Yarmouth's Video Game Numbers

The playoffs are here for the majority of fall sports – football is still in the regular season, of course – and there's a couple new things for you to check out.

Meanwhile, volleyball's prelims got underway last night. #9 Hampden picked up a small upset over #8 Mt. Ararat and #10 Edward Little avenged this KVAC championship loss to #7 Lewiston in straight sets.

If you haven't listened to the latest Overreactions Podcast with Varsity Maine's newest reporter, you have time to do that before this weekend's games. And be neighborly. Say hi to Jimmy when you see him on a sideline.

This week on the Thursday podcast, Yarmouth head coach Nick Orsi joined me to talk about the Clippers' prolific offense highlighted by his star quarterback Iggy McGrath and running back Stephen Connolly. Plus, his early years in Chicago where they're all still mourning Mike Ditka, how he got into coaching, the value of Madden in learning how to call an offense, and a whole lot more.

Plus, he proposes an exhibition game between Yarmouth and an 11-man team, which I've seen been told "can't happen", but I'm holding out hope.

Gold Ball Odds are now live for soccer, field hockey, and volleyball.

If you're a regular, you know the drill here. It'll tell you the likelihood your team wins each round. This, of course, is boys A North soccer.

In the past, this has been a snapshot that's calculated each night at the conclusion of the day's games. And by each night, I mean something like 2 in the morning.

So when you win, you're guessing what your new odds are. But you don't want to wait until 2am. So now, when the score gets entered into the scoreboard, it'll update the Gold Ball Odds automatically--up to a point. Let's say you're Edward Little and you win your quarterfinal. Your Semifinal odds already factor in the 28.9% chance you lose the quarterfinal. So when you win, that goes to 0%, which will recalculate your semi (and regional and Gold Ball) odds. And if Brunswick wins their quarterfinal, it'll recalculate again with the knowledge that you'll definitely be facing the Dragons in the next round and not the 6.1% chance you get Messalonskee. Each final will update the entire table in real time. Then, at 2am, the table will shift after the full rankings update is calculated. So after the games all go final for the night, think of that as the first draft.

One of the most popular features of Tourney Week has long been the brackets painstakingly compiled and maintained by Jay Baines. You know what I'm talking about. They're widely considered a massive upgrade over whatever version is on the MPA's site that year. The only downside, other than the hours and hours and hours Jay had to put into them, is that they had to live on Google Sheets, which isn't great on mobile.

So Jay wanted to know if we could recreate it using the website tools and...viola!

Colors are pulled from each team's logo and branding.

If you hover over a matchup, it'll give you some basic matchup data, plus an invitation to upgrade for predictions and more.

It will also update in real time as games go final on the scoreboard.

In the spirit of the tradition of Jay's brackets, this will be free.

Brackets

The classic brackets, modernized

Maine Basketball RankingsLucas McNelly

Well you can't get much more dystopian than this: DraftKings is sponsoring CBS News' election coverage.

CBS' DraftKings Gamble

CBS' owned stations will carry DraftKings branding through Election Night, Status has learned, a sponsorship that has stirred concern inside the company.

StatusBrett LoGiurato

This is insane behavior.

And I'm not the only person who thinks the Ringer/Substack partnership is odd.

Freelancers appear on the site less frequently. Numerous staff writers haven't written an article in months, or, in a couple cases, years. Other writers have left or been laid off. The last time The Ringer hired somebody with the sole intention of having them write for the website is hard to pinpoint, but I don’t think it was this decade.

If a company was fully pivoting to podcasting and abandoning print, that would make sense. But for them to do that and simultaneously all be rushing to start newsletters is at minimum weird.

Nobody Wants To Talk About Why The Ringer Is Pivoting To Substack | Defector

A media company launching a series of paywalled newsletters is not, on its own and on its face, a strange thing to do. AI’s ongoing cannibalization of online search is ravaging website traffic, and programmatic advertising doesn’t provide the kind of revenue it used to. If you were running a website like The Ringer, you…

DefectorOwen Lewis

We're back in Class C, where Hermon is in the middle of the brutal stretch of their schedule, a back-to-back with Greely and Leavitt. There's a number of teams this year that have gotten that duo in consecutive weeks, which just seems mean.

Even with the loss to Greely last week, Hermon's got a big range of where they could end up. They can still go as high as 1 and could fall all the way to 5. There's a big drop between 5 and 6.

Leavitt, on the other hand, will try to lock up the 1 seed. They've been rolling since their game with Greely and have outscored their last 5 opponents 219-19.

The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.