Over time, athletes get stronger and faster, come from a broader talent pool, are better trained, and benefit from ever-growing institutional knowledge of their chosen art. This is most readily apparent with such individual skills as swimming, running and jumping — or kicking a football. One of the biggest stories of the 2016 NFL wild-card […]
Over time, athletes get stronger and faster, come from a broader talent pool, are better trained, and benefit from ever-growing institutional knowledge of their chosen art. This is most readily apparent with such individual skills as swimming, running and jumping — or kicking a football. One of the biggest stories of the 2016 NFL wild-card […]
For all the effort that’s gone into developing sophisticated statistical measurements of football, it remains a highly unpredictable sport. As my buddy Chase Stuart once wrote about the NFL, “we don’t know anything and we never will.” And yet, while we may not know anything for certain, we’ve learned enough that from week to week, […]
For all the effort that’s gone into developing sophisticated statistical measurements of football, it remains a highly unpredictable sport. As my buddy Chase Stuart once wrote about the NFL, “we don’t know anything and we never will.” And yet, while we may not know anything for certain, we’ve learned enough that from week to week, […]
Last year, we went into the playoffs with a pretty good idea of the Super Bowl favorites. This year, not so much. According to our Elo ratings, no team entered the 2015-16 postseason with better than a 20 percent shot at the Lombardi Trophy. (As a point of historical comparison, Elo’s No. 1 regular-season team […]
