The headline from Montana’s House special election doesn’t read well for Democrats: Republican Greg Gianforte beat Democrat Rob Quist by 6 percentage points, even after he body slammed a reporter on the eve of the election. But in the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates whether the result in Montana actually bodes poorly for the party and what a big special election win would mean for Democrats.

The team also plays another round “smoke vs. fire” with the controversy over potential collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia — parsing through what’s most consequential among many recent revelations. Then, FiveThirtyEight’s Anna Barry-Jester joins the podcast to discuss the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the House health care bill and the challenges the bill is facing in the Senate.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

It’s become a rite of spring. Every year — or at least every year since LeBron James returned to the Cleveland Cavaliers — our NBA Elo ratings are skeptical of the Cavs when the playoffs begin. And every year, LeBron and Co. have smashed our poor algorithm to bits.

In 2015, the Cavs entered the playoffs with a lukewarm 1631 Elo rating. That’s perfectly respectable, but the sort of rating you might associate with the Los Angeles Clippers or another 50-something-win team that you’d expect to lose in the second round or the conference finals. Instead, Cleveland reached the NBA Finals, losing to the Golden State Warriors in six competitive games even with a depleted roster.

In 2016, the Cavs had a similarly good-but-not-great Elo rating — 1642 — when the playoffs began. But they blew through the Eastern Conference playoffs before beating the 73-win Warriors to win the NBA title, famously overcoming a 3-1 series deficit along the way. Their Elo rating finished at 1759, ranking them among the top 25 teams of all-time and implying that the system had massively underrated them initially.

This year, Elo had the Cavs pegged lower still when the playoffs began last month. Although the Cavs were our preseason favorite to win the Eastern Conference, they slumped at the end of the regular season — losing 13 of their final 22 games, including their last four — and their Elo rating fell all the way to 1545. That isn’t good; it’s the sort of rating you’d normally associate with a No. 6 seed or some other team you’d expect to lose in the first or second round. Accordingly, the Cavs’ chances of winning the title drifted around in the low-to-mid single digits — variously at 2 percent to 5 percent according to our simulations — as the regular season wound down and the playoffs began.

But the Cavs have gone 12-1 in the playoffs and won by an average score of 117-103. Their Elo rating has climbed by almost 150 points, to 1691. They clinched a return to the finals by beating the Boston Celtics by 33 points on Thursday. It’s been dominating stuff.

So has Elo learned its lesson? Well, maybe not. Cleveland’s chances of winning the finals are just 10 percent according to the more advanced, “Carm-ELO” version of our ratings — and 13 percent according to the simpler, original Elo algorithm. Bookmakers also have the Cavs as underdogs, but not as heavily, implying that they have about a 30 percent chance to beat the Warriors again and repeat as champions.

Giving Cleveland only a 10 percent chance is not the hill I want to die on. Our NBA projections are pretty simple, and sports betting markets are pretty sophisticated. While there are occasional exceptions, I’d usually defer to Vegas in the event of a major disagreement. Still, we’ve gotten a lot of questions throughout the playoffs about why Elo hasn’t given the Cavs a better chance. There are basically three reasons — but the one that matters the most right now has nothing to do with the Cavs and everything to do with the Warriors.

Reason No. 1: Elo doesn’t account for teams such as Cleveland finding a higher “gear” in the playoffs. We covered this point extensively before the playoffs began, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Our Elo projections — and most other projection systems — essentially treat regular-season basketball as equivalent to playoff basketball. But LeBron’s teams have a long history of performing at a much higher caliber in the playoffs than in the regular season.

Maybe this is because James and his teammates conserve their energy; there aren’t a lot of high-leverage regular-season games in the Eastern Conference, as evidenced by the fact that the Cavs could play so crappily down the stretch run and still stumble into the No. 2 seed. Maybe it’s because LeBron is a terrific half-court player, and there’s a premium on the half-court game in the playoffs as defenses tighten up. In any event, the assumption that playoff basketball equals regular-season basketball seems to be pretty wrong in the case of the Cavs. This is something we plan on re-evaluating as we retune our NBA models this summer.

Reason No. 2: Elo ratings heavily weight recent performance. That hurt Cleveland before, although it’s starting to help them now. Elo ratings were originally devised for chess, which doesn’t have any such thing as a “season.” Instead, performance continuously fluctuates up and down over time. Our Elo-based sports ratings mostly work the same way. The more recent the game, the more heavily it gets weighted.

I’d defend this as being the right assumption to make, in general. The degree to which Elo ratings fluctuate from game to game — which is governed by something called the K-factor — has been tested based on tens of thousands of NBA games. Other things held equal, a game played a week ago ought to tell you more than one played six months ago. Elo can be “smart” about catching cases like the 2014-15 Atlanta Hawks, who started out 40-8 but went 20-14 for the rest of the regular season before being swept by Cleveland in the conference finals.

But for a team whose regular-season performance doesn’t tell you much about how they’re going to fare in the playoffs (like the Cavaliers), there isn’t much benefit to doubling down on recent play. Cleveland played pretty well in the first half of the regular season, but middlingly — sometimes even poorly — in the second half. Elo put a lot of emphasis on that late-season slump as the playoffs approached, and that made it more skeptical of the Cavs.

Elo’s philosophy of rapidly adjusting its ratings is benefiting the Cavaliers now, however. Because of their dominance in the playoffs, the Cavs’ current Elo rating has rebounded. Their 1691 is the highest Elo rating they’ve had since Dec. 25, when they were at 1692 and had a 23-6 record after beating the Warriors.

That’s a very good Elo rating. Since the ABA-NBA merger in the 1976-77 season, the average NBA Finals participant has entered the finals with a rating of 1695. So Elo is saying that despite their regular-season struggles, the Cavs are every bit as strong as the typical conference champion.

There’s just one big problem for Cleveland: Golden State.

Reason No. 3: Elo thinks the Warriors are insanely great — one of the two best teams ever, along with the 1995-96 Bulls.

The Warriors’ current Elo rating is 1850. That’s the highest rating a team has held upon entering the NBA Finals. And it’s the second-highest rating a team has had at any point in the regular season or playoffs; the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls peaked at a rating of 1853 after sweeping the first three games of the finals. It’s higher than the peak rating of last season’s 73-win Warriors, who topped out at 1839 after starting out the regular season 24-0.

We’ll be publishing a deeper dive on the Warriors next week, but Elo’s affection for them isn’t hard to explain. They’re 27-1 over their last 28 games. That includes a 12-0 record in the playoffs and an average margin of victory of more than 16 points, which is the best playoff scoring margin of all time. And they’ve done all of this in the Western Conference, which is still a lot deeper than the East. The Warriors are making it look so easy that they may even be underrated by the “eye test,” which tends to reward teams that triumph in the face of adversity. Other than in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, the Warriors haven’t faced much adversity because they haven’t let their opponents get close.

To put this in perspective, suppose you took an indisputably great team like the 1986-87 Los Angeles Lakers, who went 65-17 in the regular season and entered the NBA Finals with an Elo rating of 1738. Elo would have given the Lakers only a 20 percent chance to win a seven-game series over the Warriors, assuming that the Warriors had home-court advantage (as they will against the Cavs). Compared with that, the Cavaliers’ 10 percent or 13 percent chance doesn’t seem so bad. Still, I’d put a few dimes down on LeBron at Elo’s odds.

As President Trump’s struggles have mounted, the overriding question in American politics has become “who’s still with him?” We’ve looked at what might make members of Congress, particularly Republicans, break with Trump. They are the ultimate deciders of how much of his agenda is passed, and even of his fate in any kind of process to push him out of office. We’ve also looked at how voters, particularly Republicans, view the president and whether they are likely to stick by him.

But it’s kind of obvious to say that Trump’s standing depends on how Republican voters and GOP members of Congress feel about him. The more complicated question may be: How do those two groups make up their minds about the president? What Trump does, first and foremost, but their decision-making is also likely to be influenced by how other major groups in the Republican Party treat Trump.

What are the major blocs of the GOP, outside of elected officials and voters? One popular definition of a political party from political science splits parties into three main wings: the party-in-the-electorate (voters), the party-in-the-government (elected officials and appointees) and the party-as-organization. The “organization,” in turn,” is comprised of many groups. Think of Fox News, which conservatives and Republicans watch much, much more than other national news channels. Or activists’ groups such as Heritage Action, which tries to push the GOP away from social welfare spending (Medicaid, Obamacare, etc.) and keeps a scorecard of the votes of members of Congress. The Koch brothers run a network of conservative groups, both nationally and in states, so vast that Politico referred to it as a “privatized political party.”

You can describe the party-as-organization wing in a lot of different ways, and Trump’s success in 2016, particularly in the GOP primary, suggested that journalists, political scientists and even GOP officials themselves may have had an incomplete understanding of how today’s Republican Party works. In 2016, there was perhaps an overemphasis on the party-as-organization, and its ability to stop Trump from winning the nomination, if it chose to do so.

That said, since Trump was sworn in, the party-as-organization appears to be strong. The president has largely not delivered (or really even tried to deliver) on his promises to provide “insurance for everybody” in his replacement for Obamacare or to or bring back factory jobs — goals that linked Trump and some of his voters but didn’t appeal to key constituency groups in the GOP organization. Instead, Trump signed on to both a health care bill and a budget that would reduce federal spending on Medicaid, as his party’s fiscal hawk wing wants, as well as a number of provisions to limit abortions, a passionate cause of religious conservatives.

So, after speaking with some political scientists and Republican operatives, examining the groups that spent the most money electing Trump and Republicans in Congress and looking at the president’s moves in his first few months in office, I came up with an informal list of six blocs that are significant parts of the Republican Party’s organizational wing. (Along with listing and describing each bloc, I included a current Republican politician whose ideology resembles that bloc, just to help clarify the distinctions.)
 

 
So if you’re looking for defections from Trump, watch these blocs. Here they are, ordered from most to least likely to break away from the president:

6. The intellectuals

Examples: David Brooks, The Weekly Standard (Stephen Hayes, Bill Kristol); National Review, Condi Rice
Politicians: John McCain
Priorities: Globalist foreign policy, support for international free trade agreements, wary of conservative identity politics

 
Many conservative intellectuals were in the Never Trump movement from the start. For Trump, these defections, if they happen, will not be surprising and perhaps are not all that meaningful either: He won the GOP nomination and the presidency while shunning the party’s wonks.

Why should the president care about these people at all? House Speaker Paul Ryan, who controls the fate of Trump’s agenda, is close to this wing of the party. Some of his closest allies work at Washington think tanks.

5. Small-government activists

Examples: Americans for Prosperity (Charles and David Koch), Heritage Action, National Rifle Association
Politicians: House Freedom Caucus
Priorities: Repeal of Obamacare, limits on Medicaid, reduced federal spending

 
This bloc, and all the others below, have said very few negative things about Trump. There is a big gap between the party’s think-tank wing, always wary of the president, and virtually every other bloc.

But why might small-government conservatives be less than completely loyal to Trump? Well, Trump is not truly a small-government figure. He has not proposed overhauling Medicare or Social Security’s retirement program, as these conservatives want.

Who is more likely to share their views? Mike Pence. The vice-president was the leader of the Republican Study Committee in the House, which was the most rightward part of the House GOP until the Freedom Caucus came along. Small-government conservatives might get more of their agenda enacted if Pence were in the Oval Office.

4. Conservative business groups/Wall Street

Examples: Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, Federalist Society
Politicians: Mitch McConnell
Priorities: Low taxes, reduced regulation

 
Business conservatives almost always get their way in Republican administrations. Trump, like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, is pushing an agenda of tax cuts and eliminating regulations. So this wing of the party is fine with Trump so far.

On the other hand, Pence would almost certainly sign these same bills just as happily. If Trump is becoming an impediment to their agenda, key party donors could lean on Republicans in Congress to stop supporting Trump so forcefully.

3. Religious conservatives

Examples: Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, Ralph Reed, Family Research Council
Politicians: Ted Cruz
Priorities: Limits on abortion, opposition to transgender rights, defense of religious rights

 
You might think that this group would be very pro-Pence and anti-Trump, since the vice-president is a devout Christian and the president is not. But white conservative evangelical activists really like Trump. He is enacting limits on abortion rights and Planned Parenthood, some of their core goals, although Pence would likely do the same.

But there’s one other reason why conservative evangelical groups might prefer Trump to Pence. Think about it this way: Would Black Lives Matter activists have more leverage in a Hillary Clinton administration compared to Barack Obama’s? Probably. Pence’s conservative Christian bonafides, like Obama’s with African-Americans, can’t really be questioned. Therefore, religious conservatives are in a place to make demands of Trump, noting that his intense support from white evangelical Christians is one of the main reasons that the president was elected.
 

2. Cultural identity conservatives

Examples: Ann Coulter, Breitbart, Federation for American Immigration Reform
Politicians: Steve King
Priorities: Limits on immigration and international free trade agreements, wary of multiculturalism

 
The anti-immigration, antiglobalization wing of the GOP needs Trump to remain office, because it may never have as much sway as it does now. It is hard to imagine another Republican president, even Pence, employing Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller as top policy advisers, proposing a travel ban from majority Muslim-country countries or even considering a withdrawal from NAFTA.

Why might they turn on him? In some ways, this bloc’s agenda is tension with all of the groups listed above, except for Christian conservatives. The party intellectuals strongly supported Trump’s decision for a military strike in Syria, but this group was more skeptical. Business conservatives don’t want the U.S. to leave NAFTA and favor more trade agreements. This group is more anti-free trade. Cultural identity conservatives may have nowhere else to turn from Trump, but their strong support for the president is not guaranteed if he starts governing more like a traditional, big-business Republican.

1. GOP-aligned media

Examples: Fox News (Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity); conservative talk radio hosts (Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh)
Politicians: Kevin McCarthy
Priorities: Opposition to liberal interests and Democratic Party

 
The simplest way to illustrate this: What would Trump have to do for Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity to start criticizing him regularly?

Actually, we don’t have to guess. As Matt Grossman and David Hopkins detail in their book “Asymmetric Politics,” Hannity and other conservatives on TV and talk radio started sharply criticizing George W. Bush near the end of his second term. Bush’s approval ratings were fading among conservatives, amid the struggling Iraq War and his bungled handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And Hannity and other radio and television hosts were blasting Bush’s advocacy of a bill that would grant citizenship to some undocumented immigrants.

In other words, Bush was already unpopular, and he was proposing an idea — citizenship for undocumented immigrants — that was more popular on the left than the right. Trump may want to consider this example before he starts touting, say, his daughter’s proposal to allow new parents six weeks of paid leave. Trump’s numbers are already declining, even among Republicans, and paid leave is an idea that liberals love and conservative activists really don’t.
 

 
Earlier this year, my colleague Nate Silver listed 14 possible scenarios for Trump’s presidency and suggested one possibility was for the president to shift left and govern with Democrats. This would mirror the approach of another celebrity-turned-Republican-politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made the pivot after initially struggling in California.

Why couldn’t Trump do that? Well, the various scandals around Russia have left the president desperately needing support from his own party. That support likely comes with strings attached: Trump needs to implement the policy goals of the party’s key blocs — or they might turn on him, and he doesn’t have strong public support to fall back on.

The Congressional Budget Office’s long-awaited report on the American Health Care Act, released Wednesday, is on one level kind of irrelevant. The GOP-controlled Senate has already said it will write its own bill, dismissing the plan House Republicans passed this month to repeal and replace parts of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

On another level, though, the report does not look good for the GOP’s current approach to reforming the health care system. According to the CBO, an estimated 23 million more people would be uninsured under the House bill in 2026 compared with current law, though the federal deficit would be cut by $119 billion during that time. The CBO score suggests that the last-minute changes to the Republican plan would mean less government savings and more insurance coverage than previous versions — but would result in a system that prices out many with pre-existing health conditions and eliminates much-promised “access” for some people with low incomes.

The CBO report provides important insight into some of the key questions the Senate is grappling with as it crafts new legislation. For the last several months, Republicans in both chambers have been debating three core challenges in U.S. health care policy: How can they wind down Medicaid, which was vastly expanded under Obamacare? How can they bring down the cost of premiums in the private insurance marketplace for people who don’t get insurance from their employer? And what kind of protections should they offer to people with pre-existing health conditions?

By giving a sense of how the House bill performs when it comes to these three core challenges, the report provides a rough roadmap of the tradeoffs Senate Republicans are likely to make as they write a new bill.

The Republicans have a big pre-existing condition problem

The biggest news of the report is how it assessed a controversial amendment added late in the process to win the support of the most conservative Republicans, which wasn’t included in two previous reports from the CBO. That amendment would allow states to seek waivers on various insurance regulations, including financial protections for people with pre-existing health conditions. The move caused public outcry, as it could allow insurers to price some people with health issues out of the marketplaces that target people without employer-sponsored insurance. It also made the task of scoring the bill challenging for the CBO. Among other things, the agency had to estimate how many states would take up the waivers and how many people they would affect.

The CBO’s findings align with what many health policy experts expected: Many people with pre-existing conditions would be priced out of the marketplace where the waivers are used. The CBO doesn’t say where exactly it thinks that will happen, but it estimates that the waivers would affect areas where about one-sixth of the U.S. population lives.

Republicans have said that people with pre-existing conditions wouldn’t necessarily be left uninsured, because the bill also called for a return to high-risk pools, subsidized plans that would isolate people who are expensive to treat, as well as other funding to reduce costs for that group. The idea is that insurance premium costs will go down for everyone else if the most expensive patients are separated out. But critics say the key to successful high-risk pools is sufficient funding, which many have argued is not in the GOP bill. The CBO report backs up the argument that the funding isn’t adequate to curb costs for many with health concerns.

How the Senate handles legislation for people with health problems, arguably those most in need of insurance, will likely be one of the most controversial aspects of its bill. Some in the chamber have signaled that they are likely to pursue policy along the lines of what the House did, allowing greater variations in insurance costs based on health status and age, while allowing insurers to sell plans that offer less coverage. The CBO report’s findings will give more fuel to pushback to this approach from Democrats and patients, as well as Republicans.

The bill is still projected to put a big hole in Medicaid

And while the handling of people with pre-existing conditions is among the most controversial aspects of the law, the biggest change to the uninsured rate would come from cuts to Medicaid enrollments, according to the CBO. The report estimates that about 14 million fewer people would be enrolled in the public insurance program in 2026 under the House plan. The CBO’s estimate of the previous version of the AHCA estimated similar declines in Medicaid enrollment.

That’s why one of the most complicated negotiations for senators will be over what to do with Medicaid. The program has long covered pregnant women, children and people with disabilities, but it was expanded under Obamacare to also cover everyone earning less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line. The AHCA would slowly deflate the expanded part of the program, by freezing its enrollment and simultaneously reducing federal funding for enrollees.

Even before Wednesday, there was substantial division among senators over Medicaid, between those from states that expanded the program (such as Ohio’s Rob Portman) and senators who don’t want more Americans on government-funded health care, such as Utah conservative Mike Lee. Portman is reportedly looking either to delay the unwinding of the Medicaid expansion or limit the cuts.

Will the individual markets be more affordable?

The House bill seeks to lower the cost of insurance by reducing regulations and removing expensive patients from the general insurance pools, two approaches that are popular among Republican legislators. The changes from current policy would reduce premiums in most places but would also make coverage less comprehensive. Costs would also vary much more widely between groups than they currently do — and still be so high that they would price out some of the poorest and sickest people in the country.

The CBO estimates that for about half the population, marketplace regulations would stay the same, and premiums would go down by an average of 4 percent in 2026 compared with what they would be under current law. Another third of the population lives in states that would invoke some regulatory changes and see a more dramatic reduction of 10 percent to 30 percent. The CBO estimates that the remaining areas would adopt the full set of waivers, which would make their insurance among the cheapest in the nation for young, healthy people — but unaffordable for many of those with health conditions. And, as the CBO notes, those averages obscure dramatic differences in premiums between age groups, since the GOP bill would allow older enrollees to be charged five times more than younger enrollees.

Like today, those costs would be offset by subsidies, though they would leave more of the poor without insurance, even if premiums decreased in most states. That’s because the subsidies would be based solely on age, not income or geographic cost variations, as is the case under Obamacare. Overall, there is likely to be an increase in coverage among healthy middle-class enrollees who currently receive fewer subsidies and have been priced out by rising costs. And even if what people pay for coverage drops, health care costs would go up for some people in states that chose to let insurers sell skimpier policies.

All this adds up to 10 million fewer people using the individual markets in 2020, and 6 million fewer in 2026, than would be expected under the current law, according to the CBO.

The Senate has signaled that it may seek to offer greater financial support to people with lower incomes, which would likely increase coverage compared with the House bill. Current subsidies are generous for the lowest earners, which has substantially increased coverage for this group. It’s unclear how much those subsidies can be reduced before people will start forgoing coverage.

How much will it all cost?

The CBO estimates that the House bill would reduce government revenue by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, mostly by eliminating the taxes that the ACA imposed on high-income households. But the bill would also cut government spending on health care by $1.1 trillion, mostly by cutting spending on Medicaid. On net, the AHCA would save the government money, reducing the deficit by $119 billion over 10 years.

The bill’s savings are chump change compared to the $8.6 trillion deficit that the federal government is expected to run during that time and are a third the size of the savings that the earlier version of the bill would have provided (per CBO’s estimates). But Republicans avoided the worst-case scenario: a bill that would have cut the deficit by less than $2 billion, which for procedural reasons would have been virtually impossible for the Senate to pass.

Politically, though, the deficit cuts may be a harder sell. In effect, the bill would cut government spending for the poor (Medicaid) in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Democrats hammered that point after the CBO released its earlier report, and the new estimates won’t do much to snuff out that talking point.

What’s next?

These are some of the key questions a 13-man group of GOP senators (none of the five Republican women senators were included, though the GOP meetings have since been opened to all GOP senators) has been debating behind closed doors for weeks, trying to hash out differences between conservatives who want a major rollback of Obamacare, such as Lee, versus Portman and others who want a more measured approach.

The political divides on the Senate bill are already emerging, even before it is fully written. Republicans must earn the votes of 50 of the 52 members. And Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy and Maine’s Susan Collins have already expressed doubts about the legislation.

“I don’t know how we get to 50 (votes) at the moment. But that’s the goal. And exactly what the composition of that (bill) is I’m not going to speculate about because it serves no purpose,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Reuters on Wednesday morning, before the CBO report was released.

Ben Casselman contributed to this article.

The NFL owners on Tuesday approved a drastic change to the NFL’s regular-season overtime format: cutting its maximum length from 15 minutes to 10.

With games played as frequently as four days a week, the NFL says it’s trying to avoid the dangerous combination of long games and short recovery periods. The move may also be a reaction to last season, when six games went more than 12 minutes into overtime. Those included the Week 7 “Sunday Night Football” stinker, during which two teams spent five full periods slogging toward a 6-6 tie.

But like the 2012 overtime modification, in which the sudden death format was changed so that a team couldn’t win the game with a first-possession field goal, Tuesday’s rule could be at the expense of overtime’s main purpose: deciding a winner. Since 2012, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com, 83 regular-season games have gone into overtime, with five resulting in ties. Of those 83, 21 games lasted more than 10 minutes, with 16 tied at the 10-minute mark. Under the new rules, those 16 games would have all resulted in a draw. (With the change, two of the actual ties would have ended up with a winner, and three would have remained ties.)

In addition to potentially tripling the rate of ties, the 10-minute overtime wouldn’t necessarily save that much time either. The 83 overtimes since 2012 would have been 49 game-seconds shorter on average.

The amount of time left on the clock affects play-calling and decision-making. Some analysts, like the MMQB’s Peter King, argued that if overtime were cut to 10 minutes, coaches would call games “faster,” pushing to get a win while the clock winds down. Maybe — but since 2012, 70 of 83 overtime games had at least two possessions, and the average elapsed time at the end of the second possession was 5:57. That means the average third possession would start just 4:03 away from a split decision. Will the NFL’s generally risk adverse coaches really jeopardize losing a bird (or, in this case, half a bird) in hand by diving into the bush to chase a full victory?

The new system already has one detractor: Saints quarterback Drew Brees. He won the 2009 NFC championship game by completing just two short overtime passes to set up the field goal that gave New Orleans a sudden-death win — and a trip to Super Bowl XLIV.

“I would disagree with [the rule change] because more games are going to end in ties now,” Brees told “The Dan Patrick Show.” He added that he wouldn’t be opposed to the NFL’s adopting rules that were similar to the “exciting” college format. In NCAA D-I football, each team’s offense lines up on the other team’s 25-yard line and takes turns trying to outscore each other, possession for possession. Although this scales back special teams and puts the bulk of emphasis on red-zone play, the baseball-like system of alternating possessions feels fairer to some fans.

The NFL game may be best served by rolling back the 2012 modification in which the league changed regular-season overtime from sudden death to occasionally prolonged death. That change targeted the perception that games were too often being decided by coin flips: All the receiving team in OT had to do was make a few first downs and kick a field goal, as Brees’s Saints did in 2009.

Under the 2012 rules, teams were given a chance to respond if they held the receiving team to a field goal on its first possession. Given the chance, though, few teams have responded to period-opening field goals with a score of their own. In five seasons, according to Pro-Football-Reference, there have been only seven occasions when a team kicked a field-goal on its opening drive that was directly answered by their opponent scoring.

As the table shows, the old sudden death rules, in which a tie occurred only if no one scored during the 15-minute overtime period, would have reduced average overtime duration nearly as much as the 10-minute cap, but with far fewer ties.

Of course, if player safety is truly its highest priority, the NFL would do away with regular-season overtime altogether. Assuming that King is right about how coaches will react to a shorter overtime, removing it would force them to be more aggressive in regulation. If he’s wrong, at least we wouldn’t have to sit through 10 minutes of timid, tired football to get the same unsatisfying result.

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After the appointment of a special counsel to investigate possible ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, can the White House return to business as usual? The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew looks at whether past presidents have been able to pursue their agendas in the face of ongoing scandals and investigations. The team also breaks down a new Harvard study showing that media coverage of Trump during his first 100 days was 80 percent negative. Lastly, they look ahead to Thursday’s special election in Montana’s at-large congressional district.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Earlier this week, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia. The history of special counsels is long, fraught and entangled with some of the country’s most infamous political scandals. So FiveThirtyEight turned to an academic expert in the history of — what else? — political scandals for some perspective on what Mueller’s appointment means for the coming weeks and months. Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, cautioned that while the appointment of a special counsel is indeed a turning point in any investigation, the path forward (including to impeachment) is far from clear. History shows that these investigations can take years and often prove inconclusive.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Clare Malone: You’ve said before that investigations into big fish in the government — like the president — can often end inconclusively. Why is that?

Brandon Rottinghaus: Number one, the president is insulated politically so that it’s hard to get the president’s staff and counsels to turn on the president. There’s an obvious need for the White House to keep the president less connected to the scandal. In this case, the president seems to be doing a lot to put [his] face on it. Other scandals aren’t like this — you have to take a little bit to get to the president’s role.

Number two, presidents are often insulated legally; they have the ability to do a lot of things that staff or Cabinet members aren’t able to do. [Editor’s note: Presidents can, for example, choose to disclose classified information as they see fit.]

The third thing is that independent counsels, special counsels and any other investigatory bodies are reluctant to challenge the president in a way that might lead to impeachment for fear that it looks like a non-democratic outcome to the legal process. Although obviously these things run into partisanship very quickly, people are less willing to remove a president unless the crisis is severe and the implications are egregious.

Malone: So you’re saying Robert Mueller might be wary of being too explicit about the degree of potential wrongdoing?

Rottinghaus: Yeah, the reason that special counsels proceed cautiously is that they’re worried that to push too far too quickly would jeopardize public confidence in the investigation and would potentially disrupt the democratic balance that is imbued in the Constitution. That’s not to say that they’ll pull their punches, but to go so far as to claim presidents have broken the law in some way — that’s something that independent counsels tend to be very circumspect about. If Congress is looking for clear guidelines from the special counsel, it might not be forthcoming.

Malone: How long can the public expect to wait before the special counsel presents his findings?

Rottinghaus: I would say that, on average, your standard investigation, even of a person who’s a Cabinet member or staff member, is probably between two and three years. For a president in particular, it tends to be longer because the amount of care to be taken is greater.

Malone: That’s a long time for the public to live with the story. If we’re looking back at precedent, how do these investigations color the view of the presidency — can it be both good and bad? A boost for the base’s partisanship?

Rottinghaus: I think in the short term there is a rallying around the flag for presidents. There will be a partisan bump for the president, but that is dissipated over the long term as two things happen. Number one, any positive stories you could have are outweighed by negative stories that come out. And number two, these kind of events often lead to legislative paralysis, and if you’re not producing legislation, the public tends to take it out on the incumbent party, especially the president. So it’s a kind of double whammy for presidents looking to keep those approval ratings above water.

Malone: People are asking a lot about whether or not Republicans will abandon Trump — what should the public be watching for in terms of Republican Party leaders signaling their confidence in the president?

Rottinghaus: I would say the first sign of difficulty will be silence as opposed to a vocal defense of the president. I think, though, that there will be a core partisan support for the president no matter what. This goes back to even the days of Nixon and Watergate. Looking at some of the internal polling that was taking place during that period, the White House had supporters right up until the very minute Nixon left office.

I would look at a couple key sets of players. Number one, the Republican leadership — are they willing to go to bat for you publicly and do the Sunday morning talk shows? Tweet about the things that are going well as opposed to going badly? Number two, you want to look at people on the Judiciary Committee or people who are eventually on a select committee, if it comes to that. Those are the people who have specific obligations to investigate and also the power to be able to subpoena you and you records and your staff and your staff’s records. The other organization that tends to get a lot of pressure in these moments are the party committees. When the Republican party stops trying to defend the president, when it begins to try to move on to other things, then I think you’ll get a flavor of how that’s starting to slip away from the president’s grip.

Malone: Anything else for people to keep in mind as they watch this?

Rottinghaus: Presidents are highly stable when it comes to surviving these kinds of things. Though we are in uncharted waters, which it makes predictions hard to be very certain about.

The final weekend of the English Premier League is upon us and the league has scheduled all 10 matches simultaneously on Sunday in order to maximize excitement. The problem is that there’s not much excitement left — and there hasn’t been for awhile. Chelsea has been the runaway favorite to win the title for a few months now, and the team officially clinched a week ago. This isn’t uncommon. Even Leicester City’s shocking run to a league title last year, one of the most exciting outcomes in league history, was clinched two weeks before the end of the season. And in the 2014-15 season Chelsea clinched the title a full three weeks before their final match. Awarding the EPL trophy to the team atop the table at season’s end eliminates most of the debate about England’s best team, but it also can eliminate fun.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine for a moment that after this weekend’s mostly meaningless matches, we were headed for the inaugural round of Premier League playoffs to decide the league champion. What would happen if more than a century of English soccer tradition was thrown out in favor of a shamelessly Americanized format?

As an experiment, I set up a mock six-team playoff for the Premier League and forecasted the results using our SPI ratings. There are a variety of playoff formats that could be used, but six teams feels right; it’s a small enough number that teams would have to compete to get in, but big enough that it would widen the pool of potential champions. Also, to reward teams that do well during the regular season, the top two teams in the table would be awarded byes. The next four teams would be seeded and would play one other team in a home-and-home aggregate, similar to the Champions League. From there the semifinals would follow the same format. Also similar to the Champions League, the final would be played as a single match at a neutral site such as Wembley.

If you applied that playoff set-up to this season’s standings, the playoffs would give us two more Manchester Derbies in the first-round and would pit Liverpool against Arsenal. Chelsea and Tottenham would be waiting to play the winners.

Chelsea would still be favored to win the playoffs — their first round bye and top seed helps quite a bit — but every team would have a reasonable shot at the title. Here’s how it would look:

Chelsea’s chances of winning the league would drop from 100 percent to 38 percent, and the five other teams that have been eliminated from the title race would still have hope.

I also set up playoff forecasts to see how our system might have affected the number of titles won by each Premier League club since 1992-93. Liverpool and Arsenal would likely have benefitted the most, while Manchester United likely would have won fewer than their league-leading 13 titles in that time span.

Playoffs, of course, inject luck into a championship but there are indications that a team still needs a significant amount of luck to win the league outright.

You can see how luck infiltrates league titles by looking at teams’ goal tallies. Goals scored and conceded will get a team to the top of the standings but they aren’t necessarily the best indicator of a team’s underlying talent, nor are they the most predictive of future performance. Expected goals, a metric we use in our SPI ratings, are a better gauge of each team’s quality of play. We can also use expected goals to approximate how likely each team was to win the league based on the shots it took over the course of the entire season.

These expected goal simulations indicate that Manchester City have been unlucky not to win the title this year; if we rerun the season thousands of times, they win the league 61 percent of the time given the shots they took and conceded. Last year’s Leicester City team was fortunate to win the league according to these simulations; they only had a 9 percent chance of winning the league based on their expected goal numbers.

Finally, if we look at the projected number of titles won over the past seven seasons based on these expected goal simulations, the number of titles each team is projected to have won is quite similar to the number of titles we expect them to have won if the league had playoffs. In other words, this implies that there may be just as much luck involved in winning the league outright as there would be in a playoff system.

Players have incredibly busy schedules already with some juggling league and cup play, the Champions League and their international team responsibilities, so any playoff system probably shouldn’t add more matches to their already packed schedules. Perhaps the size of the league could be reduced by a team or two, or some regular season matchups could be a single match on neutral ground rather than home-and-away to allow for the extra playoff matches.

I don’t know if playoffs are the right thing for the Premier League. I do know that I haven’t watched many matches during the second half of the season, but I’d watch these playoffs.

Check out our latest soccer predictions.

The appointment of ex-FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election — and potential Russian connections to President Trump and his allies — is another surprising development after a week full of them. Consider: Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating the potential Russia-Trump ties, only to now have Comey’s predecessor at the FBI take over the investigation. And Trump’s deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who was being mocked by Democrats for his role in Comey’s firing, has now made an appointment that is being praised by Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general. The president, whose aides were advocating that the Russia investigation end soon, must now watch as Mueller quits his law firm job to devote himself full-time to this assignment.

So what does this all mean? We won’t ultimately know for some time. But the Mueller appointment and the surrounding controversy around Trump and Russia remains as much a political issue as a legal one. So let’s look at how this affects the relevant political players.

Why this is good for Trump

Although the simple case is that Mueller’s appointment is not welcome news for Trump — the White House was surprised by the announcement — it does have some plausible benefits for the president, especially in the near term. The Russia investigation had been dogging the Trump administration, and his firing of Comey had turned into a debacle.

Trump can now say there is an independent investigation going on, by someone he did not personally appoint and who is not beholden to his party. And Mueller has very strong credentials. The president and his team, in theory, can turn the focus to governing, while deferring questions about the investigation. And maybe Comey, who appears to have notes of every conservation he has had with the president, will share them with Mueller and not the New York Times. (That said, as of late Wednesday, Trump had not yet reacted to Mueller’s appointment — a poorly worded Twitter rant could mitigate any short-term benefit for Trump.)

It’s also possible Mueller will interpret his mandate as limited to Russia and the election. It’s not clear Mueller would be investigating, for example, the details of Comey’s firing. That would be to Trump’s benefit.

Most importantly, Mueller can exonerate the president. If this is a high-risk development for Trump, it also comes with a big reward if Trump hasn’t done anything seriously wrong.

Why this is bad for Trump

Mueller’s appointment ensures that the Russia controversy won’t just go away — at least not anytime soon. And he could gravely threaten Trump’s presidency if he finds clear, improper connections between the president’s campaign and Russian officials. There was a reason that Republicans on Capitol Hill and the Trump administration were trying to stop the appointment of a special counsel. Prosecutors with broad authority to investigate can cause major problems. Just ask Bill Clinton.

Trump could in theory order Rosenstein to fire Mueller. But that would be exactly what Richard Nixon did, ordering his Justice Department to dump the special prosecutor investigating the president.

Why this is good for congressional Republicans

Republican members were being repeatedly asked about the Trump investigation. Like Trump, they can now defer to Mueller’s probe. This will make them very happy. And in the long run, Mueller helps them avoid the awkward circumstance of investigating their own president. A damning report will make it easier to call for Trump’s resignation, if strong evidence emerges. Alternatively, a report that absolves Trump could take the Russia issue off the table without Republicans looking like they’d engaged in a partisan cover-up.

More importantly, Republicans now have more room to get back to their policy goals, such as tax reform and Obamacare repeal. Mueller’s investigation is likely to take months. While that unfolds, Trump can sign into law bills passed by Republicans in the House and the Senate.

Why this is bad for congressional Republicans

We’re not going to do fake balance here. This may or may not end up as good news for Trump — but it’s almost certainly good news for congressional Republicans.

The one problem? Mueller is only investigating the Russia issue. It’s likely Trump will do something else controversial — in the past two weeks alone, he allegedly shared highly classified intelligence with the Russians, and he fired Comey in a clumsy way that created all kinds of political problems. Republicans will still have to answer for Trump’s other controversial moves.

Why this is good for Democrats

Just reread the “bad news for Trump” paragraph from above. An investigation of 2016, Trump and his allies could turn up damaging information. A report written by Mueller will have credibility. It’s far more likely Mueller, as opposed to GOP-led congressional committees, will release information damaging to the president. And the timing of the investigation could be good for Democrats, keeping Russia in the news through the midterm year, even if it results in a slowdown in headlines now.

But we should not ignore real-world impacts or lose sight of the big picture. Democrats strongly disagree with Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan on policy, including on sweeping issues currently on the Congressional docket such as health care and taxes. In the eye’s of many Democrats, Trump and the potential laws he might sign could damage the country for years to come. A process that could (in the long run) lead to Trump’s removal from office is a major step for liberals.

Why this is bad for Democrats

In the short-term, they may have lost an issue. Polls showed an overwhelming majority of Americans (78 percent, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey) wanted some kind of investigation of Trump’s alleged ties to Russia from outside of Congress. Democrats could have pounded Trump and Republicans on their lack of accountability every day till next year’s midterms.

Mueller has a reputation for independence, like Comey. How he approaches this investigation is unpredictable and that has risks for Democrats. (Ask Hillary Clinton.) And because Democrats have effusively praised Mueller’s appointment, they’ll have trouble criticizing him later on — or re-litigating the Russia issue — if he exonerates Trump.

What would have been more predictable? A House Judiciary Committee investigation in 2019 led by Democratic Chairman John Conyers, being cheered on by Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Make no mistake: If Democrats had won control of Congress next year and Trump had blocked a special counsel up until then, impeachment would have been on the table. Now, Democrats have to wait and see what Mueller concludes.

Why this is good for the public

By all accounts, Mueller seems to be respected by all sides.