Taylor Walls' solo home run (3)
Athletics shortstop Max Schuemann hits a solo home run in the second inning against the Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday at Steinbrenner Field.Max Schuemann hits second home run of season to extend Athletics' lead vs. Rays originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
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Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The $62m question: does a high school really need a professional-style stadium?
When the television cameras pan around the US's newest sporting temple to show the cavernous stands, elegant brick exterior, VIP suites and massive video board, viewers might believe they are looking at a professional venue. Yet the occupants of Phillip Beard Stadium, the Buford Wolves, are not a professioanl team or even a college one. They are high-schoolers. In the exorbitant world of high school football, Buford's $62m, 10,000-capacity arena is not the biggest or most expensive taxpayer-funded student stadium in the US. But it may be the most luxurious. The Wolves host the Milton Eagles on Thursday in the stadium's first regular-season game, which will be broadcast nationally on ESPN. With 13 Georgia state championships from 2001 to 2021 and a long record of players progressing to college scholarships and, eventually, the NFL, Buford is a football powerhouse – and the new stadium is a loud statement of the school's desire to keep it that way. Related: 'The stadium is secondary': how US sports teams became real-estate speculators If it feels like half of Buford is at the big game … they probably are. The Atlanta-area city has roughly 19,000 residents and the well-regarded high school (rebuilt in 2019 for $85m) has about 1,900 students. In 2010, another educational institution in the Atlanta region, Kennesaw State University, built a smart 10,200 capacity multi-use stadium for $16.5m. In the past 15 years, however, construction costs have soared, fan expectations have evolved, streaming and social media have changed how we consume sports and college athletes are now allowed to earn significant sums by monetising their personal brands. The trend is clear: newer, fancier, costlier. Phillip Beard Stadium has the typical uncovered benches familiar to anyone who's seen Friday Night Lights. Yet it also boasts more than 1,500 premium seats, 15 suites, a 3,600 sq ft double-sided video board and a 10,500 sq ft event space with a trophy wall. Buford City manager Bryan Kerlin told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the stadium had been paid for by the city general funds and its funding 'had no impact on teacher salaries, classroom resources, or any educational funding'. Still, there may well be other parts of the city the money could have been diverted to. Besides, blending spartan spaces for students and high-end facilities for corporate clients and rich alumni is increasingly common. It could make financial sense for schools aiming to maximise revenues and claw back some of the construction and operating costs, according to Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. 'The economics term is price differentiation,' he says. It's long been common in professional sports as teams adopt a strategy beloved of airlines, with their myriad fare classes and options: charging wildly different amounts for the same product based on variations in the customer experience. As the masses in the cheap seats generate the noise, corporate boxes can deliver thousands of dollars in income per event, giant video screens appeal to advertisers, and perhaps former students who've been wined and dined in air-conditioned comfort and enjoyed a perfect view of the action will be inspired to make generous donations to the alma mater. Upscale new arenas are also a way to entice fans off the couch in an era when it seems like almost every sporting contest, no matter how obscure, is streamed. 'Everyone knows their biggest competitor is being able to watch on TV,' Matheson says. Climate-controlled facilities mitigate against extreme weather, and with gargantuan video boards, televisions on concourses, myriad food and drink options and glitzy graphics on LED ribbon displays, fans can go to the stadium, experience the live atmosphere and still gaze at screens. Northwestern University in Illinois is building a privately-funded new stadium guided by the principle of 'premium for everybody,' reports Front Office Sports. At a projected cost of $862m it will be the most expensive college stadium ever, yet with only 35,000 seats it will hold 12,000 fewer people than the venue it is replacing. The theory underpinning the design is that modern fans want a more intimate and luxurious experience, with changing tastes – and a changing climate – rendering even relatively recent venues obsolete. In 2020 Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers quit their open-air 48,000-capacity ballpark, which opened in 1994, for a new 40,000-capacity building with a retractable roof. This season a minor league baseball team, the Salt Lake Bees, moved from Smith's Ballpark, which also opened in 1994, to a new home, hiking ticket prices and halving their seating capacity in the process. The concentration on high-end customers, of course, prices out fans who cannot afford to spend heavily on a night out at the game. 'In all, premium seating makes up one-sixth of seats at the new ballpark, whereas it contributed to just 3% of Smith's Ballpark's capacity,' the Salt Lake Tribune reported. 'The seats closest to the action aren't available for sale on a per-ticket basis; instead, those are field-level suites that must be reserved in their entirety.' Sports' growing focus on premium customers mirrors a shift in the American economy as a whole: this year a Moody's Analytics study found that the US economy is now deeply reliant on the richest households, with the top 10% of earners accounting for 50% of consumer spending, a sharp rise from recent decades. Logically, better facilities should breed better players, with victories leading to bigger attendances, swelling civic pride, adding to the appeal of the fast-growing suburbs where large high school stadiums are often located and boosting the prospects of the kids who dream of reaching the NFL. The trickle-down effect from the professional and college ranks to high schools isn't only a matter of swankier facilities. It's also visible in the potential financial incentives. College players have been permitted to make money from their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights since 2021. In June this year a former high school player filed a class-action lawsuit in California challenging restrictions on the ability of the state's high school student-athletes to profit from their NIL rights. It could pave the way for high school stars across the US to earn income and to transfer to other schools for sporting reasons. 'Corporations see a lot of untapped economic value in high school athletics,' Yaman Salahi, an attorney representing the player named in the suit, said in a statement to Front Office Sports, 'and we want to ensure that value is shared equitably with the athletes that create it.' Like teenaged soccer starlets at professional clubs in other countries, 16- and 17-year old American football players might one day be wealthy and famous, with a status to match the grandeur of their home stadiums. 'The difference here is that it's the local public school that's doing the development,' Matheson points out. For now, stadiums as sizeable and expensive as Buford's remain rare outside Texas, the state that is the epicentre of the high school football infrastructure arms race. In 2017 the independent school district in the Houston-area suburb of Katy opened a $70m, 12,000-capacity stadium adjacent to its existing and still operational 9,800-seat venue. According to the website more than a quarter of the 1,267 high school football stadiums in Texas can hold over 5,000 people, with eight seating at least 16,500. The combined capacity of 4.4 million is larger than the populations of 24 states. About a quarter have video scoreboards and 27 high school stadiums have opened in Texas since 2020. A $56m multi-purpose venue in the Houston-area city of La Porte is set to host its inaugural match this month. Texas produces more NFL players than any other state, found a study by the data analysis firm Lineups, with Houston the leading city. On the other hand, Texas is ranked 34th for educational attainment by US News & World Report, is far below the national average for teacher pay and expenditures per student, and according to one study, this year Texas teachers expect to spend on average $1,550 of their own money on classroom supplies. Many would argue there are better things to spend money on than school sports.
New York Times
31 minutes ago
- New York Times
8 factors that predict potential underdog College Football Playoff contenders
The AP's preseason poll dropped on Monday afternoon, and tucked inside were a list of the most obvious contenders to make the 2025-26 College Football Playoff — names like Texas, Penn State, Clemson, Georgia and last year's title-game combatants, Ohio State and Notre Dame. The Athletic's own Matt Baker recently disproved the notion that ranked preseason teams have an edge because they're ranked; rather, these squads are ranked highly because they're also the most likely playoff frontrunners, with more talent than anybody else in a sport where that tends to matter a lot (and in an era when it matters more than ever). Advertisement Either way, those 25 teams aren't necessarily going to sneak up on anyone. But we're also interested in teams from outside the preseason ranking who might still crash the playoff party. So I combed back through data since 2000 (the earliest season of turnover-margin data in Sports-Reference/CFB's database) for indicators that might predict an unranked AP preseason team's ability to still finish within the top 12 of the final pre-bowl poll — a general proxy for being in the playoff mix going into the committee's final weekend of decision-making. Many of these elements relate to the concept of regression toward the mean: the idea that teams tend to revert in the direction of longer-term norms over time, especially when we account for more volatile or luck-driven stats. It's useful to be able to create a hierarchy of those types of factors to look at — or regress away — when trying to identify playoff-worthy dark horses. With that in mind, let's run down the key questions to ask around any potential surprise contender — and the potential beneficiaries of those variables in 2025 — in order of predictive importance. This factor is not necessarily a surprising consideration — good teams tend to stay good going forward, especially in college football — but it's the most important metric for determining whether a team from outside the preseason top 25 will break through in spite of the pollsters' concerns. Of the 66 teams in our dataset that made the leap from outside the preseason poll, more than half (35) were coming off a season with a +5.0 Simple Rating System (SRS) score, which puts a team as roughly a top-50 team in the previous year's pecking order, and more had a previous rating of +10.0 or better (12) than were negative the previous season (nine). It's not impossible for a surprise team to really surprise, rising from a poor previous rating to crack the top 12, but it's rare. More often, those teams come from the top ranks of the prior year, which means BYU and Louisville get the most credit in this category, followed by USC, Iowa, Minnesota and Virginia Tech. Many of these teams suffered key personnel losses to some degree or another, so caution is advised, particularly before we get to the other indicators. Situations like Florida State last year — whose SRS declined by a shocking 21.7 points year-over-year — can happen. But as a baseline, the clear majority of teams stick within a touchdown of their previous SRS, for better or worse. Advertisement The second-most important predictor also involves SRS — but it concerns whether a school was abnormally good (or bad) by its own standards a year ago. In the spirit of regression to the mean, if a team has established a particular long-term level of play, then deviates from that level in one season, it is likely to return or at least move back to the long-term norm the following year. That means we're looking for squads whose 2024 ratings were far worse than usual. Newer FBS teams like James Madison (and Delaware, Missouri State, etc.) were excluded from consideration because they lacked a five-year sample of previous seasons. Tulsa and Kent State top the list, but are usually just mediocre and were among the worst teams in FBS last season. They are good candidates to improve, but not to make the CFP. More realistically, Air Force, Oklahoma State and Florida State all have the potential to improve quite a bit through a combination of regression, the portal and recruiting (in the case of OSU and FSU), and the other built-in ways that prevent competitive programs from staying down for too long. Much to the chagrin of mid-major fans across the nation, the college football power structure favors elite teams in elite conferences whenever it can. So it makes sense that a potential dark-horse candidate from a more prestigious conference is going to get the benefit of the doubt in the rankings before a team trying to make their bid from a smaller conference. In terms of our 2025 candidates in the categories we've looked at so far, that big-conference bias is good news for Iowa — who has the best combination of 2024 SRS and the potential to regress toward an even higher rating based on its previous norms — plus Louisville, USC, BYU, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin and the rest of the power-conference teams we've discussed. Meanwhile, the American and, to a lesser extent, Sun Belt are the epicenter of teams that have solid indicators, but their conference might get held against them, barring an automatic bid. Advertisement Though it sometimes gets mentioned in betting circles, one of my favorite semi-hidden stats remains 'yards per point' (YPP). At its core, YPP measures how efficiently a team converts yardage into points on offense — and how inefficiently it forces opponents to do the same on defense. Teams with a lower YPP than their opponents are essentially turning field position into points at a better rate, which translates into a higher scoring margin and, usually, more wins. Like turnover margin (more on that stat later), it can be volatile from year to year, bouncing around with red-zone execution, third-down conversion rates, special teams performance and 'bend-but-don't-break' defense. But when a team consistently posts a strong YPP differential, like the New England Patriots did throughout their dynasty, it's often a sign of something more sustainable. In our historical sample, teams that had lower YPP differentials between offense and defense in the previous season — negative numbers are better because they mean you traded fewer yards for the same points than your opponent did — tended to be more likely to make the leap from unranked to the top 12 after controlling for everything else. Our group of historical surprise teams had an average prior YPP differential of -1.3 and 62 percent of them were negative in the previous season. That's a bit counter to the usual wisdom that YPP is heavily luck-based and likely to regress against teams who relied on it. In this case, it may be picking up on a team's strengths that don't always show up in other conventional stats, like situational execution, special teams efficiency and a general ability to squeeze more points out of opportunities. If that holds true, Army and Iowa stand out among the unranked masses for their efficiency on offense and ability to bend, not break, on defense. In a less contrarian statistical finding, we won't be surprised to learn that teams that won fewer games than we'd expect based on their points scored and allowed — via the Pythagorean Formula — tend to be more likely to bounce back the following season. More importantly for this exercise, they are also prone to being overlooked by the preseason pollsters, who may tend to judge a team off of its standard win-loss record without digging into extenuating stats like its point differential. That could give a boost to teams like UCF and especially Auburn, plus Virginia Tech slightly lower down the list, each of which was unlucky with close games compared to blowouts in 2024. Like with Pythagorean luck, another well-known factor that regresses to the mean for football teams over time tends to be turnovers. Yes, there are some notable exceptions — we go back to Bill Belichick's Patriots for an example from the NFL — but generally speaking, a team with an outlier turnover margin in either direction has a tendency to move toward the middle the following season. That means for breakthrough candidates, we're looking for teams coming off poor turnover differentials in 2024. Most notable here is Florida State, whose uncharacteristically awful 2024 was driven at least some by that minus-16 turnover margin. Plus, lurking just at the periphery of this list are Auburn, UCF, Oklahoma State, Arkansas and West Virginia — all were at minus-eight or worse and have a number of additional factors pointing to better days in 2025. Advertisement One of the interesting philosophical arguments around preseason polls is what exactly they're attempting to rank. Most view them as an accounting of top-to-bottom roster talent on paper going into the season, which incidentally is why their basketball cousin is a good predictor of March Madness results even after controlling for season-long performance. However, they're not necessarily trying to peg where a team will end up by season's end. In theory, the two rankings ought to be correlated, but differences come about because of scheduling, which is an area we can project in our search for surprise playoff contenders. In our historical dataset, teams that went from a harder schedule (in terms of opponent SRS ratings) during one season to an easier projected schedule (based on a weighted multi-year average of SRS for its opponents) in the following preseason tended to be more likely to catch the initial polls by surprise. Factoring in schedules, teams like Virginia Tech, USC, FSU, Kansas and Washington (among others) are being underrated in their playoff potential. This might be the most fascinating result in our entire experiment. In the historical data, there was a real effect where unranked teams whose coaches were in either their third or fourth season at a particular stop (consecutively, not overall) were more likely to finish among the top 12 in the pre-bowl rankings even after controlling for everything else. Why might this be? My theory is that those seasons come in the sweet spot of a coach's tenure. By that point, they've had enough time to install their systems, bring in players who fit their style and establish the culture they want — but at the same time, their message is still fresh, morale is still high and opponents may not have fully adapted to their tendencies yet. Among our common dark-horse candidates from the rest of the factors above, teams with coaches in the third or fourth year with their current program include USC's Lincoln Riley, Jeff Brohm with Louisville, Hugh Freeze with Auburn, Brent Pry with Virginia Tech and Matt Rhule with Nebraska. This is the least important factor. It's not impossible for a newer — or older, in the case of Kirk Ferentz in his 27th year at Iowa — coach to also surprise from unranked territory, but there does seem to be something about that sweet spot that makes a team more primed to break out. Now, we combine all of the predictive factors from above into a single ranking, weighted by the importance of each sub-category: Based on past trends, we would expect USC to be most likely to rise from outside the top 25 to serious playoff contention by the end of the regular season, followed by Louisville, Auburn, Virginia Tech and a bunch of Big Ten and Big 12 schools. Not all of these teams jumped off the page in every category, but most were coming off a decent SRS season and/or had a subpar season by their standards. They're all in power conferences. The highest-ranked non-power candidate was Tulane at No. 27. Advertisement The odds are that at least a few of these teams — or teams like them a bit further down the ranking — will make the jump into the playoff conversation, as an average of 2.75 teams per year started unranked and finished 12th or higher in the pre-bowl AP poll each year in our sample. We've trended toward even more of that chaos in recent years; four teams have done that per season since 2021. So if you're thinking about this week's polls, remember that while the AP's preseason top 25 is stacked with the sport's most obvious playoff threats, history says the field won't be limited to just those hyped-up names. Every season brings a few gate-crashers from outside the group of teams we thought we knew to watch, and our list is full of schools that check the right boxes to be those spoilers in 2025. (Photo of Lincoln Riley: Kirby Lee / Imagn Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
New York Times
31 minutes ago
- New York Times
Beating the consensus: Fantasy football ADP winners from Justin Fields to Cooper Kupp
There are players the fantasy market irrationally hates. Their ADPs make little sense, but the consensus means they keep being drafted low, reason be damned. It's groupthink at this point. If you want the room's approval with the murmur of 'good pick,' you can't take these players. You'll only get raised eyebrows — and higher win probability in your league. Advertisement Fade the conventional wisdom, pay the market price and profit. These opportunities exist every year, just waiting to be capitalized on. I'll note the positional ranking according to Fantasy Pros as well as my positional rankings. (I eschew overall ranks since the number of receivers you are allowed to play, typically three or four, determines whether you should prioritize running backs or wide receivers, respectively.) LOL Jets. Gang Green (or is it gangrene) can't have nice things. They are Wile E. Coyote pulling down the shade in the TNT shack right before it gets smashed by the train. But what if you don't believe in curses? In his starts last year, Fields was the QB6. And that's the floor. The Jets' offensive line is good and could be great. Unlike the Steelers, their plan is for Fields to embrace his unique running ability with his WR speed and great size at 230 pounds. I expect 1,000 rushing yards and 10 TDs. But we don't have to pay for it because the world is snickering and assuming the Green and White will be a joke in perpetuity. He's already had a season as QB7 in fantasy. How is he five slots behind Caleb Williams, when everything you can say about Williams you can say about Lawrence, and, unlike Williams, Lawrence has been a fantasy asset already in his career. Passing game guru as head coach? Check. Elite weaponry? Check. The talent of a No. 1 overall draft pick? Check. I am agnostic about QBs, but I believe in wide receivers, and I think Brian Thomas and Travis Hunter will be at or near the top of NFL WR tandems. Taylor won his managers money last year with a playoff explosion. But by then, almost everyone who plays our game had tuned out because they were eliminated. So they missed that he averaged 100 rushing yards per game with nearly a TD per game. I understand if you think that if Anthony Richardson is the Colts' QB, then Taylor's targets and catches collapse into virtual nothingness. Advertisement It's a huge swing in Taylor's favor if Daniel Jones is his QB, about 30 to 40 expected catches. But even then, Richardson is such a running threat that defenses can't key on Taylor. Last year, when both were on the field, Taylor averaged 4.8 yards per tote and had 9 TDs. He averaged 15.8 fantasy PPG in those Richardson starts — 267 points per 17 games, which would have been RB8 last year. So that's his range: Possibly RB1 with Jones, given those extra catches, to about RB8 with Richardson and without the catches. So anyway you slice it, RB10 makes zero sense. We're all still infatuated with Patrick Mahomes' fantasy mediocrity. So we're conditioned to think the Chiefs' RB is an afterthought who an explosive passing offense will marginalize. But the Chiefs grind it out on offense now and win with defense, the ideal environment for a bell-cow RB. Is that Pacheco? Well, who else is it going to be? He looked bad last year after returning from injury, but that injury should've been a season-ender. I can't take Kareem Hunt and Elijah Mitchell seriously, due to age and an inability to stay healthy, respectively. Remember, before he was hurt, Pacheco was on pace for 300 touches, including 59 catches. He'll be the goal-line back, and the Chiefs don't sneak or tush push (0.1% designed runs for Mahomes last year). All the evidence supports my long-held position that Hunter is a wide receiver first and foremost. He played 92% of snaps with the first-team offense in the first preseason game. He's a starting WR on the depth chart and a backup CB. The head coach said the plan is for Hunter to get at least 80% of the snaps on offense. There's a belief Hunter is merely a generic first-round receiver and not one who would be drafted near the top of the round if not for his two-way skills. But most experts say that's false and maintain that he was by far the best WR prospect in a draft in which another WR went top-10 overall. Look, Hunter's already up from WR35 last week, and the market is going to land at WR20, I confidently predict, by your late-August draft day. By then, I'll probably move him to WR15. Remember, this market had Marvin Harrison Jr. as the WR8 last year, so even WR15 is cheap for this talent. I think he and Brian Thomas will help each other, and each will command 25%+ of targets, similar to Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins. Advertisement The market proclaims, 'He's DONE!' Well, the Seahawks don't think so. They gave him a three-year contract. Kupp was hurt last year, so I don't hold that against him. He's been hurt a lot, it's true. This is his age-32 season. I want you to pay WR41, believe me. But if Kupp can stay healthy, he's getting 130 targets. Do the math. No matter how they want to run, the Seahawks will throw 525 passes. How many are you giving JSN? 300? Even at 175, that leaves 350 targets, and where is the competition for them? Kupp is not a Hall of Famer, but he's a historic fantasy WR and could rebound like Adam Thielen did not long ago at a similar age. He's free money now. You can't profit from fading Kupp at that price; you should draft him there. I don't get it. The man averaged nearly 11 yards per target. He was elite at separating in the intermediate zone (10-19 air yards downfield). He just got a three-year contract. He is on the field almost as often as Zay Flowers (WR26 in the market), who goes 31 WR slots earlier. He plays with an MVP favorite who will likely throw for 40 TDs again. So Bateman, who had nine scores in 2024, is a solid bet to haul in that many or more scores again. At worst, he's the arbitrage Flowers. He's an easy pick where he's going, and the worst manager in your league will just look at the 2024 TDs. But we're (the rankers) the worst for giving him his current ADP. Again, follow the money. Palmer got serious coin from the Bills, starter money at $29 million for three years with $18 million guaranteed. Why can't he get 120 Josh Allen targets? That is ostensibly the Buffalo plan, and Palmer is WR74, basically undrafted? Madness. He's averaged 9.2 yards per target the past two years, which is solid, and that nets out to 1,100 yards if I'm right about the targets and his efficiency carries forward with the MVP QB. The expert market pays zero attention to contracts, but money is speech, and the Bills are telling us they think Palmer is a leader in their passing game. And this isn't a contract they may want to eat — they just signed him! (Photo of Cooper Kupp: Steph Chambers / Getty Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
