While watching the Sochi Olympics over the past two weeks, I couldn’t help but notice the range of different athletes that compete. On the one hand, there’s 15-year-old German ski jumper Gianina Ernst and 4'10" Canadian figure skater Meagan Duhamel. On the other hand, there’s 55-year old alpine skier Hubertus Von Hohenlohe and 46-year old linebacker/Jamaican bobsledder Winston Watts.

If the biggest day in college football was last month’s national championship game, the second biggest day might be yesterday’s National Signing Day, the first day that high school seniors can announce where they’ll play football in college. Like many before it, this year’s National Signing Day was full of stories about schools competing over players, and players deciding between their local school or a team across the country.

It’s been well-covered that games in the NFL playoffs have fewer penalties than regular season games. But what hasn’t been discussed is how penalties in the playoffs change—and particularly, offensive penalties.

After seeing our previous two posts on college football and basketball, reader Bryan Chastain sent some excellent feedback: Showing players per capita is nice, but what’s really interesting is seeing how different player counts are from what’s expected, given a state’s or county’s population. In other words, by estimating how many players each area should produce and comparing this to the number of players that they actually do, we can more clearly identify the real hotbeds of these college sports.

An update to this post is now available.

Last week, I made an interactive map exploring where different conferences and colleges recruit college football players. Several readers mentioned that they’d like to see the same map and analysis for college basketball.

2013 was a huge year for Macklemore. After rapping for 12 years in obscurity, he broke out last year, landing three songs on Billboard’s year-end Top 100 chart including the number one hit, “Thrift Shop.”