1. and 2. - I think ESPN’s history is particularly egregious.

I have no opinion on the current state of SI, but re: ESPN, my issue is that while they produce a lot of great journalism in addition to a lot of crap, the brand as a whole has demonstrated repeatedly that they’re much more concerned with protecting their corporate partnerships with the NFL in particular than they are…

Great piece!

“Michael Jorden”? I think you meant:

Also, it needs to be said: some people can’t read. Talking is faster than reading and typing, and talking can be much faster than composing an email for the benefit of someone whose eyes glaze over if a paragraph has more than two sentences.

“One less day of practice isn’t going to ruin the season.”

Personally, I still don’t REALLY believe in PER and WS/48 and the like. I don’t have the analysis to back that up, and I’ve used them to bolster points I’m making in player comparisons, but I don’t think even the guys who developed those stats think they’ve got it all nailed down. And beyond that, I think trying to…

It’s certainly a possibility, with troubling implications for how we adjudicate sports history.

I’ve seen it pointed out about the Spurs the last few years - their effort and execution (LMA aside) - basically means that on a random night in the regular season, they’re probably playing closer to their ceiling than the other championship contenders. I adopted this point to posit last year’s Celtics as the baby…

I’m going to keep arguing that Love was as good as he looked on the T-Wolves, he was just terribly suited to being the third banana on a team with LBJ and Irving. I was commenting as much at the time: Love was like the Chris Bosh “problem” made much worse. The Chris Bosh “problem” was that to fit with LBJ and Wade as…

I’m grateful to this story for highlighting the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, because previously my attempts to tick off our 17 intelligence agencies always foundered at the end with “uh, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the one that isn’t the National Reconnaissance Office.”

... he’s 30.

I wonder if modern boxing is worse in this regard than bare knuckle boxing was. By the accounts I’ve read, guys didn’t throw as many full-out power punches, and threw many fewer headshots period, when their hands weren’t cushioned, among other differences. The fights were long and bloody and exhausting, but I wouldn’t…

Yeah, it’s badass. I don’t know if it’s “optimal”, but using a balance ball to actually do core work seems to do what it’s supposed to. What was dumb was the (I think dying) fad of doing OTHER stuff while also using a balance ball to make it harder.

In a real street fight, people would be doing a lot of shit that would get them DQed in MMA.

I think if you start from the premise that any competent modern MMA fighter has sufficiently superior grappling skills than any professional boxer, then you sell out for the takedown and accept whatever body shots you have to to protect your head while closing to grappling range, and the fight’s over. That’s the key -…

It’s the stakes. There’s more to it than that, but at the end of the day, prize fighting has pretty high stakes (and I don’t mean financially), and that adds juice to every other component. Is it fun to find out out the secret unspoken byways of the NBA? As an NBA fan, absolutely! But in boxing, these people might…

Would’ve been even better - literally, more people would be alive today - if Roberts hadn’t decided to save Obamacare by rewriting parts of it on the fly, what with all his experience as a legislator, thus allowing states with shitstains for governors to refuse the Medicaid expansion.

Can we compromise with: JD Power might have an issue, but also there’s a problem with Rovell being either too hasty or too naive about really basic statistical ideas to draw accurate inferences?

If your theoretically valid sample returns a result you know for a fact is unrepresentative of the population as a whole, then you ... know the sample isn’t representative. (Not to get into detail, but this is a relevant frustration at my job, where some aspects of performance are subject to an external audit by…