Category: Football

What's special about the Kansas City Chiefs?

One of the most disconcerting aspects of traveling to a country whose language you don’t know is how the most commonplace things become indecipherable. Ask a stranger for directions and she may think to explain tricky vocabulary but she’ll almost never think to describe whether the place she just referred to is a city, train station, library, cafe, or all of the above. The same is true for sports natives. A thoughtful sports fan should be willing and able to explain a rule, but he’ll almost never think of explaining who a particular team is, what sport they play, or the team’s history and characteristics. In this series, we’ll do just that — describe what is unique about each sports team.

Kansas City Chiefs – the basics

  • Sport – Football
  • League – National Football League (NFL)
  • Conference – American Football Conference (AFC)
  • Division – AFC West
  • History – The team was founded in 1960 as the Dallas Texans. It was a member of the American Football League (AFL). It moved to its current location and took on its current name in 1963 and joined the National Football League in 1970 with the rest of the AFL teams.
  • Championships – Just one, during the 1969 season. The Chiefs won Super Bowl IV 23 to 7 over the Minnesota Vikings on January 11, 1970.
  • Rivals – Oakland Raiders

The Kansas City Chiefs are a team full of contradictions. They are one of the most traditional teams in what once was the upstart football league. They retain an air of intimidating success despite not having won a championship in over 45 years. They play in one of the smaller markets but have one of the most passionate fan bases.

Here is the their winning percentage in each season since their inception:

Who are some notable players or figures from the Kansas City Chiefs?

Lamar Hunt was not only the first owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, he also founded the AFL, the league the team played in during its early years. If that weren’t enough, he also founded two major men’s soccer leagues in the United States, the North American Soccer League (NASL) and Major League Soccer (MLS.) His contribution to both forms of football is recognized by the NFL which named the trophy given to winners of the American Football Conference (one half of the NFL) after Hunt and by American soccer, which renamed its longest running national open tournament after Hunt.

Derrick Thomas was a linebacker who played his entire 11 year career for the Kansas City Chiefs. He was selected to the NFL’s honorary Pro Bowl game nine out of his 11 seasons and set a record for most sacks in a single game, seven, which still stands today. Alas, Thomas does not. He died in 2000 from injuries sustained in a car accident. He was posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame in 2009.

Where do the Kansas City Chiefs play?

The blind date test

Imagine you’re about to go on a blind date and all you know about the person is that he or she is a Kansas City Chiefs fan. Here’s what you can guess about that person. Remember that all fans are unique. We bear no responsibility for any misunderstandings we engender. Trust but verify.

Before saying hi to your date, take a deep breath and… PROJECT. Any real Kansas City Chiefs fan is partially deaf from having spent too much time in the noisy confines of Arrowhead Stadium. Chiefs fans are loud and proud of it. The NFL record for loudest stadium keeps going back and forth between the Chiefs and the Seattle Seahawks.

What will make a Kansas City Chiefs fan squirm?

Assert that you like the Chiefs but then casually mention that your “second favorite team is” the Oakland Raiders or Denver Broncos. This will drive a real Kansas City Chiefs fan crazy! Chiefs fans might respect a fan of one of their sworn enemies but they’ll never respect someone who roots for two historically antagonistic teams.

Buy Kansas City Chiefs Swag!

What do the Kansas City Chiefs look like?

Team colors are red and gold. Their current uniforms look like this.

Kc_chiefs_uniforms

Current and recent teams

Coming soon — a post about the 2015 Kansas City Chiefs including an overview of their most interesting characters as well as what fans expect from the team this year.

Bonus podcast!

I recorded a podcast with a Chiefs fan (and a Seahawks fan.) Enjoy!

How does the NFL Supplemental Draft work?

Dear Sports Fan,

I recently posted this question on Fancred, “Raise your hand if you understand the supplemental draft at all.” Barely anyone raised their hand, and we’re all sports fans on Fancred! Can you help? How does the NFL Supplemental Draft work?

Thanks,
Jake N.

Dear Jake N.,

Hey Jake — I think I can help. Every spring, the NFL holds an entry draft for any player who has played at least two years of football since high school and would like to play in the NFL. This is a giant event with over 200 players selected and many more who declared themselves eligible for selection but who were not picked. When a team picks a player in the draft, it means that they have the exclusive right to negotiate and sign a contract with that player. No other team can try to sign them. Players who don’t get picked become free agents and are able to negotiate with any team that wants them, and indeed, many of them get signed, albeit to shorter, less lucrative contracts. Every year though, there are a few players who slip through the cracks. Either they intended to be in the draft but messed up their paperwork or, at the time they needed to make the decision, they wanted to stay in college for another year, but since then, something has changed in their life. This change could be a life event –  a death in the family, an expected child, or it could be something more salacious, like having become academically ineligible for another year at college or getting in trouble with the law. The Supplemental Draft, held in July, is a chance for players who missed the draft but have a qualifying reason (the NFL decides) to enter the NFL this year, to be chosen by teams.

The Supplemental draft is a reasonably simple procedure but it’s badly named. It works much more like a blind auction than a draft. The first thing that happens is that an order of teams is established. All the NFL teams are divided into three groups: teams that won six or fewer games last year, teams that won more than six games but didn’t make the playoffs, and teams that made the playoffs. Within each group, a random drawing is done to establish an order. Once the order is set, teams can make bids on eligible players. This year there are seven eligible players. Teams bid on players by declaring a number from one to seven. These numbers are meant to be the equivalent of the round in the normal draft the team would have selected the player if they had been the normal draft. Of course, as with most elements of sport, there’s no obligation to be truthful. Teams bid whatever they think will work, not what they actually would have done. Once all the bids are in on a player, the team which claimed they would have drafted the player in the earliest round (1st is better than 2nd is better than 3rd and so on) gets the right to negotiate with that player. If there are two or more teams with the same bid, the team that is earlier in the order gets the player.

The reason why the numbers correspond to draft rounds, instead of being totally arbitrary, is that there is a cost for winning a supplemental draft bid. When a team drafts a player through the supplemental draft, they lose the equivalent round draft pick in next year’s normal NFL entry draft. This is a fairly big cost, considering that the pool of players to choose from is so much bigger in, say the fourth round of next year’s draft compared to the handful of players in the supplemental draft. As such, teams virtually never bid very high for players in the supplemental draft and in many years, the draft comes and goes without a single player being picked. The only exception to this rule is firmly an element of the NFL’s history, not its present. In the mid-1980s, a couple players used the supplemental draft as a means of controlling which team they ended up with. This loophole, most famously used by Bernie Kosar to get to the Cleveland Browns and by Brian Bosworth to avoid the Indianapolis Colts and Buffalo Bills, was firmly closed in 1990.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Why is 50% written .500 and said "five hundred" in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

Here’s something I don’t get about sports. Why is 50% called “500” in sports? Is this some kind of metric system thing? Or is it for a purpose?

Thanks,
Emily

Dear Emily,

There are a variety of numbers in sports that are expressed as a number between zero and 1,000 when they more naturally might be thought of as a percentage. For example, a team that has won half its games and lost half its games is often said to be a “500 team” or playing “500 ball.” What this means is that they have won 50% of the games they’ve played. Likewise, a basketball player who scores on 38.9% of the three point shots she attempts may be said to be “shooting 389 from downtown.”

There’s nothing magical about these numbers, they’re just like percentages — a way of expressing the result from one number being divided by another. In the case of percentages, we take one number, divide it by another number, and then multiply the result by 100 and smack a percentage sign next to it. Thus one divided by two, which is .5 becomes 50%. The difference between a percentage and a sports number is that instead of multiplying by 100, sports numbers get multiplied by 1,000. At least when spoken out loud. A lot of times when you see a sports number like this written out, it will actually be written as “.500” even though no one would ever read it as “five tenths” instead of “five hundred” in a sports context.

If you always want to express a ratio to the hundredths place, it kind of makes sense to multiply by 1,000 instead of 100. It’s certainly easier to refer to something that happens three times every eight times it’s attempted as “three seventy five” than “point three seventy five” or even “thirty seven point five percent.” It’s not surprising that sports people feel that their numbers need this level of accuracy. People who live in and around sports often seem to be obsessed with accuracy to the point of over-precision. For example, players eligibly to be picked in the NBA draft tonight have their height measured down to the quarter inch with and without shoes! Commentators in many sports will often argue about whether it looks like something a player did took .25 seconds or .28 seconds. As if the commentators can actually judge a hundredth of a second difference from their perch at the top of the stadium! Because the difference between winning and losing in sports can sometimes be as slim as a fraction of an inch or a hundredth of a second it’s tempting to believe that all metrics in sports need to have that level of detail.

 

In defense of the sports way of expressing percentages, its historic source is a number that reasonably should be expressed to the tenth of a percent: batting average in baseball. Batting average is a player or team’s number of hits divided by their number of at bats. It’s not the best metric in baseball, in fact it’s a reasonably misleading one, but it does have a very long history. For many years, it was considered a key statistic in measuring how good a player was doing against to his current competition and for making historical comparisons. Baseball is obsessed with statistics because it creates them so nicely. Its long, 162 game season virtually guarantees that any measure one can imagine will have a statistically significant sample over the course of a year. With 30 teams and well over a dozen position players on each team, not even to mention the 120+ history of professional baseball, if you really want to know how a player’s batting average compares to his peers, you do need to take that number to the third decimal point. It would be far less interesting to say that Manny Machado and Adrian Gonzalez have the same batting average of 30% than to say that Machado is 18th in the league, with a .304 (pronounced “three oh four”) batting average and Gonzalez is 30th with a .296. Eight tenths of a percent may not seem like much, but over the course of a season (162 games times roughly 3.5 at bats per game) that’s a difference of four or five hits.

 

Of course, the source of the habit doesn’t matter so much if it is misapplied. Team records are the clearest form of misapplication. The problem with using this kind of number to express a team’s record is that aside from the most obvious numbers like .333, .666, and any of .000, .100, .200, and so on, these figures are very hard for us to translate into numbers in our heads. Quick — tell me how many wins and losses a team whose record is .527 has. According to the current MLB baseball standings, the answer is 39 wins and 35 losses, like the Toronto Blue Jays have. Although these numbers are convenient for creating a standings table (because they allow an easy comparison of teams who have played different numbers of games) they probably should not be displayed. In terms of figuring out how well your team is doing, the order of the teams in the standings and the games back metric are far, far better.

Regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable the sports percentage expression is, it’s deeply engrained in sports culture and seems to be here to stay. It’s easy to wonder though, if this small form of numerical manipulation makes it easier for sports people to mangle numbers in much sillier ways, like the habit of asking players to “give 110%.” That’s a story for another day.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra

Dear Sports Fan joins the real world: Meetup

Watching sports with someone who knows more or less than you can be a frustrating proposition.

If you’re the person who knows less about sports, you probably have a lot of questions. How many can you ask before the sports fan you’re watching with gets annoyed? When is the right time to ask? You don’t want to ruin the game for your companion by asking a simple question right at a suspenseful moment. Talking about simple questions, it can be difficult to learn when it seems like the answers to all your questions contain vocabulary words you’re not completely clear on. Words and concepts that are second nature to a sports fan, like offside, holding, second set, third and seven, or two and two, are not easy sailing if you don’t know what they mean. It often feels like a choice between pestering your companion incessantly or accepting that the sporting event can only be pleasant but indecipherable background noise.

Being the person who knows more about sports can also be tricky. Knowledge often comes from passion, so the person who knows more often wants to focus more on watching and less on talking. It can be legitimately difficult to explain the components of something you may have learned very gradually from an early age or from the altered perspective of being a participant.

It’s difficult to watch sports without understanding them but it’s impossible to learn without watching. It’s a Catch 22 of Hellermanian proportions — at least it was, until now. After four years of explaining sports online, Dear Sports Fan will be making its first foray into the real world. I’ve started a Meetup group called Dear Sports Fan Viewing Parties for people who want to watch sports with explicit permission to ask question and for sports fans who want to help create a supportive setting. Our first Meetup will be this Monday, June 8, at 7 p.m. to watch the U.S. Women’s National soccer team play its first game of the 2015 World Cup against Australia. We’ll be gathering at Orleans bar in Somerville near Davis Square. If you or anyone you know lives in the Boston area and would like to be a part of this experiment, let me know or sign up here.

How can we penalize NFL teams that hire bad people?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired about NFL teams hiring domestic abusers and then not being punished for it. The Bears shouldn’t be able to sign Ray McDonald, a known domestic abuser, and then cut him without penalty when he abuses again. What can we do about this?

Thanks,
Casey

Dear Casey,

What a dispiriting news item to break on Memorial Day! Yesterday, news broke that Ray McDonald, a defensive end who had been signed this offseason by the Chicago Bears despite having been arrested more than once for domestic abuse and sexual assault, had been arrested again. This time he was arrested for domestic violence after apparently assaulting a woman who was holding a baby. In a good news/bad news kind of action, the Bears immediately cut him from their team. The good news is that the public’s reaction to Ray Rice has forced teams to shift their stance from supporting arrested players to cutting them. The bad news is that the Bears as an organization get off scot free. They will suffer no penalty worse than having to go out and find another defensive end to sign.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t argue that organizations should be responsible for the actions of all their employees. After all, when an employee of Chipotle, to pick a corporation totally at random, is arrested for domestic abuse, no one calls for Chipotle to be penalized in some way. This feels different for three reasons:

  • NFL players are not just players. They are also all spokespeople for their teams. They all speak to the media and public. It’s part of their job requirements. If thought of as spokespeople, it becomes more reasonable to hold the team accountable. A spokesperson is supposed to represent the company and the company is responsible for picking people who will represent them well.
  • The Bears knew what was up with Ray McDonald and they chose to hire him anyway. Their investigation of his character before signing him was so slipshod that it screams of gross incompetence or (more likely) an organization that simply doesn’t care very much about domestic assault. Jane McManus lays this case out spectacularly well in this ESPNW article.
  • Thanks to last year’s giant domestic abuse story, the NFL is now an institution that people look at to measure the progress of society in addressing domestic abuse issues. It’s important for its own future as a league but also for society as a whole for the NFL to show progress on this issue.

Mike Freeman of Bleacher Report calls for punishing teams by taking draft picks away from teams that sign players with multiple arrests in their past. Taking draft picks away is a sufficiently painful way to punish a team but this potential policy is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, although there is no law against refusing to hire people with multiple arrests, it’s not a path I’d like to see organizations follow. Beyond simply an instinct for innocent until proven guilty (a rationale that need not hold in hiring decisions) it also seems regressive to implement this policy during a period of national recognition of widespread discrimination and racial bias in our police forces. A league that is 68% African-American has no business implementing that type of policy right now. The other problem is that this type of policy will almost inevitably lead to some subjective decisions on the league’s part. What if the multiple arrests are for a minor crime like shoplifting and are a decade old? Does it matter if the player was convicted? Given the NFL’s poor recent history of decision-making, giving them more discretionary power seems like a recipe for disaster.

My favorite story about penalties in sports is the habit of rugby officials to simply yell “play on” when players are fighting. It’s the easiest way of getting them to stop. By continuing the game, it creates a disincentive for the players to continue their fight. No one wants to miss too much of the game. This is exactly how the NFL should handle punishing teams for signing players who are later arrested. Instead of creating a penalty, create a disincentive. The easiest way to do this is to take away a team’s ability to cut players so easily. If teams could not get out of contracts with players so easily, they would be more careful about who they sign. Either force teams to hold players for at least a season after they sign them — using up a prized roster slot — or make it so that the money they were going to pay him can not be used to replace him with another player.

How feasible is this change? The NFL has a soft salary cap, so this would not require too much restructuring. There’s also a clear model for this. The NBA and NHL are much closer to this model today than the NFL is and it hasn’t hurt their popularity one bit. The right of NFL teams to cut players whenever they want with no financial penalty is not inalienable. Nudging this dynamic just a little towards a more lasting commitment on the part of the team will force them to care more about their players in a variety of ways. It could have many other benefits but it will absolutely force teams to think twice about hiring players with McDonald’s past and present behavior.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What to say if you have to talk about Deflategate

You remember Deflategate, right? The controversy before this year’s Super Bowl that revolved around whether or not the New England Patriots and their quarterback, Tom Brady, intentionally deflated the footballs they were using on offense beyond the NFL’s regulations. The hubbub died down for almost three months while the NFL’s investigation was ongoing. Then, this past week, it exploded again as the results of the report and then the NFL’s decision about how to penalize the Patriots and Brady were made public. The report focused on Brady and stopped just short of saying that he definitely ordered Patriots personnel to illegally deflate the footballs. Whether you think this is the best hot topic since sliced bread or the dullest subject since the weather in Singapore, you’re likely to take part in at least a few conversations about Deflategate over the next few days. Here’s a few common comments and how to respond to them.

This penalty is great! Cheating is terrible and should always be punished with righteous fury!

I guess that’s true, but there’s also a very strong sense within sports that some types of cheating is permitted or even admired. Have you ever heard the phrase, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying?” That’s a sports phrase and it could easily be applied to minor cheating that’s accepted in sports. Here are some examples of acceptable cheating, just in football: wide receivers who put a little bit of sticky substance on their hands or gloves, offensive linemen who hold defensive players to keep them away from the quarterback, or even defenders who try to sound like the quarterback in order to throw the offensive line off their rhythm. All these things are officially illegal but we usually admire players who do this for being sufficiently motivated to win.

But we’re not talking about acceptable cheating, this is totally different!

I don’t think so. The NFL clearly wants quarterbacks to be able to customize the footballs they use on offense. If they didn’t, they would simply provide the footballs themselves instead of giving them to each team before the game to customize within a range of acceptable parameters. Modifying the football’s pressure is legal, the Patriots just did it too much — it’s an infraction of degree, not an original one.

Okay fine, maybe the original act wasn’t so bad, but Brady lied! He went in front of the American people and said he had nothing to do with this. Hypocrisy should be punished!

Hypocrisy is in some ways, the cardinal sin of our era. Our sense of morals has become so relative that we find it easier to condemn hypocrisy than any given act. This plays out most frequently in politics. A football playing holding a press conference may look like a politician holding a press conference but when it comes to hypocrisy, it’s entirely different. Politicians are and should be beholden to the public, we are their constituency and their employers, but football players are not. They’re under no particular job-related ethical obligation to tell the truth. Moreover, we actually expect players and coaches to lie all the time and condemn them if they don’t. For example, if Brady answered a question after a loss by saying that a teammate of his messed the game up by making a mistake and honestly sharing his frustration with that player, the sports media would come down hard on him for being a bad teammate.

How can the NFL suspend Tom Brady twice the number of games for deflating footballs than they originally tried to suspend Ray Rice for assaulting his fiancee?

For starters, it’s pretty clear the NFL acted idiotically in only originally suspending Ray Rice for two games. Two wrongs wouldn’t make a right, so why should we compare the two situations? Secondly, it is reasonable for a football league to punish players more severely for things they do that affect football than they would other infractions. Running a red light is far, far more dangerous than pass interference but that doesn’t mean the NFL should assess a larger penalty to a player who gets a traffic ticket than one who commits a foul on the field.

This penalty is a travesty. The report only concluded that Brady probably knew about the deflation, not even that he definitely knew or ordered it. How can they punish him?

Hold on there, the NFL is not a court of law and Brady is not on trial. Principles like “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “innocent till proven guilty” don’t apply here. Brady is an employee of a company (the Patriots) that is part of a confederation of similar companies (the NFL). They can basically do whatever they want and it’s perfectly legal. Brady, as well as the other players in the NFL, are part of a union that collectively negotiates for how, when, why, and how much the NFL can punish players. They will almost definitely be appealing this penalty and they have a pretty good chance of getting it reduced. There’s no real victim here, it’s a dispute between a powerful employee and a powerful employer.

Aside from footballs, what else can be customized in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

Okay, so… what with the whole Deflategate thing popping up again, I understand that in football each team is allowed to customize their balls within certain parameters, and the Patriots probably went too far. Honestly though, I was surprised that football teams could customize their balls at all. What else in sports is customizable?

Thanks,
Charlie

Dear Charlie,

I too was surprised when I first learned that NFL teams were allowed to customize the balls that they play offense with in each game. It seems unusual to give a team leeway over such an important piece of equipment. The ball is not customizable in any other sport that I’m aware of. Not in soccer, basketball, lacrosse, field hockey, volleyball, rugby, or even kickball. Perhaps it’s because in football, the ball is only used by one team at a time. Each team gets a turn playing offense with the ball while the other plays defense without it. When there’s a change of possession, there’s a whistle and the balls can be swapped in or out. Baseball is somewhat similar, although the ball is used somewhat equally by the defense (pitcher) and offense (batter.) It’s not surprising then that despite rules against any customization of the ball in baseball, it’s the one sport I know of where players (usually pitchers) are semi-frequently caught for trying to customize the ball to their liking. Pitchers won’t deflate the ball (it’s not inflated, so good luck deflating it) but they do try to scuff it up, spit on it, or rub sticky stuff onto it. That said, what you asked about were the elements of sports equipment that can be customized. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head of important elements of the five major sports that can be customized.

Soccer: Not much. But then again, there’s not much equipment in soccer at all, that’s one of its attractions. A player’s cleats can be custom-made although the materials used as well as the sharpness (they can’t be sharp) and the height (they can’t be stilts) are controlled.

Basketball: Again, not much here. A players shoes can be customized and if he’s famous enough, they will be to great profit for him or her and a shoe company. There was a fad a while back of players wearing full-length tights on their legs but the league put an end to that, not because it necessarily gave anyone an advantage, but because (I think) they thought it made their players look silly.

Football: Beyond the ball, there are a few things football players customize. Their helmets are remarkably unregulated — mostly because regulation by the NFL would theoretically further their liability for brain injuries incurred under their auspices. Face masks may be customized but cannot include tinted visors unless players ask for and are granted a medical waiver. The number of bars and their location is also regulated and some of the more crazy Hannibal Lector looking masks you’ve seen in past years are being outlawed. (Which is good, because their weight is likely contributing to concussions among the players who wear them.)

Baseball: Major League baseball players are allowed to customize their bats and gloves but within pretty tight regulations. Bats have a maximum diameter (2.61 in) and length (42 in) and must be made of a solid piece of wood. Players have been caught corking their bats (hollowing them out and replacing the center of the wood with cork to make them lighter and theoretically better) and punished before. Gloves have a complicated set of rules, but basically they have maximum dimensions (catchers and first basemen have separate limits from all other fielders) and have to have individual fingers, not a webbing.

Hockey: Now we’re talking. Virtually every piece of equipment in hockey, except for the puck and the goals, are customizable within limits. Goalies wear armor from head to toe that is carefully regulated but thoroughly customized. For other players, the most important thing is the stick. Players can and do customize the length of the stick and the curve of the stick’s blade. The maximum stick length, of 63 inches, can be extended by special waiver for players over 6’6″. The longest stick, is 65 inches long, and used by 6’9″ Zdeno Chara. The blades can be curved however a player wants them to be but at no point can the curve be deeper than 3/4 of an inch. This is a rule that’s broken with great regularity and almost never called even though at any point a coach or player can challenge another player’s stick and have the referees check to see if it is legal. If it’s not, a two-minute penalty is assessed and one team gets a power play. The most famous (or infamous) stick challenge came in the finals of the 1993 Stanley Cup. It’s interesting that, as opposed to the current kerflufle in football, no one really blamed the stick violator, Marty McSoreley, or his team, the Los Angeles Kings for cheating in this way. In fact, if either team was seen as guilty, it was the Montreal Canadiens for calling it out.

Generally, it seems as if the more equipment a sport has and the more its use is isolated to one player or one team, the more customization is permitted. Anything that can be customized is regulated but breaking these regulations is often seen as a normal part of the sport — perhaps worthy of punishment but not of scorn.

Thanks for asking about customization,
Ezra Fischer

Why not make the NFL draft more fair to players?

The NFL draft was this past week. It has become a three-day extravaganza, hyped for weeks before and analyzed for months afterwards. Although we treat it like a sporting event, it’s really just a mutated job fair. The way it works is that the 32 NFL teams take turns selecting players. The teams select in the reverse order of how well they did in the previous year. This year, the first pick was made by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who won two games and lost 14 last year and the last pick was made by the New England Patriots, because they won the Super Bowl last year.

This seems like a fair system. Giving the worst teams the best new players, (or at least their choice from the new players) should create a league with some amount of parity, where it is difficult for some teams to continually be the best and some teams to get stuck at the bottom of the standings forever. Who, exactly, is this fair for? It’s fair for team owners who, despite a fair number of socialist league policies (revenue sharing, etc.) do benefit from the popularity and success of their own teams. It’s also fair for football fans who generally have hope each year that their team may compete for the playoffs or even the championship.

I suppose the current system is also fair for players, each of whom have declared themselves eligible for the NFL draft with a full and easy understanding of just what that means to their futures. It’s not always very nice though. A player can easily be drafted by a team whose management or coaches he does not like or from a city or region he doesn’t feel comfortable. A football player doesn’t get to choose where he lives, who he works with, or for. This year, Deadspin ran a short photo with caption style post about Amari Cooper, drafted by the Oakland Raiders with the fourth overall pick of the draft. The headline was “Amari Cooper Looks Really Happy to Be on the Raiders.” He doesn’t. And why would he? The Raiders are a notoriously inept organization with insane (sometimes good insane, sometimes bad insane, but either way, an acquired taste insane) fans. Cooper is from Florida and played his college football in Alabama. Now he’s got to move out to Northern California and play for a team that hasn’t had a winning record since 2002… when Cooper was eight years old.

Sure, there’s no need to cry for Cooper, he’ll be making over $400,000 this year, but the same cannot be said for the players who were drafted in the fifth, sixth, or seventh rounds. These players are on the fringes of the NFL and close to as many of them won’t have a job in two years as will. For all players, but for these guys especially, the difference between getting picked by a good team and a bad is enormous. So, why not think about other systems that are equally fair to fans and owners but perhaps more fair to the players? There are lots of different “fairs.” Before joining a pickup basketball game, the first thing you ask is “winners or losers?” In other words, does the team that just scored get the ball to start the next possession or does the team that just got scored on? Both are seen as fair options, one simply rewards one thing and one rewards another? The NFL could just as easily reverse the draft and reward the teams that perform well by letting them select first. That will help some players but not all of them. Another option would be to reverse the power structure. Make the NFL a little bit more like college, where teams can recruit players, but the players eventually get to choose from the teams. That’s actually a more feasible option than it may seem at first glance. Not all the players will just go to a few of the best teams because, thanks to the NFL salary cap which limits the amount of money teams can pay players, there’s a preexisting brake on how many good (and therefore expensive) players a team can have at one time. We could even still have a draft — where teams take turns announcing that they’ve chosen to select a particular player from the group of players that have said they wanted to play on that team. If a player gave his assent to a group of five or ten teams, the draft order might still determine which team gets to hire him.

Why not give a little bit more freedom to the players?

Why do football fans get so excited about the NFL draft?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do football fans get so excited about the NFL draft? The television ratings for it are always incredibly high but as far as I can tell, it’s just people talking in an auditorium. What gives?

Thanks,
Gabriel

Dear Gabriel,

Excitement over the National Football League draft is one of those elements of sports fandom that needlessly alienates people who aren’t sports fans. You’re absolutely right that watching the NFL draft seems totally crazy to non-sports fans. It is, as you say, “just people talking in an auditorium.” Yet for the more than 32 million sports fans who watch it, it’s one of the most exciting nights of the year, even if this year’s enthusiasm should be dampened by the first pick almost definitely being a rapist. The best way to understand the draft is as the ultimate piece of crossover fiction.

Here’s a topical analogy that might help explain the NFL draft phenomenon. The second Avengers movie, Avengers: Age of Ultron is coming out on Friday and it’s likely to be a blockbuster hit. I personally know lots of people who have already purchased tickets and made plans to get to the theater early so they can be sure of getting good seats. The Avengers is a team of superheroes that includes characters like the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk. Each of these characters has their own comic books and movies and in fact, they existed before the Avengers. Fans follow along with these characters individually. Part of what makes the Avengers movies so exciting is the coming together of these well known characters. How will they interact? Will they fit together well or will there be infighting? Who will take a leadership role? Who will fall back from their normal position in the spotlight to become a supporting character?

This is almost exactly the same thing that fascinates football fans about the draft. College football is an incredibly popular drama in its own right and its characters are well known to sports fans. The NFL draft is the moment when these characters get scrambled up and cross over to become a part of another, even more popular drama, the NFL. This sparks the same type of speculation and questioning as the coming together of the Avengers. How will a star college football player fit into his new NFL team? Will he become the new leader or learn to take a back seat? How will he interact on the field and off with the already established characters on that NFL team? In the highly competitive universe of NFL teams, will the addition of a new super hero tip the balance in favor of their new team?

If you’re not an Avengers fan, there are lots of other examples of the allure that this type of scrambling or crossing over in popular culture. The incredibly popular book and movie 50 Shades of Grey began as fan fiction built on top of (no pun intended) the world of Twilight. The excellent 1995 bank robbery movie, Heat, was much anticipated because it finally brought the actors Al Pacino and Robert Dinero, who had played father and son in The Godfather Part II (in different eras) together in a single scene. And of course, there are lots of examples of television show crossovers that people love or love to hate, the appearance of George Clooney and Noah Wylie on Friends chief among them. Even when or especially when the crossover never actually happens, the idea of a crossover is obsessively interesting. My own nerdy detective novel favorites are the theory that Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe may have been the son of Sherlock Holmes or perhaps his brother Mycroft. I am sure there is an example in nearly every fictional world. What would happen if the Stringer Bell met Tony Soprano? What if Olivia Pope took Frank Underwood as a client? What if the Dunphys were transplanted into the post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead?

Just like fantasy football is a nerdy statistical role playing game disguised as sports, the NFL draft is a combination of crossover fiction, fan fiction, and super-hero team comic books surrounded by a sportsy shell. We might not all be into the exterior shell but we can all understand the appeal of what’s within.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Why does no one seem to care that the #1 pick in the NFL draft is almost definitely a rapist?

It’s not hard to place what’s wrong with the National Football League draft happening on Thursday, April 30: the first player selected will almost definitely be a rapist. Not everything about the draft is so easy to figure out. It is hard to understand why the team with the first pick, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, would make this choice. There are so many other decisions they could make that would be easily defensible from a football perspective and would not involve hiring someone who is almost definitely a rapist.  It’s also hard to understand why journalists and media organizations of all shapes and sizes are either ignoring this fact or are merely motioning towards it with weak and insulting euphemisms like “off the field questions.”

The man who will almost definitely be made a millionaire when his name is the first called on Thursday night is Jameis Winston. Winston spent the last three years at the University of Florida State where he played quarterback for the school’s football team. He was part of the team in 2014 when it won a national championship and he became the youngest player ever to win college football’s most prestigious individual award, the Heisman Trophy, in the same year. He is also almost definitely a rapist. On December 7, 2012, a freshman student at Florida State told police that she had been raped. She would later identify the man who raped her as Jameis Winston and much later, when his DNA was tested and compared to some found on her clothing, there was a positive match. The comprehensive report on this crime and the subsequent investigation or lack thereof was written by Walt Bogdanich for the New York Times. Its conclusion is that “there was virtually no investigation at all, either by the police or the university.” That doesn’t mean that Winston did not rape this woman, just that the state prosecutor in charge of the case decided they didn’t think they could get a conviction. In fact, that prosecutor, Willie Meggs has publicly said, in response to being asked whether he thinks that Winston sexually assaulted the woman, “I think what happened was not good.”

We have a principle in this country that proclaims people are “innocent until proven guilty,” but that’s a legal principle, not a cultural one. “Innocent until proven guilty” makes sense as a legal rule because we generally believe that wrongfully imprisoning an innocent person is a worse miscarriage of justice than letting a guilty person go free. I believe in “innocent until proven guilty” as a foundational principle of law but I don’t think it means that we should blindfold and mute ourselves to a person’s actions simply because they were not convicted of a crime. From reading the New York Times expose, we know about the insufficient and probably willfully corrupt way the police and university officials handled the case. From reading Daniel Roberts wonderful piece in Deadspin, we know that the odds of being falsely accused of rape are “about the same as your odds of being attacked by a shark,” and that’s without factoring in that Winston was the most important football player in a corrupt and football crazed city. Winston is almost definitely a rapist.

Winston is almost definitely a rapist and I don’t think there’s actually much debate about the fact. So why won’t anyone say or write those words in the context of the NFL draft? The NFL draft is the signature offseason event for the most popular professional sporting league in the United States. It’s viewed by over 30 million people. Last year more than 9 million tweets (that’s up to 1.2 billion characters) were sent about the draft. Pre-draft media coverage is intense and focused largely on a form called the mock draft. In a mock draft, people predict what is going to happen during the draft — which teams are going to select which players. Virtually every mock draft this year predicts that Jameis Winston will be the first pick of the draft. Virtually none of them mention the fact that Winston is almost definitely a rapist. Some ignore it completely or some use euphemistic and infuriatingly demeaning language to refer obliquely to it. Below is a selection of mock drafts. (I chose somewhat randomly, but I did not exclude any for having mentioned the fact that Winston is almost definitely a rapist.) Many of these organizations have published excellent articles covering Jameis Winston as likely sexual assault perpetrator but in the context of the NFL draft, that work seems to have gone missing.

NFL.com mock draft by Charlie Davies: My top-ranked QB. Despite all the issues that surround him off the field, the Buccaneers feel good about their background checks and will make him their latest franchise QB.

CBS Sports mock draft by Rob Rang: Though questions still remain about Winston’s maturity, from purely a football perspective he is an excellent match in Tampa Bay…

ESPN mock draft by Todd McShay: No surprise here. I have Winston as the top-ranked player on my board, and I believe he will be the first overall pick by the Bucs on April 30. Tampa Bay has to get its quarterback of the future out of this selection, and while Winston does bring with him some off-field risks, I give him the edge as a player over Marcus Mariota. In the areas that matter most in projecting QBs to the next level — including reading defenses, going through progressions, anticipating throws and delivering the ball accurately — he’s one of the best prospects I’ve evaluated in the past 10 years.

Newsday mock draft by Nick Klopsis: …signs point to Winston more recently… As long as the Buccaneers have done their homework into Winston’s well-documented off-field issues, his name likely will be the first one called April 30 in Chicago.

New York Times mock draft from the Associated Press: Player character and behavior should be even more of a deciding issue in this year’s draft. The Bucs, desperate for a quarterback, say they are convinced the guy they choose is not a bad apple and is a great prospect.

Washington Post mock draft by Mark Maske: …Winston’s off-field issues must be considered when making such a franchise-defining decision. But Winston is the more NFL-ready QB and it would be a significant surprise at this point if the pick is not Winston.

The MMQB mock draft by Peter King …Always got the sense the Bucs wanted to pick Winston, then went through the investigative process to see if there was some great reason not to. They couldn’t find one…

[editors note] With no sense of irony, King starts his column with a long discussion of another prospective NFL draft pick, Shane Ray, and how his recent traffic violation and marijuana possession charge is likely to end with his being picked significantly later than he would otherwise have been. No mention of rape though.

The Big Lead mock draft by Jason McIntyre: Hasn’t changed. Wouldn’t be my guy.

“Issues,” “maturity,” “character and behavior,” “not a bad apple,” “background checks,” and “off-field risks.” That seems to be how NFL teams think about the potential problem of drafting someone who is almost definitely a rapist. To be clear, this is not just how football teams think about picking a player, this is how multi-million dollar businesses are thinking about the hiring process for one of their key employees. That’s reprehensible, especially if you combine that with the well documented fact that NFL teams are notoriously bad at predicting the success of quarterback hires. If you have a high profile hire to make and know that your organization and its 31 competitors have a long history of struggling to hire well in this position, why would you choose to hire the guy who is almost definitely a rapist?

There are so many other things the Tampa Bay Buccaneers could do with the first pick of the draft. They could take another quarterback like Marcus Mariota, from the University of Oregon, who also won a Heisman trophy during his college career. Or select a player who plays another position, like defensive tackle Leonard Williams who is said to be the most reliable player in the draft. Or trade the pick to another team and let them employ the rapist. In an highly competitive entertainment industry where success is based not just on winning but also on inspiring a base of people to literally wear your employees name on their backs, why would you hire someone who is almost definitely a rapist?

There’s very little we can do about this before Thursday. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have already made up their minds about who to hire and Vegas is so certain that it’s Jameis Winston that they’ll only give you $100 if you bet $1,000 with them. That’s about as certain as something can be before it happens. Sexual assault is an enormous problem in this country and having our biggest sports league so blatantly ignore it deters people from taking the problem seriously. The best thing we can do is refuse to hide behind euphemism. If you want, you can follow Keith Olbermann’s call to boycott the NFL Draft. My preference is for you to go to a draft party or a bar where people are watching the draft or turn it on in your own house, and when Jameis Winston’s name is called, turn to the people next to you and say, “That guy is almost definitely a rapist. I wouldn’t hire him and I don’t think a football team should either.”