Ezra Fischer, Author at Dear Sports Fan

What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer?

To celebrate and prepare for the World Cup in Brazil, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a set of posts explaining elements of soccer. We hope you enjoy posts like Why do People Like Soccer? How Does the World Cup Work? and Why Do Soccer Players Dive so Much? The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13.

baggio kick — The weight of a country’s hopes weighs down penalty kick takers in the World Cup.

Soccer is often called the beautiful game because it consists of almost constant fluid motion by twenty two players; because of the way players seem to dance over the ball to fake each other out; because of the way the ball dips and swerves when shot with power. So why is it that so much of the scoring involved in the game happens when one player starts from a stand-still right in front of the goalie and takes an unobstructed shot?

A penalty kick is an unobstructed shot on goal taken 12 yards from the center of the goal with only the goalie present to stop the shooter. It is awarded to the attacking team when they are fouled within the big rectangular area called the penalty box or the 18-yard box. Penalty kicks are often decisive moments in a soccer game because soccer is such a low scoring game and penalty kicks so frequently result in goals. In the World Cup, penalty kick competitions called shoot-outs are used to determine the winner of a game in the knock-out round if it is tied after two fifteen minute over-time periods. In a shoot-out the two teams alternate taking penalty kicks until one team has scored more than the other. It begins with a best-out-of-five-rounds competition and then if both teams have scored the same number after five penalty kicks each, it moves to a best-out-of-one-round format which continues only as long as both teams make or both teams miss their penalty kick.

One of the great things about the World Cup is that each national team has its own distinct personality and that personality reflects the nation it represents. This holds true with how they fare taking penalty kicks and in shoot-outs. Among the traditionally strongest teams, there are some that excel at penalty kicks and some whose fans dread them because their team almost always flubs them. For example, Brazil and Argentina have won 66% of shootouts and Germany 60%. Those three teams have won 10 of the 19 World Cups ever. Then there’s a group in the middle that are neither good nor bad at shootouts: Italy, France, and Spain are all around 50%. Finally there are the two traditional powers notorious for their poor showing in shootouts: England and The Netherlands are a combined 2-12 in shootouts all-time.

As you might expect for something that is so important to so many people, there’s been a fair amount of research on what makes a good penalty kick and what makes a good penalty kick taker. Scienceofsocceronline.com tells us that penalty kicks are successful 85% of the time and that the most successful strategy for goalies is not to dive to one side of the net or the other on a hunch but to stay in the middle of the net. Too bad that this is the least common strategy for goalies… maybe because if it doesn’t work, you look like the idiot who “didn’t even try” to stop the penalty kick. The Telegraph has a great interactive graphic that lets you choose where to place the kick and shows you the success rates of each part of the goal. The New York Times ran an article before the 2010 World Cup which argued that success and failure in penalty kicks was mostly about psychology and confidence. They noted that the success of a penalty kick declines in each round of a shootout from “86.6 percent for the first shooter, 81.7 for the second, 79.3 for the third and so on.” More dramatic was their finding that “Kick takers in a shootout score at a rate of 92 percent when the score is tied and a goal ensures their side an immediate win. But when they need to score to tie the shootout, with a miss meaning defeat, the success rate drops to 60 percent.” One of their most interesting findings was about what a player who scores early on in the shoot-out can do to help his teammates:

One of Jordet’s conclusions deals not with the run-up to a kick, but what occurs afterward. A player who celebrates demonstratively after scoring, he said, increases the chance that his teammates will score later in the shootout and also increases the likelihood that the opposing player who shoots immediately after him will miss.

“I make this point every time I work with a team,” said Jordet, who was an adviser to the Dutch national team from 2005 to 2008. “Some players score and look like they’re at a funeral because they’re still nervous.”

So there you have it — it pays to celebrate, even in soccer!

Soccer traditionalists hate the shoot-out because it decides important games with something that really isn’t soccer. When tournaments were less focused on television and a game ended in a tie, the two teams would go home, rest for a couple days, and then come back and play another game to see if a victor could be determined. This just isn’t practical anymore. Viewers want to see a winner and the schedule must be kept to for an international audience of billions. The shoot-out has become an integral part of World Cups and even though I am a grouchy old traditionalist who roots for games to be decided in regulation time or in over-time, even I have to admit that shoot-outs are nerve-jangling, edge-of-your-seat, exciting television.

How a Basketball Team is Like Inigo Montoya

Spurs Heat — Will the Spurs take their revenge on the Heat this year?

The San Antonio Spurs are like Inigo Montoya three-quarters of the way through the Princess Bride. I know what you’re thinking… have I finally and forever lost my mind? The Spurs are an NBA basketball team and Inigo Montoya is a fictional Spanish sword-fighter. You are technically correct but bear with me and I’ll tell you why they are similar.

In the Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya is single-mindedly obsessed with finding the man who killed his father and defeating him. The death of his father at the hands of a distinctive, six-fingered man, so haunted and infuriated Montoya that he trained harder and smarter than anyone and became one of the greatest fencers in the world. So armed, he pursued his enemy with unequalled intensity and focus until he could say to him, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Last year, the San Antonio Spurs faced the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals. The Finals are a best four-out-of-seven series and after five games the Spurs led 3-2. They needed to win only one more game to win the championship. In the sixth game, they led by five points with 28 seconds left in the game. They were so close to winning the finals that the rope used to keep spectators off the court had already been deployed. Then the unthinkable (or at least the very unlikely) happened and the Heat came from behind to win in overtime. In game seven, the Spurs were behind by only two points with less than a minute. They had the ball. Then the unthinkable happened again. Tim Duncan, one of the greatest and most reliable players of all time, missed a shot he’s made a thousand times. Watch the video. Pay close attention to Duncan’s reaction a few seconds after missing the shot and then again a few seconds after that when the Heat call time-out. If there’s a sports equivalent of witnessing your father being murdered, it’s what happened to the Spurs last year in the finals against the Heat.

This year, instead of under-playing the factor of revenge, as teams often do following losses, the Spurs this year have been single-minded and open about their goal — to get back to the finals and beat the Heat. It’s almost as if they’ve been repeating at every practice, during every game, and at every press-conference, “We are the San Antonio Spurs, you beat us in the Finals. Prepare to be defeated.”

We’re almost there. The Heat are up three games to one against the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals and the Spurs are up two games to one against the Oklahoma City Thunder. We still have a little ways to go but if the Spurs make it to play the Heat in the finals, my money (or at least my heart,) is on Montoya to beat the six-fingered man one last time.

How Does the World Cup Work?

Dear Sports Fan,

The soccer World Cup is coming up soon in Brazil. I know it’s a big deal for sports fans — how does the World Cup work?

Thanks,
Bobby

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Dear Bobby,

The World Cup is the world’s biggest soccer tournament between National teams representing their countries. It is, like you said, a big deal. Almost a billion people worldwide watched the final match of the tournament in 2010. Like the Olympics, the World Cup only happens once every four years. The World Cup is separated into three phases, each of which has its own setup: qualification, the group stage, and the knockout stage. We’ll walk you through how each phase works.

World Cup Qualification

The month-long tournament which, this year, starts on June 12 and ends on July 13, is actually the culmination of an international competition which may have started up to three years before. This preliminary competition is called World Cup Qualification and determines (with one exception) which teams get to play in the World Cup Finals. The qualification format is bewilderingly complicated and involves both “continental zones,” a “hexagonal round,” and finally “intercontinental playoffs.” It’s honestly not worth getting too deep into it but the principles are fairly simple — it attempts to take the 200+ countries who are hoping to be one of the 32 teams to play in Brazil and select the best teams while also finding a geographic balance so representatives from all around the globe can compete. All the complicated mumbo-jumbo of qualification is an attempt to meet this internally conflicting end. Some regions (Europe and South America) are much stronger than other regions (Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the complicatedly named North and Central America and the Caribbean) so there are more qualifying spots for the stronger regions. This year Europe and South America combined have 19 of 32 teams, or more than half. Every other region is represented by teams, except for Oceania which lost out on its one spot when New Zealand lost in a playoff to Mexico. Even though the two best teams in Europe that didn’t qualify — Sweden and the Ukraine — could almost certainly beat any of the qualifying teams from Asia and most of the North American or African teams, it’s a more exciting world celebration the way it is and it does more to foster soccer as a global sport. Oh, yes, and the one exception to all this? The host country automatically qualifies.

The Group Stage

The World Cup finals begin as a round-robin tournament in eight groups of four teams each. In a round robin tournament, each team within a group plays all of the other teams, and the team or teams with the best results in those games advance to the next round. In the World Cup, that means each team plays three games in the group stage against the other three teams in their group. The way the results are tabulated, a win is worth three points, a loss, zero, and a tie is worth one point. As you can probably imagine, with only three games, there are frequently teams with the same number of points after the group games have been played. To break ties, since only the top two teams in each group move on to the next stage, the World Cup has a series of factors which they use:

Goal difference in all group matches
Greater number of goals scored in all group matches
Greatest number of points in matches between tied teams
Goal difference in matches between tied teams
Greatest number of goals scored in matches between tied teams
Drawing of lots by the FIFA Organizing Committee

I know, I know, that seems really complicated. It is. Sometimes I think that people who love sports mostly just love technicality. In any event, all these tie-breakers basically favor teams that play in a more risky style. Try to score goals, the rules say, even if that means you give up more goals, because that makes for more entertaining soccer, and when in doubt, we’d rather advance teams that are more entertaining to watch.

The Knockout Stage

The top two teams from each of the eight groups enter the Knockout Stage. This stage is similar to March Madness or Wimbledon in that it is single elimination. The first place team from each group plays the second place team from another group. Win, and you move on to the quarter-finals (eight teams left.) Win again, and you’re in the semi-finals (four teams left.) Win once more and you’ve made it to the World Cup Finals (two teams left) — have fun playing soccer while a billion people watch! The one wrinkle with the World Cup is that the two losing teams from the semi-finals play each other in a game to determine third place.

Over the next month, we’ll be publishing more to help prepare you for the World Cup. Tune back in!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra

What Does "Ball Don't Lie" Mean?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “ball don’t lie” mean? I’ve heard the phrase used in basketball but I’m not exactly sure what it means.

Thanks,
Dot

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Dear Dot,

“Ball don’t lie” is a great basketball phrase that means roughly “you get what you deserve.” Its meaning is similar to other common phrases like “karma is a bitch” or to saying someone got their “just deserts.” While it’s true that basically every human endeavor can be interpreted through the lens of karma or just deserts, sports, because they set up high pressure situations and then resolve them with a high degree of luck involved, are uniquely suited to being interpreted through this lens. Of all the sports, basketball is the most well suited to embracing this philosophy.

Basketball is the highest scoring major sport, so if you’re looking to confirm a theory, you’re more likely to find evidence for it in a basketball game than any other sport — there’s just more stuff happening! Of all the major sports it also has perhaps the most subjective (or arbitrary) foul calls. This leads to players and fans on both sides feeling righteously indignant about the calls that went against them. They express it by screaming, “BALL DON’T LIE” and then, no matter which way the next play goes, one side will feel vindicated and consequentially have their belief in the existence of just basketball gods verified.

As one of basketball’s signature phrases, “Ball don’t lie” pops up in unexpected places. Yahoo’s NBA blog is called Ball Don’t Lie and there was a selling novel by that name by Matt de la Pena which was turned into a movie. Retired basketball player Rasheed Wallace was the world’s foremost proponent of “ball don’t lie” as a way of life. Before he retired, he left behind this exemplum of the phrase’s use. Someone put together a six and a half minute compilation of Wallace yelling “ball don’t lie” and more or less acting like a total lunatic goofball basketball yogi. There’s even a t-shirt of the phrase with Wallace’s likeness on it. My favorite example though comes from Hedo Turkoglu in an often misunderstood post-game interview from 2010. During the interview the sideline reporter asks him what he did differently that night that lead to him having such a good game (usually the best player in the game is chosen to do the on-court post-game interview) and Turkoglu responds simply, “ball.” The reporter tries to interpret this mysterious comment as best he can, but I like to think it was more mystical than mysterious — Turkoglu felt that he had worked hard or been unjustly slighted in a previous game and that according to the basketball principle of “ball don’t lie,” the basketball gods owed him one.

Now that you know what it means, you should feel free to shout “ball don’t lie” as much as you can. Watch out for those wonderful moments when the person who cut you off on the sidewalk while texting bumps into a light-post or when that guy who keeps moving your laundry from the washer mistakenly dyes his underwear pink. Ball don’t lie!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra

Time for Other Television

tv watching — Now is your time for other television. Hit it!

This is a public service announcement on behalf of all of you who share a television with a sports fan. Now is your time for other television! It’s a brief lull in the sports calendar. The excitement of baseball’s opening games has worn out and the realization that there are 155 more games to go has descended. March Madness is over. Football is a distant mirage. The NBA and NHL regular seasons are wrapping up but the playoffs are coming soon. The NHL playoffs begin in five days, the NBA playoffs in less than a month. Now is your chance to dominate! Binge-watch True Detective, Downton Abbey, or Orange is the New Black. Watch new episodes of Mad Men or Game of Thrones live. Put your feet up and lackadaisically jock the remote while you go through episodes of some pleasurable show like the Real Housewives of North Dakota or Say Yes to the Dress, Paisley Edition.

The television is yours, enjoy it!

[Editor’s note: if you live with a golf fan, your results may vary. The biggest golf tournament of the year, The Masters, just started today. But really, if you live with a golf fan, you already know this.]

The "Gang Ties" Dilemma

desean-jackson-93a4893d71e95192 — Desean Jackson escapes a tackle.

People often say sports brings people together, which is true in many ways. Bringing people from all walks of life together also often serves to highlight the gaps and misunderstandings that separate them, which can be a good thing as well.

Recently, a professional football team – my Philadelphia Eagles – released a star wide receiver amid rumors that he had “gang ties.” The cause and effect here is unclear: the Eagles have not, and likely will not, say that is why they released him. In fact, they will likely not ever discuss these “gang ties” at all. (Note: “gang ties” will be in quotes throughout this column, because no one anywhere has published anything remotely conclusive tying the player to actual gang activity).

But this happens from time to time in sports because many athletes come from impoverished backgrounds and grew up in circumstances that seem alien to the fans who follow and root for or against them.

It’s much easier for a kid from the suburbs (New Jersey, in my case) to shake a finger at someone for having “gang ties” – I couldn’t have found a gang to join or gang members to hang out with if I’d wanted to (Note: I did not want to and no gang would’ve had me). But too many kids who grew up in Compton, or Chicago, or Camden couldn’t help brushing shoulders with other kids who were in gangs, whether they wanted to or not. Another athlete with a similar background – Richard Sherman of the Seahawks, who has walked into the cultural buzzsaw a couple of times himself – made this point particularly well in a recent column.

I don’t think commentators and fans usually judge a person’s actions without stopping to consider how different their life experiences or circumstances maliciously; they do it because they’re people, and people view the world through the lens of their own experience. I also don’t subscribe to some notion of absolute moral relativism: I love David Simon more than any living artist not named Allen Iverson, but I don’t agree that I’m incapable of judging someone else’s moral choices simply because their life experiences are drastically different than mine.

But incidents like this highlight the sheer hypocrisy in criticizing people for having “gang ties” without stopping for a second to ask why gangs have taken root in so many of our cities – let alone what we would have done growing up in the same situation.

This reminds me of the cultures-colliding aspect of rap music, which for years was derided as not real music, exploitative, violent, and reflective of society’s moral decay – with the critics somehow managing to miss, or ignore, the fact that those lyrics were frequently a reflection of the world that surrounded the rappers. The fact that rap has been around for thirty years and a portion of the population still doesn’t get it suggests that the Desean Jacksons and Richard Shermans of the sports world will continue to make waves simply by putting their life experiences front and center.

Thanks for reading,
Brendan

A One Word March Madness Bracket Guide — 2014

As many of you know, the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Championship tournament begins this week. This event bleeds far over the normal sports-fan border because of the omnipresent BRACKET. March Madness brackets are a fun and usually low-stakes form of gambling that asks people to predict the outcome of all games in the tournament before it even starts. This is harder than it sounds because a mistake in an early round can compound throughout the tournament. As such, winning is often more about luck than anything else.

To help you win your bracket, my colleague Brendan Gilfillan and I created a Dear Sports Fan March Madness Bracket with each team described in a single word. So, instead of wracking your brain picking between Oklahoma and North Dakota St., choose between Fast and Large. My favorite match-ups are between Streaky and Happy and Zone and Butter.

Enjoy!

What is Selection Sunday?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is Selection Sunday?

Thanks,
Siobhan

031311_SPT_Selection Sunday_MRM — Teams get together with fans to see if their team gets selected for March Madness.

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Dear Siobhan,

Selection Sunday is the day that the 68 teams who have qualified for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament (March Madness) are announced. It’s also today, so let’s get down to the business of explaining how it works.

Like another facet of college, the admissions process, not all 68 open spots are open to every team equally. In college admissions, some spots (a majority at some schools, I believe) are reserved for the children of University employees, legacies whose parent attended the school, or star athletes. In the case of Selection Sunday, 32 of the 68 teams are reserved for conference champions. There are so many schools in the top division of college basketball with teams that they can’t all play each other in the regular season. Instead, their schedules are largely driven by what conference they are in. Conferences are federations of schools who agree to play with and against each other — one day soon we will write a post all about conferences. In the week leading up to Selection Sunday all but one of these conferences hold championship tournaments of their own. These conference championships are miniature versions of March Madness — single elimination tournaments that end in a championship game. The one exception is the Ivy League who disdains tournaments and simply declares the team with the best regular season record to be their champion. Each of the 32 conference winners are guaranteed a spot in the field of 68 teams that make it into the NCAA tournament. These 32 spots are called automatic bids.

The other 36 spots in the 68 team field are called at-large bids and are chosen by a selection committee. The selection committee is made up of ten college athletic directors or conference commissioners and functions just like committees everywhere. It creates controversy. According to a post about March Madness on howstuffworks.com the committee selects based on the following factors:

Rating Percentage Index (RPI) (For more information on RPI, go to CollegeRPI.com.)

Ranking in national polls

Conference record

Road record

Wins versus ranked opponents

The way a team finishes the regular season

Also, I would add, just like the college admissions process, the factors of instinct based on having watched the team during the year, luck, and how much coffee the committee member has had in the last half hour.

Conference is one of the most visible factors in the selection process. There’s a few conferences like the Big 12, Pac-12, Big Ten, and Atlantic 10 that are likely to get five or more teams into the tournament, then there’s a small middle of conferences that will get two or three teams, and a long tail of conferences where only the winner of their conference championship tournament will make the NCAA tournament. These three groups of conferences can colloquially be referred to as power conferences, mid-major conferences, and one-and-done conferences. Traditionally the overall winner of March Madness has almost always come from a power conference but the mid-majors are getting stronger every year. This year a mid-major, Wichita State, won every game throughout the regular season and conference championship and is thought to have a good shot to win the big tournament. The one-and-done conferences are called that because they usually only get one team into March Madness and that team usually loses in its first game.

The excitement of Selection Sunday is mostly about the ten or so teams that realistically don’t know whether they will be selected for the tournament or not. These teams are called bubble teams or are said to be on the bubble which is a nice visual. In addition to the secret whims of the selection committee these teams are effected by the outcomes of the conference championships. This is because of the automatic bids that conference champions receive. In most conferences, the team (or teams depending on what type of conference this is) with the best regular season performance are pretty much locks to get into the NCAAs. If a team outside of this group surprises everyone and wins the conference tournament, they will get the automatic bid, and, if the selection committee doesn’t subtract one of the teams from that conference from their selection, then all of the teams from that conference that were going to get in will get at-large bids, the under-dog upstart will get the automatic bid, and there will be one fewer at-large bid for the bubble teams to fight over. An example of this happened last night in the Big East when Providence upset Creighton. Creighton is still likely to make the tournament but as an at-large team. Providence, which wasn’t likely to qualify, now will on an automatic bid. And a bubble team like Minnesota or Xavier, as The Big Lead supposes, will not qualify as a result.

The selection will be announced on CBS around 6 p.m. ET after the conclusion of the SEC championship game. Enjoy!

Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals

2014 Paralympic Winter Games - Day 4 — Nikko Landeros shields the puck from a Russian opponent

The Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals will be televised at 1 pm on NBC! The United States will play host country Russia in what’s is invariably going to be an exciting rematch of their preliminary round game from earlier in the tournament. For the Russian fans, it will likely also have some revenge-factor for their team’s Olympic defeat to the U.S. in the Olympics last month.

In case you’ve never seen sled hockey, here’s a highlight reel of hits to get you pumped up. The action is fast and inspiring. Nikko Landeros, pictured here, is one of two Coloradans who lost their legs seven years ago when they were high school classmates. They were changing a tire on the side of the road when a passing car hit them. Now they are both representing the United States in the Paralympics.

The Denver Post has a wonderful profile of Landeros and Tyler Carron which I highly recommend reading. NBC always markets the Olympics by focusing on stories of athletes overcoming obstacles but the Paralympic stories trump them by a mile. I can’t wait to watch today. Go USA!

Why is March Madness the Best?

As one of my oldest sports-watching-friends and a big college basketball fan, I thought Brendan Gilfillan could help me answer the question, “why is March Madness the best?” What follows is a rambling email exchange between the two of us marginally focused on that question. My writing is in italics, Brendan’s in plain text.

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Obviously it’s hard to objectively say what sporting event is the best to watch but people who love college basketball are often quite passionate in arguing that the men’s college basketball postseason tournament commonly known as March Madness, is the absolute greatest sports experience of the year. Why do you think that is?

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The first four days: no matter when you turn on a TV, you’ll see hundreds of 18-22 year-olds put under an incredible amount of pressure. Needless to say, that results in some pretty incredible stuff: heartbreaking, skull-thumping mistakes, once-in-a-lifetime performances, and absolute unparalleled chaos. Because of the format, it’s the sporting playoff where sheer unpredictability reigns most supreme (the NFL comes closest, in my opinion). There are other, lesser reasons: unlike the NBA most players aren’t talented enough to score consistently, which forces coaches to use some diverse and creative offenses; and for a lot of these players, this is the end of their athletic career, which adds an additional sense of desperation.

But for me, the central reason is the sheer nuttiness that ensues when you put kids under the spotlight in a single elimination tournament many of them have been looking forward to their entire lives. It’s kind of like why the Olympics are so intense, but magnified because the sport is more accessible and easier to follow/invest in over the course of a season.

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The question of unpredictability is a good one — I think we had a post answering the question “are predictable sports more popular” but I don’t think we came to any real conclusion. The NBA is known as the most predictable sport. Funny that basketball can be the most and the least predictable just at different levels. The difference has something to do with the skill and ability to withstand pressure of the players but there are some important format differences too. The college game is shorter (forty minutes instead of forty-eight,) and the shot clock is longer (35 seconds instead of 24.) This leads to lower scoring games with fewer possessions and therefore more chance for an on-average weaker team to come out victorious. The format of the playoffs (single elimination instead of a seven game series) is also a big factor in making college basketball less predictable. How do you rationalize the obsession of sports fans with determining who the best team is with an enjoyment of unpredictability which inevitably leads to a less conclusive champion?

You’re absolutely right about the first four days though. They are so exciting. The first four days of the tournament winnows the field from 64 teams to 32 and then to 16. So that’s… 40 games in four days. I remember a time when I was at work… but keeping an eye on the games on one side of my monitor… and a colleague of mine on the opposite end of the office and I let out a yell at the same time when someone hit a buzzer-beating shot to win a game. Classic moment in lost productivity. How do you think the advent of streaming games on computers and tablets has changed how people consume the tournament, especially those hectic first four days?

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Do you think sports fans are obsessed with determining who the best team is? I guess every fan is after something different in sports. I’m in it for the experiences and moments, not for justice.

Although I’d argue that the best team is the team that performs best when it matters most. This is an age-old argument, but I don’t understand how you can have the best team if you lose when the stakes are the highest (even in the event of injury, horrific officiating – great teams overcome!). You may have the most talented collection of players, but whatever thing you need to put you over the top when there’s no margin for error is what makes a team the “best.” Do you (or fans you know) end up disappointed when the “wrong” team wins, assuming they don’t have a direct rooting interest in that team? I guess I can understand that…it’s just not how I experience sports.

re: streaming games – I don’t how much it’s changed it for the diehards, cause they are more likely to skip work altogether, buy a case of beer and a family-size bag of Doritos and camp out on the couch in a tee-shirt, tube socks and sweatpants(if they’re wearing pants at all), moving only to perform the most urgent bodily functions. There’s nothing nastier than the smell of an NCAA-tourney diehard on that first Sunday night. But more fans watching more games early on means they’ll be more invested in those teams as they advance. They get invested in individual players, know their stories, and ultimately end up feeling genuine disappointment/elation at their performance – feelings that are completely out of proportion to any actual impact on their own lives.

Another thing on college sports (in my experience, basketball) in general: the fun of college basketball isn’t in seeing the guys who are just stopping over on their way to the pros. The fun is in seeing a guy like Markel Starks – Georgetown’s starting point guard. I remember watching him in person his freshman year, when he only got in during garbage time. I somehow ended up sitting next to some of his friends/family – they were cheering for everything he did despite the fact that it had no impact on the outcome of the game. And he wasn’t very good then – he sat behind better players for most of his career, and spent his time getting a little better each year, without any guarantee other than his coach’s word that it’d work out.

Watching him progress over those four years – and then watching him this year, when he’s all Big East first team, when he was amazing on senior night in an upset win over Creighton that we absolutely had to have – is what college sports is all about. There’s usually guys like that on every team – guys who may or may not go pro, here or abroad – and this is their time in the spotlight.

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I do think there’s some serious interest in at least the appearance of determining who the actual best team is. For evidence of this, look at the enormous mess that has been made of college football in the past twenty years in an attempt to create a post-season format that better determines the national champion. Not to pour salt in a very old wound but if the NBA was a single elimination tournament, your 76ers would have beaten the Lakers in the 2001 finals and the lasting image would have been Allen Iverson stepping over Tyrone Lue. Instead, the Lakers won the seven game series decisively 4-1. There’s truth to the narrative about players and teams playing their best when it counts but there’s a whole lot of luck involved too.

Technology has definitely changed the way even die-hard fans consume March Madness. Even the earliest streaming websites and apps allowed for the consumer to choose which game to watch. On TV, the games were only on one channel, and someone at the station would decide who saw what game and when to switch from a less competitive game to a closer one. Now I believe that every game is televised in full by CBS Sports taking over a bunch of networks in their… network. This puts the onus on the viewer just like in a streaming type situation. I have to say, I miss the more curated experience of watching whatever was on CBS the whole weekend. What do you think? Has technology made the viewing experience better or worse for you?

Great point about feeling a connection with the players. That’s something that’s more difficult to do with professional sports because the life of a millionaire professional athlete is so far from identifiable for most of us, unfortunately. Not that the life of a stud college athlete is all that different but at least many of us went to college and can identify with some of the elements (exams, hormone-driven obsession with romance, weekend drinking, etc.) of their lives. You can also identify with Starks because you went to Georgetown but for people like me whose colleges don’t have top-level basketball programs, there’s always a team to latch on to during the tournament whether it’s an exciting Cinderella story, a regional team, a friend’s alma mater, or just a team we favor for our bracket.

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Red herrings, all! I think the issue with college football is that the champion is too frequently not being determined on the field, which means there can’t be any sort of justice. I also think the Lakers/Sixers argument is flawed, as much as I enjoy picturing that step-over (top 3 highlight of my sports fan existence…picturing now…that little head nod where he almost looked down, then seemed to decide Lue didn’t even warrant it). The question those teams were trying to answer was who would be best over a seven game series, not in a single elimination game. Everyone’s approach to that game changes if it’s winner take all. And as much as I love AI, I don’t think he’s able to drag that team over the hump when both Kobe and Shaq know it’s all or nothing.

The streaming thing has been net positive for me – I think anything that gives fans more agency is better. What non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…not only in the beginning but potentially in real time.

Your favorite playoffs – at least I think – are the Stanley Cup playoffs, right? Is it cause the familiarity built up over seven games yields such intense/high-level play?

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Hey now, “what non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…” That sounds like something Dear Sports Fan should be doing! Maybe we can do that this year.

You’re right, my favorite playoffs are ones based on seven game series. It’s not so much that they are better at determining which team is better (although they are dramatically better at that) it’s more about the drama that they produce. Seven games is an eternity for two teams to play against each other at the highest level with elimination at stake. Invariably, players start to hate each other; a dirty hit in game one will be retaliated for in game five. The tactics that worked one game will be countered the following game. There’s so much more depth to watching a series than a single game. And in terms of raw excitement, every series ends with an elimination game — sometimes, in the case of game sevens — for both teams. That’s really the perfect mix, a single elimination game with six games of history before it.

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Well but just as often the elimination game comes at 3-0 or 3-1 or something – there’s no guarantee of a game 7, whereas with the NCAA it’s all elimination games. I do think the seven game series is uniquely suited for hockey – it’s kind of a grind in baseball, where the strategic changes are much less interesting and teams’ retaliation is limited to pointless milling about in each other’s vicinity. Basketball is closer but you don’t necessarily see the intensity you do in hockey – or, that you saw in the NBA 30 years ago. Everyone’s competitive but you don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of hatred there.

What about Olympic hockey, though? Did you enjoy that less than the NHL playoffs cause of the format?

[some time elapses]

And now I’ve tasted my own mutton…how do I like the taste? Georgetown lost a single-elimination game in the Big East tournament to a “lesser team,” meaning they will definitely not go on to the NCAA tournament. It’s pretty disheartening. Georgetown is clearly “better” than DePaul – they’ve played and beaten better teams, have a better record, have more talent. But when it came down to a single game with real stakes, DePaul flat-out outplayed them. No excuse, no fluke, they were the better team last night.

So justice was done. The same things that plagued Georgetown all year – and put us in the position of needing this win – did us in last night. No front-line scoring cause of the suspension of Josh Smith, who was clearly way too integral to our plans for a transfer with a shaky past; offensive droughts and the occasional, incredibly poorly timed defensive lapse; and generally playing down to the level of our competition. How else to explain a season sweep to Seton Hall? A loss to Northeastern?

Sigh.

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I think we’ve come full circle here. I’m sure you’ll still be able to enjoy watching March Madness starting next week. Maybe even more now that the excitement and unpredictability can’t harm your rooting interests any further.