We read 8 NHL preseason games: every home team won — and 3 did it with fewer shots
Colorado put 32 shots on net and scored once — 3 home teams won despite being outshot. The power play managed 5 goals on 47 chances, none at all in 5 of the 8 games.
Sports
Accountability the broadcasts skip — officiating-accuracy ledgers, the leagues nobody staffs, the numbers behind the narrative.
We read the 15 MLB games ESPN listed as Final for September 11: 3 out-hit their opponents and lost — all 3 hit zero home runs
Houston reached base 10 times and scored once. Tampa Bay reached base 6 times and scored 3. Three teams generated more hits — and fewer results.
Seattle went 0-for-2 in the red zone and won. Both trips scored.
New England ran 67 plays, held the ball 34 minutes, and converted the game's only red-zone touchdown — then Drake Maye threw three interceptions on three straight drives.
We read the 15 MLB games ESPN listed for September 9: hits matched the winner 10 times — conversion rate matched 14
In 4 games the team with more hits lost — and in all 4, the winner converted baserunner opportunities into runs at a higher rate.
We read the 45 tight ends with 30-plus targets in 2024: the two highest PPR totals were built on volume, not touchdowns
Brock Bowers and Trey McBride finished first and second in the pool on yards and catches. Mark Andrews finished sixth on 11 touchdowns — and his volume without them ranked him eleventh.
We read the 26 completed games ESPN listed across two days: in 18 of them, the first team to lead was never overtaken
Thirteen finished within one run, yet 18 of 26 saw no lead change — and the 4th inning was scoreless in 45 of 52 half-innings
We ranked the 284 qualifying skill-position players by 2025 PPR: the WR12-WR13 gap was 0.2 points, the QB12-QB13 gap was 30
Across the 284 qualifying players in four positions, the largest rank-12-to-13 step — the last-starter boundary in a standard 12-team single-QB PPR league — belonged to quarterback, not tight end.
We computed expected wins for all 30 MLB clubs — the team with zero run differential has 77 wins
Tampa leads the AL East despite a run-margin gap of 70 runs behind the Yankees. Cincinnati is 8 games above what a -108 run differential suggests. A full read of the MLB's own formula, all 30 clubs through September 7.
We read all 13 completed September 5 MLS games: the shots-on-target leader won 4 of 7 decided — the Galaxy won with 3
47 goals, 136 shots on target across 13 completed games — and in 3 of 7 decided, finishing rate beat volume
We read all 15 September 2 MLB games: 5 went to extras — and every one was tied through nine
September 2 ran at 3.8× the season's extra-inning rate. Four of the five games were already knotted before the ninth began. Away teams went 4-1 when the innings kept coming.
We read college football's first 19 games: losers account for 17% of Q1 scoring and 39% of Q4
The box score's final margin compresses the story. In the 10 games decided by halftime, the trailing team held just 5% of first-quarter points — and 39% of fourth-quarter points.
We read every 2025 QB run: scrambles made 80% of the rushing yards, designed runs 60% of the touchdowns
The 38 quarterbacks who threw 200-plus passes ran for 8,801 yards and 97 touchdowns. Split every carry into a play the offense called and a scramble off a broken pass, and the two halves point opposite ways — Patrick Mahomes gained 420 of his 429 rushing yards improvising; Josh Allen scored 11 of his 14 rushing touchdowns on runs that were called.
We read all 15 WNBA shot diets: three-point volume barely tracks a team's record; accuracy tracks it far more
Across the full 2026 season to date, the share of a team's shots that come from three-point range is essentially unrelated to its record (Pearson 0.06, tie-aware Spearman 0.04) — the four most three-reliant offenses are 28-11, 24-16, 16-23 and 11-29. Three-point accuracy tracks winning far more closely (0.61 / 0.63); volume does not.
All 32 passing offenses: a lead pass-catcher's fantasy value tracked target concentration more closely than pass volume
Rank all 32 NFL offenses by the share of targets its single busiest pass-catcher commanded and the lead receiver's full-PPR points follow it — correlation 0.74, against 0.38 for how many passes the team threw. Buffalo charged more targets than New Orleans and produced no startable receiver; New Orleans funneled 27.6% to Chris Olave and made him a WR6.
Two par-5s made nearly half the Tour Championship's under-par scoring — the other 16 holes played almost even
Through 54 holes at East Lake, we scored every player who finished all three rounds: the 6th and 18th holes, 11% of the course, produced 112 of the field's 231 strokes under par — one shy of what all twelve par-4s made combined, at a 63.8% birdie rate.
We read all 49 workhorse backs of 2025: rushing touchdowns tracked goal-line carries, not total volume
Across every running back who carried 100-plus times, rushing scores correlated 0.885 with carries inside the 10-yard line and just 0.636 with total carries — and in Seattle and Atlanta the back who owned the goal line was not the one who owned the workload.
Two of MLB's three best records in one-run games belong to losing teams — close games barely track quality
We split all 550 one-run games this season from the rest. Run differential tracks a team's multi-run record (r=0.92) and barely its one-run record (r=0.23) — Texas and Cincinnati sit top-three in close games with badly negative run margins.
Field goals nearly matched touchdowns across the NFL preseason's first 33 games — and in six, the winner made no more touchdowns than the team it beat, but more field goals
We counted every scoring play in the 33 completed games — Hall of Fame weekend plus the first two preseason weekends: 112 field goals against 123 touchdowns, a third of the kicks from 50 yards or longer, and in 6 of the 32 decided games the winner scored no more touchdowns than the team it beat. Two of the six were Tennessee's, both with four Joey Slye field goals.
Jefferson drew 19 red-zone targets and scored twice; Goedert drew 15 and scored 11 — we read all 811 receiving TDs
In the 2025 regular season a target from inside the 20 scored at 24.2%, one from anywhere else at 1.6% — and across 124 pass-catchers the red-zone look, not the raw target column, is the target that tracks the scoring.
We read every US Open qualifying opener: the first-set winner won 84% of matches — and exactly half the deciders
Across all 128 completed first-round qualifying matches at the 2026 US Open — 64 men, 64 women — the player who won the opening set won the match 105 of 125 times that finished on court. But that entire edge is straight-sets. Once a match reached a third set, the first-set winner went 20-20.
We read all 36 qualified 2025 passers: 38% to 64% of each one's passing yards came after the catch
Standard fantasy scoring pays 0.04 points a passing yard whether the quarterback drove it downfield or dumped it to a receiver who ran the rest. Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford each threw for about 4,600 yards in 2025 — Goff's came 53% after the catch, Stafford's 39%.
We read all 33 NFL preseason games so far: scoring peaks in the second quarter and craters in the third
The fourth quarter, played almost entirely by backups, outscored the starters' opening quarter by 78 points. The scoring doesn't follow the talent off the field.
We priced all 31,210 fantasy opportunities of 2025: in PPR a target is worth 2.64 carries, 1.60 in standard
A carry and a target are the two atoms of fantasy scoring, and they are not priced alike. Read the complete 2025 ledger and the gap holds even inside the running-back pool — the 55 backs with 100-plus opportunities ran on 81% of their chances but banked only 63% of their points there, and made the other 37% on the 19% that came through the air.
The average WR week overstates the typical one: rank 2025's top 36 by median, not mean, and 16 move five-plus spots
We scored all 18 regular-season weeks in full PPR for every receiver who played at least 14 of them. For 78 of 94, the season average sat above the median game — a few booms lifting a number a weekly lineup never collects. Michael Wilson ranked WR13 by average and WR35 by the game he turned in half the time.
We counted every shot in Europe's big four last weekend: 999 of them, two-thirds never hit the target
Across 38 matches in England, Spain, Italy and France on Aug. 21-24, teams put 327 of 999 shots on target and scored 98 — one goal for every 10 attempts. Barcelona scored 5 on 11 shots; Angers took 20, hit the target twice, and scored none.
We read all 10 Serie A openers: home and away scored 12 goals apiece — and the road teams won 6 of 10
Across the complete 2026-27 opening round on Aug. 22-24, visitors kept five of the six clean sheets — and the only two shut-out hosts who still held a majority of the ball, Venezia at 71% and Bologna at 59%, lost by two and by one.
We read all 18 weeks: 2025's weekly RB1 tier was 55 different backs, most from outside the season top 12
We scored every 2025 regular-season week in full PPR and ranked the 12 highest-scoring running backs in each — 216 startable weekly finishes. They belonged to 55 different backs, and 115 of them came from players who ended the year outside the total-points top 12.
We read all 15 of Sunday's MLB games: in 12, the winner's biggest inning matched or beat the loser's whole night
Across 141 runs on the Aug. 23 slate, 56.7% scored in each team's single biggest inning. Only three winners ground it out — one of them without ever scoring more than a single run in an inning.
We read all 32 NFL backfields: on a third, the back who runs the ball isn't the back who catches it
In 2025 the leading rusher and the leading pass-catcher were different players in 10 of 32 backfields, and 15 lead runners took under half their own backfield's catches — the passing down is a separately owned job the depth-chart 'starter' label hides.
We read all 33 backs who carried 150+ times in 2025: the yards they made after contact ran 33% to 61% of their total
Pro Football Reference splits every rushing yard into what a back gained before a defender touched him and what he gained after. Read across the whole workhorse pool, the same rushing-yards line hides two very different stories — Jahmyr Gibbs got two-thirds of his yards before contact, Quinshon Judkins made 61% of his after it, on the thinnest before-contact cushion of the group.
We read all 15 of Friday's MLB games: home teams went 14-1, and swept every one-run game
On a night the league is normally a 52.7% coin flip at home, the road won exactly once — Cleveland's 9-1 rout at Coors, an 8-run blowout, though not the night's biggest: that was Arizona's 9-0 shutout of Cincinnati, a home win. Every game decided by a single run went to the home team, three of them on a 10th-inning walk-off.
Portland made 5 more threes and led most of the night — then lost by 3 at the free-throw line
Two 2026 WNBA expansion teams met at Rogers Arena, and the box score split into three clean columns: Portland won the three-point column by 15, Toronto won the two-point column by 6 and the free-throw column by 12 — 33 trips to the line to Portland's 17 — and the game 82-79.
We read the four completed NFL preseason games: the losers went 0-for-5 in the red zone, the winners 12-for-13
The four beaten teams — Steelers, Jaguars, Texans, Chargers — reached the red zone five times and scored no touchdowns. Two of them found the end zone on defense — pick-sixes of 80 and 16 yards — but none scored one from inside the 20, and Houston put up 20 points on zero red-zone snaps and still lost by two.
We read all 32 kickers: accuracy barely moved the 2025 fantasy order — attempts did, and the offense owns those
One primary kicker per team, the full 2025 regular season. Field-goal accuracy ranged 66.7% to 96.6% and correlated 0.39 with fantasy points. Attempts correlated 0.95 — and attempts belong to the offense, not the leg.
Preseason football scored 18% fewer points than a regular-season week — not sloppier, just shorter of the red zone
We read every point and every drive of the 16 games played Aug 13–16 against a regular-season opening week: the same possessions, the same red-zone conversion, the same turnover rate. The only real gap was how often a drive reached scoring range.
All 78 WRs with 50+ targets in 2025: PPR points tracked volume, not depth — aDOT ran 3.7 to 19.0 and barely moved the total
Across every wideout who saw 50 targets in the 2025 regular season, full-PPR points correlated 0.97 with receiving yards and −0.01 with how far downfield those targets flew. The pool's deepest-target receiver and a far shallower one finished six-tenths of a point apart.
We read all 15 of MLS's Wednesday games: the team with more of the ball won 4 and lost 8
Across the complete August 19 slate, the side that kept more possession went 4-3-8 and the side that took more shots did worse (3-2-9). Only shots on target pointed the right way — and barely, 6-3-5.
The gap between PPR and standard fantasy scoring is exactly one number — catches — and it reorders the receiver board
We read every 2025 pass-catcher on both scoring systems most leagues draft from. The two boards differ by a single input — receptions — and it sorts possession receivers and field-stretchers into opposite tiers.
Toronto took 17 more shots than Indiana, grabbed 18 offensive boards — and led for none of the 40 minutes
We read the full box score from the Tempo's first home date with the Fever. Toronto out-shot, out-rebounded and out-shot-from-deep the visitor by raw counts — and lost by six, because Indiana turned 70 shots into 101 points while Toronto needed 87 to score 95.
We read all 39 tight ends: re-price 2025's fantasy TE finishes at the position's average touchdown rate and the board reshuffles — TE7 Goedert falls five spots, TE8 Johnson climbs three
Re-score every qualified tight end at the position's own scoring rate and the board shuffles: Dallas Goedert's TE7 finish, built on 591 yards and 11 touchdowns, falls five spots to TE12 — while Juwan Johnson's 889 yards climb from TE8 to TE5.
New Orleans was 89% to win at halftime, then never scored again — and lost to Jacksonville on even yardage
The Saints scored on four of their first eight possessions and none of their last four; Jacksonville, down 20-6, answered with 18 unanswered points and won 24-20. Final yardage: 277 to 275. Read the two halves apart and a coin-flip box score becomes a game whose result turned on when each team scored.
Fantasy's QB1 was passing's QB10: across all 45 qualified passers, Josh Allen's edge was 14 rushing touchdowns
We read every quarterback who threw 100 passes in 2025 and ranked them twice. On his arm alone Josh Allen finishes 10th; his QB1 season is 138 points of rushing — and Drake Maye ran nearly as often for a quarter of the scores.
We read every completed singles match at the Cincinnati Open: 9 winners took fewer games than the player they beat
Across 204 finished singles matches at the 2026 tournament, 9 were won by the player who won fewer total games — Alex de Minaur among them — and 8 more, including Novak Djokovic's loss, ended with both players winning exactly the same number. Tennis is built to throw away the margin inside a set, and the complete read shows how often that flips the scoreboard.
Across the 78 WRs with 50+ targets in 2025, fantasy and opportunity ranks diverge — and the wedge is touchdowns
Justin Jefferson out-targeted, out-caught and out-gained Davante Adams last season — and finished 12 fantasy spots behind him, his 12-touchdown deficit outweighing every volume edge. We ranked the whole pool two ways to find where the box score and the workload disagree.
We read all 16 NFL preseason games at once: turnover margin picked the winner in just 7 — and 4 won it backward
The complete 13–16 August slate — all 32 teams, one game each, one 13-13 tie. The team with more first downs won 13 of the 15 decided games; the team that lost the turnover margin still won 4 of them. Indianapolis turned the ball over four times, out-gained New England anyway, and settled for a tie.
Breece Hall out-gained Josh Jacobs by 204 yards on identical catches — yet finished 8 fantasy spots back, on 9 fewer TDs
We read all 46,452 regular-season plays of 2025 and every touch by the 55 running backs who cleared 100 opportunities. Fantasy rank tracks volume at 0.94. The gap left over is almost entirely touchdowns — the rarest thing a back does, on 3.4% of his touches.
Seattle won four box-score columns and never led once. We read the whole sheet: it shot 31% on two-pointers
Portland won 84-82 at Climate Pledge Arena on 19 made two-pointers to Seattle's 13. That column was a 12-point edge — the final margin, once you subtract the Storm's +6 from three and +4 from the line. It is the one column the final score hides.
Colorado had Monday's second-highest expected offense of 20 lineups — and scored the fewest runs of all 20: none
No human desk ranks all 20 team-performances on a slate by expected offense. We did. Colorado posted a .387 team expected wOBA — a rate on the on-base scale — reached base 10 times, and lost 9-0 at Arizona. Its two hardest-hit balls in play, 104.5 and 103.4 mph, came back as a fly out and a double play.
You'll remember Caminero's home run — but the play that turned the Athletics' 96% game was a soft single two batters later
A 6-2 lead entering the eighth became a 10-6 loss in one half-inning. From one seat, a four-run road win; read end to end, the way we read it, both in-game win-probability feeds record a game they had all but decided, then not.
Eight of the 34 League Cup first-round ties went to penalties — every one was level at 1-1 after 90 minutes
A fan follows one club; we read the whole round. Eight of 34 first-round ties were settled from the spot, where home and away split the shootouts 4-4. Across the round the home side advanced 19 times to 15, a 55.9% share.
The Angels hit the only home run of the game and scored once; Texas hit none, singled eight times, and won 4-1 in ten innings
Every run the Rangers drove in came on a single. Every base the Angels earned above first came on one swing — Mike Trout's 418-foot homer in the first — after which they were shut out for nine innings.
Washington is the only winning team in the WNBA that has been outscored — and the number that says so is describing a team that no longer exists
The Mystics are 20-13 on the league's longest active win streak, yet their season point differential is minus-18. Laid out game by game, that minus-18 is a first-half fossil: since late June they have outscored opponents by 35 over 17 games — against a tougher schedule, not an easier one.
Philadelphia reached base 21 times, stranded 16, and needed 12 innings to beat Toronto by one
Both teams managed exactly 10 hits. The Phillies drew 11 walks to the Blue Jays' 3, blew a 5-2 lead, fell behind again in the 12th — and won on a walk-off only after burying 16 runners on the bases.
Dallas out-shot the Lynx on twos, out-rebounded them, and shot 91% from the line — and lost by 13, because Minnesota made 12 more three-pointers
The Wings scored 23 more points than Minnesota on everything that wasn't a three. Kayla McBride went 10-for-14 from behind the arc — a new WNBA single-game record — and the three-point column alone was a 36-point swing.
Melbourne and Fremantle kicked the same 17 goals at the MCG — the four-point result was decided entirely by behinds
Fremantle led by eight at the last change, moved the ball more cleanly, kicked more accurately, and had the game's leading goalscorer. Melbourne generated 28 scoring shots to 24, and its four extra minor scores were the exact margin of a 113-109 win.
North Carolina scored four goals on nine shots; Washington needed twenty for three — and lost 4-3 on the last kick
At Audi Field the Spirit held 58.1% of the ball, out-shot the Courage more than two-to-one, and won every possession metric on the sheet. The Courage scored three times inside 15 minutes, conceded the lead entirely, and won in the 95th minute on a fast break.
Four Brazilian first-division matches on Saturday, four teams that kept the ball — and two points from a possible twelve
In every one of the day's completed Série A games, the side with majority possession failed to win. The four teams with less of the ball took 8 of 12 points, and in three of four they also put more shots on target.
Arizona out-gained Carolina by 47 yards, held the ball 8 minutes longer, and lost the Hall of Fame Game
The Cardinals reached 82.7% win probability with 0:44 left. Two categories the volume stats don't capture — red-zone touchdowns and penalty yards — decided a 33-30 game at the gun.
Phoenix took 11 more shots and turned it over 8 fewer times than Connecticut — and lost by 3
The box score reads as a Connecticut comeback from 16 down. Phoenix took 11 more shots and committed 8 fewer turnovers, but went 5-of-28 from three; Connecticut went 7-of-20 and won by three.
Seven MLB slates, 13,698 taken pitches: the two-strike accuracy edge is which pitches get taken, not how they get judged
One night suggested umpires bear down with two strikes. Across 94 games the advantage is pitch selection — and on the closest calls it reverses.
Detroit has the best run differential of any losing team in baseball
The Tigers have outscored opponents by 77 runs — more than any other sub-.500 club, and wider than several playoff teams — yet sit at 56-60. No team in the majors is further from the record its scoring predicts.
One MLB slate, 2,174 taken pitches: umpires were 93.65% right — and most accurate on the counts that end at-bats
The blown third strike is the call fans remember. Across every game on August 7, it was the call umpires missed least.