Sports fans are some of the most passionate people on the planet. You live and die by each game, minute, and second. As you know, not every team can have the best fans, so in this series we attempt to actually prove which teams do.
The 2012-13 NBA schedule laid out with days of rest for each team, home and away. Every game of the year is grouped into rest categories, from back-to-backs through five days off.
Part III turns to the impact of returning starting quarterbacks. Neither raw returning starters nor experience predicted success in the first two parts, so the question is whether the one position everybody watches behaves differently.
Part I concluded that the total number of returning starters had many flaws as a predictor. Part II weights those starters by experience, because a returning senior and a returning freshman plainly do not count the same.
Returning starters get quoted every preseason as though the count alone forecasts the year ahead. Part I of the series tests whether the number of returning starters has any predictive power on next season's results.
In college athletics, football is king, and the head coach is the most important hire an athletic director makes. This piece lines up what schools pay their staffs against what those staffs actually deliver on the field.
Pavel Podkolzin. Mouhamed Sene. Oleksiy Pecherov. The names that stick are the ones that did not work out, which is exactly why the reputation needs testing against the whole draft record rather than the memorable failures.
