Last year, Cooper Kupp and Deebo Samuel finished as the #27 and #97 receivers in fantasy football. Through the first ten weeks of the NFL season, they’ve emerged as the clear #1 and #2 receivers.

What explains their terrific performances this season? A little bit of Matthew Stafford, and a little bit of Kyle Shanahan, for sure, but a lot of one thing in particular: yards after the catch (YAC). Kupp and Samuel (especially Samuel) have been absolute monsters this season with the ball in their hands, breaking tackles and running past safeties.

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In most ways, 2020 ended up being a pretty “quiet” year. Many workers stayed home to work virtually, international travel ground to a halt, and most Americans limited their social contact to a much smaller circle than normal to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

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For a longtime Nationals fan, watching the Playoffs this season has been a funny mix of nostalgia, jealousy, and happiness. Nostalgic for our 2019 run through the NL, jealous of the Braves and Dodgers for their success this season, and happy for longtime Nats Max Scherzer and Trea Turner, who have played such an integral role in Dodgers’ success after their blockbuster acquisition by trade.

Speaking of that deal… it was especially fun to be at the Dodgers vs Brewers Wild Card game and get to see Juan Soto attending in person, making the cross-country flight to be able to see his old teammates play a crucial elimination game!

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As a Nationals fan, it’s been a tough season. After entering with high expectations, the team has had a disappointing run of things, losing start pitchers to injury, hitters to slumps, and close games to hungrier teams.

To cap it all off, they began to finally execute a painful but necessary rebuild, trading away two of our best players in exchange for desperately needed young prospects.

To make myself feel better about the whole thing, I thought it might be nice to enjoy a little schadenfreude on behalf of some of the other teams which are on the outside of the playoff picture (I’m looking at you, Mets), and celebrate some of this season’s surprise contenders.

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The eternal cat and mouse game between pitchers and hitters took another turn this past month, as Major League Baseball made the decision to start enforcing its long-dormant prohibitions against use of foreign substances by pitchers.

First announced to owners and teams at the start of the month, and then officially revealed to the public on June 15th, umpires now perform a series of mandatory spot-checks over the course of each game to ensure that pitchers are not using illegal foreign substances.

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Data recently released by LA County shines a light on some fascinating (and troubling) trends in terms of who in the county has been vaccinated.

Nearly 5 million doses have already been administered in total through April 9th, across the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which is certainly an impressive accomplishment from a public-health perspective, and will only continue to rise once the entire adult population becomes eligible for the vaccine on April 15th.

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On March 2nd, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas lifted the state’s mask mandate, and removed all capacity restrictions on restaurants and businesses. Precisely a week later, the Texas Rangers announced that they would be taking full advantage of the Governor’s new rules, and they would be utilizing the entire 40,518 person capacity at Globe Life Field to open their season.

One of my favorite sports websites, The Athletic, covered the Ranger’s situation in a bit more detail earlier this week, comparing their laissez-faire attendance policy to what other MLB teams around the country have chosen to open the year with - which seems to be about one-quarter capacity on average.

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After years of hype and not-quite-living-up-to-his-potential, it seems that things are finally clicking for Joel Embiid. Anthony Davis, LeBron, and the Lakers figured out just how difficult the big man can be to stop this past Wednesday night as they lost their first road game since last season - a performance that also opened my eyes to exactly how well Embiid has been playing.

Coming off that performance, I thought it might be fun to do a mini-dive into some different offense metrics, and see if, in Joel’s case, the numbers back up the eye-test - and what other players have also popped to open the 2021 season!

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From 1999 to 2014, the Bowl Championship Series (better now as the BCS) administered a series of season-ending bowl games in an effort to determine the National Champion of Division I College Football. Rankings for these games, which would ultimately determine who would participate in the National Championship game, was done by fusing results of the AP Rankings, Coaches Poll rankings, and six different computer ranking systems.

This system, while well-intentioned, was ultimately doomed to a lifetime of controversy. Fusing the results of the different ranking systems created perpetual debate around the subjectivity of the results, and hosting just a single National Championship game made it difficult to compare a number of highly qualified teams against each other.

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Building maps that are rich in data and also easy to interpret is an incredibly hard task. The map-maker must keep in mind the needs of their audience and cater the projection, coloration, shading, labeling, and more so that the map can be grasped intuitively.

If you’re anything like me, you probably got a full year’s dosage of maps thrown up on big touchscreens at the start of this month as part of the 2020 Presidential Election. Unfortunately for us all, the most common map we were all looking at is objectively, with all due respect, a pretty bad map. You know, this guy?

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