The following is excerpted from This is Your Brain on Sports.

This Wednesday, the Cubs play the Pirates in the NL wildcard game. The game is in Pittsburgh, but it’s worth noting that the Cubs finished one win away from hosting it themselves. The slimness of that margin should send Cubs fans back to April, when their front office decided to detain Kris Bryant for a few games in…

Of course it makes sense for the NCAA and its major college football conferences to oppose having their athletes participate in Daily Fantasy contests like those hosted by FanDuel or DraftKings. The ten conferences that make up the NCAA’s Football Bowl Division (FBS) are major sports leagues, selling a commercial…

With 4:20 left in the first quarter of a scoreless game, Ben Roethlisberger hit Heath Miller for a touchdown on a quick turnaround route and immediately turned to his sideline and signaled to go for two. It’s the kind of left-brain peel-out the NFL has been looking for on two-point calls for years.

According to PBS’s Frontline, an ongoing joint study by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University has found CTE in 87 of 91 examined brains of former NFL players, bringing the Boston lab’s total to 131 of 165 of former football players at all levels.

For all the worried exegesis of the NFL’s corn-fed rulebook this offseason, not much of it was aimed at football’s best rule change in years: the new extra point.

Last night, a mountain of documents and transcription emerged from Tom Brady’s late June appeal hearing before Roger Goodell. It’s been a circus, with a series of insults, emails, and sneaker requests to Tom Ford pouring out of the file cabinet, but the testimony most relevant to the case circles back to whether or…

Every so often, as the last dregs of NBA free agency congeal into place, a name floats across the ticker that gives a little shock of Oh, what ever happened to ... ? pause. Last night, it was Jimmer Fredette signing on, with minimal guarantees, to be a San Antonio Spur. And, begging your pardon, consider my hopes for…

Yahoo’s Jeff Passan is reporting that the Tampa Bay Rays, a team that has always been at the forefront of baseball’s analytical revolution, have installed a new high-tech camera system at their home ballpark that they hope will help them save their pitchers from injury.

There’s a way to look at Steph Curry’s stat line as an artifact of not just box score accounting, but his style. If you look closely, there are traces of the visceral experience of watching Steph double axel around a screen and fire up a three from the hip in arcane statistical whimsy, like fast break points outside…

Steph called it the scariest fall of his career. “You’re in the air for a long time,” he said after the game, “not knowing how you’re going to hit the floor, knowing that it’s inevitable.” Curry’s taken harder hits—and come away with worse symptoms—but that second-and-a-half or so of unexpected flight was the…

FiveThirtyEight has a cool interactive up today by Nate Silver and frenemy of the program Reuben Fischer-Baum, calculating the Elo ratings throughout history for every team in the NBA. I’m a sucker for Elo ratings, so I love this. I’m also a sucker for the shitbag Knicks, so I pulled up their chart ready to cringe.…

It’s pretty common to hear that Title IX creates a huge financial burden on colleges such that even if a school is lucky enough to be making millions on football or basketball, federal law mandates that a certain amount be spent on women’s sports. Leaving aside how this story implies schools are being forced to…

After yesterday’s release of the 243-page Wells Report regarding Tom Brady’s balls, Twitter’s begun passing around the tinfoil-hat statistical analysis that was circulated earlier this year “proving” that the Patriots have turned delated balls into impossible luck with regard to fumbles. This isn’t exactly the case.

The best example I found of this was them stating “these equations predict that the Patriots balls should have measured between 11.52 and 11.32 psig at the end of the first half, just before they were brought back into the Officials Locker Room. Most of the individual Patriots measurements recorded at halftime,…

Ballghazi is a perfect, perfectly hilarious scandal, and it just keeps getting better. To wit: The NFL, having ducked and dodged the many, varied complaints about the criminal behavior of its players, its own far-reaching municipal extortion schemes, and the long-term health effects of the game it promotes, has now…

At some point in your life you will be asked to order pizza for a group. When that time comes, don’t be afraid. All the information you need to determine how many pies to order can be found in the pizza itself. Because what is a pizza if not a tool for learning fractions?

During last night’s Spurs-Clippers game, TNT threw up a graphic showing the Clippers’ record when DeAndre Jordan shoots at least 12, 14, and 15 free throws in a game, implying that the donkey show you were watching at the time—a professional athlete performing his sport’s most boring component badly—is not only a…

There’s no one quite like Steph Curry in the NBA, and it follows, we’ve argued, that when you look closely at the thing, there’s nothing quite like Steph Curry’s stat line, either. If you needed another example, reddit turned one up.