One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me.
This week, I chose four articles that delve beyond the surface of sports to examine the strange, quirky, sometimes charming, sometimes complicated underpinnings of sports. What are athletes and coaches really like? How do cultural changes effect the game? What can we learn from how we organize our sporting events? What is life like for athletes a tier or two down from the stars?
We start with an article about the complicated relationship between an eccentric, demanding coach, and his strong-willed quarterback. There’s a melancholy addendum to this story, which is that Connor Halliday, the quarterback in this story, broke his leg during a game the week after this was published. His college career is over.
The Pirate and His Pupil
by Michael Weinreb for Grantland
He tends to treat his quarterbacks a little bit like fiction writers treat their protagonists: He projects himself onto them,5 sets them in motion, and puts them through an emotional and physical wringer, and they emerge on the other end having fundamentally changed, most of the time for the better.
Part of the burden of being a Leach quarterback is in the inherent freedom of the offense: Every play call that Leach makes is meant to be viewed as a suggestion. If the quarterback sees something different… he is free to change the play call at any time.
Because Halliday had to adapt to Leach on the fly — because he was thrown into a leadership role starting in place of the oft-injured Tuel before he was fully prepared — he struggled to decipher this balance. He often felt that he was being blamed for things that weren’t his fault; his offensive line wasn’t accustomed to all that pass blocking, and Halliday took a beating, spraining ankles and injuring and then reinjuring his hip and taking shots that constantly threatened to knock him out of games. He is naturally a headstrong and outspoken kid — “A cowboy,” Loscalzo says — but those first couple of years, he was weighed down by the burden of the manners he’d been taught, by the idea of respecting one’s elders, and especially by the idea of respecting one’s head football coach. If Mike Leach called the play, he thought, what makes me think I could possibly call a better one?
At the very least, Leach and Halliday appear to have reached a mutual understanding, so that when Leach fell into that long digression about Guadalupe and the Bermuda Triangle and Jacques Cousteau and volcanoes during the quarterbacks meeting, it was Halliday who egged him on with questions, who encouraged him to go deeper, who seemed to be enjoying this latest wholly unpredictable left turn more than anyone else in the room.
We all know how much the iPad changed our lives. For some, it freed us from our desks and let us work in a radically more mobile way. For others, it was just a new and innovative way of reading in the bathroom. This article examines how technology has changed the balance of football.
How Technology Is Killing NFL Defenses
by Kevin Clark for the Wall Street Journal
Until now, the chess match before the snap had always been a fair fight. Offenses get to come out in a set formation and can make minor tweaks—a different route here, an adjusted blocking assignment there. But defenses can change their whole scheme based on what they see from the offense.
But then technology intervened. For about the last four seasons, players have had tablets to watch film on. This year, the effects are being felt for perhaps the first time. “Things that used to be subtle, like a safety lining two yards outside of a hash mark, is now a dead giveaway,” said former NFL lineman Shaun O’Hara, now an analyst at the NFL Network.
Cameron Heyward, a Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman, said that research of pass-rushing moves has gotten so advanced that he rarely wants to make the first move, since the offense will know what’s coming.
“It’s totally changed the way we’ve played,” said Steelers lineman Ramon Foster. Fellow lineman Kelvin Beachum said that the team excels at “anticipatory management” with the new technology at their disposal.
“We’ve trained ourselves to, when I talk to Kelvin Beachum, I make sure to say, ‘Yo, let’s not do this with our hands. Just know it, no pointing,’ ” Foster said. “The technology part is crucial.”
“Playing for love of the game” is a quaint, almost anachronistic phrase and idea, but as this article teaches us, there are many soccer players playing at the highest professional level in this country who are doing just that. While salaries for star players have increased to attract better players to Major League Soccer, pay for the rank-and-file players has lagged behind in a major way.
Many in M.L.S. Playing Largely for Love of the Game
by Andrew Keh for The New York Times
In many ways, this year has been a high-water mark for soccer in the United States. After years of fighting to gain recognition alongside the more established major sports in the country, soccer reached an unprecedented level of public consciousness during last summer’s World Cup, where an intrepid run by the American team charmed a fresh crop of casual fans.
Yet in some ways, salaries in the league show how far the sport has to go… The league’s median salary is about $92,000, with an average of about $226,000 in guaranteed money, and there is a belief in the union that the number must be considerably higher to attract and retain better talent, which in turn would ensure the future of the league.
As Nasco said, “When you compare this to anything else in professional sports, you really are playing for the love of the sport, and you’re hoping, if you can stay in it and stay healthy, you can eventually get the money you deserve.”
This year marks the first year of a new era in college football. For years people have been loudly calling for a college football playoff and they’ve finally got it. This article outlines why you might not always want what you want, not really. Learn all about the unexpected downsides to a playoff system.
Tossing the Crystal Ball: What’s Lost When the Path to College Football’s Championship Is Made Clear
by Michael Terry for Grantland
October 28, 2014, is meant to be the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare. On that fine autumn day, the inaugural College Football Playoff rankings will be sent down from on high, and finally, following a debate that extended from stadium bathroom lines to the Oval Office itself, we will have our College Football Playoff. And with it, supposedly, the era of injustice will be over.
In our increasingly uniform way of choosing champs, we want to believe there is clear reasoning: that if we give more teams a pathway to the playoff, we are creating a journey the champion must complete in order for us to feel that the team in question is a justly deserving winner. More often than not, though, the narratives that have been most compelling are actually those in which the outcome seems unjust. Whether it’s a judge robbing a boxer of a deserved victory, or a fresh horse being sent out at Belmont to prevent a Triple Crown, or a system that chooses the wrong two teams to play in a purported title game, these stories drive home the reality that sports aren’t actually fair, nor were they meant to be.
What was interesting about college football was that it stood out from the increasing uniformity of sports through the intriguing inadequacy of its system. Its frequent inability to make sure the best team was awarded the championship was fun to watch because of that inability, not in spite of it.