An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Every avocation has its own language and sports is no different. There’s a particular language that sports fans become conversant with and fluent in over the course of years. Like all languages, it’s difficult for an outsider to understand. This is a shame because there’s no reason for sports to be an exclusive society. Twitter, with its 140-character limit only magnifies the difficulty for casual fans or non-fans to understand what someone is saying about sports. There’s no room, even for the most open and thoughtful sports fan, to explain all the terms they’re using or the implications of what they’re saying. Today, I’m going to take one tweet from Wall Street Journal writer Kevin Clark and unpack it.
If football gets an honest-to-goodness hot stove, which it will, and there's legit player movement like this, other sports should shut down.
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) March 10, 2015
Let’s start with the what is probably the most immediately confusing phrase in this tweet: “hot stove.” What does a kitchen appliance have to do with sports? Hot stove is a phrased used to refer to the movement of players from team to team during a time when a sports league is not actively playing games and the rampant and excited speculation among fans that potential or real player movement creates. According to Wikipedia, this term “dates from nineteenth-century small town America when, during the winter, people ‘gathered at the general store/post office, sat around an iron pot-bellied stove, and discussed the passing parade. Baseball, along with weather, politics, the police blotter and the churches, belonged in that company’.” Players can move from one team to another by signing a contract with a new team when they are at the end of a contract and are therefore free agents or by being traded to another team while under contract.
Now that you know what a hot stove is, the next step is to understand why football hasn’t traditionally had one. There are a couple reasons for this. One is specialization. Football is the most highly specialized sport. Players can not only just play one of the dozen or so positions on the field but they usually are best in a particular offensive or defensive scheme. As opposed to basketball, hockey, or certainly baseball, transitioning from one team’s system to another is way more painful in football. There are lots of examples of good players moving from one team to another and never regaining the success in a new system that they had in their first. Another reason is power. The NFL is the most lopsided of the major American sports leagues when it comes to the power dynamic between players and teams. NFL teams can arbitrarily cut all but the best players and are usually able to get their way in contract negotiations. As a result, NFL players have traditionally had less power than in other leagues to ask for or force their team to trade them. The last reason is the salary cap. Unlike in the National Basketball League, where player contracts are all guaranteed and trades are often made for financial reasons, in the NFL, teams have the opportunity to cut their players if they don’t want to deal with counting their salaries towards the team’s cap.[1]
The NFL’s free agency period began yesterday and with it came an unprecedented slew of player signings and meaningful trades. The Philadelphia Eagles have led the way by trading a star running back to Buffalo for a young linebacker and a draft pick and then following that up by swapping quarterbacks and draft picks with the St. Louis Rams. Right behind them in terms of timing and significance were the Seattle Seahawks who acquired the outstanding tight end, Jimmy Graham from the New Orleans Saints. The Miami Dolphins signed controversial but effective defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh to a massive free agent contract and the New York Jets traded for wide receiver Brandon Marshall and signed free agent cornerback, Darrelle Revis. These moves came in quick succession and their perceived importance brought football writers and fans everywhere to their computers in droves where they registered their thoughts, complaints, and excitement.
The last thing to unpack in this tweet is Clark’s suggestion that other sports leagues “should shut down” if the NFL’s player movement becomes exciting and plentiful. This is likely a somewhat hyperbolic statement but there’s some truth to it. The NFL is already by far the most popular sport in the country and when it is in season, it’s hard for other sports to get attention from sports fans. Luckily for them, the NFL only plays from September to February. Beyond those times, only the NFL draft in late-April/early-May generates enough excitement among football fans to draw attention away from other sports. If there were more player movement between teams, like there was yesterday, it would extend the period of NFL obsession even further and that would damage the ability of other sports to have their time in the spotlight.
Twitter is a powerful platform for facilitating communication but it does sometimes make hard-to-understand comments impossible. If you see a sports tweet you don’t understand, send it to dearsportsfan@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to explain it.
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
This morning I woke up to find that Dear Sports Fan turned 100,000 overnight. That’s right, since May 22, 2011, the first day of this blog’s existence, it has been viewed 100,000 times! The past almost five years have been an amazing time for me. This blog has gone from being a casual side-project to a passion to an almost full-time avocation. I’ve poured a lot of myself into the around 500,000 words I’ve written for this site and if there hasn’t been blood or tears so far, there has definitely been a lot of sweat. I want to thank the close to 3,000 people who have come along for the ride in a really meaningful way by following me on Twitter or Fancred or liking my page on Facebook. You all are the worm that keeps me excited about getting up early and writing. [BAD METAPHOR ALERT]
To celebrate, I’d like to share a little bit about the blog, give some stats and anecdotes from the first 100,000 views and talk a little bit about the next 100,000.
How did Dear Sports Fan get to 100,000? Let’s let the numbers tell the story.
As you can see from this first chart, the site’s growth was reasonably consistent for its first three years, from May of 2011 to the spring of 2014. Then it starts picking up a little speed and grows a little more rapidly. Starting in August of 2014, the site’s growth accelerates like a mile runner kicking towards the finish line. This growth rate continues to get steeper until the last little bit of the graph. Translating those numbers to events, I can tell you that I became much more dedicated to the site in late 2013/early 2014. My dedication was rewarded with more views. More views fed my dedication, and during the Spring and Summer of 2014, as I struggled with the decision to leave my job of seven and a half years, I decided that part of what I wanted to do when I left was write Dear Sports Fan. After I left in August of 2014, I was able to start writing every day. This, combined with a particularly newsworthy NFL football season, sparked the growth you see in the curve above. This peaked with the Super Bowl on Feb 1, Dear Sports Fan’s best day ever with 966 views. Since then, there’s been a natural lull, both in terms of my writing and the public’s viewing. I’m actually thrilled that Dear Sports Fan has maintained its relevance as much as it has during the slow sports time after the Super Bowl.
An even better way of looking at these statistics is through a chart showing average views per day.
One fun thing to notice in the chart above is that every September before this past one has a little peak. This is the peak in interest as the college and NFL football seasons start and lots of people start wondering how football works and why our culture seems so obsessed with it. This past year I was able to take that peak and build on it. Two other spikes that are fun to notice and remember are February 2014, when I wrote a lot about and even traveled to the Winter Olympics in Russia and June 2014 when the World Cup made soccer a brief national obsession.
Dear Sports Fan has 766 published posts. I’ve tried to find a good balance between stock (posts whose subject will last, if not forever, than a long time) and flow (articles whose interest will probably last only a few days.) In the flow category, I do two daily features — a 2-4 minute Sports Forecast podcast where I run through the most interesting sporting events of the coming day and a series of Cue Cards with very pithy synopses of high profile sporting events from yesterday and lines to use in conversations about them. During the football season, I was also writing weekly features previewing (as an imaginary good cop, bad cop duo) and reviewing each NFL football game.
As for stock, I’ve tried to concentrate on explaining the basics of major sports for people who are curious or confused about why so many people spend so much time being so involved with them. For a sample of the types of posts I’ve been writing, here are my top twenty posts from the first 100,000 hits.
No surprise that the series of “Why do people like _____?” posts are consistently quite popular. That’s the most basic question non-sports fans ask about sports fans. Although it doesn’t show up in my greatest hits numerically, I’m particularly proud of my series on brain injuries in football and how to save the future of football and football players by solving the brain injury problem. I also enjoyed putting together my two email courses (so far), Football 101 and Football 201. If you haven’t earned your certificates yet, you should do that before next fall.
I have two projects that I’m excited about starting. The first is a text message service for hockey or basketball fans and the people who live in, around, or with them. The NHL and NBA playoffs begin April 15 and April 18 respectively. The playoffs are a hectic time. Teams play almost every other night but are not always scheduled in a predictable way. The importance of each game is magnified to somewhere on a scale from vital to earth-shatteringly important depending on the context of the seven-game playoff series. Injuries are tracked with as much interest and as little forthrightness as Cold War era troop movements. It’s a lot to keep track of and I’d like to help out with a text message each morning. The second project will be a series of articles and podcasts describing major sports franchises and what’s unique about being a fan of that team. There’s a surfeit of information out there about sports teams but very little that helps the layperson understand what to expect from a typical Mets fan and how that’s different from a Yankees fan.
Both of these new initiatives are more focused on getting directly involved with people who read, listen to, or otherwise make use of the site. Engagement has been the biggest struggle so far and I’m really hoping this will help. If you’re interested in being a part of one or both of the new features, comment on this post or send an email to dearsportsfan@gmail.com. Let me know if you’re a fan or someone who lives among the fans and which team or teams you follow.
Thanks for all the support,
Ezra Fischer
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
