Category: Football

Super Bowl 50 – Who is Denver Broncos coach Gary Kubiak?

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest sporting events in the world. It’s certainly the biggest sporting event in the United States. This year, the game is between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers and will be held at 6:30 on Sunday, February 7 and televised on CBS. Watching any football game is more fun if you understand who the key characters are and what compelling plots and sub-plots there are. It also helps to know some of the basic rules of how football works. Dear Sports Fan is here to help you with both! For learning the basics of football, start with Football 101 and work up to Football 201. To learn about the characters and plot, read on and stay tuned for more posts throughout the week.

Head coach of an NFL football team is an enormously important and high profile job populated mostly by even more enormously self-important men who never miss an opportunity to raise their profile. As such, it’s actually surprising how little press the two Super Bowl coaches this year are receiving. Both Carolina head coach Ron Rivera and Denver head coach Gary Kubiak are the exceptions that prove the rule. Despite their teams making the Super Bowl, neither one is the center of attention. The plot of this game does not revolve around either of them. They aren’t groundbreaking “geniuses.” Nor is this a redemptive journey for either of them. That doesn’t mean that either of them is uninteresting or has a boring back story though, so without further ado, let’s explore who they are and how they got here.

What’s Denver Broncos coach Gary Kubiak’s story?

Gary Kubiak has been connected in some way with the Denver Broncos for most of his adult life. He was drafted as a quarterback by the team in the eighth round of the 1983 NFL draft. This was the same draft in which the team acquired quarterback John Elway, the number one overall draft pick that year, in a trade. So, Kubiak was not drafted to start, but rather to be the backup quarterback — the break glass in case of emergency option. He remained with the Broncos, playing only when Elway was injured, for his entire nine year career. After he retired, he went almost immediately into coaching. His first job as a coach was for the Texas A&M’s college team, where he served as their running backs coach. This is somewhat remarkable — a former player who wants to get into coaching almost always coaches his own position first. The fact that Kubiak’s first job was a cross-positional job says a lot about who he was as a player (observant, interested in what was going on around him even if it wasn’t directly his responsibility, etc.) and a lot about who he was going to become as a coach. From Texas A&M, Kubiak moved into the NFL as an assistant coach, first for the San Francisco 49ers and then for the Denver Broncos, before getting his first shot at a head coaching job for the Houston Texans in 2006.

In Houston, where he coached for eight seasons, Kubiak became a known quantity. He coaches like an ideal backup quarterback plays the position: steadily, unspectacularly, and reliably. He gets the job done. Look at his seasonal records in Houston, where he inherited an unsteady team:

  • 2006 – 6-10
  • 2007 – 8-8
  • 2008 – 8-8
  • 2009 – 9-7
  • 2010 – 6-10
  • 2011 – 10-6
  • 2012 – 12-4
  • 2013 – 2-11 (fired mid-season)

Until that last season, it’s hard to imagine a more mundane but functionally successful coaching record. As was foreshadowed by his first job as a coach, Kubiak is known for leading offenses that excel at running the ball and whose quarterbacks succeed through being an unremarkable cog in the system. Kubiak doesn’t draw a lot of attention to himself on the sidelines. He doesn’t throw temper-tantrums at refs or scream at his players. The only time he ever became the story was when he collapsed on the sideline in 2013 and had to be taken to a hospital. He had suffered the precursor to a stroke but was thankfully able to avoid any long-term harm.

After a year as offensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens, Kubiak was hired to become head coach of the Denver Broncos this season by none other than John Elway, Kubiak’s old quarterback buddy from his playing career. This creates an interesting dynamic. After backing up Elway for nine years as a player, Kubiak is back in a subordinate position to him. That’s one way of looking at it, but although team presidents and general managers like Elway can hire and fire coaches, the failure of a head coach is also the primary reason why presidents/general managers lose their jobs. It’s a much more symbiotic relationship than you would expect.

The more interesting plot with Kubiak as coach this year has been his interactions with quarterback Peyton Manning. For most of his amazing career, Peyton Manning has been de-facto offensive coordinator as well as quarterback, designing the offense and calling the shots. Kubiak, as we now know, wants a quarterback to fit into his system, not the other way around. This season could easily be characterized as a struggle between Manning and Kubiak over control of the offense. Because they both have the same goal in mind — winning the Super Bowl — it would be more accurate to say it’s been a collaborative struggle to find a blended approach that works for both men and wins football games. Finally, in the last couple games, they seem to have found it. Kubiak calls plays that put Manning in positions he is comfortable with and Manning executes them in a typically Kubiakian conservative way. It’s gotten them to the Super Bowl. We’ll find out on Sunday if it’s good enough to win.

Super Bowl 50 – Cam Newton and race in football

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest sporting events in the world. It’s certainly the biggest sporting event in the United States. This year, the game is between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers and will be held at 6:30 on Sunday, February 7 and televised on CBS. Watching any football game is more fun if you understand who the key characters are and what compelling plots and sub-plots there are. It also helps to know some of the basic rules of how football works. Dear Sports Fan is here to help you with both! For learning the basics of football, start with Football 101 and work up to Football 201. To learn about the characters and plot, read on and stay tuned for more posts throughout the week.

As is true of most American institutions, especially those with histories that go back 100 years or more, professional football has a complex, coded, and cruel history of racism. Although we have undoubtedly made giant strides toward correcting many of the racial issues in society and sports, many remain. The racial issues that remain are almost never talked about openly on television. Instead, they are referred to with a delicate coded language that you have to be on the inside of sports culture in order to catch. As surely as it is my goal on Dear Sports Fan to help people understand the basic terms of football, it is my responsibility to try to help sports outsiders understand the racist history and coded language of football. Super Bowl 50 provides a great opportunity to do this, particularly through the character of Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.

In my previews of the last two Carolina Panthers playoff games, here’s how I’ve described Newton: “Quarterback Cam Newton is, and always has been a lightning rod for controversy. In college, he won a national championship with Auburn, and it was an even more open secret than with most high-profile college players that he had taken fairly large sums of money under the table for playing there. In the NFL, he’s been the subject of years of criticism for being too self-impressed, too brash, both criticisms that have suspiciously racial overtones. From a strictly football standpoint, he’s been an amazing success. He’s a combination of one of the top ten pure passers in the league with a top ten running back in a single body. Newton ran for over 600 yards and 10 touchdowns this season. This makes him an unusual double-threat for opposing defenses to fret about, especially when the Panthers get close to the goal line.”

For a long time in football, even after the sport had been integrated, African-Americans were barred from playing quarterback either directly or because of unconscious bias on the part of coaches who thought quarterbacks required too much intelligence or leadership to be played well by Black athletes, who they felt were lacking in those qualities. Black players were pointed toward positions like running back, wide receiver, and any defensive role, all of which were thought to reward people with great “athleticism” or “natural talent” — both phrases used to describe African-Americans. The “athleticism” stereotype claims that African-Americans were either bred by slave-owners to be more physical than White people or are somehow genetically superior to White people (which offers an excuse to believe that the reverse could be true morally or intellectually). The “natural talent” descriptor is a subtle way of building on that idea while adding the insulting suggestion that Black athletes don’t practice, train, and study their craft as much as White athletes (who are often described as having “great motors” or as being “hard workers.”

As the cultural ban on African-American quarterbacks receded in the 1990s and 2000s, it was replaced by a new bias. Black people could be quarterbacks, but they wouldn’t do it the same way as White people had. The phrase “Black Quarterback” became synonymous with “running” or “scrambling” quarterback — a player who leveraged his athletic ability and improvisational skill to threaten a defense through passing or by running with the ball himself. Never mind that there had been plenty of White quarterbacks who had played with this style before, and some examples of African-American quarterbacks who did not play with this style (although most African-American quarterbacks have been scramblers… perhaps another example of bias in coaches who accepted Black quarterbacks only if they conformed to a single idea of how someone who looked like one way would play the position). The term “Black quarterback” also offered another way of attaching a derogatory association to African-Americans, because the accepted wisdom is that a scrambling quarterback will generally have a shorter and less successful career than a pocket passing quarterback.

Finally, in the 2010s, the NFL and football culture is beginning to accept that African-American quarterbacks can play the position with all different approaches. What remains of the bias, however, is a desire to control or judge Black quarterbacks on how their non football-related behavior on and off the field. Although the culture seems to be accepting that a Black quarterback may stand in the pocket and pass the ball instead of running himself, it’s still slow to accept that player’s personal expression through his clothing, public comments, and on-field behavior including celebrating with or remonstrating his teammates. This, then, is the final frontier for racial acceptance in football.

Cam Newton is, as I wrote before, almost the perfect lightning rod for all of this racially loaded history and emotion. He is a traditional so-called “Black quarterback” because of his power and proficiency running with the ball, but his equal success throwing the ball defies expectations. He also refuses to adhere to traditional notions of how a quarterback is expected to speak and behave. As a rookie, he famously stated that he wanted to be, not just a football player, but an “entertainer and icon.” This broke an unwritten rule, enforced more stringently, I would imagine, for African-Americans than White players, that players should focus only and obsessively on their sport. (Never mind that his opposite in this game, Peyton Manning, has hosted Saturday Night Live a half-dozen times and seems to be on every third television commercial.) On the field, he celebrates openly, joyously, and if you listen to some of his critics, notoriously. Again, this breach in football-decorum seems to be more noticed and criticized when a Black player breaches it than when a White one does.

If you’re looking for a positive ending to all of this, there is one. In sports, winning seems to wipe away almost all biases. Just by making the Super Bowl, Cam Newton has already silenced and even turned most of his critics. What’s more, the Panthers are favored to win this game, so there’s a good chance that Newton’s impact on race in football is just getting started.

Super Bowl 50 – Deja vu for John Elway and Peyton Manning

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest sporting events in the world. It’s certainly the biggest sporting event in the United States. This year, the game is between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers and will be held at 6:30 on Sunday, February 7 and televised on CBS. Watching any football game is more fun if you understand who the key characters are and what compelling plots and sub-plots there are. It also helps to know some of the basic rules of how football works. Dear Sports Fan is here to help you with both! For learning the basics of football, start with Football 101 and work up to Football 201. To learn about the characters and plot, read on and stay tuned for more posts throughout the week.

Nineteen years ago, John Elway was an aging quarterback preparing to play for the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. A star in college, he had entered the National Football League (NFL) with great expectations and fulfilled nearly all of them. He was a prolific passer and won many NFL awards. The only real knock on him was his performance in the playoffs. Despite having been to three Super Bowls, he had never won one. In the lead-up to Super Bowl XXXII, the Broncos were the clear underdogs, facing what seemed like an invincible opponent. Although still a good player, it seemed too much to ask for the 37 year-old quarterback to be the offensive leader. As it turned out, he didn’t need to be. Despite having a terrible statistical day, (he threw for only 123 passing yards, one interception, and no touchdowns,) Elway’s team shocked the world and won the game 31-24. They accomplished this largely by relying on their running game, which was fantastic. Super Bowl MVP, Terrell Davis, had 157 yards and three touchdowns despite missing time with a migraine he suffered mid-game. Thanks to being lifted by his teammates, Elway was finally a Super Bowl champion. Elway played one more year, in 1998, and won the Super Bowl again before retiring. His back-to-back championships followed by retirement completely changed the narrative arc of his career and he is now thought of as one of the best quarterbacks of all time.

This history lesson is relevant for two reasons. Peyton Manning, the current quarterback of the Super Bowl bound Denver Broncos, is even older than Elway was in 1997 and has possibly an even greater potential legacy at risk in this game. Although he has won a Super Bowl, the difference between his performance in the regular season (beyond great) and his performance during the playoffs (he has lost the same number of games as he’s won, 13 each, and his record in Super Bowls is currently 1-2) is a glaring weak spot in his record. If it were simply that Manning reminds football fans of Elway, that would be enough of a parallel to build the plot of this Super Bowl around, but there’s more. John Elway is currently the president of the Denver Broncos. He’s been in charge of the team since 2011 and has been the key architect of this team. During his time as an executive with the Broncos, he made the decision to bring Manning to Denver and he made the decision last year to fire the team’s head coach and replace him with Gary Kubiak. Kubiak, just as a bonus, was the long-time backup quarterback for the Denver Broncos during the John Elway quarterback era.

Like the Broncos did when Elway was an aged quarterback, the Broncos of today will be trying to win the Super Bowl through a strength other than their quarterback. The team 19 years ago led with their rushing attack. This team leads with their smothering defense. In the American Football Conference (AFC) Championship game (which is like a semifinal for the Super Bowl) the Broncos beat the New England Patriots almost completely based on their defense. They hit the Patriots quarterback more times than any quarterback was hit in a single game all year. They’ll try to do the same to the Carolina Panthers quarterback, Cam Newton. If it works, they have a good chance of winning the game and making history repeat itself for John Elway.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

2016 NFL Championship Preview: Arizona at Carolina

The NFL season is like a good season of television. Like the old standard for television shows, it takes place over 22 weeks, with one game (episode) per week. Throughout the season, and over many seasons, football fans are treated to great character development and consistently intriguing plots. The competition to win a Super Bowl, which only one team can be succeed at each year, often feels as epic as Game of Thrones, Scandal, or Downton Abbey. I’m always surprised when I talk to non-sports fans who are themselves surprised that I think about football in terms of plot and characters. I don’t think I’m unique among sports fans for following sports in this way, although perhaps most people wouldn’t use those terms. In any case, at this point, with only two episodes and three games left, this year’s arcs feel a little less epic than most. One reason for that is that the last four teams alive in the playoffs are the top four seeds, ranked one and two in each of the two conferences, the AFC and NFC. By earning a top-two seed, these teams got a bye, which means they took the first week of the playoffs off. So, we don’t have a team this weekend that’s coming off two playoff wins, with at least one surprise win. On the other hand, we do have the four teams that played the best over the course of the regular season. We’re set up perfectly for things to get truly epic very soon.

In this post, we’ll preview the plot and characters of the second NFL Championship game, the NFC Championship between the Carolina Panthers and the Arizona Cardinals. This game is in North Carolina on Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 6:40 p.m. ET on Fox.

What’s the Plot?

In the NFL these days, the offense almost always provides the most compelling characters who drive the plot of the game. That’s true in this game, but it’s worth admitting right up at the top that it’s defense which has driven both of these teams to the success they’ve had this year. Both teams have marvelous defenses, but because they’re evenly marvelous (Football Outsiders has Carolina as the second best defense in the league, Arizona the third,) they cancel each other out, plot-wise. When it comes to defense in this game, it’s safe to say, both teams will be great.

On the offensive side of the ball, we do have some wonderful contrasts. Carolina’s offense has a clear and unquestioned leader in quarterback Cam Newton. A dual running and passing threat, Newton is a young veteran at 26 who is having the best season of his career. He will almost definitely win the league Most Valuable Player award for his play this season. He probably would win the award even if he had had legendary supporting players, but it doesn’t hurt that most people think the other players on the offense are extremely average. Running back Jonathan Stewart has been around for a while, and shown promise before, but has always been brought down by one injury or another. The Panthers wide receivers are what turn Newton’s season from great to spectacular: Tedd Ginn Jr., Philly Brown, Devin Funchess, and Jerricho Cotchery are all totally unremarkable, below-average NFL wide receivers.

Arizona is almost the complete opposite. They’ve taken a very, very good but not great quarterback, Carson Palmer, and surrounded him with an extremely deep and talented bunch of players at wide receiver and running back. There are descriptions of most of these characters farther below, so I won’t go into them too deeply here, but it’s safe to say that any of Arizona’s top five wide receivers would be Carolina’s best or second best wide receiver if they switched teams. At running back, Arizona is actually using their third starter this year, but he may be their best. David Johnson is a rookie who played last year at the University of Northern Iowa. He’s looked completely at ease, and at times dominant, as a starting running back in the NFL. Impressive!

Arizona quarterback, Carson Palmer, is just slightly too good to turn this game into a referendum on whether it’s better in the NFL to have a great quarterback but nothing else on offense or an average quarterback surrounded by great skill players. Instead, let’s take the plot one step back from that dramatic precipice and simply say it’s a referendum on whether an absolutely great quarterback can elevate his supporting characters over a more well-rounded offense with better receivers and running backs but a slightly less dynamic quarterback.

Who are the main characters on the Arizona Cardinals?

Bruce Arians – Head Coach Bruce Arians is almost always the biggest character in the room. He’s an iconoclast who wears his weirdness literally on his head. He’s famous for wearing kangol hats. When it comes to football, he’s ready to try just about anything that might work but he has some clear preferences. On offense, he wants to throw the ball farther down the field more often than any other coach in the league. This high-risk, high-reward strategy asks a lot of the team’s quarterbacks and offensive linemen, which has been a problem in the last two years.

Carson Palmer – The guy throwing the ball down the field for Arians is Carson Palmer. Palmer has had one of the most long-lasting tragic careers in sports. Early in his career, he was seen as being on track to be one of the truly great quarterbacks of his generation. Then, on the first throw of his first playoff game, he completed a beautiful, long pass to receiver Chris Henry (who has since died, so this is a doubly tragic play in retrospect,) and was hit low by an opposing linemen and tore his ACL. The injury was not a career ending injury (clearly) but it altered his path significantly. He’s now seen as a very good player whose greatness was robbed from him, not once, but several times thanks to other injuries. At 36, this isn’t his last shot to reclaim that greatness, but it may be his best shot. It’s hard not to root for Palmer.

Larry Fitzgerald / John Brown / Michael Floyd / Jaron Brown / J.J. Nelson – This is the best set of five wide receivers that any NFL team has ever had. Other teams (including the Pittsburgh Steelers this year) might have had a better top three, but I don’t think any team was as good and as deep as the Cardinals. Larry Fitzgerald (who remains the best football player I’ve ever seen in person. I had the unfortunate pleasure of watching him go for 207 yards and 2 touchdowns in the first half against Rutgers in 2003.) is the old man of the bunch. A sensational player who has transitioned into being the world’s best possession receiver, capable of picking up 8 yards whenever his team needs him to. The other four are different varieties of deep threat — insanely fast dudes who are good at running past their defenders and catching the ball. If they start getting it going, just watch and marvel at them.

Who are the main characters on the Carolina Panthers?

Cam Newton – Quarterback Cam Newton is, and always has been a lightning rod for controversy. In college, he won a national championship with Auburn, and it was an even more open secret than with most high profile college players that he had taken fairly large sums of money under the table for playing there. In the NFL, he’s been the subject of years of criticism for being too self-impressed, too brash, both criticisms that have suspiciously racial overtones. From a strictly football standpoint, he’s been an amazing success. He’s a combination of one of the top ten pure passers in the league with a top ten running back in a single body. Newton ran for over 600 yards and 10 touchdowns this season. This makes him an unusual double-threat for opposing defenses to fret about, especially when the Panthers get close to the goal line.

Josh Norman – If you had surveyed a group of football fans a year ago today about who corner back Josh Norman was, you would probably have gotten a lot of blank stares. Now, after the season he had this year, he’s a household name. Norman is one of the rarest commodities in football, a shutdown corner. He will line up opposite a team’s best wide receiver and basically erase him from the game. Quarterbacks have learned that throwing to a player guarded by Norman is close to a no-win situation and it can be a giant loss if Norman gets his hands on the ball. One thing that Norman doesn’t normally do though, is move into the slot (when there are three or more wide receivers on the field, the slot refers to wide receivers that are not one of the ones on the outside edge of the formation,) so he probably won’t be shadowing Larry Fitzgerald.

Luke Kuechly – Middle linebacker, Luke Kuechly is literally at the center of the Panthers defense and he’s figuratively its heart. He’ll be wearing the green dot on his helmet which signifies that he is the only defensive player who gets the play calls radioed in from the coach and it’s his job to communicate them out to the rest of his teammates. Experiment for a few plays and just watch him — he wears number 59 — and marvel at how quickly he figures out what the offense is going to do and gets himself into a position to help stop them from doing it.

Who is going to win?

The obvious choice here is Carolina. They are playing at home and their home field, which will be wet, cold, and in bad shape after a snow storm, should favor their more physical run-laden attack. They also came very close to going undefeated this year and n their first playoff game last week, went up 31-0 against the Seattle Seahawks in the first half, one of the most impressive performances I’ve ever seen. Compared to that, Arizona looked downright shaky in their first game. Carson Palmer barely played well enough to win, and the team needed overtime and extraordinary heroics from Larry Fitzgerald just to beat the Green Bay Packers, a team not nearly as good as Carolina. Despite all that, or maybe even because of it, I’m going to guess that Arizona wins this game. Both teams’ defenses will pose real problems for the opposition’s offense. I think it’s possible that at home, with all the expectations of being the number one seed and almost going undefeated, there’s a chance this seriously frustrates the Panthers. The Cardinals have struggled before, as recently as last week, and have more recent memories of overcoming. A bad start on offense won’t knock them out of whack, but it might derail the Panthers.

2016 NFL Championship Preview: New England at Denver

The NFL season is like a good season of television. Like the old standard for television shows, it takes place over 22 weeks, with one game (episode) per week. Throughout the season, and over many seasons, football fans are treated to great character development and consistently intriguing plots. The competition to win a Super Bowl, which only one team can be succeed at each year, often feels as epic as Game of Thrones, Scandal, or Downton Abbey. I’m always surprised when I talk to non-sports fans who are themselves surprised that I think about football in terms of plot and characters. I don’t think I’m unique among sports fans for following sports in this way, although perhaps most people wouldn’t use those terms. In any case, at this point, with only two episodes and three games left, this year’s arcs feel a little less epic than most. One reason for that is that the last four teams alive in the playoffs are the top four seeds, ranked one and two in each of the two conferences, the AFC and NFC. By earning a top-two seed, these teams got a bye, which means they took the first week of the playoffs off. So, we don’t have a team this weekend that’s coming off two playoff wins, with at least one surprise win. On the other hand, we do have the four teams that played the best over the course of the regular season. We’re set up perfectly for things to get truly epic very soon.

In this post, we’ll preview the plot and characters of the first NFL Championship game, the AFC Championship between the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots. This game is in Denver on Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3 p.m. ET on CBS.

What’s the Plot?

This game is being billed as MANNING VS. BRADY XVII because it is the 17th time the quarterbacks of the teams, Peyton Manning for Denver and Tom Brady for New England, have played each other. That’s a big number for any pair of quarterbacks, but for two who have never been in the same division (and would therefore only play once per year in the regular season,) it’s a huge number. That number includes four playoff games, which is not a surprise because Manning and Brady have been among the most successful quarterbacks in the league over the past fifteen years. This is almost definitely their last meeting in the playoffs. Could there be a better way to end the rivalry? With one last game and a Super Bowl trip on the line?

Until two or three years ago, the conventional way of looking at their rivalry was to believe that Manning was the more prolific player but that Brady was more of a winner. Manning set more records but Brady had a psychological je ne sais quoi that helped him win when the stakes were high. Brady has won four Super Bowls in six Super Bowl appearances, Manning only one in three. Another key difference is that Manning was basically his own coach, managing all of the elements of his team’s offense, while Brady was a masterful piece, but still a cog in a system whose mastermind was coach Bill Belichick. For most of the past fifteen years, you could have a legitimate argument about who was better between the two. Now things have changed, and most people look at Brady and Manning quite differently. At age 38, Brady is still going strong. He looks as good as ever. Calm, almost regal while he plays, and pinpoint accurate as a thrower. Manning, on the other hand, is a mess. His throws wobble all over the place, he was benched for a big portion of the season, and he’s had to accept a form of demotion — he now fits into his coach’s idea about how the offense should operate, not the other way around. The key reason for this change? While each quarterback has suffered a major injury during their career (honestly, how could they not after such long NFL careers?) Brady’s was a torn ACL, something which has become relatively routine to return from, while Manning’s was an unusual neck injury which required spinal surgery and has left him with reduced strength in his throwing arm and a loss of feeling in his hand.

Characterizing a football game as a matchup between two great quarterbacks is a convenient thing to do. Quarterbacks are the highest profile characters and often the single most important players on their teams. With this game in mind, I argued earlier this week that this approach to plot is a legitimate one. Manning vs. Brady is definitely an attractive way of thinking about the plot of this game. Even given the physical disparity between the two quarterbacks’ conditions, it still works. Instead of being an anything you can do, I can do better competition, it’s a pair of individual events. Manning has to overcome his own limitations. He’ll be battling time and his own body to see if he can eek one more great (or, frankly, even average) performance out of himself. Brady will be engaged in a prolonged struggle with an equally daunting but external enemy, Denver’s defense, which is thought of as the very best in the league this year. Whichever team can win their own personal battle will probably win the game.

Who are the main characters on the New England Patriots?

Bill Belichick — It all starts with coach Bill Belichick. Now the longest tenured coach in the league by far (Belichick started in New England in 2000, the next two coaches started at their jobs in 2003 and 2006!), depending on who you talk to, Belichick is thought of as either an evil genius or a benevolent one, but either way, he’s given a lot of the credit for the Patriots’ winning ways. He’s not a stereotypical football coach who screams and yells or tries to motivate his players. He doesn’t give memorable half-time speeches. He just tries (with his assistant coaches) to out-think, out-smart, and out-prepare the opposing team. Before every game, Belichick figures out what the other team is good at and what they’re bad at. Then he decides how to attack them where they’re weak and avoid falling prey to what they are good at. It seems simple, but most teams either can’t figure this out or are unable or unwilling to change what they do fast enough to adjust to their opponent.

Rob Gronkowski — Tight end Rob Gronkowski provides an element of meat to balance Brady and Belichick’s cerebral natures. Gronkowski is a 6’6″ 265 lbs football monster. When he goes down the field to catch a pass, he often looks too big, too fast, and too skilled for the other team to have a chance at stopping him. He looks improbable, like the result of a cheat code in a video game. Then a defender hits him and every Patriots fan in the world gasps. Gronkowski’s one weakness is his health. He seems to always either be seriously injured, hobbled, or one hit away from being one of those things. Right now, reports say he’s suffering from knee and back injuries. Only time will tell if that’s true, but if it isn’t, watch out!

Malcolm Brown / Alan Branch — With Manning limited, the Broncos almost definitely need to run the ball effectively to win this game. The Patriots first line of defense against the run are their two big defensive tackles, Malcolm Brown and Alan Branch. Brown and Branch are classic Patriots finds — the 6’6″, 350 lbs Branch is a veteran player who was cut from several teams before ending up on the Patriots, where he has thrived. The smaller Brown, 6’2″, 320 lbs is a rookie who was picked at the end of the first round by the Patriots in this year’s NFL draft. If these two guys can keep from getting pushed backwards by the Broncos offensive line, it will go a long way toward preventing the Broncos from running effectively.

Who are the main characters on the Denver Broncos?

Demaryius Thomas / Emmanuel Sanders – Wide receivers Demaryius Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders have to do a better job of helping Peyton Manning drive the Broncos offense than they did last week. Last week, they combined for 125 yards and only caught nine of the 16 balls thrown their way. These are low totals for a team’s best two receivers. They’re very different from one another – Thomas is a prototypical new-age NFL receiver. He’s big, 6’3″ and 230 lbs. and aims to make big plays way down field. Sanders makes up for what he lacks in size, 5’11”, 180 lbs, with quickness and precise route running. His tendency is to catch many short passes and try to turn them into big gains by running after the catch. If anything, Manning’s lack of arm strength makes Sanders an even more ideal teammate.

Derek Wolfe / Von Miller / DeMarcus Ware – Tom Brady is one of the best quarterbacks every, but like all quarterbacks, if you hit him early and often, he can have a bad game. These are the three defenders who are most likely to knock him down and potentially knock him off his game. Wolfe is a gargantuan defensive lineman, Von Miller is a swashbuckling linebacker, and DeMarcus Ware is a savvy veteran still capable of making explosive plays. Watch for these guys to put a little extra mustard on their quarterback hits today…

Who is going to win?

When Denver lost at home in the playoffs last year, it was a stunning loss. The Broncos hadn’t seemed unbeatable, but they were definitely expected to win. This year, despite having the best record in the AFC, their fans are much more wary. If they have hope that Peyton Manning can pull one last (or second to last) rabbit out of his hat, they’re hiding that hope carefully. The Patriots are favored by three points, according to Vegas, which normally gives the home team a three point advantage over however they think the game would go on a neutral field. That means they think the Patriots are actually six points better than the Broncos. I disagree. I think the teams are much closer than that. The Broncos have more talent in their supporting cast, especially on defense, than the Patriots do. Still, the Patriots have the better quarterback and the better coach, and that’s usually enough to win the game, as it will be in this very close AFC Championship game.

What does third and long mean in football? How does it happen?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m learning a lot! I understand the downs to an extent but my question is, what does it mean when it’s 3rd and long or 3rd and 18? Does it mean that on 3rd down the offense has to cover over 10 yards? Does 3rd and 18 means that they didn’t pick up 8 yards on 2nd down so now the 8 yards are added to the 10 yards on 3rd down?

Thanks,
Susette

Dear Susette,

I’m so happy that you are enjoying and benefitting from our Football 101 email course. Thanks for sending me this question. You’ve definitely picked up the basics about down and distance which is covered in the article that first appeared on this website under the title, “What’s a down in football? I’ve been pretending to know but I don’t!” As a quick review for people who may be seeing this article without having read that one, the football team on offense has four chances to move the ball ten yards. If they can meet that geographic goal, they earn another set of four chances with a new ten yard target. The four chances are called downs, with first down being the first of the four chances, second being the second, and fourth being the last. The number expressed after the down, is the number of yards remaining to meet that original ten yard target. In most cases, as a team works on offense, that number will go down. For instance, a team that runs the ball three yards on first down only needs to move seven more yards to earn themselves another first down with a new target. This would be expressed as 1st and 10 followed by a three yard run followed by 2nd and 7. The scenario which intrigued you is what happens when the distance number goes up instead of down. How did that happen? What does it mean?

When you see a distance number that is greater than 10, the one thing you can be sure of is that something bad happened for the offense. The two categories of bad things that account for this are penalties and negative plays. If you missed the play that caused the offense to be put in its bad situation, you may not be able to tell which of the two categories it was. If you had to guess, one guide would be the number of yards to go. Because penalties are usually assessed in five yard increments, if the distance is a number divisible by five, it was probably due to a penalty.

A negative play is one that resulted in an offensive player being tackled or running out-of-bounds with the ball behind the line of scrimmage where the play started. It seems strange at first to think that an offense would ever put itself in a position to suffer such an outcome, but it’s actually quite common. For example, almost every time a quarterback takes the ball from the center, he either retreats backwards a few yards or is already positioned four or five yards behind the line of scrimmage. This distance gives him a short time (sometimes only a second or two) to survey the field and decide where to throw it. Sometimes, the defense gets to the quarterback before he can decide and tackles him. This is called a sack. The offense would have to start the next play from the location where the quarterback was tackled, behind the original line of scrimmage. If the first play was a 2nd and 10, the next one might be a 3rd and 14 if the quarterback was tackled four yards behind the original line of scrimmage. The same logic holds for plays where a running back or wide receiver is tackled behind where the ball originally started.

A penalty is another explanation for why an offense might move backward. Most offensive penalties make that down not count. Most penalties offensive penalties supersede whatever the result of the play was and force that down to be replayed. This is why you sometimes see a team “decline” a penalty. This is a decision the team that the foul was called in favor of might make if the result of the play was more favorable to them than the penalty would be. A penalty on first and 10 could result in a first and 15, 20, or even 25 depending on the infraction.

While it’s impossible to say exactly what lead to a team having a 3rd and 18, my guess is that it resulted from a 10 yard penalty on a play that was run from 3rd and 8. Eight yards seems like too far to be the result of a common negative play, and a 3rd and 8 is not an uncommon situation. Third and “long” is just an expression. It doesn’t really have an exact meaning, but I would say that anything over seven yards could be considered “long.” Certainly anything over ten yards — which you now know to be the result of a penalty or negative play — would be considered “long.”

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

 

 

It is okay to see football as a battle between two quarterbacks

In the days leading up to a big football game, you will often hear people discussing a game as a matchup between two great quarterbacks. This description has great appeal. Quarterback is the single most important position in football, and quarterbacks are often the most well-known personalities on the team. How well a team fares usually has more to do with how well the team’s quarterback plays than the performance of any other single player. When the dominant narrative of a game is about the two opposing quarterbacks, there is always a backlash against the idea. This counter-narrative, put forth by fans in a knowing voice, reminds us that players of a single position in football, quarterback or otherwise, don’t actually play against each other. Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, two legendary quarterbacks whose teams will play each other in the AFC Championship Game this weekend, won’t even be on the field at the same time, unless it is for the coin flip or an awkward pre- or post-game hug. Fans who argue against the legitimacy of a quarterback vs. quarterback narrative have the full weight of literalness and snark on their side, but they’re missing the point.

Two athletes don’t need to play directly against one another or even perform at the same time to engage in epic competitions. Take the many fantastic duels in Olympic sports like figure skating, gymnastics, or any of the skiing disciplines. The one after another format of all three of these sports only acts to heighten the drama as one athlete tries to best the mark set by a previous competitor. Even in team sports, like basketball and soccer, where two opposing great players are usually on the court or pitch at the same time, they don’t necessarily come up directly against each other. In the past year’s NBA finals, the two best players on each team were LeBron James for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Steph Curry for the Golden State Warriors. James is 6’8″ and over 250 lbs. Curry is 6’3″ and 185 lbs. They barely interact more on a basketball court than players of the same position in football would on a football field, it’s just that football makes this division more explicit.

If we are going to personalize a football game, perhaps it’s more literally correct to talk about the matchup between a great quarterback and a great defensive player. For example, we could talk about the battle of wits and bodies between Peyton Manning and Patriots linebacker Jamie Collins. Or even more directly, between Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski and cornerback Aqib Talib or whoever the Broncos decide to have guard him. Those are all fascinating sub-plots and one-on-one battles, but in the end, they’re not as compelling as Brady vs. Manning. There’s something more compelling about watching two people try to achieve the same thing. It’s why we often find that Presidential primaries are more interesting than general elections. No matter how interesting the candidates are in a general election, over 80% of everyone who watches, roots, and votes will do so based on party. In a primary, everything is up for grabs. That’s how it is in football. It’s fascinating to watch a great offensive player play against a great defensive player, but each of their successes and failures is so contextual. In a battle between two quarterbacks, even though the battle is not literal, the figurative battlefield is much more level. One quarterback may have better receivers or a better offensive line than the other, one quarterback may be up against a tougher defense than the other, but their goals are the same.

Simplifying football to a matchup of two quarterbacks is not a lazy simplification, it’s a convenient way of capturing one of the most exciting aspects of the sport.

2016 NFL Divisional Preview: Pittsburgh at Denver

The Denver Broncos host the Pittsburgh Steelers in the last of the four 2016 National Football League (NFL) Divisional playoff games. This game is on Sunday, January 17, 2016 at 4:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

What’s the Plot?

The worst part of football is how damaging it is to the mind and body of the people who play it. It’s also one of the things that makes football so fascinating. At the team and individual level, football poses questions — how badly do you have to be injured before you stop playing? how effective can you play while injured? how do you replace an injured player? how can you overcome the loss of one, two, five, ten injured players — and demands answers. This game is largely about those questions. Can the Pittsburgh Steelers overcome the loss of their best running back and wide receiver? Can their quarterback play effectively with an injured shoulder? Were the Denver Broncos right to choose to go with their once legendary but now seriously diminished quarterback over the younger healthier choice? The answers to those questions will determine who wins and who loses.

Who are the main characters on the Pittsburgh Steelers?

Ben Roethlisberger – Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is the biggest mystery of this game. He injured his throwing shoulder in last week’s game against the Bengals, left the game, and then heroically returned to help his team to victory. During the week, he claimed that he had torn ligaments and that he was going to play. Roethlisberger is famous both for playing through injuries that would leave most humans curled into a small ball, moaning, AND for exaggerating the extent of his injuries. Are his ligaments really torn or is he playing it up to make him feel tougher for playing? His teammates won’t care as long as he makes it out onto the field and can throw the ball. The first is a certainty, the second a mystery.

Martavis Bryant/Marcus Wheaton/Darrius Heyward-Bey  – The Pittsburgh Steelers started the season with one of the most talented trios of wide receivers in the league. Antonio Brown was the leader of the bunch but he will not be playing today due to a concussion he suffered last week. One of his normal two wingmen, Martavis Bryant or Marcus Wheaton will have to step up to replace him. Bryant and Wheaton are both young receivers whose ceilings seem limitless but neither is as good as Brown. Sliding into the third wide receiver position from the bench will be Darrius Heyward-Bey, whose main claim to fame so far was that the Oakland Raiders selected him way too early in the NFL draft. What these three receivers have is speed. Each of them is freakishly fast, even for football players. There will be two or three times during the game when one of them gets behind his defender. If Roethlisberger has enough arm strength to get them the ball, there could be a long touchdown or three.

Who are the main characters on the Denver Broncos?

Peyton Manning – Quarterback Peyton Manning will be an obvious choice for the NFL Hall of Fame when he retires. He’s the most prolific passer in league history. At 38, after multiple neck surgeries, he’s clearly a diminished player. During the first half of the season, the Broncos were winning despite his poor play. During the second half, they played without him, going with the younger Brock Osweiler. In the final game of the season, Osweiler struggled and Manning was called on to come in and win the game. He did and now the team has chosen to go back to him for the playoffs. Manning, even at 60% of what he used to be, is a very good quarterback. Manning at 40% of what he used to be is a liability to his team. Which Manning will we see?

Derek Wolfe / Von Miller / DeMarcus Ware – These are the three defenders who are most likely to hit Ben Roethlisberger and knock him and his injured shoulder out of the game. Wolfe is a gargantuan defensive lineman, Von Miller is a swashbuckling linebacker, and DeMarcus Ware is a savvy veteran still capable of making explosive plays. Watch for these guys to put a little extra mustard on their quarterback hits today…

Aquib Talib / Chris Harris – The flip-side of the Steelers speedy receivers are the Denver Broncos two cornerbacks. Aquib Talib and Chris Harris are the best pair of pass defenders in the league. Antonio Brown might have been enough to get these guys sweating, but without him in the game, Talib and Harris will probably be able to take two Steelers receivers out of the game and leave their teammates to worry about the rest.

Who is going to win?

The only thing that could keep the Denver Broncos from winning would be a total and complete collapse from quarterback Peyton Manning. With one of the best defenses in the league going up against a reeling Pittsburgh Steelers offense, the Broncos may only need one or two touchdowns from their offense to win. I trust that Manning has enough football wherewithal left in his body to do at least that.

2016 NFL Divisional Preview: Seattle at Carolina

The Carolina Panthers host the Seattle Seahawks in the third of the four 2016 National Football League (NFL) Divisional playoff games. This game is on Sunday, January 17, 2016 at 1 p.m. ET on Fox.

What’s the Plot?

As I’ve been watching football games this weekend, I’ve seen a bunch of commercials for the Batman v. Superman movie. It seems to pit two super heroes against each other. That’s kind of the plot of this game as well. The Seattle Seahawks have made the last two Super Bowls, won one, and came a few seconds away from winning the other. They are physical, intimidating, and resilient. The Panthers are equally worthy of being characterized as a super hero. They almost got through the season undefeated, losing just once, late in the season. Their offense is driven by a quarterback whose trademark celebration has him acting like Superman, and based on the way he plays, it’s not that much of a stretch. Their defense is just about as good as the Seahawks’ ever was, even when they were at their peak two years ago. As a wild card team coming into the playoffs on a hot streak, the Seahawks are the team no one wanted to play. The Panthers are probably the one team that doesn’t care who they play — they think they can beat everyone.

Who are the main characters on the Seattle Seahawks?

Russell Wilson – After three years in the NFL, quarterback Russell Wilson had led his team to the playoffs in all three years and to the Super Bowl twice, winning once. That’s a heck of a record for any quarterback, especially one who was thought to be too small to be successful in the NFL. Despite that amazing start, it wasn’t until this season, his fourth in the league, that you started hearing people talk about Wilson as one of the best quarterbacks in the league. With injuries hampering the team’s running offense, it started to rely more heavily on Wilson and he did not disappoint. It’s largely through his amazing improvisation and accurate passing that the Seahawks are back in the playoffs for the fourth straight year.

Marshawn Lynch – Running back Marshawn Lynch, known as Beast Mode for his brutally physical running style, has missed the last month and a half after having surgery on a sports hernia. A sports hernia is a significant tear in the abdominal wall and muscles and the surgery to repair it is pretty major. After missing the team’s first playoff game last weekend, Lynch plans on being back for this game, but it’s an open question of how close to his normal self he’ll be able to be.

K.J. Wright/Bobby Wagner/Bruce Irving – Over the past few years, the Seahawks have been known for the strength of their defense. More specifically, they’ve been known for their strong secondary (nicknamed the Legion of Boom) and their aggressive pass rushing defensive line. In this game however, because the strengths of their opponent (I wrote this last week about Teddy Bridgewater and the Vikings, but it’s even more true about the Panthers) are a strong running attack and a mobile quarterback, the most important part of the Seahawks defense may be their linebackers. In K.J. Wright, Bobby Wagner, and Bruce Irving, the Seahawks have three strong veteran linebackers. The outcome of this game is most likely to hinge on their success or failure.

Who are the main characters on the Carolina Panthers?

Cam Newton – Quarterback Cam Newton is, and always has been a lightning rod for controversy. In college, he won a national championship with Auburn, and it was an even more open secret than with most high profile college players that he had taken fairly large sums of money under the table for playing there. In the NFL, he’s been the subject of years of criticism for being too self-impressed, too brash, both criticisms that have suspiciously racial overtones. From a strictly football standpoint, he’s been an amazing success. He’s a combination of one of the top ten pure passers in the league with a top ten running back in a single body. Newton ran for over 600 yards and 10 touchdowns this season. This makes him an unusual double-threat for opposing defenses to fret about, especially when the Panthers get close to the goal line.

Josh Norman – If you had surveyed a group of football fans a year ago today about who corner back Josh Norman was, you would probably have gotten a lot of blank stares. Now, after the season he had this year, he’s a household name. Norman is one of the rarest commodities in football, a shutdown corner. He will line up opposite a team’s best wide receiver and basically erase him from the game. Quarterbacks have learned that throwing to a player guarded by Norman is close to a no-win situation and it can be a giant loss if Norman gets his hands on the ball.

Luke Kuechly – Middle linebacker, Luke Kuechly is literally at the center of the Panthers defense and he’s figuratively its heart. He’ll be wearing the green dot on his helmet which signifies that he is the only defensive player who gets the play calls radioed in from the coach and it’s his job to communicate them out to the rest of his teammates. Experiment for a few plays and just watch him — he wears number 59 — and marvel at how quickly he figures out what the offense is going to do and gets himself into a position to help stop them from doing it.

Who is going to win?

Of all the playoff games so far, this is the one I’m having the most difficulty in predicting. Who wins when Batman meets Superman? It’s just hard to imagine either of these teams losing. When in doubt though, I’m always inclined to go with old-age and treachery to win out over youth and vigor. Both of these teams are (obviously) made up of young, vigorous people, but making it to the Super Bowl two times in a row has to count for something. I’m guessing the Seahawks winning muscle memory gets them through this game victoriously.

2016 NFL Divisional Preview: Green Bay at Arizona

The Arizona Cardinals host the Green Bay Packers in the second of the four 2016 National Football League (NFL) Divisional playoff games. This game is on Saturday, January 16, 2016 at 8:15 p.m. ET on NBC.

What’s the Plot?

The Green Bay Packers were generally thought of as the least likely of the four Wild Card teams last weekend to win on the road. They may have been, but they still traveled to Washington and won their game convincingly. The spark from their offense that had been missing for the last three quarters of the season was back. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers looked happy and everything was rosy in Green Bay. Now, less than a week later, they are back on the road facing a rested and daunting Arizona Cardinals team. The Cardinals have been a potentially great team for the past few years but each year their potential is stolen from them by dint of an injury to quarterback Carson Palmer. There are lots of great players on the Cardinals (their depth is impressive) but only one is irreplaceable. This year, Palmer is finally healthy for the playoffs and it will be a thrill to see how far this team can get… as long as he stays healthy.

Who are the main characters on the Green Bay Packers?

Aaron Rodgers – I wrote last week about the mystery of Aaron Rodgers. Generally thought of as the best quarterback alive, he had been having a terrible season. True, he was missing (and will be until next year) his best wide receiver, but that shouldn’t be enough to totally thwart such a great player. Whatever accounted for Rodgers’ malaise, he shook it off and played an amazing game. He’ll need to be even better this week for the Packers to have a shot against the Cardinals.

Mike McCarthy – Mike McCarthy has been the coach of the Green Bay Packers for the last ten years. That’s a long time in football terms and it’s also Aaron Rodgers’ entire career. Despite having won a Super Bowl in 2010 and returned to the playoffs every year since then, McCarthy is not thought of as a great coach. My guess is that this is due to a combination of Rodgers getting the bulk of the credit and McCarthy making too many obvious time-management blunders at the end of games. Last week’s victory over Washington quieted some of McCarthy’s critics.

The offensive line – A few weeks ago, when these two teams played in the regular season, the Cardinals blew the Packers out and a big reason for that was the Packers offensive line. In that game, two of their best linemen were out injured. The team should get at least one and perhaps both of them back for this one and they hope the results will be different. As is often said about quarterbacks, you should be able to get a good sense of how well the game is going to go for the Packers by how many times the line lets Aaron Rodgers get hit. As a reminder, this is the line that made news last year for playing Settlers of Catan.

Who are the main characters on the Arizona Cardinals?

Bruce Arians – Head Coach Bruce Arians is almost always the biggest character in the room. He’s an iconoclast who wears his weirdness literally on his head. He’s famous for wearing kangol hats. When it comes to football, he’s ready to try just about anything that might work but he has some clear preferences. On offense, he wants to throw the ball farther down the field more often than any other coach in the league. This high-risk, high-reward strategy asks a lot of the team’s quarterbacks and offensive linemen, which has been a problem in the last two years.

Carson Palmer – The guy throwing the ball down the field for Arians is Carson Palmer. Palmer has had one of the most long-lasting tragic careers in sports. Early in his career, he was seen as being on track to be one of the truly great quarterbacks of his generation. Then, on the first throw of his first playoff game, he completed a beautiful, long pass to receiver Chris Henry (who has since died, so this is a doubly tragic play in retrospect,) and was hit low by an opposing linemen and tore his ACL. The injury was not a career ending injury (clearly) but it altered his path significantly. He’s now seen as a very good player whose greatness was robbed from him, not once, but several times thanks to other injuries. At 36, this isn’t his last shot to reclaim that greatness, but it may be his best shot. It’s hard not to root for Palmer.

Larry Fitzgerald / John Brown / Michael Floyd / Jaron Brown / J.J. Nelson – This is the best set of five wide receivers that any NFL team has ever had. Other teams (including the Pittsburgh Steelers this year) might have had a better top three, but I don’t think any team was as good and as deep as the Cardinals. Larry Fitzgerald (who remains the best football player I’ve ever seen in person. I had the unfortunate pleasure of watching him go for 207 yards and 2 touchdowns in the first half against Rutgers in 2003.) is the old man of the bunch. A sensational player who has transitioned into being the world’s best possession receiver, capable of picking up 8 yards whenever his team needs him to. The other four are different varieties of deep threat — insanely fast dudes who are good at running past their defenders and catching the ball. If they start getting it going, just watch and marvel at them.

Who is going to win?

I don’t think this game is going to be particularly close. Yahoo’s football blog ran an article about this game headlined, “No on expects another blow out when Packers meet Cardinals.” I do. The Cardinals should be able to start scoring and never look back. The Packers might be able to score some but not nearly enough. Cardinals will win by a bunch.