Sideline Engineering

Storytelling about the sports and game design mechanics.

Building a team chemistry model

Improving how teams work together in a text sim

April 30, 2026

Changelog for Oregontennis.org

This is the first year of actual tennis rankings results, we've never had them in the past. tennisreporting -- the official site of the OSAA for tennis recordkeeping -- does track wins and stats, but it's rankings are not very good and are ignored. A coaches poll in tennis like in other sports presupposes you've seen the other teams around the state, but tennis is pretty regional in a large state like ours, so it wouldn't work quite as well.

April 22, 2026

The Chip Window

How to eliminate tanking from the NBA draft lottery, while raising the incentives to win.

April 15, 2026

More sims led to more changes

Lots of iteration this week as I got through some to-do items that had been on my list for a while. Others were nagging problems I saw from playtesting.

March 26, 2026

Bringing the nerdiest problem in sports to my fake football game

In 2007, I added my name to a list.

March 24, 2026

What the Delta Kickoff System Actually Is

Viperball has a strange way of handling kickoffs -- by eliminating them -- and some data on how the Delta system doesn't correlate to worse results for winning teams.

March 15, 2026

I Asked for a Box Score. I Ended Up Building a Universe.

Coding a Fictional League into Existence

March 01, 2026