Runs the numbers desk on one rule: a number without its method is a rumor with a decimal point.
When he files: Thursdays, plus any day a number becomes the story.
11 resolved, 64% held up.
The 49ers do not acquire a player carrying a 2026 cap hit above $10 million between July 26, 2026 and the November 10, 2026 trade deadline.
Resolves in 15 days, Nov 10, 2026
The piece that made itAbout $39 Million Of The 49ers' Cap Space Did Not Come From The 2026 Salary CapThe 49ers carry more than $25 million of unused 2026 cap space forward into the 2027 league year.
Resolves by Mar 31, 2027
The piece that made itAbout $39 Million Of The 49ers' Cap Space Did Not Come From The 2026 Salary CapThe first veteran contract the San Francisco 49ers sign or extend at $10,000,000 or more in total value, between 2026-08-06 and 2027-04-30, includes at least one void year. Rookie contracts and minimum-salary benefit deals do not qualify. Scored from Over The Cap's contract page for that player, cross-checked at Spotrac. If the qualifying contract carries no void year, the take is scored wrong.
Resolves by Apr 30, 2027
The piece that made itParaag Marathe Left, And Seventy-Two Void Seasons StayedGolden State finishes the 2026-27 regular season with fewer than 39 regular-season wins.
Resolves by Apr 18, 2027
The piece that made itGolden State's First 44 Games Paid Both Prices Of Curry's Own Bar, 39 Wins And 42Stephen Curry's three-point percentage for the 2026-27 regular season is below .400.
Resolves by Apr 18, 2027
The piece that made itGolden State's First 44 Games Paid Both Prices Of Curry's Own Bar, 39 Wins And 42Michigan's 2027 recruiting class finishes with a blue-chip share below 68.0 percent in the 247Sports Composite, where blue-chip share is five-stars plus four-stars divided by total commitments on the Composite team-rankings row.
Resolves by Feb 15, 2027
The piece that made itNine Finished Michigan Classes Top Out At 68 Percent Blue-Chip, And The 2027 Board Reads 71.4Michigan's 2027 recruiting class finishes with at least 24 total commitments, as stated on Michigan's row in the 247Sports Composite team rankings.
Resolves by Feb 15, 2027
The piece that made itNine Finished Michigan Classes Top Out At 68 Percent Blue-Chip, And The 2027 Board Reads 71.4Spotrac's published San Francisco 49ers cap space and Over The Cap's are within $5,000,000 of each other on November 5, 2026, in either direction. The take is WRONG if the two published figures differ by more than $5,000,000.
Resolves in 10 days, Nov 5, 2026
The piece that made itMy August Estimate Said $57 Million. Over The Cap Says $45,532,257.Spotrac and Over The Cap state Trent Williams' 2026 cap number exactly $2,499,997 apart on November 5, 2026. The take is WRONG at any other difference, including a larger one.
Resolves in 10 days, Nov 5, 2026
The piece that made itMy August Estimate Said $57 Million. Over The Cap Says $45,532,257.Bryce Underwood's passing yards per attempt across Michigan's nine 2026 Big Ten regular-season games is 7.52 or lower, which is his figure across Michigan's nine 2025 Big Ten regular-season games (1,601 yards on 213 attempts). Scored off Michigan's official box scores: his passing yards divided by his pass attempts, each summed over the games against Iowa, Minnesota, Penn State, Indiana, Rutgers, Michigan State, Oregon, UCLA and Ohio State, rounded to two decimals. A game he does not play adds nothing to either total; if he attempts no pass in those nine games the call is void.
Resolves by Nov 29, 2026
The piece that made itIs Bryce Underwood a better passer, or did he play Western Michigan and UTEP?In the first SP+ ratings table ESPN publishes after Michigan's regular season ends on November 28, 2026, Michigan's special-teams rating is 0.0 or better as printed to one decimal. Scored off the SPEC TMS column of ESPN's all-138-FBS-teams SP+ table (Bill Connelly) in its first edition dated after November 28; -0.1 or lower misses. If ESPN publishes no such table by December 8, the call is void.
Resolves by Dec 1, 2026
The piece that made itIowa's special-teams edge is 0.8 points, and three games have shrunk itBrandin Podziemski's 2027-28 salary, under the next NBA contract he signs with any club (rookie-scale extension, restricted free-agent deal or offer sheet, or the qualifying offer), is $23,500,000 or more.
Resolves by Oct 15, 2027
The piece that made itWhat would a Brandin Podziemski extension cost Golden State's 2027 room?The San Francisco 49ers acquire at least one interior defensive lineman by trade between Oct. 9, 2026 and the trade deadline at 4 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 10, 2026. Interior means a player the 49ers' announcement or his former club's roster lists as a defensive tackle or nose tackle, or a defensive lineman who played primarily inside for his former club this season. A free-agent or practice-squad signing does not count; an edge rusher acquired by trade does not count. WRONG if no such trade is completed by the deadline.
Resolves in 15 days, Nov 10, 2026
The piece that made itOsa Odighizuwa ranks 108th against the run. Tampa Bay has the 2nd.Brock Purdy's career regular-season passer rating, as printed in the TOTAL row of his NFL.com career passing stats, is below 106.0 after the 49ers' final 2026 regular-season game. WRONG if it reads 106.0 or higher. If he does not play again, the rating stands as it is and the call is scored on it.
Resolves by Jan 11, 2027
The piece that made itHow much of Brock Purdy's 105.6 passer rating belongs to Brock Purdy?At least two of the four players placed on active/PUP on July 25, 2026 (George Kittle, Mykel Williams, Alfred Collins, Isaac Guerendo) are on the reserve/PUP list when the 49ers set their 53-man roster on August 30, 2026.
The piece that made itAbout $39 Million Of The 49ers' Cap Space Did Not Come From The 2026 Salary CapRobbie Ray finishes the 2026 season with an ERA above 4.00.
The piece that made itLuis Arraez Is Worth What He Looks Like. Robbie Ray Is Worth 1.3 Runs Less.Neither Willy Adames nor Matt Chapman is traded by the August 3, 2026 deadline.
The piece that made itLuis Arraez Is Worth What He Looks Like. Robbie Ray Is Worth 1.3 Runs Less.Luis Arraez is traded by the deadline, and the headline piece coming back is not a consensus top-100 prospect.
The piece that made itLuis Arraez Is Worth What He Looks Like. Robbie Ray Is Worth 1.3 Runs Less.From August 1 through the end of the 2026 regular season, Tyler Mahle posts a lower ERA than Robbie Ray.
The piece that made itFourteen Trades Into July, One Top-100 Name Has Moved, And Not For A RentalSan Francisco does not select the contract of Parks Harber at any point in the 2026 regular season.
The piece that made itThe Giants Have One 40-Man Spot Left. December 1 Is What Makes It Expensive.San Francisco makes two or fewer contract selections between August 14 and the end of the 2026 regular season.
The piece that made itThe Giants Have One 40-Man Spot Left. December 1 Is What Makes It Expensive.Stephen Curry has not signed a contract extension with the Golden State Warriors as of October 21, 2026, the night Golden State opens its season.
The piece that made itGolden State's First 44 Games Paid Both Prices Of Curry's Own Bar, 39 Wins And 42Over The Cap's published San Francisco 49ers 2026 cap space is below $60,000,000 on September 15, 2026. The take is WRONG at $60,000,000 or above.
The piece that made it$11,991,268 Of The 49ers' Cap Space Depends On Which Book You OpenSpotrac's published San Francisco 49ers 2026 cap space exceeds Over The Cap's by more than $5,000,000 on September 15, 2026. The take is WRONG at $5,000,000 or below, and WRONG if Over The Cap's figure is the higher of the two.
The piece that made it$11,991,268 Of The 49ers' Cap Space Depends On Which Book You OpenSpotrac and Over The Cap still state Trent Williams' 2026 cap number more than $2,000,000 apart on September 15, 2026. The take is WRONG at $2,000,000 or below.
The piece that made it$11,991,268 Of The 49ers' Cap Space Depends On Which Book You OpenSan Francisco finishes the 2026 regular season with fewer bases on balls than any other club in Major League Baseball. Scored off the league's official 2026 regular-season team batting record for bases on balls (the season team hitting totals published by Major League Baseball), read the morning after the final day of the regular season. RIGHT if San Francisco's final walk total is strictly lower than every other club's. WRONG if any club finishes with fewer, and WRONG if any club ties San Francisco's total. Intentional walks count, exactly as they do in the official team total. Hit by pitch does not count. If the regular season is shortened and San Francisco plays fewer than 158 games, score it off the games actually played and say so.
The piece that made itThe Giants can hit with men on base. They are last at putting them there.
Brock Purdy finished Monday's win over Washington with 1,524 career regular-season attempts and a 105.6 passer rating, first among quarterbacks with at least 1,500 attempts, ahead of Lamar Jackson's 102.7. Against the league average over the same seasons, 90.7, he is 14.9 points better. Of 81 quarterbacks who entered the NFL in 1999 or later and reached 1,500 attempts, only Patrick Mahomes reached it further above the league. Other quarterbacks in Kyle Shanahan's offense since 2017 have rated 1.3 points above the league; Jimmy Garoppolo rated 8.9 above. The ten quarterbacks who qualified furthest above the league kept about four-fifths of that margin over their next 1,000 attempts.
From 1999 through 2025, 51 NFL teams won their first five games, and they won 63 percent of their remaining games. The ten that also led the league in net expected points added per play after five games won 66 percent of the rest; the other 41 won 63 percent. Over the 49ers' 12 remaining games that gap is about four-tenths of a win. San Francisco is 5-0, has outscored opponents by 61 points and ranks first in net expected points per play. The base rate projects about 12.6 to 12.9 wins.
Through Week 4, PFF's grades rank A'Shawn Robinson 2nd of 113 interior defensive linemen against the run and 78th as a pass rusher. The 49ers' two interior regulars rank 108th and 101st against the run. Robinson is on a one-year, $10 million deal with no dead money for Tampa Bay if traded, and the 49ers would carry about $2 million of it against $41.4 million in cap space. From 2021 to 2025, two deadline-window trades involved an interior lineman aged 29 or older on an expiring deal: Johnathan Hankins for a sixth-round pick swap and Leonard Williams for a second and a fifth. Robinson's profile sits much closer to Hankins.
Nine rookie-scale extensions below the maximum were signed in 2025 and 2026. Converted to a share of the salary cap, the four whose third seasons look most like Podziemski's 2025-26 started at an average of 13.4 percent, which is about $23.5 million against the league's projected 2027-28 cap of $176 million. That is roughly $6.5 million more than the $17 million hold Golden State would otherwise carry into next summer.
The Giants section of the Called Shots ledger finished the regular season at 38 right, 28 wrong and 2 void. A hit rate says little until it is set against the odds each call carried. The twenty priced calls beat their prices by about one and a half hits, all of it in five short-priced favorites, on a sample too small to call anything but calibrated.
In Bill Connelly's SP+ ratings after Week 3, Iowa's special teams rate 0.5 points per game better than an average FBS unit and Michigan's rate -0.3, a gap of 0.8 points. That is the same size as the gap between the two defences, which sit 9th and 11th, even though the special-teams ranks are 7th and 108th. Every FBS special-teams rating sits between -0.6 and 0.6, a range of 1.2 points, against about 30 points on offence and on defence. ESPN's own note says early-season ratings rest mainly on preseason projections, special teams included, and the table agrees: across all 138 teams the Week 3 special-teams ratings track the final preseason ones almost exactly, and 121 teams have moved by 0.1 or less. Michigan has moved up 0.2, from -0.5, and Iowa down 0.1, from 0.6, so the gap has shrunk from 1.1 to 0.8. Michigan's counting numbers through three games are clean: 2 of 2 on field goals, 10 of 10 on extra points, 43.5 yards a punt. Iowa has missed two extra points and a field goal and averages 17.0 yards on 11 punt returns, with a touchdown. One take filed, on where Michigan's rating finishes the regular season.
Bryce Underwood's 2026 passing line looks better than his freshman line: 50.0 percent of his dropbacks have been successful plays against 41.4 percent in 2025, and his expected points added per dropback has risen from +0.14 to +0.31. By expected points, the schedule explains all of that; by success rate, somewhere between a sixth of it and nearly all of it. Forty-nine of his 68 dropbacks this season came against Western Michigan and UTEP, against 58 of 355 against Group of Five teams in 2025. Against Group of Five opponents he completed 66.1 percent in 2025 and 66.0 percent this season. Against Oklahoma, the one Power 4 defence in both seasons, his success rate went from 20.0 percent to 31.6 percent and his expected points from -0.05 to -0.02. Reweighting his 2025 rates to this season's schedule puts his matched expected points at +0.38 or +0.33, both above his actual +0.31; the matched success-rate gain is between 0.4 and 7.2 points, inside the sampling error of 68 plays. Michigan is not throwing less by choice: on first and second down in one-score games through three quarters it has passed on 44.2 percent of plays, against 44.4 percent in 2025. Iowa's pass defence ranked 13th of 136 last season by expected points allowed per pass play; Oklahoma's was 17th. One take filed, on yards per attempt in Big Ten games.
Read Thursday, September 17, 2026, off the league's play-by-play for all 153 San Francisco finals and cross-checked against Baseball Savant: the Giants have scored 649 runs, 278 of them on home runs, leaving 371 runs that did not come on a swing over the fence. That is 2.42 a game, twenty-sixth of thirty clubs, against a league average of 2.67. The usual explanation does not survive contact with the numbers. San Francisco hits .263 with runners in scoring position, ninth best in baseball and above the league's .253. What it does not do is put men there. The Giants have drawn 429 walks, fewer than any other club, with Toronto next at 432 and the league averaging 513.6. They are ninth in batting average and twenty-seventh in on-base percentage, an eighteen-place fall that is the largest in the major leagues. Their share of runs on home runs, 42.8 percent, is ninth of thirty against a league figure of 40.5 percent, which makes it ordinary. One take filed.
Read in both books Thursday, September 10, 2026: San Francisco leads the NFL in cap space at $45,532,257 on Over The Cap and $50,209,913 on Spotrac. Over The Cap's charges rose $22,523,241 since August 27, against a modelled $9,842,532 to $10,825,332, so the August estimate missed by between $11,697,909 and $12,680,709. The practice squad landed inside the modelled range at $4,617,000 and dead money was light by $756,599. The miss is the reserve lists: injured reserve, reserve/PUP and one suspension carry $39,632,011, of which $3,419,563 reached the published number in August, and none of the three was an input to the estimate. The gap between the two books has collapsed from $11,991,268 to $4,677,656, and $6,302,000 of what is left is the two sites filing one player's absence under different headings at different prices. Trent Williams remains $2,499,997 apart, unchanged for thirty-three days, and that one contract is larger than the entire $2,059,992 active-roster difference. Of three calls resolving September 15, two are on track right and one is wrong by $322,344.
Michigan's 2027 recruiting class is 71.4 percent blue-chip in the 247Sports Composite, fifteen four-stars and no five-stars out of twenty-one commitments, read Thursday morning. Michigan's last nine finished classes ran from 35.0 to 68.0 percent, median 54.5, and they carried between 20 and 26 names. The number being quoted now is a rate over a class that is four commitments short of the program's own median. Measured across the 26 programs on both this morning's 2027 board and the finished 2026 board, the unfinished share runs a median of 6.6 points and a mean of 7.7 points above the finished one, and 20 of the 26 sit above their own finished figure. That puts Michigan's 2027 class on a path to about 64 percent, which would be fifth of the ten classes measured here.
Read in both books Thursday morning: San Francisco leads the league in cap space on Over The Cap at $68,055,498 and on Spotrac at $80,046,766. The $11,991,268 between them is not an error in either. It decomposes into a cap limit, a pricing difference on the top 51 contracts, injured reserve, the exempt list and dead money, and it sums to the dollar. What the accounting flip at the start of the regular season adds is between $9,842,532 and $10,825,332, which is less than the two books already disagree by.
Stephen Curry set his own bar in April: keep the core together, stay alive, get a chance at a playoff series. Priced against five full seasons of Western Conference results, the cheap reading of that sentence costs a median of 39 wins and the expensive one costs 42. Golden State won 37. Its record before Butler's injury was a 47-win pace and its record after was a 26-win pace, and the published data cannot say which absence caused which.
Counted entry by entry Thursday morning: 45 names on the Giants' 40-man roster, six on the 60-day injured list, 39 against the limit, one spot open. Two contracts have been selected in the last six days and neither was a prospect decision. What a September call-up costs in a year when two labor agreements expire at different times, and the part of it nobody outside the building can see.
Twenty-one contracts on the 49ers' 2026 cap sheet carry void years, 72 of them in total. Mike Evans' deal decomposed to the dollar, why the books close $450,000 short, and the reason the executive credited with that architecture had already handed off the job that produces it.
Fourteen completed July trades, one top-100 name, and it moved for a controllable infielder rather than a rental. Against that market, a buyer takes on two and a half times as much salary for Robbie Ray as for Tyler Mahle, whose component numbers are nine hundredths of a run apart.
The 49ers have more cap space than any team in football. Roughly 55 percent of it arrived from outside the 2026 salary cap, and about $7 million of that is an insurance policy paying out on Nick Bosa's knee.
One of the Giants' two rentals is having a season the components support. The other has the rotation's best ERA and its second-worst FIP. Pricing them the same way is the mistake available between now and August 3.