The top line is the outcome. The bottom row is the part nobody counted.

I'm Chris. Dad, youth coach, former athlete, lifelong Baltimore fan. I lead a company in tech and AI, which means I spend my working life arguing with data, and I coach, which means I spend my weekends watching everything happening away from the ball.

Everyone in sports talks about the bottom line. The final score, the stat line, the W or the L. One number that settles it, grabs the headline, and moves on.

This is about the row underneath. Sports data does not arrive as a bottom line. It arrives as rows, one per play, and every row carries everything that play happened inside: the score at the time, the clock, the down and the distance, who was on the field, what was called, how likely each team was to win before the snap. Very few people read those rows. The takes get made off the top line, and the row underneath goes uncounted.

The top line is the outcome. The bottom row is the part nobody counted.

So every piece here works the same way. I state my thesis before I look, so you can hold me to it. Every stat I use has a definition that lives on its own page, with the exact filter, the thresholds I picked, and the arguments against picking them. And when the numbers say I was wrong, that goes in the piece, because the correction is usually more useful than the theory was.

I will be wrong often. That is the fun part.