In some cases, that can account for almost total randomness. Take the Texans, who had the league’s seventh-best turnover margin (plus-12) in 2012 before falling to the league’s worst mark (minus-20) with much of the same personnel in 2013. One year later, having replaced Matt Schaub with, um, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Houston’s run-heavy scheme bounded back toward the top of the class; its plus-12 mark was tied for the second-best rate in foot...
The NFL Statistical Crystal Ball: What 2014’s Numbers Can Tell Us About 2015 «
9 years
Schedule played a huge role as well. Here’s the 2012 and 2013 schdule of the Texans:
On the other side, it’s unlikely the Packers will again finish undefeated in close games. It’s tempting to chalk up last year’s performance to Aaron Rodgers, ignore the numbers, and move along, but remember that the Packers were 5-1 in one-score games during that 15-1 season in 2011. The ...
The NFL Statistical Crystal Ball: What 2014’s Numbers Can Tell Us About 2015 «
9 years
... past. Robert Mays and I both backed them in 2013, and while I hopped off the bandwagon last year, Mays stuck around for another run. I wouldn’t blame anybody for ignoring the numbers with Tampa Bay, but the numbers have never been stronger in favor of their improvement. The 2013 team also had a staph infection run through the locker room during camp, ending two players’ careers, while its starting quarterback basically washed out of the league in entirely inexplicab...
The NFL Statistical Crystal Ball: What 2014’s Numbers Can Tell Us About 2015 «
9 years
The obvious candidate to take a step backward would be the Arizona Cardinals, who went 11-5 despite outscoring their opposition by a mere 11 points, which paints them as a team more likely to be narrowly over .500. Since the league went to a 16-game slate, just one other team has managed to win 11 games while outscoring their opponents by fewer than 20 points: the 2004 Falcons, who went just 8-8 the following y...
The NFL Statistical Crystal Ball: What 2014’s Numbers Can Tell Us About 2015 «
9 years
...football than they do for just about every other professional sport, specifically because the season is much shorter. You can fit 10 NFL seasons into one MLB campaign with a couple of games to spare. The 16-game schedule means we learn less about the true talent level of each team in football than we do in other sports.
The NFL Statistical Crystal Ball: What 2014’s Numbers Can Tell Us About 2015 «
9 years
Each May, during the rare, glorious downtime of the NFL calendar, we take a look back at the underlying metrics from 2014 that will help predict what happens to teams in 2015. Many of them are familiar to regular Grantland readers, but here’s a useful primer on where they come from and how they work.
The NFL Statistical Crystal Ball: What 2014’s Numbers Can Tell Us About 2015 «
9 years
...r in Florence, where I sat in on a Dante course at the university. The entire term was devoted to the analysis of a single canto. As it happened, the canto was Inferno 19, which is devoted to simony. Dante reserves a special hole in the third sub-circle of the eighth circle of Hell for corrupt Popes; they are stuffed into it, one after another, headfirst. Their feet are then lit on fire. Among the issues the class discussed at length was how, exactly, new Popes could be accommodated. Had space bee...
Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty - The New Yorker
9 years
...ive years, and so in what might be considered the thirteenth grade, the text for the year is the Paradiso. I recently asked the high-school-aged son of an Italian friend of mine about the experience. “It’s annoying, boring, and it never ends,” he told me. “But then you get to like it.”
Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty - The New Yorker
9 years
9 years
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