One of my least favorite questions is: “Did Russian interference cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election?” The question is newly relevant because of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians on Friday on charges that they used a variety of shady techniques to discourage people from voting for Clinton and encourage them to vote for Donald Trump. That doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to answer, however. But here are my high-level thoughts in light of the indictment. (For more detail on these, listen to our emergency politics podcast.)

1. Russian interference is hard to measure because it wasn’t a discrete event.

You know what probably did cost Clinton the election? The letter that former FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress on Oct. 28, 2016, and the subsequent media firestorm over it. The impact is relatively easy to measure because it was the biggest news event in the final two weeks of the campaign, and we can compare polls conducted just before the Comey letter to the ones conducted just after it.Even there, there’s some ambiguity — but considering that Clinton essentially lost the election by only 0.8 percentage points (Trump’s margin of victory in the tipping-point state, Wisconsin) and that the Comey letter coincided with a polling shift of about 3 points toward Trump, we can be reasonably confident that it was enough to make the difference.

‘>¹

Russian interference isn’t like that. By contrast, the indictment (and previous reporting on the subject) suggests that the interference campaign had been underway for years (since at least 2014) and gradually evolved from a more general-purpose trolling operation into something that sought to undermine Clinton while promoting Trump (and to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders). To the extent it mattered, it would have blended into the background and had a cumulative effect over the entirety of the campaign.

2. The magnitude of the interference revealed so far is not trivial but is still fairly modest as compared with the operations of the Clinton and Trump campaigns.

The indictment alleges that an organization called the Internet Research Agency had a monthly budget of approximately $1.25 million toward interference efforts by September 2016 and that it employed “hundreds of individuals for its online operation.” This is a fairly significant magnitude — much larger than the paltry sums that Russian operatives had previously been revealed to spend on Facebook advertising.

Nonetheless, it’s small as compared with the campaigns. The Clinton campaign and Clinton-backing super PACs spent a combined $1.2 billion over the course of the campaign. The Trump campaign and pro-Trump super PACs spent $617 million overall.

In terms of headcounts rather than budgets, the gap isn’t quite so dramatic. The “hundreds” of people working for the Internet Research Agency compare with 4,200 paid Clinton staffersIncluding Democratic National Committee staffers and people who worked for state parties.

“>² and 880 paid Trump staffers.Including Republican National Committee staffers and people who worked for state parties.

“>³ Russian per-capita GDP is estimated at around $10,000 U.S. dollars — about one-sixth of what it is in the U.S. — so a $1.25 million monthly budget potentially goes a lot farther there than it does here. The Russian efforts were on the small side as compared with the massive magnitudes of the campaigns, but not so small that you’d consider them a rounding error.

3. Thematically, the Russian interference tactics were consistent with the reasons Clinton lost.

How did Trump win? Or more to the point, how did Trump win given that he only had a 38 percent favorability rating among people who voted on Election Day? The answer is partly the Electoral College, of course. But it’s also that Clinton was really, really unpopular herself — almost as unpopular as Trump — with a favorability rating of just 43 percent among Election Day voters. Also, the substantial number of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump went to Trump by a 17-point margin. Voters really weren’t willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt.

That’s largely because Clinton was viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy, exactly the sort of message that the Russian campaign (which used hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison) was trying to cultivate. Trump, of course, was trying to cultivate this message too. Media coverage often struck the same themes. And voters sometimes heard variations on this theme from Sanders and his supporters in the more contentious moments of the Democratic primaries. Was some of this Clinton’s fault? Yep, of course. Would Clinton still have been “Crooked Hillary” even without the Russians? Almost certainly. But the Russians were at least adding fuel to the right fire — the one that wound up consuming Clinton’s campaign.

The indictment also alleges that the Russian conspirators sought to suppress African-American turnout. A decline in black turnout was an important — perhaps even decisive — factor in Clinton’s defeat, although it may have been inevitable given that Barack Obama, the first African-American president, had been on the ballot in 2012.

Overall, then, my view on the effects of Russian interference is fairly agnostic. I tend to focus more on factors — such as Clinton’s email scandal or the Comey letter (and the media’s handling of those stories) — that had easier-to-prove effects. The hacked emails from the Clinton campaign and the DNC (which may or may not have had anything to do with the Russians) potentially also were more influential than the Russian efforts detailed in Friday’s indictments. Clinton’s Electoral College strategy didn’t have as much of an effect as some people assume — but it was pretty stupid all the same and is certainly worth mentioning.

But if it’s hard to prove anything about Russian interference, it’s equally hard to disprove anything: The interference campaign could easily have had chronic, insidious effects that could be mistaken for background noise but which in the aggregate were enough to swing the election by 0.8 percentage points toward Trump — not a high hurdle to clear because 0.8 points isn’t much at all.

Perhaps there are more clever methodologies that one could undertake. For instance, if we knew which states the efforts were concentrated in, we might be able to make a few additional inferences. Maybe some of that information will come to light as the result of Mueller’s probe and further investigative reporting. For the time being, however, we’re still somewhat in the dark.

On any given week during peak soccer season, FiveThirtyEight offers projections for dozens of club soccer matches across the globe. The sheer volume of matches taking place this time of year can be paralyzing. With that in mind, we’ve added a feature to our club soccer predictions that rates upcoming matches on their quality and importance. You can use this page to pick a few good ones to be sure not to miss.

This week’s biggest match — rated an overall 96 out of 100 — is today’s Champions League round of 16 first leg between Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. This is a bit of a no-brainer — it features Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo leading the second- and third-best teams in the world against each other in a high-stakes clash. But there are some other good matches to watch: Borussia Dortmund and Atalanta — two of the best eight remaining teams in the Europa League — play each other on Thursday in the round of 32. If we dig deeper, Empoli and Parma — two teams fighting for promotion and the league title at the top of a very tight Italian Serie B — play each other Saturday. And Manchester United plays Chelsea on Feb. 25 in the Premier League in what is a pivotal match for Champions League qualification.

Here’s how we calculate our match ratings:

Quality is simply a measure of how good the teams are. Specifically, it’s the harmonic mean of the two teams’ Soccer Power Index ratings. (We’re using the harmonic mean instead of merely averaging the two ratings because in lopsided matches it limits the impact of very high or low ratings, resulting in a more balanced number.) Because every team has an SPI rating between 0 and 100, our match quality stat also ranges from 0 to 100.

Importance is a measure of how much the outcome of the match will affect our forecast for how likely the two teams are to win the league, or be relegated or promoted, among other things. To calculate it, we generate probabilities conditional on each team winning the match and then find the difference between those two possible numbers.

We consider different factors depending on which league the match is being played in. For some leagues, our forecasts cover winning the league and qualifying for the Champions League, for example.

We take a weighted average of the change in each applicable factor and scale the result to between 0 and 100. All leagues are treated equally when calculating importance, so a match to decide the winner of the Swedish Allsvenskan would rate just as high as a match to decide the winner of the English Premier League.

The overall match rating is just the average of quality and importance.

Visit our club soccer predictions to explore the ratings of all the upcoming matches yourself.

The stage has never been bigger for Tottenham Hotspur’s star striker Harry Kane. On Saturday, Spurs defeated Arsenal 1-0 in the North London Derby, one of the Premier League’s most storied rivalries. Now it’s off to Turin, Italy, where they’ll take on Juventus, one of Europe’s most storied clubs, in the Champions League round of 16. And there will never be a better moment than now for Kane to demonstrate, in front of the entire soccer-loving world, that he just might be the best pure striker alive.

Kane won himself a place in history when he notched his 100th English Premier League goal on a controversial stoppage time penalty two weekends ago against Liverpool. It’s an incredible achievement for a player who, at 24 years old, is only just now hitting the prime years of his career. Kane is not the fastest ever to the century mark, but only Alan Shearer managed it in fewer appearances than Kane’s 141, and only Wayne Rooney, Robbie Fowler and Michael Owen did it at a younger age. The milestone also just happens to come during the best season of Kane’s young career. If anything, his league-leading 23 goals undersells just how good Kane has been.

The top of the Premier League scoring table is increasingly split between traditional forwards, like Kane, Sergio Aguero and Romelu Lukaku, and more hybrid attacking wingers, like Mohamed Salah and Raheem Sterling, which makes it difficult to define what the center forward role looks like in modern soccer. The same problem crops up around the rest of Europe. Calling Lionel Messi a center forward undersells all the things he does for Barcelona, especially considering that he’s playing next to, behind and generally all around a truer version of a center forward in Luis Suarez. At Paris-Saint Germain, Neymar might be the best attacking player in the world, but he’s also a winger while Edinson Cavani occupies the center forward position. The line between forward and winger is increasingly blurry, and a list of the most productive scorers in Europe is littered with goal-scoring wingers. But Kane still sits atop that list.

Kane posts tremendous numbers in many scoring measures. Looking at goals from open play (so removing penalty shots and direct free kicks), Kane is scoring 0.8 goals per 90 minutes. That’s the third-best rate in Europe’s big five leagues,Among players who have played at least 1000 minutes.

“>¹ behind only Salah and Cavani. Kane has the second-most shots per 90 from open play as well, with 5.30. Only Cristiano Ronaldo, who is mired in a terrible shooting season, takes more shots, with 5.71 per 90. Only five other players are even over four shots per game: Roma’s Edin Dzeko, Napoli’s Lorenzo Insigne, Messi, Salah, and Bayern Munich’s Robert Lewandowski.In fact, if Kane stays on pace and finishes the season with more than five shots per 90 minutes, he’ll be one of only three players to do so in the last five years, joining Ronaldo (who did it four times) and Gonzalo Higuain, who managed it with Napoli in 2015/16.

“>²

Kane is similarly at the top of the list when it comes to expected goals per 90 minutes. His 0.78 expected goals per 90 tracks pretty closely with his actual goals scored and is good for fifth best among players with at least 1,000 minutes, trailing only Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who just transferred to Arsenal, Gabriel Jesus of Manchester City, Ronaldo and Lewandowski. The fact that Kane’s finishing is roughly in line with his expected goals is an important marker of how he has developed from last season to this year.

His scoring on shots from open play actually remains essentially unchanged from last year, going from 0.81 to 0.80, but his expected goal rate last season was much lower, only 0.48. Finishing more chances than expected, as Kane did a year ago, is a real skill but it’s also almost impossible to do consistently, and players’ numbers are incredibly noisy and undergo wild fluctuations. Some of Kane’s goal scoring last season came on the types of wonderful finishes that typically fly over the bar, or on contested headers that usually glance just wide. In other words, if Kane’s current season were similar to last year, it’s very likely that his goal scoring would have gone down. Instead, Kane has upped his game, creating and taking more shots and better shots. Last season, Kane scored like a great striker, but he played like a very good one. This year, he’s both playing and scoring like one of the best in the game.

The case for Kane as one of the world’s best strikers is easy to make, but once you get up into the rarified air of players like Salah, Lewandowski and Aubameyang, differentiating between them becomes difficult. Where Kane stands out is in just how big a share of the team’s workload he takes on. Again looking at shots not including penalties and direct free kicks, there are 101 players in the top five leagues who have scored seven or more goals. Harry Kane takes 32.7 percent of his team’s shots when he’s on the field — none of the other 100 players are more involved. Ronaldo is second at 32.0 percent, Messi is third at 31.4. (Ronaldo and Messi, of course, both take a large number of direct free kicks that aren’t getting counted here, while Kane gets credit for all the shots he accumulates on set plays that aren’t direct free kicks. So Kane has some advantage that comes from how we’re defining the center forward role.)

Kane is similarly dominant when it comes to expected goals from these shots. When he’s on the field, he accounts for a whopping 41.7 percent of Spurs’ expected goals, the third most of this set of players. Only Antonio Sanabria of Real Betis, who is having an improbable season with seven goals in six substitute appearances, and Cristhian Stuani of the surprisingly competent Spanish side Girona are responsible for a higher percentage of their teams’ expected goals. This is the primary argument for Kane. While some players have scored more goals, and some players may have slightly higher underlying expected goals numbers, no strikers in the world have put up the gaudy numbers Kane has while accounting for as high a share of their team’s shooting and finishing.

Harry Kane isn’t a complete forward. His job isn’t to facilitate play, or bring wingers into the game, or create holes in the defense for his teammates to take advantage of. Tottenham Hotspur’s star striker does one thing: He scores. But that goal scoring has Tottenham challenging for a top-four place in the Premier League and has gotten Spurs into the knockout rounds of the Champions League. Nobody scores as much while accounting for as high a percentage of their team’s scoring. He’s the ultimate scoring forward, and at only 24 years old, he’s likely to be a dominant force for years to come.

Nancy Pelosi has been a key figure in Republican attack ads for years, and this year is no different. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team debates why she is the focus of so much negative attention from the right (and often the left, too). The crew also breaks down the findings in a new study claiming that the “use of election forecasts in campaign coverage can confuse voters and may lower turnout.”

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.

With roughly a month left in the college basketball season, three teams already have a tight grip on one of the four No. 1 seeds in this year’s men’s NCAA tournament: Villanova, Virginia and Purdue. But the last top spot is very much up for grabs. And one team that is a legitimate contender to snag it may be a surprise to college hoops fans: Tennessee.

Tennessee, on paper, may seem like a long shot for a coveted top seed: The Vols have five losses and are only ranked 15th in the latest AP poll. What’s more, Tennessee has never been a top seed in the NCAA tournament, has never made it to the Final Four, and was predicted to finish 13th in its conference in a preseason SEC media poll.

But according to ESPN’s College Basketball Power Index, which estimates team strength and is designed to predict future performance, the Volunteers have a 37 percent chance of earning a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. That gives them the best shot of any of the remaining teams outside the top three.

One key to BPI’s projection is that it considers not only what Tennessee has done so far but also what it thinks every team will do over the remainder of the regular season and conference tournament. So what makes the Volunteers’ chances so strong? A combination of accomplishment, a front-loaded schedule and tough roads for competitors.

Let’s start with what Tennessee has done so far this year. The Vols rank seventh in Strength of Record — strong, especially for a team with five losses, but not enough to justify making them a No. 1 seed if the season ended today. One reason Tennessee ranks so high in this measure is that those losses are made more palatable by the circumstances (opponent and game location) they came in. The Volunteers lost to the best team in Division I, Villanova, on a neutral court before falling to two top-20 BPI teams in North Carolina and Auburn at home. They have two losses against lesser opponents, Missouri and Arkansas, but both came on the road. And while neither the Tigers or Razorbacks are ranked, both are currently forecast to make the tournament and rank in the Top 50 in BPI, so these losses aren’t complete clunkers (like, say, this one).

Even if the members of the selection committee ignored Strength of Record (though it will now be right in front of them when they perform the selection), they would only see “quality” losses. In its current team sheets, the committee divides games up into quadrants of difficulty according to RPI rank and whether the game was played at home, on the road or on a neutral court. Of the four levels of difficulty, all five of Tennessee’s losses appear in the toughest quadrant at the moment. In addition, the Volunteers have recorded impressive wins against Purdue earlier this season and at Kentucky on Tuesday.

If facing all of those teams already this season sounds difficult, that’s because it is. The Volunteers have faced the fourth-toughest schedule thus far per BPI, but it’s about to get easier, because they have just the 64th-most-difficult regular-season schedule remaining. That’s right in the sweet spot: There’s a 56 percent chance they only take one or zero losses during that stretch, according to BPI, but the games are still challenging enough that they’ll get some credit for the wins. From there, they’ll likely need to win the SEC tournament to land a No. 1 seed, but they are the favorite (36 percent) to do that according to BPI. If the Vols can lose no more than once the rest of the way and win their conference tournament, their projection for getting a No. 1 seed will rise to a 85 percent.

Part of the reason Tennessee could earn a top seed even without meeting the above criteria is that its competitors have a tough road ahead.

Xavier, for example, currently has the third-best Strength of Record in Division I, but BPI projects it to lose twice more this regular season — the team is an underdog at Creighton Saturday and at Villanova the following Saturday — and is a long shot to win the Big East tournament (17 percent), which all combines to suppress the Musketeers’ chances.

Kansas is a similar story. Though it’s the best team in the Big 12, the conference is so stacked that the Jayhawks only have a 36 percent chance to win their conference tournament. Michigan State is only projected to lose about one more game during the regular season, but it isn’t as good as Purdue, according to BPI, so the Spartans will likely take another loss in their conference tournament. Duke was a serious contender until Thursday night, when the Blue Devils dropped a close game to their rival Tar Heels, reducing Duke’s chances of earning a No. 1 seed from 29 percent to 6 percent.

In other words, the best thing that Tennessee has going for it is that it’s in a slightly weaker conference than most of the other majors and happens to be the best team in that conference, per BPI. Granted, if one of those other teams outperforms its projection, then Tennessee will probably be left off the top seed line. But right now, the Vols have a shot.

Paul Sabin contributed to this story.

Every year, Congress faces an Oct. 1 deadline to pass a spending package that will pay for our government through the following fiscal year. And every year since 1998, Congress has blown straight past that deadline. The government is prohibited from operating without funding, so lawmakers rely on stopgap legislation, called “continuing resolutions,” to temporarily approve funding and avoid a shutdown while they negotiate a longer-term deal. But those resolutions don’t buy Congress a lot of time, sometimes as little as one day. The result — to use the go-to cliché for government funding — is that Congress repeatedly kicks the can down the road.

If the two-year, bipartisan spending deal that the Senate announced Wednesday is any indicator, legislators appear to have had enough of the recurring budget drama. House members will vote on the bill just ahead of a looming Thursday deadline, which was set when the most recent continuing resolution was signed into effect, ending last month’s three-day shutdown.

This is an old dance for legislators — there have been an average of 4.6 continuing resolutions per fiscal year since 1977. But keeping the government open for a few weeks at a time has its costs. A new study by the Government Accountability Office describes how these temporary deals create inefficiencies in contracting, hiring and clinical research. And when the government does shut down, the productivity losses can add up. The Bureau of Economic analysis estimated that the growth of the country’s gross domestic product was slowed by 0.3 percentage points in the fourth quarter of 2013 as a result of that year’s shutdown. Setting spending levels for the next two years might open up space for more compromise on next year’s appropriations bills because a breakdown in negotiations won’t result in a government shutdown. Or the longer-term bill might just free lawmakers from the pressure of being in Washington next October — right before the midterm elections.

This week, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast discusses whether the Nunes memo was much ado about nothing — and even if is is, whether it could still cause political consequences. The crew also discusses whether Trump has molded the GOP in his image and what it takes to shift a party’s ideology — and the ideology of its voters.

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.