While Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website still has some work to do to meet its high expectations, the site gave the World Cup a pretty strong effort. This included in-depth features on important players, comparisons of numbers from this year’s tournament to past ones, and lots of work regarding the United States’ run into the knockout round.

Excluding the “Weekly round-up” posts, the site posted a pretty remarkable 88 World Cup articles in the past 35 days, or roughly 2.5 per day.

In any case, one of the most popular features of 538 over the past several weeks has been its game picks, in which Nate’s statistical model generates game outcome probabilities. For the group stage, this entailed three-way probabilities (allowing for the possibility of ties), and for the knockout stage, 538’s model gave a probability for each team advancing.

Given the model’s fascination with Brazil, and the home…