a...

Inside the Camera Technology That's Changing How Basketball Is Played
That video up top is a play from a New York Knicks game agains the Toronto Raptors. It was captured and created using a video system called SportVU, which is licensed by 15 NBA teams from Stats LLC. Basically, they track where every player is for every second of every game. And for the first time, ...

The Ravens Won The "Fuck" Bowl, Too: An Analysis Of Twitter Profanity During The Super Bowl
Twitter reports that the Super Bowl generated 24 million tweets last night. Most of them were terrible, so I just looked at the ones that said "fuck." ...

Who Is America's Favorite NFL Team? Facebook Data Offer A Clear Winner.
You've seen Facebook's map of geographic NFL fandom. Our clever friends at the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective dig deeper into the data to discover America's most popular football teams....

NFL 2012: Which Teams Actually Had Injuries, And Which Teams Just Lied?
Football injuries are random but inevitable. Every year, some teams will spend the season in an MRI machine, and others will end up pretty much unharmed (outside of thousands of micro-concussions). Just as predictably, some coaches will try to obfuscate their team's health to screw with their oppone...
![A Vote For Roger Clemens Was A Vote For Barry Bonds: The Politics Of The Hall Of Fame Ballot, By The Numbers [UPDATE]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/18azwl896gdgujpg.jpg)
A Vote For Roger Clemens Was A Vote For Barry Bonds: The Politics Of The Hall Of Fame Ballot, By The Numbers [UPDATE]
Hall of fame ballots follow their own own internal logic. For instance, regardless of how they feel about steroids, almost all voters agree with both or neither of the following statements:...

Do Foreign Footballers Really Dive More?
This Regressing entry is brought to you by our clever friends at the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective. Today: how Premier League diving might be a cultural phenomenon....

Even If Icing The Kicker Doesn't Work, It's Better Than Never Icing The Kicker
Mike Tomlin iced the kicker twice last night, but with an unfortunate twist: First, he called a timeout on his own kicker, Shaun Suisham, who proceeded to miss a 54-yarder. Then he stopped the Titans' Rob Bironas just as he was about to attempt the game-winning 40-yarder. Bironas waited two minutes ...

Bud Selig's New, Random Postseason Knows The Soul Of Baseball Better Than You Think
Out of the 22 playoff games in the first two rounds of the MLB playoffs, 12 have featured at least one team on the brink of elimination, and six of those will have been sudden death for both teams. Bud Selig's new postseason format puts a lot more weight on single games, which has led many players, ...

How The Crazy-Ass AL Division Races Unfolded: Visualizing Momentum
The Athletics and the Yankees clinched their respective division titles on the same day, but the paths they took to get there were very different. The A's budget freight train slammed through a Rangers squad that had sat atop the AL West for over 170 consecutive days, while the Yankees barely edged ...

Just How Tight Is The AL Playoff Race?
With three weeks to go in the season, over half of baseball is still in the race. Seventeen teams are within five games of a playoff spot. You might think that's mostly due to the new second wild card, and that's the case in the NL. With all three division leaders comfortable and the Braves safe at...

Can Science See Inside An NFL Player's Skull Before It's Too Late?
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a diagnosis for dead people. Last month, Junior Seau was found in his home in Oceanside, Calif., with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. A familiar sequence unfolded: His brain was requested by both the Brain Injury Research Institute and ...

Pablo Sanchez Would've Used Steroids, And Other Real-Life Projections For The Greatest Youth Baseball Player In Video Games
As every Millennial knows, Backyard Baseball is the children's computer game in which neighborhood boys and girls play pickup ball with kid-sized incarnations of everyone's favorite major leaguers. The 2001 edition, for example, featured the likes of Mike Piazza and Barry Bonds, traveling across dis...

How Readable Are Bill Simmons, Jason Whitlock, Rick Reilly, And Other Sportswriters? Science Investigates
The last time we played around with sportswriter analytics, we wondered if we could algorithmically determine a column's author based on his favorite words. (We could!) For a followup, I decided to look at the readability of different writers. Reading level is a nebulous concept and hard to define p...

The Verducci Effect Is Overworked And Broken Down
Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci came out with his annual "Year After Effect" column yesterday, based on his hypothesis that that young pitchers tend to break down the season after an increased workload. Specifically, a pitcher 25 and under is supposed to be at risk if he pitched at least 30 more i...