regressing Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
How Close Are We To A Two-Hour Marathon?
On Sunday, from the moment 30-year-old Dennis Kimetto breasted the tape at the Berlin Marathon at 2:02:57 to set a new world record by 26 seconds, conversation in certain circles turned to what this meant for the assault on a sub-two-hour marathon....
Chart: Which NCAA Football Teams Outplay Their Recruit Rankings?
When college football teams fail to meet expectations, fans tend to turn to an old stand-by: Our coach is an all right recruiter, but he just can't coach. This is the narrative behind, for example, Will Muschamp's downturn at Florida. On the other hand, coaches who significantly exceed expectati...
The Math Behind McDonald's Monopoly
Man, was I ever excited when I saw that McDonald's Monopoly was back this year. Not so much to play it, mind you: I just had a blast looking at the Roll Up the Rim stats last year, and hoped I could do the same for Monopoly this year. ...
Which College Football Team Does Your Hometown Root For?
The New York Times has a new interactive showing which college football teams the country roots for, according to data it has exclusively from Facebook. Fandom is broken down into ZIP codes, which you can zoom in and mouseover to see in detail, with percentages—which is the only way you can see som...
Chart: Royals-A's Was Awesome; Giants-Pirates Was Shit
Everyone knows the AL wild-card game between Oakland and Kansas City was much more exciting than San Francisco's blowout win over Pittsburgh in the NL game. Fangraphs' Jeff Sullivan has provided all of us with a stark visual representation of that fact by charting the win-expectancy fluctuations fro...
What's Wrong With LeSean McCoy?
Philadelphia is 3-1 and at the top of the NFC East, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the stat line of its star, LeSean McCoy. In Philly's last two games, Shady's totaled 37 rushing yards on 39 touches, and no receptions. Through four games last season, McCoy had 468 yards on the ground. This...
The Most Popular Porn Genres, Visualized
Generally, PornHub PR cosplaying as dataviz is useless and branded, in the way a cheap USB drive or lanyard or Eli Manning might be. This is half decent. Open image in a new tab for the full size. ...
Blowouts Have Gotten Worse In Non-Conference NCAA Football Games
If you thought early-season college football games have gotten more boring over the years, you might be onto something. Analysis from the Wall Street Journal shows blowouts have become more common for ranked college football teams in non-conference games....
A's-Royals Confused The Hell Out Of Gamblers
Last night's AL play-in game was the kind of protracted back-and-forth that makes a baseball game genuinely exciting. It also drives bettors nuts. Here are the implied winning percentages, which are modeled off of live betting on Betfair by Gambletron 2000. ...
The Pirates Were One Of The Unluckiest (And Best) Teams In Baseball
Pittsburgh hosts its second straight National League play-in game tonight. The Pirates will host the Giants, with both teams finishing the regular season at at 88-74—which doesn't mean they were necessarily equal this year. While the one-game format renders a lot of season-long trends obsolete, the ...
Chart: How Sabermetric MLB Forecasts Stacked Up Against Vegas
From Skidmore College statistics professor Michael Lopez comes the handy chart you see above, plotting the 2014 win totals of all 30 MLB teams against preseason predictions from Vegas and what Lopez calls his "Statsheads Prediction."...
What Were The Most Extreme Home Runs Of 2014?
This Nelson Cruz blast was the most line-drive home run of the year, reaching its apex at just 41 feet off the ground, according to FanGraphs. Check out the season's deepest, shortest, and other "extreme" home runs over at FanGraphs. ...
Chart: Which MLB Fans Suck At Supporting Winning Teams?
This graph, from Harley Ellenberger, charts MLB home attendance and winning percentage throughout the season. As expected, the Red Sox, Cubs, and Yankees had solid attendance despite missing the playoffs, and no one went to see the Astros or Rays. But what's most amusing is that despite making their...
Important Update: NYT's Math Also Rates Cardinals The Damned Worst
The New York Times is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Wall Street Journal on the issue of the least sympathetic, most contemptible MLB playoff team....
Chart: Stadium Distance From Downtown In Four-Sport Cities
This chart from Redditor jamintime shows distance between stadiums and downtowns in cities with NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL franchises. Google Maps was used to track distance and define downtown and stadium locations. In cities with multiple pro teams in the same sport, the closest stadium to downtown wa...
Michigan's Problem Isn't Commercialism; Michigan's Problem Is It Stinks
Recently, I've been reading about Michigan's attendance woes (which only really count as "woes" if you consider a college selling out 95 percent of a 100,000-seat stadium at $75+, plus an unspecified donation per ticket, woeful), and it occurs to me that lay people and economists think very differen...
Important WSJ Study: The Cardinals Are The Most Hateable Playoff Team
According to science, the Cardinals are the most hateable team in in the MLB playoffs. ...