Ep 115: Jeff McFarland on Jim Courier and GOAT Algorithms
Listen now
Description
Jeff McFarland is the proprietor of the analytics site HiddenGameOfTennis.com, and like me, he has tried his hand at various mathematical approaches to rank the best players of all time, in both tennis and baseball. We start this jumbo episode by talking about Jim Courier--#107 on my Tennis 128 list--a player with a reputation that outstrips his career record, though both are outstanding. Jeff weighs in on the Courier-Chang comparison, and we talk about how Jimbo's inside-out forehand changed the game. We consider whether the early 1990s were a deceptively weak era, how much weight the slams deserve, which current players are most like Courier, some possible limitations of Elo for GOAT rankings, and--in more than one and half hours of tennis talk--a whole lot more.
More Episodes
This year, I ranked the top 128 players of the last 100 years. I wrote long-form essays about each one, which I've published over the last eleven months. Carl Bialik joined me for a podcast episode to mark the end of the project. We solicited questions, and many of you came through--we ended up...
Published 12/23/22
Published 12/23/22
Serbian-American writer Ana Mitric joins me to discuss the latest entry in my Tennis 128, Goran Ivanisevic. Ana was a Goran fan even before she took a broader interest in tennis, and she is particularly sensitive to how the breakup of the former Yugoslavia affected players on all sides of the...
Published 03/16/22