FiveThirtyEight’s top stories last week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular This Week] Sunday, February 12, 2017 [1. Brady vs. Belichick: Who’s To Blame For The Patriots’ Insufferable Success?]( [Read more]( [2. The Darkest Town In America]( GERLACH, Nev. — Here in the desert, the Earth boils and stars fill the sky. By day, you can see plumes of geothermal steam rising in every direction, pouring from vents in the ground and disappearing into the crisp, dry air. At night, you can see distant galaxies with the naked eye, their light much older than our species. [Read more]( [3. About Those Falcons Play Calls …]( Every Super Bowl loser wants a do-over, but no team has had as disastrous an ending as Atlanta had in the final nine minutes of Super Bowl LI. If the Falcons were given 1,000 do-overs, they would have been expected, according to ESPN’s win probability model, to win the game 996 times. [Read more]( [4. 14 Versions Of Trump’s Presidency, From #MAGA To Impeachment]( When faced with highly uncertain conditions, military units and major corporations sometimes use an exercise called scenario planning. The idea is to consider a broad range of possibilities for how the future might unfold to help guide long-term planning and preparation. The goal is not necessarily to assess the relative likelihood of each scenario so much as to keep an open mind so you’re not so surprised when events don’t develop quite as you’d expected. [Read more]( [5. Donald Trump Had A Superior Electoral College Strategy]( [Read more]( [6. The Pats’ Comeback Was Incredible — Even If You Think The Falcons Blew It]( As you may have heard by now — perhaps from the eardrum-shattering sound of New England Patriots fans booing Roger Goodell — the Patriots are Super Bowl champs, having rallied back from a 28-3 deficit to beat the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 on Sunday. The comeback alone was historic, ranking as the most improbable in Super Bowl history, but there’s also a whole layer of history attached to the accomplishments of New England quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick, plus the revenge narrative of Deflategate. It’s a lot to keep track of. [Read more]( [7. The Red Wings’ Empire Is Crumbling]( On April Fools’ Day in 1990, the Detroit Red Wings and Philadelphia Flyers skated for the final game of the season at The Spectrum in south Philly. Captain Steve Yzerman banged home a goal late in the third period to earn the Wings a 3-3 tie, ending Detroit’s campaign with 70 points and a last-place finish in the Norris Division. Soon after, the 1989-90 Red Wings cleaned out their lockers and parted ways for the summer. [Read more]( [8. What Really Matters From Trump’s First 3 Weeks?]( In this week’s politics chat, we try to separate the important, lasting storylines from the first three weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency from the more trivial, ephemeral ones. The transcript below has been lightly edited. [Read more]( [9. The 4 Types Of Constitutional Crises]( People have been talking about the possibility of a “constitutional crisis” since before President Trump’s election. And in the wake of Trump’s executive order restricting the ability of people from seven predominantly Muslim nations to travel to the U.S., we’re once again hearing that term a lot. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, used the phrase to describe reports of Customs and Border Protection officials snubbing members of Congress and refusing to abide by a judge’s ruling delaying the enforcement of the order. And the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake investigated whether Trump’s disparaging remarks about a federal judge who ruled against the administration could be considered a constitutional crisis. [Read more]( [10. The Super Bowl Wasn’t Really Like The Election]( It’s time for some probability theory. Imagine you’d passed out on Lime-A-Ritas before kickoff on Sunday night and woken up in a cold sweat at 3 a.m. to read the headline, “New England Patriots win 34-28.” That would have been about the least surprising Super Bowl result imaginable. The Patriots were favored before the game according to Vegas betting lines and FiveThirtyEight’s Elo projections, and it was expected to be high-scoring. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Trump Skeptics Tell Us Where They Think The GOP Is Headed]( Lastly, The Riddler Edited by Oliver Roeder From Humberto Barreto, a seaside problem: You’re a lifeguard standing on the beach, right at the edge of the water, and gazing out over the ocean. You see someone drowning 100 meters to the right of you and 100 meters away from shore. You can run 100 meters in 15 seconds and swim 100 meters in 75 seconds. (The beach drops off steeply, meaning that you can’t run in the water.) What’s the fastest you can get to the victim? [Solve it!]( [FiveThirtyEight] [ESPN]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 147 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10023.