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Ep 115: Jeff McFarland on Jim Courier and GOAT Algorithms
The Tennis Abstract Podcast
English - March 25, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 1 Byte - ★★★★★ - 22 ratingsSports tennis analytics stats statistics tactics wimbledon us open australian open roland garros roger federer Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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.