With Selection Sunday selected and brackets being furiously filled, the final component of college basketball season is always the best: March Madness. We offered some of our bracket superlatives a few days ago, but let’s dive into a few more of the storylines and numbers that could determine the fate of the men’s and women’s […]
Remember all those big favorites going into the MLB postseason? The record-tying four 100-plus win teams from the regular season? The 20-win gaps between best and worst seeds in each league? The theoretical advantage of a first-round bye for top teams under MLB’s new playoff system? Turns out only one league got the memo about […]
Mel Tucker was ready. His Michigan State football team had just delivered a statement win, rallying from 16 points down to beat rival Michigan 37-33. The Spartans had soared to No. 5 in the AP Top 25 poll and would be unveiled at No. 3 in the season’s first College Football Playoff rankings. And their […]
Year after year, experts repeat the same mantra about the Australian Open: expect upsets. “Tennis’s annual surprise party,” read one headline years ago about the first Grand Slam of the tennis year. But in the past decade, compared to the other majors, the Happy Slam has resembled more of a Somber Slam for underdogs. Despite […]
They come from every corner of the country. They have been ranked and unranked, bluebloods and doormats. They are the major-conference teams — from the Power Five conferences plus Notre Dame — that have fallen prey to an upset by an upstart from the lower tier of Football Bowl Subdivision schools (now called the Group […]