While researching the history of North Carolina’s Lake Norman (as one does) I encountered the story of “the real life Long Sam.” The wikipedia paragraph is so weird that I had to dig up the primary sources, which are ten times weirder. As presented in a full page spread in the Charlotte Observer on August… Continue reading Lost America: The Hot Girl In The Woods
2025: Previewing a historical season
Is this the lowest point for California college football ever? There were no California teams in the AP preseason top 25 and only USC managed to even receive votes in the most recent one. Doing an eyeball survey of the preseason AP Top 25 polls archived in wikipedia it took going back to 1965 before… Continue reading 2025: Previewing a historical season
David Stern part 10 : The roots of NBA draft manipulation
An NBA insider from a middle class franchise (the Hawks) sounds off about NBA draft practices. The system is a mockery of fairness. He’s so sick of how the top pick in the draft is manipulated by the league to allocate the best players for a handful of privileged franchises. The year is 1963. “This… Continue reading David Stern part 10 : The roots of NBA draft manipulation
The worst punt of 2024
A few years ago I added some code to apply “punt sadness score” and search for bad ones. I never really followed up because the play-by-play data was pretty polluted. Doing the API v2 cleanup reminded me of it so let’s see what running it against 2024 comes up with. Disclaimer up front: This idea… Continue reading The worst punt of 2024
David Stern part 9: The Cap
Why the salary cap matters then and now I finally got around to a detailed read of this fantastic book: The Cap, How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA by Joshua Mendelsohn. There are many interesting parts for our understanding of David Stern and his legacy. The author is a labor lawyer… Continue reading David Stern part 9: The Cap
2025 preview: We’re not dead yet
The 2025 schedules are fully loaded into CFB data so let’s run it. $ python3 ./mcc_schedule.py -vCalifornia at San Diego State on Sep 19, 2025San José State at Stanford on Sep 26, 2025San Diego State at Fresno State on Oct 24, 2025California at Stanford on Nov 21, 2025San José State at San Diego State on… Continue reading 2025 preview: We’re not dead yet
API v2
Our data provider of choice is collegefootballdata.com and they’ve been great. In the natural life stages of API developers everywhere they’ve introduced a V2 with breaking changes, final deployment coming real soon now. I’ve been there myself. After putting off any mods for a while I dusted off the codebase yesterday and got the fixes… Continue reading API v2
Bowl Season
The elusive all-California bowl One side effect of the destruction of the Pac-12 and scattering the California schools to the winds is that it increases the chances of a bowl matchup between California teams. The “classic” bowl formula is two winning schools from different conferences meet in a neutral location after the regular season has… Continue reading Bowl Season
2024 post mortem
Let’s look at the bright side: after years of Stanford and USC trading titles we have a fifth winner in as many years. Your 2024 Mythical California Cup champs, for the first time in 21 years and only the third time in 65 years: the California Golden Bears. San Diego State 10 at California 31… Continue reading 2024 post mortem
Just add hornets
After all my hand-wringing about the state of California college football last week it was a pleasant surprise to see a Sacramento State v. San Jose State matchup on TV Friday night (albeit TruTV). Sacrament State has raised its profile lately, or maybe I’m just desperate. Right now we have all the California colleges we… Continue reading Just add hornets