fivethityeight

If March Madness is defined by upsets and buzzer-beaters, one team on the women’s side has been flying under the radar by soaring high over the rest of the field.  The Tennessee Lady Volunteers’ contests have entirely lacked excitement. The Lady Vols walloped No. 13 seed Saint Louis 95-50 in the first round of the […]

As the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments roll into their second week, starting with tonight’s slate of Sweet 16 men’s games, it’s time to take stock of just who the best and most exciting performers have been in March Madness so far. To that end, let’s look at a ranking of every active player, according […]

2022 brought baseball fans a handful of gifts, headlined by Aaron Judge’s all-around excellence and Shohei Ohtani continuing to be Shohei Ohtani. But a few months of Albert Pujols’s farewell season were just as historic. Serving as designated hitter for his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals, Pujols put up one of the great old-guy […]

In the modern NBA, there is no resource more valuable than time on the shot clock. In fact, it’s the only thing that teams can’t score without. While it’s tough to put the ball in the basket if you don’t have a high-level ball handler or marksmen to knock down shots and space the floor, […]

The 2023 men’s NCAA Tournament started with a bang. Within six hours of the round of 64 tipping off, we’d seen an experienced No. 4 seed Virginia collapse in dramatic fashion to No. 13 Furman and the much taller No. 2 Arizona get schooled by No. 15 Princeton down the stretch. By Friday night, we’d […]

If you had envisioned a 2023 women’s NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 without Grace Berger of Indiana, Haley Jones of Stanford and Celeste Taylor of Duke, well, congratulations: You predicted the future better than almost anyone. But for the rest of us, it’s been a crazy tournament already, with massive swings in the odds and futures […]

For the past two weeks, the passion of the World Baseball Classic has been on full display. There was the indefatigable cheer squad for Chinese Taipei; Joey Meneses’s epic bat toss after homering for Mexico; Italy pitcher Joe LaSorsa’s ear-splitting paroxysm after getting a clutch out; and dueling Nicaraguan and Puerto Rican street bands in […]

The opening weekend of the 2023 men’s NCAA Tournament certainly delivered on its widely anticipated madness. Four of the 10 teams with the highest pre-tournament championship odds according to FiveThirtyEight’s model were eliminated before the Sweet 16, two of whom were slotted as No. 1 seeds. In the 38-year history of the current tournament format, […]

The month of madness is upon us, and it didn’t take long for the moniker to deliver. In the third game of the opening full day of the 2023 men’s NCAA Tournament, No. 7 seed Missouri advanced past No. 10 Utah State, 76-65. Wait, that doesn’t sound like a big deal, does it? After all, […]

For the second consecutive men’s college basketball season, just five of the 15 teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference were selected to participate in the NCAA Tournament: Duke earned an automatic bid and the No. 5 seed in the East after winning the ACC tournament; regular-season co-champions Miami (No. 5 in the Midwest, No. 1 […]