Welcome to the latest episode of Hot Takedown, FiveThirtyEight’s sports podcast. On this week’s show (Nov. 8 , 2016), we chat about Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and wonder if the numbers can tell us anything about whether the Cowboys should start Tony Romo when he is healthy again. Then we preview FiveThirtyEight’s college football predictions and Neil Paine explains why working out the selection committee’s rankings makes forecasting the playoff a little harder than usual. Finally, new FiveThirtyEight sports writer Chris Herring joins to chat about bad teams in the NBA and whether the process is finally beginning to pay off for the Philadelphia 76ers. Plus, a special Election Day quiz on the best presidents in American history.
Links to what we discussed:
- Neil Paine says Dak Prescott is already playing as well as Tony Romo ever has.
- ESPN Stats & Info explains why Dak Prescott was the best quarterback in the NFL last weekend.
- Neil Paine explains how FiveThirtyEight is predicting this year’s College Football Playoff.
- You can find the site’s predictions here.
- Tom Ziller at SB Nation says the New Orleans Pelicans and Anthony Davis are probably destined for a sad future.
- If you want to check out the historical rankings of U.S. presidents that we discussed at the end of the show, you can find them here.
- And Julia Azari wrote about how scholarly rankings of presidents are correlated with the presidents’ years of experience.