Friday Recap: Embarrassing Wins, Twins Playoff History and Liquid Trees

The work we cover this week is of the preview-review type football-wise but has some interesting explanations of liquid trees and some Twins playoff catharsis.

First, apologies for the light posting schedule over the last two weeks. I’ve been involved in a legal matter that I cannot get into the details of, lost my car to a car theft (it has since been recovered and is currently in police custody) and am currently traveling for a wedding. My laptop currently appears to be fried, so the recap has come out late on Friday as I type it out on my phone.

Second, there’s still a lot of stuff I encountered this week that was worth covering! Links to my work and work I enjoyed below. As always, links with a paywall will be marked with a ($).

My Work:

• My recap of the Vikings win over the Panthers ($) and why I'm concerned despite the win.

• The recap episode of Norse Code, which focused more on the mailbag than a recap.

• I wrote a keys-to-the-game type preview for the Vikings for a Chiefs newsletter. The newsletter is a subscription but you can get a free trial ($).

• Video: On the Minnesota Football Party, our recap of the Panthers game focused on specific defenders.

• Video: We also previewed the Chiefs game, with a discussion about the path to victory for the Vikings.

Work I Liked (Sports):

• There's been some good coverage of how the Chiefs defense is expected to cover Justin Jefferson and T.J. Hockenson over at Arrowhead Pride here and here.

• On the other side of things, the Athletic’s Nate Taylor discussed the issues surrounding the Chiefs receivers ($).

• And Alec Lewis never disappoints. This week, his piece on Justin Jefferson’s insane pace ($).

• A couple weeks ago, I featured a post from the Purple Pain Forums about EPA. Another good one just dropped, this time going into player-by-player metrics.

• Seth Keysor does great work for his Substack and he reviewed the film of Patrick Mahomes’ surprisingly difficult day ($) against the Jets.

• Video: If you want to relive the Twins playoff misery to really enjoying what they did this week, I recommend this video on their playoff futility before this season.

• The power struggle at PFF has been well-reported on by Front Office Sports. Their latest reveals more in the strange story.

• Buy Matthew Coller’s book on the history of PFF. I've become very familiar with some of the key figures in the company and it's history as an involved advocate going back to 2009, but I learned a lot just from reading the first few chapters.

Work I liked (Non-Sports)

• Video: Rebecca Watson defends the “liquid trees” that get roasted every so often on social media.

• Video: Tom Nicholas covers the potential death of Patreon.

• Video: Folding Ideas (Dan Olson) goes over meme stocks and the bizarre culture surrounding the GameStop stock controversy.

• This is at Football Guys but it's not really sports so much as it is models of thinking. Adam Harstad goes over the philosophical tension between the hedgehog and fox approaches ($) to knowledge.

• Thor Benson talked to Yoel Roth about Elon Musk’s decision to make deep cuts to Twitter’s election integrity team ahead of the 2024 election.

• Ettingermentum is always worth reading and I appreciated his take on the crazy circumstances surrounding the GOP revolt against former Speaker Kevin McCarthy ($).