Ezra Fischer, Author at Dear Sports Fan

What is a Snap in Football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a snap in football? I hear it all the time in what sounds like many different contexts. Can you explain them all?

Thanks,
Ollie

— — —

Dear Ollie,

You’re right, there are a lot of different uses of the word snap in football. There’s a snap count, there’s a person on a football team called the “long snapper,” and a snap can refer to the act of snapping or the moment of the snap. In this post, we’ll go through them all and connect them to other elements of football. Finally, we’ll ask why it’s called a snap and what it tells us about football.

The Act of Snapping a Football

When a football play begins, the ball is motionless on the ground, positioned on an imaginary line which stretches from side-line to side-line, called the line of scrimmage. One player grabs the ball with his hand and moves it backwards between his legs to another player. That action is called the snap. The player who performs the act of snapping is the center. There are two main kinds of snaps, referred to by the position of the quarterback. A quarterback is either “under center” to receive the snap or “in the shotgun.” With a quarterback under center (right behind the center, so close that he rests one hand on the under-side of the center’s butt,) the center quickly hands him the ball through his legs. When a quarterback is in the shotgun formation, he is a between five and seven yards behind the quarterback. Snapping the football in this formation is a more challenging task — it requires spinning the football while throwing it backwards between his legs so that it flies in a straight, easy to catch spiral. You may also hear that there was a “direct snap.” This is a totally normal snap — either under center or shotgun but instead of a quarterback receiving the ball, it is a running back.

The act of snapping the football connects football to its past when, like rugby, throwing the ball forwards was not allowed. Although the majority of plays in most football games today involve throwing the ball forward, all of them begin with a backwards pass in the form of a snap. In case you’d like to learn how to snap a football, wikihow.com has a great tutorial.

Snap Count

The phrase “snap count” is pretty common but has two only tangentially related meanings. One meaning refers to any vocal cue that a quarterback gives to his own team to synchronize their movement with the snapping of the football. Because only one player on the offensive side is allowed to move at a time before the snap, a good snap count provides the offense with an advantage over the defense; it knows when to start moving and can get a head-start on the defensive players. Once in a while defensive players will mimic a quarterback’s snap count in an effort to get the offense to move at the wrong time. This is illegal and a defensive team may be penalized for “simulating the snap count.” Another meaning of the phrase snap count is the number of plays a player is a part of, usually in a single game. In this use, the snap is representative of a play and the count is just the act of counting the number of plays or snaps someone is a part of.

The Snap as a Moment

As described in the first paragraph, before a play begins, the football is motionless on the ground. The act of snapping the football begins the play and, confusingly, the moment that this happens is also called a snap. This is important because the exact moment a play begins is vital for a couple of important rules in football. Aside from the one offensive player who is allowed to move before the snap (said to be “in motion”) if any other player moves before the snap, they are offside. If a defensive player moves across the line of scrimmage and is not able to get back to his side of that line before the snap, he has encroached and will be called for a penalty. Dear Sports Fan covered both of these rules in our post on offside rules in various sports. Football, similar to basketball, has a play clock that counts down and requires a team to make an offensive play. In the NFL, the play clock is forty seconds long. If the clock runs out before the snap, there is a delay of game penalty.

The Snapping Specialist

While most snapping is done by someone playing the center position, there are some snaps that are so critical and so technically difficult that teams pay someone to perform them, even if that is almost all they can do on a football field. This player is the long snapper. He snaps the ball for punts and field goal attempts. For a punt, the long snapper needs to spiral the ball backwards to someone standing closer to 15 yards behind him than the five yards of a shotgun snap. The mechanics of a field goal snap are even more exacting because the snapper has to snap the ball in such a way that it spins exactly the right number of turns. This way the field goal holder has an easy job of placing the ball with the laces facing away from the kicker’s foot so that the kick flies true. The New York Times produced an amazing multi-media feature on this a few weeks ago.

Why is it called a snap? And what can we learn about football from it?

There doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus about why the snap is called this snap. This delights me because making up derivations runs deep in my family. Google defines snap as “a sudden, sharp cracking sound or movement” and as a secondary meaning, “in football: a quick backward movement of the ball from the ground that begins a play.” Football can be inaccessible or less pleasing to fans of other sports because it lacks the fluid motion and continuous play present in sports like soccer, basketball, and hockey. Instead of fluid play, football is characterized by quick bursts of action beginning from a standstill and creating havoc in a matter of seconds before coming to a halt. It’s no wonder then that we call the act that initiates these sudden, sharp bursts of movement a “snap.”

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 11-3-2013: NFL One Liners

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

Kansas City 23, Buffalo 13 — The Chiefs are undefeated but people suspect they are not quite as good as that would suggest because they’ve played a lot of weak teams or teams missing important players this year. Down, 10 – 3 at the half, the Chiefs looked like they were on their way to confirming those suspicions before they rallied to win.

Minnesota 23, Dallas 27 — The week after losing in the last minute of the game against the Lions, this week the Cowboys won in the last minute. This proves only that cowboys love drama.

Tennessee 28, St. Louis 21 — Football is a brutal sport and resting often helps. Before this game, the Titans had a week off. The Rams had one fewer day of rest than normal because they played last Monday. In a matchup of two mediocre teams, that might have been enough to decide who won.

New Orleans 20, New York Jets 26 — It’s starting to get creepy how Jets rookie quarterback Geno Smith alternates good and bad games. If you average ESPN’s proprietary measure of quarterback success, the QBR (quarterback rating) for the odd numbered weeks in the season so far (1, 3, 5, 7, 9) Smith receives a 52. Over even weeks, he has an average of 8.4. This week was an odd week — the Jets won.

San Diego 24, Washington 30 — Like the Cowboys, these two teams seem incapable of playing unentertaining games. Washington won, in part, by faking the Chargers defense out three times on the same running play from close to the end-zone they were trying to score on. Each time they gave the ball to little-known fullback Darrel Young who had only touched the ball twice all year before this game. This infuriated fantasy owners everywhere who were counting on more well-known Redskins scoring touchdowns.

Atlanta 10, Carolina 34 — It sure seems like when the Panthers win, they really win. Of the five games they’ve won so far, the closest one has been a 15 point margin.

Philadelphia 49, Oakland 20 — Eagles quarterback Nick Foles threw for seven touchdown passes in this game, tying the NFL record. You might remember that Peyton Manning threw seven touchdowns of his own on the opening night of this season. Before that, it hadn’t been done since 1969. Something strange is in the air. Or, you know, it might just be random.

Tampa Bay 24, Seattle 27 — In the same vein as the undefeated Chiefs, Seattle inspires suspicion that its true talent is not as good as its 8-1 record would suggest. The yet-to-win-a-game-this-year Buccaneers almost pulled off the upset but lost in overtime.

Baltimore 18, Cleveland 24 — Last year the Washington Redskins were 3-6 before winning their final seven games and making the playoffs. Their neighbors, the Baltimore Ravens would like to emulate them now that they are 3-5, and it’s possible, but it certainly feels like the defending Super Bowl champions have succumbed to what basketball coach Pat Riley famously called the “disease of me.”

Pittsburgh 31, New England 55 — For the past few weeks, the narrative surrounding Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady has been “what’s wrong with Tom Brady?” This week the narrative will be “nothing.”

Indianapolis 27, Houston 24 — The Texans were up 21-3 at halftime when head coach Gary Kubiak collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. Without Kubiak in the second half, the Texans were unable to prevent the Colts from coming back to win the game.

How Difficult is Running a Marathon?

Dear Sports Fan,

I live in New York along the path of the Marathon. I enjoy cheering the runners on as they go by but I’ve never been tempted to train for a marathon myself. I’m wondering, how difficult is running a marathon?

Curious in Queens,
Carl

A lot of people run the NYC Marathon each year but that doesn’t mean it’s not difficult.

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Dear Carl,

That’s so cool that you live on the route of the New York City Marathon. I’ve heard from friends who have run it that they really appreciate the people on the route who cheer or set up their houses as giant stereo systems or in some other way enliven the long slog to the finish-line. I’ve never run a marathon, so I can’t write from personal experience, but it seems like a marathon is very, very difficult but accessible to most people who want to run one.

A marathon is a 26 mile, 385 yard race run by over half a million people each year. 48,000 people will run in the NYC Marathon alone! Most of these people are amateur runners, people like you and me, except that they for any number of reasons decided to train for and run in a long-distance race. Most of the runners don’t treat the marathon like a race; at least, not the kind of race you might have had as a kid when you and a friend ran to see who could reach the end of a path the fastest. For one thing, there’s no way that 48,000 people can start at the same time. The start of the race is highly regimented and staggered event^[1] where the relatively small group of professional runners who actually have a chance to win start 25 minutes before the next wave of slower runners. No, most of the people who run a marathon are trying to beat only a personal goal they’ve set. Data, put together on Deadspin.com by Rueben Fischer-Baum suggests that many are successful in this; instead of a smooth curve of finishing times, there are little spikes at even ten and thirty minute marks.

Almost all (98%) of the marathoners who start the race, complete the race. That’s very different from what would happen if amateurs tried to complete other professional sporting feats. An amateur, even a trained amateur, would have almost no chance of hitting a major league fastball, finishing a shift in hockey, scoring more than a fluke basket or two in an NBA game, or even just making it through a football play without a major injury. Then again, a layperson might have less chance of hitting a baseball than completing a marathon, but they’d certainly be less sore after trying. Just finishing something doesn’t mean that it wasn’t difficult to do.

The curious distance of the race and its history speak eloquently, if somewhat unreliably to how difficult it is. The marathon was invented as an athletic event in 1896 by some of the architects of the first Olympic Games who were searching for an event to catch the imagination of spectators and journalists. They recalled the Ancient Greek story/myth of an Athenian soldier who ran from Marathon to Athens to spread the news of a victorious battle over the Persians. The legend ends with the runner’s end as he dies of exhaustion after successfully delivering his message. There’s a lot of conflicting reports of this story — had he fought that day? did he follow the path of the road that was measured in 1896 to get the figure of 26 miles, 385 yards? or was it a shorter road? had he just run a 150 miles on another mission when he left on the 26 mile run that killed him? did he really die?

A very small percentage of runners these days die. There was an article in Time magazine entitled “Running a Marathon Won’t Kill You” that stated the death rate of marathoners as 1 per 259,000. Of course, that’s consistent with the 1 per 1 of the legend but I would suggest we just take that whole story with a grain of salt. Talking about salt, marathon runners today keep themselves fresh by eating and drinking all kinds of things during the race. The Huffington Post’s recent article on marathon nutrition suggested everything from specially created and marketed runner’s gels to gummi bears and marshmallows. Counter-intuitively, one thing that actually kills a marathoner once every other year or so is too much water, according to this article in the Washington Post. If you see someone in distress tomorrow, make sure to check how much water they’ve had before you offer them some more.

The popularity of marathon runners has brought on a slew of articles minimizing the difficulty of running a marathon. The New York Times ran an article a few years ago with the mildly obnoxious headline, “Plodders Have a Place, but is it in a Marathon?” In it they quote an experienced marathon saying, “It used to be that running a marathon was worth something — there used to be a pride saying that you ran a marathon, but not anymore. Now it’s, ‘How low is the bar?’” This past spring the Running Blog of the Guardian surveyed runners trying to distinguish themselves from the increasingly common marathoners by performing feats like running seven marathons in seven days or running across the continental United States.

I don’t think the fact that many people can run a marathon suggest it is anything other than an extraordinary feat worthy of congratulations. Here’s two suggestions on how to show people just how impressive marathons are. First, have them tune in to ABC at around 11:30 tomorrow morning. The professional men’s runners will be nearing the end of the race. After 24 or 15 miles of running at a pace of under five minutes per mile, the runners will begin to sprint, raising their pace to around four and a half minutes per mile. After that, ask the skeptic to go run a single mile with you. If even that doesn’t work, you can break out my favorite fact about marathons, and one that I once lost a bet on. Ask your friend if they think a runner could ever beat a person on horseback in a race of this distance? Then show them the Wikipedia page for the amazing Man vs. Horse Marathon run each year in Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells which was won by a runner twice in the last ten years.

Happy running and happy cheering,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

As opposed to the finish, which sees many people staggering to the finish line, exhausted but victorious.↵

Why Are Athletes and Sports Fans so Superstitious

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are athletes and sports fans so superstitious? You never see articles about stock brokers or opera goers doing insane things but for some reason sports seems to create so much craziness.

Thanks,
Hugh

bengals-fans-750x256 — The team always wins when I wear my orange beard and headband. Right?

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Dear Hugh,

It’s Halloween today, so it’s a perfect time to answer this question about sports and superstition. You’re right — sports do seem to inspire an enormous amount of mystical lunacy among the people who play them for a living and the people who follow them closely. I happen to think that superstition is one of the more amusing elements of following sports, so I’m going to share a few examples. After that, we’ll deal with the question of why sports create this lunacy among us.

Much has been made about the World Series winning Boston Red Sox and their superstitious beards. After they won the series, Reuters posted an article with the headline, “Boston Bond and Beards drive Red Sox to Victory.” While we won’t get into the fact that the playoff beard is a well-known and thoroughly explored phenomenon in hockey, it is worth noting that a reputable news organization is suggesting that the growing of beards had an effect on the outcome of a sporting event. This is, of course, more or less the reason why hockey fans across the continent stop shaving when the playoffs begin — they are hoping their own shaving patterns affect the outcome of sporting events.

On the subject of beards, Deadspin.com ran a story about a man in Minnesota who decided he wouldn’t shave his beard until the local NFL football team, the Vikings, won the Super Bowl. That man, Emmett Pearson, died this past Monday, 38 years after he made that promise, still unshaven. Long championship draughts seem to breed that level of superstition as well as wry humor. A long-time Cleveland Browns fan gained posthumous notoriety after specifying in his obituary that he “respectfully requests six Cleveland Browns pallbearers so the Browns can let him down one last time.” The Browns didn’t go that far but they did send two representatives of the team to his funeral in appreciation for Scott Ensminger’s long-time support of the team which apparently included writing a song for the team and sending it to them each year.

Bud Light has an entire ad campaign based on the concept that drinking bud light will somehow grant good luck to the team you root for. The clever slogan is “It’s only crazy if it doesn’t work.” Business Insider^[1] published a list of the 30 strangest superstitions in sports, including one of my favorites — that NBA player Jason Terry falls asleep with the shorts of whatever team his team is playing the night before the game. It makes such logical sense — if you want to win, you’ve got to sleep a night in your opponents’ clothes. Perhaps the best sports superstition I’ve read about in a long time comes from the New York Times article about the various compulsions of players and coaches on the New York Jets football team:

One Friday night about 20 years ago, the Jets’ offensive line coach, Mike Devlin, and his girlfriend, Julie, had a fight. Devlin, then an Iowa Hawkeye, had a great game the next day, and so the next week, he insisted that they fight again. Again he played well.

A tradition was born. Devlin and Julie did not add it to their wedding vows. But in sickness and in health, in Buffalo or in Arizona, they have staged a fake argument by telephone the night before every game — about 350 of them to date.

What is it about sports that inspires players, coaches, and fans to act so strangely? There are lots of fairly obvious reasons. For sports players and even sports fans, the outcome of a game can be very important. Yes, for players there are gobs of money involved as well as the downside of being fired, and for fans there is only the joy of winning balanced against the frustration of losing, but I would argue that most players who make it to the pros are likely to be people who are internally driven to win. Being driven to win has to explain the time and energy put into becoming a professional athlete for most people who do it. There’s also a lot of chance involved in the outcome of games. Sports are incredibly complex and it’s also very difficult to analyze why a game is won or lost. My experience with playing spots is that individual performance, like the result of a game, is highly unpredictable and it’s hard to tell why you feel strong and fast one day and slow and clumsy the next.

If superstition is an attempt to bring rationality to an inexplicable world defined by chance, then it makes sense that sports are the most superstitious area in many people’s lives; they are the most important and most unpredictable aspect in many people’s lives.

There may be another, more curious answer, as suggested in the conclusion of a scholarly study of superstition in top-level athletes done by Michaela Schippers and Paul Van Lange of the Rotterdam School of Management; that it works:

One may speculate, that in preparing for a match, the most important concern is to regulate one’s own psychological and physical state. Thus, sportspersons realistically may see a strong link between enacting superstitious rituals and a desired outcome.

As for fans — there’s no proof of any of our superstitions working, despite what your friend who hasn’t changed his underwear in six months says. The last word on this topic should come from Chuck Klosterman’s essay about why he doesn’t enjoy watching DVR’d sports:

If you think your mind and heart play a role in the game you’re watching, a DVR’d game is like trying to hug a dead body. Your hopes and desires immediately become irrelevant. Which, of course, they always were — but now you can’t even pretend.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

I guess it’s inside the business of sports, but I’m guessing it’s mostly just a way to get views on their website.↵

Cue Cards 10-28-2013: NFL One Liners

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

NFL One Liners

Dallas 30, Detroit 31 — This was an absolutely crazy game. Detroit wide-receiver, Calvin Johnson, had over 300 receiving yards, which is usually the high-water-mark for an entire team, not one player. The Cowboys blew this game in the last few minutes by not remembering the Alamo.

Cleveland 17, Kansas City 23 — The Chiefs remain unbeaten and look impressive but people will be quick to point out that almost every team they’ve faced so far this year has been in some kind of disrepair. The Browns starting quarter-back in this game was the third best on their roster at the start of the year.

Miami 17, New England 27 — Between the Red Sox in the World Series and the Patriots win, Boston continues it’s streak as an outsize player on the sports scene. Especially for such a small city.^[1]

Buffalo 17, New Orleans 35 — I had some New Orleans style etouffee for dinner on Saturday; the Saints had the Bills.

New York Giants 15, Philadelphia 7 — After starting the season with six losses, the Giants have won their second straight game and are shockingly still in contention to win the not-so-good-this-year NFC East division which contains the Eagles, Giants, Cowboys, and Redskins.

San Francisco 42, Jacksonville 10 — The NFL keeps putting games, like this one, in London in an effort to grow the game in Europe. Unfortunately they are games like this lopsided one.

New York Jets 9, Cincinnati 49 — Talking about lopsided games… the thing to say here is “Geno Smith (quarterback of the Jets) really played like a rookie.”

Pittsburgh 18, Oakland 21 — Nine years ago, my friends and I were instructing the non-sports fan in our midst to say “Ben Roethlisberger really played like a rookie.” We’re old and so is he!

Washington 21, Denver 45 — The Broncos had a sub-par day and still beat the Redskins by 24 points.

Atlanta 13, Arizona 27 — With the Falcons falling to 2-5 the story this week will be whether or not they trade tight-end Tony Gonzalez back to the Kansas City Chiefs who he played for during the first thirteen years of his career and where he’d have a better chance than in Atlanta to finally win a super bowl in what is probably his last season.

Green Bay 44, Minnesota 31 — Minnesota has started three quarterbacks this season. Aaron Rodgers has started for the Packers for the last five years and it shows.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Just kidding all my Boston friends!↵

Cue Cards 10-21-2013: NFL One Liners

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

NFL One Liners

Tampa Bay 23, Atlanta 31 — Usually the time to fire a head coach in the NFL is during the team’s bye week (the one week in seventeen that they get the weekend off.) Buccaneers coach Greg Schiano probably kept his job through the team’s bye by assigning the blame to the quarterback who they later cut from the team. The Buccaneers play again this Thursday and my guess is that after they lose that game they will fire Schiano anyway.

Cincinnati 27, Detroit 24 — This game featured two of the best wide receivers in the NFL, Calvin Johnson of the Lions and A.J. Green of the Bengals. They put on a show, catching a combined 310 yards and three touchdowns in a closely contested and entertaining game.

Buffalo 23, Miami 21 — Stuck in the same division as the Patriots, these teams have not had much success over the past decade. This year, they have both shown flashes of goodness but their inconsistency likely dooms them to another year of not making the playoffs.

New England 27, New York Jets 30 — The Jets and Patriots are rivals so any close game between them takes on at least epic pretensions. This game went back and forth and into overtime before being decided partially on an obscure rule which will be the subject of conversation among infuriated Boston fans tomorrow. A good way to defuse the situation is to point out that their baseball team is in the World Series and the football team is 5-2.

Dallas 17, Philadelphia 3 — This game was a great example of how unpredictable football can be. Every expert, pundit, and gambler thought this was going to be a high scoring game. At half-time the game was 3-0.

Chicago 41, Washington 45 — Talking about high scoring games… even losing starting quarterback Jay Cutler to a groin injury in the first half didn’t keep the Bears from almost keeping pace with the controversially named Washington Redskins.

St. Louis 15, Carolina 30 — Carolina is unexpectedly good. If they didn’t wear teal, I think people would be taking them more seriously.

San Diego 24, Jacksonville 6 — Jacksonville’s horrible play is drawing focus from the fact that they are the only team I’ve ever seen that plays with matte helmets. I think I like it.

San Francisco 31, Tennessee 17 — This game was not as close as the score suggests. The 49ers are bigger and meaner than most of the other teams in the league and most weeks that’s all they’ll need to win.

Cleveland 13, Green Bay 31 — A few years back legitimate sports writers questioned whether the Cincinnati Bengals made a mistake because they drafted a red-headed quarterback. It seems like having the last name of Weeden should have been a red flag for Cleveland’s general managers. Alas, it wasn’t.

Houston 16, Kansas City 17 — The Chiefs squeak by the Texans to remain undefeated.

Baltimore 16, Pittsburgh 19 — The defending Super Bowl champion Ravens lose their third game out of the last for while exhibiting why people say the NFL stands for “not for long.”

Denver 33, Indianapolis 39 — The game with the best plot of the weekend saw legendary quarterback Peyton Manning returning to the city he played for for 14 seasons to face the team that released him. Indianapolis’ defense frustrated the high-flying Denver offense all night and led their team to victory. Losing this game actually makes me like Peyton Manning more — he was clearly emotional about returning to what used to be his home and it affected his play.

Should the Washington Redskins Change their Name?

Today the Washington Redskins beat the Chicago Bears in a back and forth, exciting 45 to 41 game. Although they were able to outlast the Bears in a contest with very little effective defense, the Washington professional football team may not be able to outlast their opponents in another contest. Proponents of keeping the team name, Redskins, find themselves, like their team, without an effective defense.

The Redskins began their existence in 1932 in Boston under the name of the Braves which matched the name of the Boston baseball team they shared a field with. The next year, according to Wikipedia, the team moved to Fenway park where the Boston Red Sox played (and still do,) and changed their name to Redskins to match Red Sox better. In 1937 the team moved to Washington D.C.

It’s not completely clear why a movement to change the name has picked up momentum over the past year but it has. In recent weeks there has been a flurry of comments from prominent figures about the name. Television commentator Bob Costas used his platform on Sunday Night Football to argue that the name is “an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present day intent.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer claimed that the team should follow the trend of common usage which suggests that most people wouldn’t use the word Redskins “because the word [is] tainted, freighted with negative connotations with which you would not want to be associated.” President Obama even said in an interview that if he were the owner he would think about changing the name.

A few voices have come out in defense of the name. Foremost among them is the team owner, Daniel Snyder, who wrote a public letter to fans that was reprinted in many newspapers. Snyder sites public polls that show that most people, even most Native Americans are not offended by the use of the word “Redskins” in the team name. He also takes what I consider to be an unbelievably wrong-headed tack in arguing that the name should be preserved because of its great and historic legacy during the 81 years of the team’s existence. I can’t believe that in arguing for the preservation of a name with connections to a genocidal history that anyone thinks playing to its history is a good idea. Often vilified ESPN columnist Rick Reilly makes an interesting case for the name by (after first giving himself the street cred to make this argument without being accused of being racist by name-dropping his “father-in-law, a Blackfeet Indian”) sharing stories of mostly high-school teams with similar names whose predominantly Native American population are proud and defensive of. Reilly’s best line addresses Native Americans who defend the name, “Too late. White America has spoken. You aren’t offended, so we’ll be offended for you.” This paradox is also addressed in the best article I’ve read on the issue. Published on Deadspin.com and written by a Blackfeet Indian, Gyasi Ross, the article looks at what he believes the larger issue is — the unequal treatment of Native Americans as compared to other minorities by the mainstream public. He writes, “NO non-black person has ever gone rummaging through American cities in search of a black person who’s not offended by the word “nigger,” and then held them up as proof that the word isn’t so bad. ”

Of course this controversy has stirred up some of people’s best, worst, and most comedic instincts. Design company 99 Designs ran a contest to redesign the team’s logo with three name suggestions: Griffins, Warriors, and Renegades. They received 1,887 submissions in one week. PETA shamelessly stole an idea from a Tony Kornheiser column in 1992 and suggested that the team keep their name but change their logo to the potato of the same name. The Onion put its stamp on the issue with a fictional quote: “We’ve heard the concerns of many people who have been hurt or offended by the team’s previous name, and I’m happy to say we’ve now rectified the situation once and for all,” said franchise owner Dan Snyder, adding that “Washington Redskins” will be replaced with “D.C. Redskins” on all team logos, uniforms, and apparel.”

One common reaction to the controversy from many writers, bloggers, and podcasters has been to stop using the name Washington Redskins and instead go with the awkward “Washington Professional Football team” or the euphemistic “‘skins.” This seems as likely to help the team avoid the issue as it does to force them to change it. At Dear Sports Fan we’re going to keep using the name Washington Redskins until the team changes it, which we hope they do soon. Of all cities, the capital of the United States should be the most careful when it comes to team names that send racist or violent messages. Dan Snyder should emulate the former owner of the professional basketball franchise in Washington D.C., Abe Pollin, who got rid of the name “Bullets’ because of his feelings about gun violence.

Why do Sports Teams Report Injuries?

Dear Sports Fan,

One thing I’ve never understood about sports fans is why they seemed to be obsessed with injuries? Why do sports teams even report injuries?

Thanks,
Rhea

This player is likely to get a Probable (neck) designation on next week’s injury report.

— — —

Dear Rhea,

Like many artifacts of sports culture, the reporting of injuries has historically been driven by gambling. Sports and gambling have a long and curious symbiotic relationship and even omnipresent elements of sports like the injury report often have gambling origins. An injury can affect a player’s performance and therefore the outcome of the game. Information about which players are injured therefore is helpful if you are predicting what will happen in a game, which is essentially what sports gambling is. In the major American professional sports leagues, teams are required to give information about their players’ injuries to the press. I always believed that this was evidence of the hypocrisy of the leagues. How can you claim to be anti-gambling when you require teams to publish information that is only really useful to sports gamblers? In fact, this is only partially true. The requirement of reporting injuries began in the late 1940s as a response to a plot to fix the 1946 championship game. Then NFL commissioner, Bert Bell, figured that publishing who might not play in a game or who was likely to play at less than 100% effectiveness was a good way to prevent gamblers or bookies from profiting from inside information.

Fantasy football is a form of sports gambling and is similarly, if not more, obsessed with injury reports. Fantasy owners pay very close attention to the injuries of their players. Because of how fantasy football works, owners get a chance each week to choose from among the players on their team those who they think are going to perform the best. Injuries to their players or to players who affect their players, like the quarterback who throws the ball to one of their wide-receivers or the linebacker whose job it is to hit their running back go a long way to helping decide whose stats to have count each weekend.

Injury reports have their own peculiar vocabulary. Here’s some of the common words and phrases and what they mean:

Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.
Upper/Lower Body Injury — Searching for a way to avoid exposing injured players from being targeted by their opponents, hockey teams are now only required to release whether an injury is an “upper body” or a “lower body” injury. This is silly in an era when players can watch replays of plays that happened five seconds ago or five months ago equally easily on team ipads.
(body part) — In sports that do give a little more specific information about where the injury is located than hockey does, you’ll often see this: Player Name, Probable (knee). This has led to the convention of announcers saying that a player is “out with a knee.” Sports columnist Bill Simmons has been poking fun at this convention for years.
(neck) — In the past few years there has been an increasing understanding of the seriousness of head injuries, particularly concussions. As a result, I believe that teams have started defaulting to the neck when reporting any head injury when they are not absolutely sure it is a concussion. Calling an injury a neck injury instead of a concussion allows the team more freedom in how and when the player returns to play. Crooked and dangerous but true.

One last thing to think about when it comes to injury reports is that they are evidence of how cooperative sports truly are. Sports has the reputation of being a refuge for the extremely competitive but the sharing of injury reports belies that to some extent. If the Jets were really trying to put the Dolphins out of business, they wouldn’t tell them about their injuries on their offensive line before playing them. Sports teams are at least as much collaborating with one another to make a communal profit within agreed-upon guidelines of behavior as they are competing to win at all costs.

Hope this has answered your question,
Ezra Fischer

Portraits of the Manning Family

If you’ve been exposed to any NFL football in the past few weeks or years, you’ve probably heard of the Manning family. Father Archie was a well-respected quarterback whose personal brilliance was always undermined by the mediocre to terrible teams he played on, first in college at Ole Miss and then in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints. He married the college home-coming queen, Olivia, and they had three sons, Cooper, Peyton, and Eli. Peyton and Eli have both had successful college and professional football careers. The long-time quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts and for the last two years of the Denver Broncos, Peyton is generally thought of as one of the top five or ten quarterbacks of all time. Eli, his younger brother, has been the Giants starting quarterback since he was drafted in 2004 and has won two Superbowl championships; one more than Peyton. The oldest brother, Cooper, was diagnosed with a spinal abnormality in high school and had to give up playing football. The Mannings are the “first family” of football.

This year the Mannings have been a particularly prominent part of the football season. Peyton’s team, the Broncos, is undefeated and he has been playing some of the best football of his career… or anyone else’s. Eli has been having exactly the opposite kind of season. His team, the Giants has lost every game so far and he has thrown 15 interceptions — the same number he threw all of last season. Coincidentally ESPN released a documentary about the Mannings two weeks ago called The Book of Manning.

Brian Phillips is one of my favorite writers on the Grantland staff and has an absolutely fabulous Twitter feed. Phillips in his own abstract way often seems to have a direct line to the Zeitgeist so I wasn’t surprised to see he had written an article about each of the Manning brothers last week. I’m going to excerpt from each of the articles but I recommend you read them in full.

Peyton:

You look at his stats and you have no choice but to deploy weapons-grade verbiage… Peyton Manning crushes. Peyton Manning burns. Peyton Manning annihilates. And yet … have you ever seen a football player less likely to crush, burn, or annihilate anything than Peyton Manning? It’s possible to imagine, say, Ben Roethlisberger, if a night took a weird swerve, actually wielding a torch in anger; Peyton Manning would spend that same night at home, in his sock-folding room, folding his socks. I doubt he has ever shredded anything in his life. (Maybe a document.) On the field, he’s Genghis Khan as portrayed by your 11th-grade trigonometry teacher. The language that best describes his accomplishments is also the language that most completely misrepresents his style.

And Eli:

Eli is more Archie’s natural heir than Peyton will ever be — like Eli, his dad was a fun and scrambly quarterback, more a seat-of-the-pants adventurer than the lucid math-compulsive then playing in Indiana — but because Peyton came along first, the definition of Manningness has somehow shifted in a way that includes Eli out… Eli is the un-Manning. He is the Manning who makes mistakes, and thus, as a Manning, he is unlike himself.

This is the kind of sportswriting I enjoy! I hope you do too.

Cue Cards 10-14-2013: NFL One Liners & Bonus Baseball

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

NFL One Liners

Cincinnati 27, Buffalo 24 — If the Bengals needed overtime to beat the Bills, who didn’t even have their best quarterback playing, they’re not a serious playoff contender.

Detroit 31, Cleveland 17 — Lions rookie tight-end Joseph Fauria caught three touchdowns and did a different celebratory dance each time.

Oakland 7, Kansas City 24 — Kansas City continues it’s undefeated season on the strength of its defense which sacked quarterback Terrelle Pryor 10 times and intercepted him three times.

Carolina 35, Minnesota 10 — The Vikings signed deposed former Buccaneer quarterback Josh Freeman in the middle of last week. You’ll hear a lot of talk about how “distracting” that was to the Vikings.

Pittsburgh 19, New York Jets 6 — The Steelers win their first game of the season sending the Jets back to earth after a week of flying high following their big victory over the Falcons.

Philadelphia 31, Tampa Bay 20 — Eagles quarterback Michael Vick missed this game because of an injured hamstring and might never get it back after replacement Nick Foles’ four touchdown day.

Green Bay 19, Baltimore 17 — Green Bay squeaked out a victory in this matchup between two teams that have been very, very good over the last five years but are struggling to get things together this year.

St. Louis 38, Houston 13 — Talking about struggling to get things together, there’s going to be a lot of people quoting Apollo 13 after the Texans lost their fourth game in a row.

Jacksonville 19, Denver 35 — The story with this game all week was that Vegas bookmakers had set the Broncos as 28 point favorites, equalling the highest line ever. Denver won but it was much closer than expected so now the story will be about how the plucky Jaguars showed so much heart.

Tennessee 13, Seattle 20 — This game was a comedy of errors that ended in a Seahawks win which undoubtedly made their cutest fan very happy.

New Orleans 27, New England 30 — In our post last week about how to negotiate with a fan in your life who wants to watch football all day, we mentioned that one of the reasons was chasing the rare game that becomes a transcendent experience. This was one of those games. Leading in the last five minutes, the Saints had two chances to win the game but failed to get a first down both times leaving Tom Brady and the Patriots with about fifty seconds to go down the field and score a touchdown… which was exactly what they did.

Arizona 20, San Francisco 32 — The Forty Niners are like the weather in San Francisco: unexpectedly fierce.

Washington 16, Dallas 31 — The good news for Washington is that their quarterback, Robert Griffin III, finally looked like he wasn’t hampered all that much by his knee which is recovering from ACL surgery. The bad news is that at 1-4 on the year, it might be too late for them this season.

Sport: Baseball
Teams: The Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox
When: Sunday, October 13
Context: Game two of the American League Championship Series, Detroit was up 1 game to zero
Result: The Red Sox won 6-5
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

Boston’s transcendent sports day continued into the night at Fenway park. Down 5-0, the Red Sox scored one run in the sixth and then four in the eighth when David Ortiz, known as Big Papi, hit a grand slam (a home run with three of his teammates already on base) to tie the game. The Sox then scored one in the bottom of the ninth to win the game.
If there’s anyone at work today from Boston, you’ll be able to tell from the big circles under their eyes and the goofy grin that keeps appearing on their faces. Last night’s game reminded Bostonians of 2004 when the Red Sox and David Ortiz seemed to do this almost every night during the playoffs on their way to winning their first world series in 86 years.

What’s Next: They play again tomorrow at 4:07 for game three of the seven game series.