In the wake of Tom Brady winning his 7th Super Bowl Ring, the consensus NFL GOAT (Greatest of All Time) has started to be called the "GOAT of GOATS." Brady's Super Bowl win this last week was with a new team and a shortened offseason due to Covid-19. This seemed to solidify to most doubters that the fabled "Patriot Way" may have been the "Tom Brady Way" all along.

Donté Stallworth got this whole thing started with this unassuming but controversial tweet:

This "GOAT of GOATS" thing has drawn the ire of different groups of fans who think the GOAT from their sport is GOAT-ier than Tom. But none have been more outspoken about this than Serena Williams fans.

And it goes on.

The general argument going around, more or less, seems to be that: Serena has more titles than Tom, and that should be that. And they're not wrong: 23 Major Championship trophies is more than 7 Super Bowl Rings.

BUT people are also saying, "Yeah, but there are four majors in a year and only one Super Bowl." And they are also right.

So, let's see who is more of a GOAT.

GOAT vs. GOAT

It's borderline impossible to do a perfect job of comparing the "greatness" of players between two different sports. I am personally not a proponent of it, but everyone seems to be doing it anyway. And they seem to be using the championship numbers to do it.

And based on championships, both athletes are clearly the best ever in their sports. But a different way to ask the question is, “Which of the two rose the furthest above the other athletes in their own sport?” And, if we're asking the question that way, the data seems to indicate that Tom Brady is very much the GOAT of GOATS in a him vs. Serena matchup (and it's not even close).

It’s just not close. Serena is clearly great and seems to be the front-runner for the GOAT in Women’s Tennis. But, if you’re judging based on having a standout number of titles, Tom is just way better.

Now, I agree that Tom Brady could not have won a Super Bowl while he was pregnant. One or two days off of his mandatory avocado toast and gallon of water per day seem to send this guy into a tailspin.

The Amazing Thing About Tom

A little context to the chart makes Tom Brady look even more annoyingly good. He obviously has had teammates who were great at doing their jobs. That's a given for any Super Bowl Team. But, in Tom's case, they were never the same players. Of the players who have won 4 or more Super Bowls:

• 22 of those players were all members of the 1975-1980 Steelers who won 4 Super Bowls

• 6 were members of Joe Montana's 1980s 49ers teams that won 4 Super Bowls

• 5 were miscellaneous players who won with multiple organizations at positions much less important than quarterback (4 LBs and 1 TE)

• Adam Vinatieri won 3 of his 4 on Tom Brady Patriots teams

• Rob Gronkowski won all 4 with Tom Brady led teams

• And then there is Tom Brady, with 7 Super Bowls

The Patriots won 6 Super Bowls with Tom Brady at the helm, and there was not a single player other than Brady who was on the team for more than 3. The great 49ers and Steelers teams of the 70s and 80s had a core of players there for all 4 championships. The only Patriots player to be on the roster for at least 4 Super Bowls was "Touchdown Tommy."

Looking Forward

Maybe Coach Belichick and the Patriots just need another year or two to draft and trade their way back on track. A few more seasons will be necessary to truly decide if the "Patriot Way" can thrive in a post-Brady era. If it does, maybe that will bring these unprecedented numbers down to size.

But for now, if it is between Tom's Super Bowl Rings and Serena's Major Championships, Tom Brady is undoubtedly the GOAT of GOATS.

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It should be noted that I don't particularly love watching Tom play, while I find Serena electric to watch. This article is nothing personal, just my two cents. For years, I argued Tom was not the NFL GOAT, but I really don't have much of an argument anymore.

Also, Serena might be GOAT-ier than Tom, just not on this metric.

Also, here is the chart for Men’s Major Tennis Championships if you were interested.

all of this data was pulled from these wikipedia pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grand_Slam_women%27s_singles_champions and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_players_who_have_won_the_most_NFL_championships

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grand_Slam_men%27s_singles_champions

As a responsible social scientist, I obviously had to lay out my hypothesis before conducting my data work because that’s what responsible social scientists do when they’re pretending to be real scientists.

My hypothesis: SF or LA is probably the highest.

My reasoning: Both of these counties contain a large city that TONS of young people move to from outside the area. These more lively social scenes are probably correlated with higher rates of “unsafe” decision-making on the weekends.

With that all squared away, the next step was to take a peek and see what the data had to say. Which county in California is the STD king? Each one of these lines represents a county. So, whichever line is highest, wins.

DING! DING! DING! We have a winner!

San Francisco County was, in fact, the winner in both categories. Nobody else, including LA, was even close. SF’s chlamydia rates (the first graph) were previously pretty normal, but have exploded in recent years. Meanwhile, their gonorrhea rates (the second graph) have always been elite, but recently they have taken it to another level. SF seems to be on a level of its own when it comes to STDs.

Why is this happening?

The natural question is, “What the hell is happening in SF?”

And while I can’t entirely answer that question, the data is pretty telling.

The dataset also contains STD rates for males and females in each county. And when we look at San Francisco’s STD rates for males and females separately, a pretty clear pattern emerges.

The male rates are SKYROCKETING, while the female rates are not moving very much. There are really only two possible explanations for this: 1) the very sizable male gay community in SF has a growing STD problem or 2) somehow a ton of heterosexual men are being “unsafe” with a small group of infected heterosexual women and not spreading the disease to the rest of the women. There might be some truth to both of these, but given how sharp the contrast is between the males and females, the smart money says it’s mostly the gay community—but not necessarily entirely.

This huge growth in STD rates reflects a California-wide trend. STD rates are growing everywhere, but nothing like in San Francisco. The next chart shows the STD rates of San Francisco County vs. the average of the rest of California’s Counties.

I used 49ers colors.

In recent years, SF has literally blown the roof off of the chart. They have made what would have been a seemingly large growth rate in the rest of the state appear tiny in comparison to their own growth.

I’m not exaggerating. Look at these STD growth rates for San Diego County.

That is MAJOR growth.

But San Diego’s “Yeah bro, we’re just having a good time down here” growth is barely even noticeable when you compare it to what the flower children up North have been up to.

Also, these parallel-looking lines between the male and female STD rates for San Diego are what you would expect to see if the heterosexual community was mostly responsible for STD growth. You’d expect to find the lines rising and falling together because you’d need one male and one female, usually, to spread the disease between straight partners.

It is likely that the straight community in SF is experiencing this same kind of moderate growth that you’re seeing in San Diego (and everywhere else). We can test this by seeing if the SF female population has STD rates similar to San Diego.

It looks like it does. That means that the straight community in SF has a growing STD problem as well. But, their STD rates seem to be on par with those of the rest of the state. Essentially, the straight community in SF seems to be “regular bad” at spreading STDs. Meanwhile, the SF male gay community seems to be “super bad.” The Bay might have a growing public health problem on its hands.

The good news is that neither of these STDs tends to be life-threatening or affect one’s health in a serious way. But ‘the clap’ is inconvenient, to say the least.

This is not at all an indictment of SF’s gay community. From the looks of these charts, it seems like the entire state (and likely the entire country) needs to be doing a better job of making responsible decisions. Not to mention, many might posit that a lot of the better decision-making being made in the straight community is not exactly driven by the men.

This data was only as recent as 2018, so maybe this trend has fixed itself in the meantime…but I highly doubt that.

Do with this information what you will. I’m not a doctor. I just do this for fun.

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* It should be noted that there is some chance that gay men in SF just get tested way more frequently than anybody anywhere else and they are just finding more STDs in this community because they get tested so much more often than anyone else. If this is the case, it likely would diminish the rate to some extent, but probably not enough to put its growth rate on par with the female population.

If you're anything like me you've probably wondered, "What do white people actually do for fun?" Are their weekends just golf and skiing if they're on the rich end? Building decks and fishing if they're more working class? Is there a lot of bocce ball involved?

These are exactly the kinds of meaningless questions that get me excited!

I wasn't sure if there would be any way to figure this out empirically. But the whole point of this Substack is computational takes on things that don't mean anything to anybody. And this topic is exactly that! So, goddamnit, I had to try for my beloved, nonexistent readers.

And lucky for us, it seems our tax dollars have been hard at work to help us answer this exact question without us even knowing it. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission apparently collects data on emergency room visits involving all consumer products. The National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). And if we make the very believable assumption that all races seem to hurt themselves at the same rate doing the same activities, then we can repurpose this data to tell us what exactly it is white people do on the weekends.

This also assumes that all races are equally as likely to go into the hospital for a given injury. Now, I have seen about a half dozen stand up comedy sketches that would indicate that this is not the case, but we're gonna make the assumption anyway. All data work is built on tenuous assumptions. If you think this is a bad one, then boy do I have some bad news for you about the entire field of economics...

I am only going to show you the list of activities where at least 9 in 10 people who reported injured were white. To put that number in context: only 89.1% of the golf injuries and 89.2% of the horseback riding injuries turned out to be white people. So, every activity on this list is both whiter than golf and whiter than the infamous "horse girl." Feel free to call this the "Whiter than Golf" or "Whiter than Horse Girls" Index if you wish (I do).

Without further ado, I present to you the empirically whitest activities people get injured doing:

“Whiter Than Golf” Index

Now, I would like to be very clear, I filtered out all activities where less than 20 white people got injured. So, it is pretty astounding that skeet shooting still came out at 100%! 26 white men, 6 white women, and nobody else. This data was collected from a representative sample of 100 of the nations 5,000+ hospitals. So, some back of the envelope math would indicate that something like 1,600 people per year are injured skeet shooting, and almost all of them will end up being white.

The rest of the list kind of speaks for itself. The different forms of hockey and skiing making appearances on the list is unsurprising. A lot of the activities look like they'd be in the backdrop of a Carhartt workwear commercial which didn't shock me too much, except for one item. I'd never personally thought of tarps as a very white thing, but it seems that they might be.

The more you know.

The coming articles will attempt to estimate just how many broken fingers are on the field at one time during the Super Bowl, why GameStop’s valuation could be stupider, and how Wall Street’s (arbitrary) “best practice” portfolio rules might be de-stabilizing governments in developing countries

Email/Twitter DM me with dumb article ideas that you'd want to see or just to let me know that you liked it (or hated it I guess?).

Please keep in mind that this is all in good fun. We're all just stuck inside and need a good laugh at the Zoom water cooler. Hopefully this can be that for you.

I've limited this article to just the "whitest" injuries, but subscribe to my mailing list and if you'd be interested in seeing some of these other lists for men, women, and other ethnicities.

Data Barguments are the articles that nobody asked for, nobody needed, but people think are pretty damn fun.

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(The goal of Data Barguments is for articles to be fun, clear, and approachable. If you would like to read much more convoluted data pieces, but where every single variable is controlled for, I get it. Go read an econ paper or something.)

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