(NEW YORK) — Simone Biles, a four-time Olympic gold medalist gymnast, said she should have quit competing “way before” the Tokyo Olympics, where she had to withdraw from several events due to mental health struggles.
“If you looked at everything I’ve gone through for the past seven years, I should have never made another Olympic team,” Biles said in a new interview with LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Images). “I should have quit way before Tokyo, when Larry Nassar was in the media for two years.”
“It was too much,” she said. “But I was not going to let him take something I’ve worked for since I was 6 years old. I wasn’t going to let him take that joy away from me. So I pushed past that for as long as my mind and my body would let me.”
Biles, 24, was on track at this summer’s Olympics to win an unprecedented six gold medals during the Games, with the aim of also becoming the first woman since 1968 to win back-to-back titles in the all-around.
After stumbling on a vault landing in the team competition final, Biles withdrew from three of her event finals, citing her mental health.
Earlier this month, while testifying before Congress, Biles tied her performance in Tokyo to her struggle to recover mentally after being abused by Nassar, a former USA Gymnastics team doctor who is now serving up to 175 years in prison for sexually assaulting hundreds of girls and women.
In the interview with New York Magazine, Biles said she is back in therapy and calls her recovery from the abuse she suffered a frustratingly long “work in progress.”
“You get surgery, it’s fixed. Why can’t someone just tell me in six months it’ll be over?” Biles said. “Like, hello, where are the double-A batteries? Can we just stick them back in? Can we go?”
Leading up to the Tokyo Games, Biles said she “didn’t feel as confident as I should have been with as much training as we had.”
Once there, Biles said she faced what in gymnastics is called “the twisties,” when one loses sense of where they are in the air or in their routine.
“If I still had my air awareness, and I just was having a bad day, I would have continued,” Biles told the magazine. “But it was more than that.”
“It’s so dangerous,” she said. “It’s basically life or death. It’s a miracle I landed on my feet. If that was any other person, they would have gone out on a stretcher. As soon as I landed that vault, I went and told my coach: ‘I cannot continue.’”
Biles faced criticism from some when she withdrew from her Olympic events, but she was mostly applauded for listening to her body and prioritizing her mental health.
To those critics who said she went to Tokyo and quit, Biles compared what she went through to suddenly waking up blind one day.
“Say up until you’re 30 years old, you have your complete eyesight,” she said. “One morning, you wake up, you can’t see … but people tell you to go on and do your daily job as if you still have your eyesight. You’d be lost, wouldn’t you? That’s the only thing I can relate it to. I have been doing gymnastics for 18 years. I woke up — lost it. How am I supposed to go on with my day?”
In the nearly two months since she returned home from Tokyo, Biles said she has had time to come to terms with what happened, though she said it still feels in many ways like she “jumped out of a moving train.”
“Everybody asks, ‘If you could go back, would you?’ ” Biles told New York Magazine. “No. I wouldn’t change anything because everything happens for a reason. And I learned a lot about myself — courage, resilience, how to say no and speak up for yourself.”
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Monday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Cleveland 8, Kansas City 3
Chi White Sox 8, Detroit 7
Seattle 13 Oakland 4
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Cincinnati 13, Pittsburgh 1
Washington 5, Colorado 4
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE PRESEASON
Columbus 3, Pittsburgh 0
Montreal 5, Toronto 2
Vancouver 4, Calgary 2
St. Louis 2, Dallas 1 (OT)
Arizona 2, Los Angeles 1
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE
Dallas 41, Philadelphia 21
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Sunday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE
Tampa Bay 3, Miami 2
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Kansas City 2, Detroit 1
Texas 7, Baltimore 4
Chi White Sox 5, Cleveland 2
Toronto 5, Minnesota 2
Seattle 5, LA Angels 1
Oakland 4, Houston 3
NY Yankees 6, Boston 3
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Pittsburgh 6, Philadelphia 0
Cincinnati 9, Washington 2
Milwaukee 8, NY Mets 4
St. Louis 4, Chi Cubs 2
San Francisco 6, Colorado 2
LA Dodgers 3, Arizona 0
Atlanta 4, San Diego 3
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE PRESEASON
Florida 5, Nashville 4 (OT)
Boston 3, Washington 2 (SO)
Florida 3, Nashville 1
Seattle 5, Vancouver 3
NY Islanders 4, NY Rangers 0
Anaheim 6, San Jose 3
Ottawa 3, Winnipeg 2 (OT)
Edmonton 4, Calgary 0
San Jose 4, Vegas 2
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE
Arizona 31, Jacksonville 19
Atlanta 17, NY Giants 14
Baltimore 19, Detroit 17
Buffalo 43, Washington 21
Cincinnati 24, Pittsburgh 10
Cleveland 26, Chicago 6
LA Chargers 30, Kansas City 24
New Orleans 28, New England 13
Tennessee 25, Indianapolis 16
Denver 26, NY Jets 0
Las Vegas 31, Miami 28 (OT)
LA Rams 34, Tampa Bay 24
Minnesota 30, Seattle 17
Green Bay 30, San Francisco 28
WOMEN’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION PLAYOFFS
Phoenix 85, Seattle 80 (OT)
Final Chicago 89 Minnesota 76
MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER
Nashville 0, Chicago 0 (Tie)
Seattle 2, Sporting Kansas City 1
Austin FC 2, LA Galaxy 0
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Thursday’s sports events.
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Chi White Sox 7, Cleveland 2
Seattle 6, Oakland 5
Cleveland 5, Chi White Sox 3
Baltimore 3, Texas 0
Minnesota 7, Toronto 2
LA Angels 3, Houston 2
NATIONAL LEAGUE
St. Louis 8, Milwaukee 5
Arizona 6, Atlanta 4
LA Dodgers 7, Colorado 5
San Diego 7, San Francisco 6
Washington 3, Cincinnati 2
Philadelphia 12, Pittsburgh 6
(MICHIGAN) — Michigan football fans are not conditioned in their modern state to feel anything good. The sport so many of them live and die with has burned them too often over the past 20 years for many Wolverines fans to feel truly excited as the calendar flips from month to month in the fall.
This September has put these fans in a tough spot. Michigan football is off to a 3-0 start, and if you’ve watched the games or looked at the numbers, you know it’s been a crisp 3-0. The Wolverines have beaten Western Michigan, Washington and Northern Illinois by a combined 107 points, the largest cumulative margin of victory among Football Bowl Subdivision teams. Michigan was supposed to win all of these games, but there is winning and then there is covering the spread by nearly 19 points per game. Save for losing star receiver Ronnie Bell to a right knee injury for the year, it would be tough to imagine Jim Harbaugh having a smoother first three weeks of a season.
Yet Michigan fans understand how this goes. Harbaugh was 18-3 in August and September since his takeover of the program in 2015 through last season (though there were no such games for the team in 2020). That was the seventh-best winning percentage in FBS in the season’s opening stretch during those years. The problem was October and November, months in which Harbaugh has gone 30-15 — a nice enough record for most teams but not nearly enough to get Michigan over the Big Ten East hump. Many are understandably circumspect about what lies in store for 2021.
Before we go further, it’s worth doing the necessary Michigan-related hedging. The Wolverines might fall apart and lose three to five games, as they’ve done several times in recent years. They might be great but fall short in their regular-season finale against Ohio State, which is now an annual bit of misery (save for 2020) no matter what’s happened up to that point. In short, Michigan could do what Michigan has done too many times before. These potential outcomes all point to fans shielding their hearts from vulnerability. Why get too serious with a team that has hurt you? But if Michigan fans can stomach it, they should let themselves live a little bit. Three games into 2021, there is no reason Michigan won’t have Harbaugh’s big breakthrough this year.
In Harbaugh’s first six years, his offenses were good, but not great, and “good” does not win the Wolverines’ division, much less anything beyond that. From 2015 to 2020, Michigan was 19th in FBS in expected points added per game on offense, adjusted for opponent quality. The results varied a bit by year, but its most productive offense by far was in 2016, when Michigan came a J.T. Barrett fourth-down spot away from making the Big Ten Championship. That team produced an adjusted offensive EPA of 15.16 per game. That was the best college offense Harbaugh has ever fielded, save for the 2010 Stanford outfit that had Andrew Luck and various NFL pass-catchers and produced a figure of 20.19.
The Wolverines have been unable to approach their 2016 level over the last four years. But this year, Michigan leads all of FBS in adjusted offensive EPA and is tracking, at this early date, to produce the most efficient offense by EPA of Harbaugh’s career. Adjusted EPA flattens out the results some, since it accounts for the competition level faced, which means the computers aren’t calling fraud on Michigan’s excellent start.
Along the same line, Michigan’s September success looks like a shift upward even when compared only with its previous nonconference schedules. In strictly regular-season, nonconference games in Harbaugh’s first six years, Michigan’s offense was a combined 44th in adjusted EPA per game. This year, Michigan is second. And again, that’s an opponent-adjusted stat, which suggests that Michigan’s leap can’t be chalked up totally to a schedule that lacks a team like Florida or Notre Dame, two recent season-opener foes for Harbaugh’s teams.
Harbaugh’s new starting quarterback, Cade McNamara, is outdoing his predecessors in a similar way. The junior, a former four-star recruit, threw for 10 yards per attempt in nonconference games and posted a 60.5 Total QBR. Both figures put him ahead of Harbaugh’s previous starting QBs in the same situations: Jake Rudock, Wilton Speight and Shea Patterson. And Michigan’s lead tailback, Blake Corum, has blown away Harbaugh’s previous primary running backs in both yards per attempt (8.5) and missed tackles generated per touch (0.3) against teams outside the Big Ten. In various offensive areas, Michigan is lapping its old self.
On defense, the Wolverines are under new management this fall. First-year coordinator Mike Macdonald arrived in the offseason from the Baltimore Ravens, where he had worked since 2014 for Harbaugh’s brother, John. (Macdonald was going to be co-defensive coordinator with fellow new hire Maurice Linguist, but Linguist left to take the top job at Buffalo before the season.) Macdonald replaced Don Brown, who’d been Michigan’s defensive coordinator since 2016 and had a reputation for his infatuation with two things: blitzes and man coverage. During Brown’s time in charge, the Michigan defense played man-to-man coverages on 48 percent of opposing dropbacks, the ninth-highest rate in the country. (The average was 33 percent.) In front of all coverages, Michigan blitzed 12.6 times a game, 10th-most in FBS. So far in 2021, the Wolverines have kept playing a lot of man coverage, though less than before — 40.7 percent of the time, which still ranks ninth. Their blitzing has also eased up a bit, to 10.33 times per game (tied for 46th-most).
It’s a little early to know what shape Macdonald’s defense will take the rest of the way, but it looks like his plan is working. In nonconference, regular-season games under Brown, Michigan was fifth in adjusted defensive EPA per game. Under Macdonald, Michigan is 19th in the same situations — a step back overall, but not compared to Brown’s most recent work. There’s no way to make an apples-to-apples comparison from last year to this year because there were no nonconference Big Ten games last fall. But the early returns say Michigan’s defense has cleaned up a 2020 mess where the Wolverines finished the season an ugly 109th in adjusted defensive EPA per game overall. This year, Michigan is 16th, and its straightforward yards allowed per play are down at this point from 5.6 to 4.5. Even if the defense regresses significantly in Big Ten play, it looks like the bleeding from 2020 has slowed.
Michigan has played what looks like a light schedule, but it’s not that hard to look at it in the right light and see something decent. WMU beat Pitt, NIU beat a Georgia Tech team that is probably bad but almost beat Clemson, and Washington looked dysfunctional but has one of the more talented rosters in college football.1
Whatever you think of this schedule, Michigan has pulverized it to an unusual extent. Forward-looking projection systems tend to believe, even if lots of humans aren’t there yet. Bill Connelly’s SP+ and ESPN’s FPI, two opponent-adjusted systems, each have Michigan No. 6 overall. In SP+, the Wolverines rank 12th on offense, eighth on defense and second on special teams. In the AP Top 25, Michigan is 19th, which is fair for now and may turn out to look low.
The Big Ten might be ripe for the picking, too, or at least more so than usual. The conference has a lot of interesting teams that weren’t at all interesting last year. Penn State looks like a serious contender. Iowa has a punishing defense, Michigan State seems to be getting back to some of its mid-2010s ways, and even Maryland and Rutgers are presently undefeated. But the league’s biggest hoss looks more vulnerable than usual. Ohio State is 37th in Defensive SP+ and has already taken play-calling responsibilities away from its defensive coordinator.
The Game is in Ann Arbor this year, and that combined with a slightly reduced OSU gives Michigan one of its best chances in a while. Predicting a Michigan win would be foolish, but for a rare change, so would be dismissing the possibility out of hand that the Wolverines give their much more successful rival a lot to handle.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events.
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE
Philadelphia 4, Baltimore 3
Final Minnesota 5, Chi Cubs 4
Boston 12, NY Mets 5
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Tampa Bay 7, Toronto 1
NY Yankees 7, Texas 3
Seattle 4, Oakland 1
Houston 9, LA Angels 5 (12)
Chi White Sox at Detroit (Postponed)
Kansas City at Cleveland (Postponed)
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Washington 7, Miami 5
St. Louis 10, Milwaukee 2
Colorado 10, LA Dodgers 5
Atlanta 9, Arizona 2
San Francisco 8, San Diego 6
Pittsburgh at Cincinnati (Postponed)
MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER
Nashville 5, Miami 1
New England 3, Chicago 2
New York City FC 1, New York 1 (Tie)
(LAS VEGAS) — Four years ago, the poorest owner in the NFL committed over $1.1 billion he didn’t have toward building a $1.9 billion stadium in Las Vegas, at a time when NFL policies forbid team owners, staffers and players from even appearing to have connections to gambling.
Three years ago, he lured the franchise’s famous former head coach out of the announcers’ booth and back onto his sideline with a 10-year, $100 million contract. At the end of the following season, he hired the NFL Network’s top draft analyst to run his front office. Last season, his team played their home games in the brand-new, gleaming black Allegiant Stadium — but without any fans (or gameday revenue to pay down the attendant debt).
Mark Davis bet everything — his team, his fortune, and his father’s legacy — on this season being a success.
It didn’t look like it was going to pay off. Head coach Jon Gruden’s first three seasons back in black (19-29, .396 win percentage) were significantly worse than the three years under his predecessor, Jack Del Rio (25-23, .521). General manager Mike Mayock’s transition from mock drafts to real drafts has been bumpy, with Gregg Rosenthal of the NFL Network ranking him and Gruden as the worst-drafting front office in the league. Team President Marc Badain, who had spent all 30 years of his professional career with the organization, resigned days before training camp with little explanation. Mayock admitted before this season that his job likely depended on the Raiders making the playoffs, and FiveThirtyEight’s preseason NFL predictions gave them just a 24 percent chance to do it.
After two weeks, the Las Vegas (née Oakland, née Los Angeles, née Oakland) Raiders are 2-0, having knocked off the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers by a combined score of 59-44. Quarterback Derek Carr leads the NFL in passing yards with 817, nearly 130 yards ahead of second place. The team is No. 2 in the NFL in Sports-Reference.com’s predictive Simple Rating System metric.
Is this a mirage in the desert, or are the Raiders for real?
Right off the bat, there’s room for skepticism: Simple Rating System, predictive as it is, pretty much only takes into account a team’s opponents and average point differential. This early in the season, it’s not even as predictive as point spread or point differential alone.
On the field, the Raiders boast the No. 7 scoring offense and No. 1 yardage offense so far this year. They rank seventh in yards per play and are tied for fifth in per-drive scoring rate. Though they can’t run the ball for beans, Gruden’s play-calling is drawing raves — and has Carr playing the best football of his life. The three-time Pro Bowler has the fourth-highest quarterback passing grade on Pro Football Focus, and he ranks fourth in Football Outsiders’ Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement (DYAR). (Carr injured his ankle in last week’s win over the Steelers, though, and is currently questionable for Week 3.)
Defensively, the Raiders are closer to the middle of the pack. They are tied for 10th in scoring defense and 16th in yards allowed. They’re 16th in Football Outsiders’ defensive Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA). But PFF loves the tape of defensive coordinator Gus Bradley’s unit, grading them the sixth-best overall defense, with the league’s No. 1 pass rush.
That pass-rush dominance shows up in the stat column, too. Despite blitzing less often than any other team, the Raiders rank 15th in pressure rate, according to ESPN Stats & Information Group. Mayock’s first-ever draft pick — defensive end Clelin Ferrell, taken No. 4 overall in 2019 — may never be productive. But the edge-rusher Mayock took 102 picks later, Maxx Crosby, has blossomed into a stud: two sacks, eight tackles, three tackles for loss, and 10 quarterback hits season alone, not to mention the highest overall PFF grade of any defender in the league. Right behind Crosby, in ninth place, is 2021 free-agent class headliner Yannick Ngakoue.
The Raiders do have significant flaws. Their offensive line ranks dead last in PFF’s run-blocking grades and 16th in pass protection. They’re also the league’s worst tackling team, according to PFF. That’s partly why they’re only a decent defense, despite dominant players up front. All told, the Raiders are still outside of the top 10 in most predictive team-strength metrics.
But look how much these two opening wins have impressed the models:
Vegas has made huge leaps in the models
Rankings and playoff odds in five models for the Las Vegas Raiders before Week 1 and before Week 3 of the 2021 season
RANKINGS
PLAYOFF ODDS
METRIC
W1
W3
DIFF.
W1
W3
DIFF.
Football Outsiders DVOA
21
19
+2
31.5%
49.5%
+18.0
ESPN FPI
25
19
+6
17.0
50.4
+33.4
PFF Power Rankings
21
12
+9
49.0
59.0
+10.0
Jeff Sagarin
23
13
+10
—
—
—
FiveThirtyEight Elo
24
13
+11
24.0
54.0
+30.0
Before Week 1, the Raiders ranked no better than 21st in any of these five predictive team-strength metrics. After Week 2, they’re 12th in both FiveThirtyEight’s Elo projections and PFF’s Power Rankings and at least in the teens everywhere else.
Jeff Sagarin’s model doesn’t predict playoff odds, but the other four metrics do, and after playing two games, the Raiders’ chances of making the postseason have jumped from a range of 17 to 49 percent to 50 to 60 percent. According to Rotowire, the Raiders’ betting odds of making the playoffs are now at +100, with an implied probability of 47.8 percent. Even though those odds are much better than the preseason high of +340, every predictive model we looked at thinks the Raiders are more “for real” than betting markets do.
Is it really the right time to get on board the Raiders bandwagon? Maybe not. But many NFL observers were skeptical of Davis — who, to put it mildly, zigs where most NFL owners tend to zag — and his ability to get a new stadium built without another team involved. Or attract attention in attraction-saturated Las Vegas. Or bring Gruden back into the fold. Or build a roster without the help of longtime Raiders execs like Badain, former general manager Reggie McKenzie or former CEO Amy Trask.
Yet Vegas is the hottest ticket in football, Gruden is prowling the sidelines, and the Raiders have better-than-even odds to make their third trip to the playoffs since Gruden left 20 years ago.
Davis bet it all on (silver and) black, and he’s going to let it ride.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Tuesday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE
Philadelphia 3, Baltimore 2
Boston 6, NY Mets 3
Minnesota 9, Chi Cubs 5
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Detroit 5, Chi White Sox 3
Cleveland 4, Kansas City 1
NY Yankees 7, Texas 1
Toronto 4, Tampa Bay 2
Seattle 5, Oakland 2
Houston 10, L.A. Angels 5
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Washington 7, Miami 1
Pittsburgh 6, Cincinnati 2
St. Louis 2, Milwaukee 1
LA Dodgers 5, Colorado 4
Atlanta 6, Arizona 1
San Francisco 6, San Diego 5
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Monday’s sports events:
INTERLEAGUE
Baltimore 2, Philadelphia 0
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Kansas City 7, Cleveland 2 — Game 13
Detroit 4, Chicago White Sox 3
Kansas City 4, Cleveland 2 — Game 14
NY Yankees 4, Texas 3
Tampa Bay 6, Toronto 4
Seattle 4, Oakland 2
Houston 10, LA Angels 0
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Cincinnati 9, Pittsburgh 5
St. Louis 5, Milwaukee 2
Miami 8, Washington 7
Atlanta 11, Arizona 4
