This year’s N.C.A.A. tournament has not featured all that many great games — with some exceptions, like Michigan’s come-from-behind win against Kansas on Friday. The flip side is that the four teams that remain have all played exceptionally well, often dominating their opponents. Louisville won its first four games by an average of 22 points — the same margin by which it beat Duke on Sunday. Syracuse has won by 20 points, on average. Michigan’s margin of victory has averaged 16 points, despite the close call against Kansas. Even Wichita State, which has a chance to become the most poorly seeded team ever to win the tournament (and probably the least likely, statistically), has won its games by an average...
FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver traveled to Australia to play in the Aussie Millions Poker Championship. While he was there, he spoke to Fairfax Media about tics, tells and “playing the math.”
Jessie Schwartz for The New York Times Baseball writers elected no one to the Hall of Fame on Wednesday, despite what might have been the deepest ballot in years. The failure of the writers to pick Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens was not a surprise given the low vote totals received in the past by Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, other players associated with the use performance-enhancing drugs. But the vote totals for Bonds and Clemens, just 36 and 38 percent, were lower than expected. Craig Biggio, who received 68.2 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility, will almost certainly make it into the Hall of Fame someday. Still, his profile is quite similar to Robin Yount...
Left, Barton Silverman/The New York Times; Chris Livingston for The New York Times Some Hall of Fame voters lump Mike Piazza, left, and Jeff Bagwell together with known steroid users. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, eligible to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame for the first time, will almost certainly not be named when the next choices for Cooperstown are announced on Wednesday. Instead, tallies of sportswriters who have publicly announced their ballots suggest that they may only get 40 to 50 percent of the vote, despite having statistical records that rank them as among the best players in history. A player must be named on 75 percent of the ballots to be elected to the Hall of...
Monday’s Bowl Championship Series title game is attracting a significant amount of attention from fans and the news media. Google searches for the terms “BCS Championship Game” and “BCS Title Game” are on pace to be about twice as high as they were last year. Senior executives at ESPN, which will televise the game, are openly speculating that the contest could challenge ratings records — perhaps matching the mark set in 2006, when the game between Texas and U.S.C. attracted a 21.7 Nielsen rating. There are reasons for television executives to be excited. Notre Dame ranks as the fourth-most popular football program in the country, and Alabama as the eighth, according to an analysis I conducted in 2011. And the...
