1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jimmy Murphy

A day late, but I'm going to write two columns today.

I meant to write this yesterday on the 100th anniversary of Murphy’s death, but I knew I probably wouldn’t make it since I wanted to listen to both the NASCAR race at Watkins Glen and the IndyCar season finale simultaneously (I don’t have a cable package), then calculate my post-race NASCAR and IndyCar data, then calculate the post-season IndyCar data including once again updating my open wheel teammate model. After that, I needed to write my RotoBaller post-race columns, so this kind of got lost in the shuffle but I’m going to make it up to you by writing both my Murphy column and my post-championship capsule of Álex Palou today. It seems there might have been some sort of error in my open wheel model update since it seems like almost all drivers dropped by -.003 to -.007 points for some reason I can’t figure out, but that error seemed to affect all drivers equally so I’m still going to go with it since it shouldn’t affect either the overall ranking or single-season ranking of drivers relative to each other. (You’ll never guess who the highest-rated IndyCar driver in my model was this year… it’s as weird as Chris Buescher leading NASCAR drivers in my model in 2021, and although he has proven himself to be a very good driver, just as in yesterday’s win, he’ll probably never at any point be the best driver in the series.)