Sports – FiveThirtyEight — Defense RSS



The 49ers Are The Best In Football’s Most Important Stat

For decades, the battle to win football games has pivoted on the battle to win the passing game. The connection between winning and net passing yards per pass play — that is, outgaining your opponent on passing yards minus sack yards lost per pass play — has been well known in football circles since the […]

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A Better Way To Evaluate NBA Defense

Basketball, in some sense, is fundamentally a shooting game. Shooting isn’t the only important action that takes place on a basketball court, obviously. But if no one kept track of who was taking shots and making buckets, we’d have, at best, an extremely fuzzy impression of which players were actually any good, even if we […]

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