Launch of Below Surface Stats

I’ll never forget the day I watched First Take when Mark Cuban destroyed Skip Bayless. It was shortly after the Mavericks won the title against LeBron’s Heat, and Skip kept insisting LeBron “choked” and faced “excruciating pressure.” Cuban finally flipped the script and proved those claims were complete BS. He incinerated him by asking a simple question Skip couldn’t answer: what did the Mavs actually do differently to hold LeBron to such mediocre performances? As a viewer, it opened my eyes.

There’s more to the game than the average person understands. We tend to view everything at the most obvious level. Things are binary in our simple brains, it’s either “LeBron good” or “LeBron bad,” and the nuance never gets explained. Honestly, I don’t know why. Most coverage of the things we love stays basic and high-level, even when the people talking have legendary careers as coaches or players themselves. I want to change that. I want to actually dive deep on the hot topics in the things I care about and explain them from a statistical and strategic standpoint.

This is my place to learn about the things I care about, and I’ll share what I find here as a way to save my own thoughts. I see it as my mission to explore my passions and apply the love for statistics and strategy that I normally reserve for my 9-5, for boring purposes, to the things I actually daydream about. You know, during the Zoom call when someone asks “can you see my screen?”, or during the part where everyone talks about the weather instead of taking ten seconds to think about a topic people actually give a shit about.

Hopefully someone else learns something from this, or at least gets entertained along the way. I may never earn a cent, or even land a second reader, but it’d be pretty sick if I could eventually make money doing this. One day I might have enough to buy the domain that drops “stats” from the title and just be the simple phrase: Below Surface. I want to dive into my passions and actually feel that depth of knowledge and immersion, instead of being stuck in purgatory with the things I care about.

On the 250th birthday of the greatest country in the world, it’s time to go deep, and get below surface.