Once a year, members of Congress take a break from delivering grandiose speeches and passing historic legislation to do something significantly more humbling: play baseball. On Wednesday evening, Democrats and Republicans will face off in the Congressional Baseball Game, an annual event that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. Though the play is […]
How this works: Our model uses the College Football Playoff (CFP) selection committee’s past behavior and an Elo rating-based system to anticipate how the committee will rank teams and ultimately choose playoff contestants, accounting for factors that include record, strength of schedule, conference championships won and head-to-head results. It also uses ESPN’s Football Power Index […]
This year’s college football season has started with a dose of parity rarely seen in the playoff era. While Nick Saban and top-ranked Alabama still seem plenty dominant, having extended their winning streak to 18 games and counting by crushing Southern Miss last Saturday, the four other schools with at least two College Football Playoff […]
First, we talk about an NFL matchup two years and so many hot takes in the making: Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers returning to his old stomping grounds in New England to face his old coach, Bill Belichick. It’s Belichick with something to prove in the faceoff: His teams without Brady have in […]
At first glance, the pecking order in the WNBA was pretty clear this season. Essentially, there were six teams with legitimate playoff campaigns, which we’ll measure with the shorthand of a positive regular-season net rating. On Sunday, four of those six played for the right to advance to the WNBA semifinals, and while the lower […]