Category: Football

NFL Week 10 Good Cop, Bad Cop Precaps

The NFL season has started but how do you know which games to watch and which to skip? Ask our favorite police duo with their good cop, bad cop precaps of all the Week 10 matchups in the National Football League this weekend. To see which games will be televised in your area, check out 506sports.com’s essential NFL maps. If you’re worried about watching too much football or if you’re negotiating for a little break during the weekend, read our weekly feature, Do Not Watch This Game.

Week 10

Sunday, November 9, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Kansas City Chiefs at Buffalo Bills

Good cop: This game is for the real football fans out there! The teams may not be glamorous but they’re both 5-3 and playing great football! I can’t wait to see it!

Bad cop: Not glamorous is an understatement for teams featuring Alex Smith and Kyle Orton as starting quarterbacks. Even the biggest football fans in the world wouldn’t know those guys if they bumped into them in the super market. Unless Orton had his famous neck beard. Neck beard.

Tennessee Titans at Baltimore Ravens

Good cop: The Baltimore Ravens are the best last place team in football! A win this weekend is going to start their run to the playoffs!

Bad cop: The Tennessee Titans are the WORST third place team in the NFL by far. Can you say blowout? 

Dallas Cowboys vs. Jacksonville Jaguars (In London)

Good cop: Will Cowboys Quarterback Tony Romo play with two broken bones in his back?!? What a tough guy! That’s a game I want to watch!

Bad cop: The Jaguars always play with at least two broken elements of their team. The Cowboys could beat them without ever even attempting a pass.

Miami Dolphins at Detroit Lions

Good cop: Without ever making headlines, these two teams are quietly among the best in the league! They have great defenses! Neither team gave up a point last weekend!

Bad cop: Sure… the Dolphins shut out the Chargers and the Lions… had a bye week. Cheap stat.

San Francisco 49ers at New Orleans Saints

Good cop: Whoooo! This is an exciting game! Both teams have underachieved this year and both teams need to win this game! At 4-4, a loss here could end the playoff chances of either team!

Bad cop: You’re overselling that a little. A loss would be disastrous for the 49ers but the Saints are actually in first place of their division at 4-4, that’s how bad their division is. The Saints can afford a loss here.

Pittsburgh Steelers at New York Jets

Good cop: Ben Roethlisberger has thrown twelve touchdowns in the last two weeks!

Bad cop: The New York Jets have eight passing touchdowns this whole year. I keep mistakenly typing their name as the Jest and I think I should stick with it.

Atlanta Falcons at Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Good cop: If 8-8 might win this division, the 1-7 Buccaneers still have life!

Bad cop: Amazingly, that’s what they’re thinking too. As evidenced by them switching back to unsuccessful veteran quarterback Josh McCown.

SUNDAY, November 9, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Denver Broncos at Oakland Raiders

Good cop: These teams hate each other! The Raiders would love to continue the Broncos losing streak!

Bad cop: One loss creates a losing streak? The Broncos lost last weekend and now they’re mad. You think the Raiders are going to even score in this game? Bah.

New York Giants at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: This is an unexpectedly important game for the standings! With the Cardinals running out to a two game lead over the Seahawks and the Eagles and Cowboys ahead of the Giants and looking strong, these two teams need to win to stay in the divisional race!

Bad cop: I have no idea what will happen in this game. But I can’t see it being exciting. These teams induce my afternoon football nap more than any other teams in the league.

St. Louis Rams at Arizona Cardinals

Good cop: The Rams may be a losing football team but they love playing within their division! They are 2-1 against divisional opponents and they just beat the 49ers in a close game! Will they make it two in a row?!!?

Bad cop: Rams are sheep. Sheep need water. Arizona is a desert. No, the Rams won’t win.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears at Green Bay Packers

Good cop: Old time football! Outside! Freezing cold! The forecast says it will be 34 degrees at kickoff!

Bad cop: So it will probably be 65° and sunny. Did you see Patriots quarterback and star curmudgeon, Bill Belichick go off on the weather forecasters this week?

MONDAY, November 10, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Carolina Panthers at Philadelphia Eagles

Good cop: It’s a classic matchup of star quarterback versus offensive system! The Panthers have the quarterback, Cam Newton, but the Eagles have the system! Even with a new quarterback, Mark Sanchez, coming in, my bet is on the system!

Bad cop: You do know that the offenses don’t actually play against each other, right? There are so many other factors that go into winning a football game, something that, dare I mention it, the Panthers haven’t done since October 5.

Checking back in on Michael Sam

It’s halfway through the National Football League schedule, so it’s a good time to check back in on some of the big stories from the start of the NFL season. One of those stories was Michael Sam, who this past spring became the first openly gay male athlete to be drafted by a team in one of the big four professional sports leagues (football, baseball, basketball, hockey) in the United States. Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams but was cut towards the end of the pre-season. Soon after, he was signed by the Dallas Cowboys to be on their practice squad of ten players who help simulate the opponents during practice and who also would be the next men up in the case of injury to someone on the regular season roster. A few weeks ago, the Cowboys dropped him from the practice squad and Sam has not been signed since.

This past spring, when Sam was first drafted, I wrote that he made me feel “Proud, Ashamed, and Old.” When he was drafted, I was willing to believe that he had slid down teams’ draft boards because of his mediocre combine workout numbers and the stature that made him fit neither the linebacker or defensive end position in the pros. When his first team cut him, I pointed out that they had one of the best and deepest rosters at Sam’s position. I thought he would be signed quickly by another team, at least for their practice squad, and that he would break through onto an NFL roster soon. Now, I’m not so sure. It’s hard to imagine Sam playing this year, and if he doesn’t play this year, he could easily be drowned by the next wave of young players from college, and never become what we thought he would be: the first openly gay man in the NFL.

Other people are thinking the same thing. Three authors wrote about Sam recently: Phil Taylor nominated Sam for 2014 Sportsman of the Year in Sports Illustrated, Michelangelo Signorile wrote an essay for the Huffington Post questioning Sam’s treatment, and Cyd Ziegler of Outsports took a strong stance that Sam has been discriminated against.

To start with the positive, here’s Taylor writing about Sam’s admirable conduct and his impact:

Sam could have played it all so differently. He could have tried to tap into our sympathies, presented himself as a victim struggling against the homophobia of the league and of segments of the public. But he repeatedly said he wanted to be considered a football player first, and he backed that up by simply playing football. He never complained about things he had every right to complain about… By choosing not to do anything except play, Sam showed a toughness that can’t be measured by tackles or sacks. He left the social commentary to others, knowing that he would lend power to the LGBT struggle for equality just by putting on his pads.

Here is Signorile leading his readers to the conclusion that something is very fishy about the way Sam has been treated by the NFL:

Again, any of the individual actions can be explained away as a football decision. But when you add it all up and throw in the NFL’s past and current disregard for homophobia (in incidents and hiring), it’s impossible to escape the very real probability that Sam’s being gay was a factor that determined his fate.

Finally, here is Ziegler with hard-hitting facts and a definitive statement about wrongful treatment and discrimination:

To put it another way, of the 73 DPOYs (Defensive Player of the Year — an award which Michael Sam won in what is widely though of as the best defensive conference in the country, the SEC last year) in the big conferences since 2000, 95 percent were selected earlier than Michael Sam; all but two since 2000 (97 percent) – and 100 percent in the last eight years – made an active roster his rookie season … all except for Sam.

Sam is not being considered equally in that way. He is being held to a higher standard. Instead of potential to succeed, Sam must succeed now to make a roster. He must play like an All-Pro simply to crack a 53-man roster; he has to play like a starter just to make a practice squad. As he works out on his own, away from the league’s 32 teams, he’s not given that opportunity to show his stuff on the field. The bar for him has been set that much higher.

There’s still time to write a different ending to Michael Sam’s story. With each week that goes by, it seems more and more likely that for the story to end happily, a general manager of an NFL team is going to have to find one fifteenth the courage that Sam has shown. So far, we haven’t seen it.

What is a trade in fantasy football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a trade in fantasy football? And why do people who play fantasy football get so excited about trading?

Thanks,
Noah

Dear Noah,

We’ve written a few posts on how fantasy football, two of which are good preparatory reading in order to understand trades: How does fantasy football work? and What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football? In those posts, you’ll learn how fantasy football teams are constructed (by selecting real world football players in a fantasy draft) and then evaluated each week (by the statistics that a select group of the starting players on each team accumulate.) After the initial selection of players onto teams, the only way improve your team’s fortunes is through swapping players with the “bank” of players that have not been selected by any team — this is called adding/dropping a player — or by swapping players with another team. This is called trading.

Every fantasy trade is the product of negotiation between players. Two fantasy owners get together in person or over the internet and go back and forth suggesting different ways of swapping players until they both agree. At this point, they can enter the trade into the website used to run the fantasy league. Every fantasy league is a little different, but there is often some kind of review period so that the rest of the fantasy league or the person who runs it can confirm that this was a “good” trade where both people think they’re getting the better deal. It’s important to avoid trades based on collusion (you trade me your good player for my bad one and I’ll buy you a pony) because it subverts the honesty of the competition.

Fantasy football is almost but not quite a closed system. In a true closed system, we’d be able to simply add up all the points from the players involved in a trade at the end of the season and whichever person ended up with the players with more cumulative points would have “won” the trade. In fantasy football though, there are positional requirements that make things more complicated. Each week, a team’s starting lineup has to consist of (for example) one quarterback, two running backs, and three wide receivers. If my team has two good quarterbacks but no good running backs, I will benefit from a trade that moves my good quarterback for your decent running back even if the quarterback will end the season having scored more points than your running back. There are a wide variety of reasons to make trades and looking for a trade partner, assessing their team, deciding which type of trade to approach them with, and then working back and forth with them to make it is great fun. All of this makes trading one of the most enjoyable parts of fantasy football. Here are some of the most common types of trades:

  • One position for another trade — this is the scenario we just talked about. If I’m rich at one position but poor at another, I’ll look for teams in the opposite position and talk to them about making a deal.
  • Two or three for one trade — this is a common trade made between one team at the top of the standings and another team towards the bottom or middle. If one team is so strong that they can give up two or three good players for another team’s great player, both teams can profit. The good team just got better by adding a great player to their roster and the not-so-good team improves in several different spots. The risk for the better team is that they’re putting more of their eggs in one basket and as we all know, an NFL player is an egg basket that frequently gets injured and breaks.
  • Dissatisfied like for like trade — the ultimate grass-is-greener logic. I’m annoyed at the performance of my tight end and you’re annoyed at the performance of yours, so we just swap them. This is relatively rare because in order to do it, both people need to think they’re winning the deal. This type of trade truly is zero sum.
  • Bye week trade — bye weeks (read the post on what a bye week is here) can hit fantasy football teams hard. On some weeks there can be up to six real NFL teams that don’t play. If you see that a team in your league is stuck with a lot of their players not playing that week, you may be able to induce them to trade you some of them for players who actually have games. Using this logic, you might be able to get slightly better players in the deal just because you’re willing to wait a week to use their statistics.
  • Keeper league trade — some fantasy leagues allow fantasy owners to retain players from year to year. By the time the middle of the season comes around, teams at the bottom of the league may be willing to give away good players this year for players that are more attractive candidates for next year. This type of trade may seem like collusion because it is intentionally imbalanced in terms of how good the players are but if you think of fantasy football as a multi-year instead of a single year competition, it makes sense.

Trading in fantasy football is an art and a skill. It involves analysis, negotiation, and risk taking. If you’re in a fantasy league, give it a shot. If you’re just around people who are in the midst of making fantasy trades, ask them what type of trade it was.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden —  international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

Do Not Watch This Game 11.8.14 Weekend Edition

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Thursday, 8:25 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Cleveland Browns at Cincinnati Bengals. It’s on the NFL Network but do not watch this game!

I know what you’re thinking… it’s a little early in the week for this post. You’re right. Whatever level of hunger you have for football, you’re still digesting last week’s games. So, why am I already thinking about Week 10 in the NFL and which game to suggest skipping, if you’re going to skip any of them. Easy – because this week, the clear candidate for skipping is the Thursday night football game between the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals.

Here’s the case against the game. The Cleveland Browns right now are like a stale donut rotating in a display. It looks delicious on the outside, but once you get past that layer of glimmering glaze, it’s stale and crummy on the inside. Mmmm… donuts. The Browns have a good record this year with five wins in their first eight games, but when you look at their schedule, especially recently, they’ve really only played bad teams and even then, they haven’t been impressive. During the last three weeks, they’ve played the three worst teams in the NFL: the Jacksonville Jaguars, Oakland Raiders, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Any decent team should have been able to rattle off three easy wins. The Browns lost to the Jaguars and beat the other two with a distinct lack of aplomb. The two most compelling characters on the Browns are interesting partially because of their absence. Wide receiver Josh Gordon is serving a ten week suspension for his third violation of the NFL’s ban against weed. Rookie quarterback Johhny Manziel is sitting on the bench because literally nothing he’s done so far in the NFL has suggested he should be playing over the hum-drum current starter, Brian Hoyer.

The Browns’ opponent, the Cincinnati Bengals are 5-2-1 (five wins, two losses, and one tie) on the year so far. They’ve made the playoffs four out of the last five years and lost in the first round every single time. That’s impressive – it’s like flipping a coin sixteen times and calling at least ten right four out of five times but then getting the next one wrong ALL FOUR TIMES. Football isn’t exactly like flipping coins, but it would be interesting to know what the likelihood of a coin-flipping team having the record the Bengals have had over the last five seasons [activate math friends!] Honestly, the best reasons to watch this game are that both teams wear orange and black/brown and they’re from Ohio. If you’re not an Ohio native or resident or you don’t have a thing for orange, it’s probably safe to spend your Thursday night doing something else.

If you are an Ohio/Orange lover, here’s an alternative – skip the 4:05 game between the Denver Broncos and the Oakland Raiders. The Broncos are one of the best three teams in the league and they’re pissed after losing to the Patriots last week. They’re not about to allow the winless and hopeless Raiders even an eight of an inch of wiggle room in this game.

What is a bye in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a bye in sports? I’ve heard that word in a bunch of different contexts but I’m not totally sure what it means.

Thanks,
Samuel

 

Dear Samuel,

In sports, a bye refers to a period when a team or player would normally compete but for one reason or another does not have to in this case. In mainstream sports like football, soccer, baseball, or basketball, it has two common uses. The first is a scheduled week off in sports where teams play weekly. The second is in the context of a playoffs or a tournament, when a team or player is rewarded for earlier success by getting a free pass into a later round. We’ll take a quick look at each meaning in this post and then spend a moment on the word’s history and derivation.

In leagues where teams play weekly, like professional and college football in the United States and soccer in most European leagues, teams sometimes have a week off. In the NFL, each team has one week off during a seventeen week schedule during which they play sixteen games. This is a great thing for players and coaches to rest up in the midst of a very physically and mentally challenging season. An unintended but intriguing consequence of this is that it wreaks havoc of fantasy football owners whose start/sit decisions are made a thousand times harder on weeks when important members of their team aren’t playing. When organized this way, a bye week is an equitable way of rewarding all teams with the same amount of rest.

In tournaments and playoffs, a bye week rewards a team or player by guaranteeing entry to a future round of play. Let’s take a single elimination tournament, like the NFL playoffs or a tennis tournament. If you wanted to design a tournament or playoff without byes, you would start at the finals (two teams) and go back: semifinals (four teams,) quarterfinals (eight teams,) the round before that (sixteen teams), and again (thirty-two,) once more (sixty-four.) Choose a number from those and you can have everyone play the same number of rounds. If, instead of four teams, you want to start with six, one easy way of handling it is to have two games (four teams) while two teams wait to play the winners of those games in the next round. This gives you two rounds of four teams each, followed by a final with two teams. It’s not “fair” because it gives a significant advantage to the teams who don’t have to play in the first round, so instead of selecting these teams or players at random, the reward of the bye goes to teams or players who have performed better in previous tournaments or in a regular season. Using byes in this way is one strategy the organizers of a sport have for balancing the excitement of an inclusive tournament with the goal of getting the two best teams or players into the finals so they can play each other.

The word “by” has lots of meanings in English but the one that I think most clearly represents its current use in a sports context is as an adverb, meaning “so as to go past” as in, “the reindeer ran by the puzzled pig.” This fits the use of the word in sports fairly well, even if the word has shifted from being used as an adverb to a noun: “The Dolphins have their bye week this week” or “Serena Williams has a first round bye in an upcoming tournament.” Another possibility, called out in this Yahoo answers post, is that the word is used because it means “something secondary.” This is supported by a great discussion of byes on Stackexchange’s English language site, where a person named Hugo points out that the first use of byes (and how they still work in some throw-back competitions like dog racing) were an attempt to make competition more fair, not less. When a dog (or human athlete) could not compete in a tournament, their opponent would have to complete a bye or a secondary form of the game. Advancement to the next round of the playoffs was guaranteed but, in order to keep things fair, the athlete would have to tire themselves out as much as they would have if they had had to play. In the case of dog racing, the dog would have to run the course anyway. In human sports, I’m guessing a substitute was brought in to compete just as a workout partner.

Hope this shed some light on what byes are,
Ezra Fischer

Week 9 NFL One Liners

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

 

Week 9

Sunday, November 2, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Tampa Bay Buccaneers 17, at Cleveland Browns 22

The Cleveland Browns’ romp through the three weakest teams in the NFL continued today with a win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They’re now 5-3 but one senses that reality might treat the Browns harshly once they start playing better teams.
Line: The Browns cut through opponents like a knife through butter but… so far all their opponents have basically been butter.

Jacksonville Jaguars 23, at Cincinnati Bengals 33

Talking about weak opponents, that’s written on the back of every Jaguars business card. The Jaguars may be the best of the worst teams but they still fell to the Bengals.
Line: Another week, another Jaguars loss. Maybe they would do better if they had a different governor?

Arizona Cardinals 28, at Dallas Cowboys 17

This matchup of highly ranked teams was marred by the absence of Cowboys starting quarterback Tony Romo who missed the game because of two broken bones in his back.
Line: Without Romo, the Cowboys never seemed to have a chance against the Cardinals.

Philadelphia Eagles 31, at Houston Texans 21

The Eagles lost their starting quarterback, Nick Foles in this game. The Texans lost their starting running back, Arian Foster. Despite quarterbacks being generally though of as less replaceable than running backs, the Eagles didn’t miss a beat while the Texans faltered.
Line: The Eagles barely seemed to miss Foles when he got injured.

New York Jets 10, at Kansas City Chiefs 24

Kansas City needed some good news after suffering a game seven World Series loss and an early elimination from the Major League Soccer playoffs during the past week. They got it with the arrival of the woeful New York Jets.
Line: I expect Rex Ryan to get fired this week. 

San Diego Chargers 0, at Miami Dolphins 27

I have no idea what happened in this game. I’m not sure anyone has any idea what happened in this game.
Line: I have no idea what happened in this game.

Washington Redskins 26, at Minnesota Vikings 29

This game was overshadowed by two artifacts of protest against the use of a racial slur as the name of an NFL team. 1. When the team bus was involved in a traffic accident, the NFL’s official twitter account posted a photo but referred to the team only as “Washington,” noticeably not using the team’s name.  2. Thousands of Minnesotans gathered before the game to protest the name.
Line: Washington lost, but the bigger story might be them losing their name soon enough.

SUNDAY, November 2, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

St. Louis Rams 13, at San Francisco 49ers 10

All year, the 49ers have seemed like a powder-keg of resentment towards their coach and worse than expected performance. The Rams might have just lit a match and thrown it.
Line: Watch out for the “49ers are exploding” stories this week.

Oakland Raiders 24, at Seattle Seahawks 30

Not a bad showing from the Raiders on the road in Seattle. The Raiders specialize in moral victories.
Line: Remember when the Raiders we’re good? Oh, you weren’t born then? Neither was I.

Denver Broncos 21, at New England Patriots 43

Like an anticipated heavyweight boxing match that ends with a first round knockout, leaving viewers feel like they were robbed of some enjoyment, this game was over before it really got started.
Line: The Patriots hit the Broncos before they could get started.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Baltimore Ravens 23, at Pittsburgh Steelers 43

The new-age Ravens and Steelers may not be the defensive behemoths of old, but, even as they are scoring lots of points, they seem to hit each other harder than any team hits another team.
Line: The Ravens vs. Steelers rivalry still brings out the most violent aspects of football, it’s just that they score now too.

NFL Week 9 Good Cop, Bad Cop Precaps

The NFL season has started but how do you know which games to watch and which to skip? Ask our favorite police duo with their good cop, bad cop precaps of all the Week 9 matchups in the National Football League this weekend. To see which games will be televised in your area, check out 506sports.com’s essential NFL maps. If you’re worried about watching too much football or if you’re negotiating for a little break during the weekend, read our weekly feature, Do Not Watch This Game.

Week 9

Sunday, November 2, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Cleveland Browns

Good cop: I want to see if the Cleveland Browns can keep their winning season going! They’re like the Kansas City Royals of the NFL!

Bad cop: Including this week, over the last three weeks, the Browns will have played two 1-6 teams and one 0-7 team. Yeah, I think they’ll win but that isn’t saying much.

Jacksonville Jaguars at Cincinnati Bengals

Good cop: Cats!

Bad cop: Dogs.

Arizona Cardinals at Dallas Cowboys

Good cop: These teams have been the most pleasant surprises of the year! They’re both at the top of their divisions and looking good!

Bad cop: You see pleasant surprise, I see two teams about to be exposed as being only okay at football. 

Philadelphia Eagles at Houston Texans

Good cop: This game features two of the most dynamic running games in the league!

Bad cop: Dynamic running games? What is this? 1934?

New York Jets at Kansas City Chiefs

Good cop: This game features a wonderful contrast in quarterbacks! Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith is consistent, plays everything safe, and is extremely accurate! New York Jets quarterback Michael Vick is dynamic, explosive, and crafty!

Bad cop: What? Vick is playing? Isn’t he 48 years old? Man, the Jets are having a terrible season.

San Diego Chargers at Miami Dolphins

Good cop: Powder blue versus teal! I love the teams as much as I love the colors!

Bad cop: Doesn’t it feel like these two teams have played three out of the last four weeks? It’s such an ordinary game, it feels like there are three or four of these every weekend.

Washington Redskins at Minnesota Vikings

Good cop: This is basically a single elimination game! At 3-5, both teams need a win!

Bad cop: And neither team deserves a win.

SUNDAY, November 2, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

St. Louis Rams at San Francisco 49ers

Good cop: True to form, the Rams are 2-5 overall but 1-1 in their division! No matter how bad the Rams are and how good the teams in their division are, they always play them tough!

Bad cop: Maybe. The 49ers beat the Rams 31-17 in St. Louis just three weeks ago though. What makes you think this game will be any closer in San Francisco?

Oakland Raiders at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: Oh, my! The Seahawks might set a scoring record in this game!

Bad cop: You mean because the Raiders are so horrible? Don’t get too excited, the Seahawks aren’t that good either this year.

Denver Broncos at New England Patriots

Good cop: THIS IS THE BIG ONE! TOM BRADY VS. PEYTON MANNING FOR THE SIXTEENTH TIME! DENVER IS NUMBER 1 THIS YER IN POINTS SCORED PER GAME, NEW ENGLAND IS NUMBER THREE! I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS GAME! 

Bad cop: You know what they say… when you get excited, you make an ass of yourself.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Baltimore Ravens at Pittsburgh Steelers

Good cop: What nice balance between the big afternoon game and this one! As many points as will be scored in Patriots vs. Broncos, that’s how many bone-jarring hits there will be in this one! The Steelers and Ravens play OLD-FASHIONED FOOTBALL!

Bad cop: Oops, I think Good Cop fell into a time-machine. Last week, Steelers Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger threw six touchdown passes. Back in Week Six, Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco passed for five touchdown in twelve minutes. These are not your grandmother’s Ravens and Steelers. This game is just a cut-rate version of the Broncos v. Patriots game.

MONDAY, November 3, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Indianapolis Colts at New York Giants

Good cop: What a great way to end the football week! Two classic franchises with good teams going head to head on Monday Night! I love it when football weekends end like this!

Bad cop: You do know that the last game every week is the Monday night game, right? And that Monday isn’t really in the weekend? And that the Colts are going to gobble the Giants up as effortlessly as hundreds of thousands of kids are going to gobble up trillions of pieces of candy tonight?

What is a kicker in football?

Kickers are the resident aliens of a football team — and when I say alien, I don’t mean an immigrant in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen, I mean a green, bug-eyed Martian living amongst us Earthlings. Kickers play a very important role on every football team but that doesn’t mean they fit in.

Football teams have a lot of players on them. NFL teams can carry 53 players for a game and college teams can have 85 players! Only 11 players can be on the field at one time, so the large rosters leave room to have a lot of specialists. Offensive players don’t play on defense. Defensive players only play on offense every once in a while. There are players who specialize in playing in certain situations, like when a team is on defense and knows it’s opponent is going to throw the ball. Then there are the most specialized of all players, the kickers. Kickers are a group apart. They don’t engage in any of the activities that are seen as truly core to football. They don’t hit or get hit, they don’t throw, they don’t catch, they don’t block. They don’t usually look like football players. They’re not bulked-up behemoths, they don’t wear scary looking shields on their face-masks. More frequently than other positions, they don’t share a common background with other football players. They didn’t grow up playing Pee Wee Football, being the best athlete in their schools. They grew up playing soccer or rugby and then switched over later in life. Sometimes they didn’t even grow up in the United States.

What kickers do is kick the football. You might say they put the “foot” in “football” but then you’d be ignoring all the incredible footwork that offensive linemen do in unison to block defenders, that quarterbacks to do slide away from threats in the pocket, that running backs do to juke people out of their shoes, and that cornerbacks do running backwards at full speed. You’d certainly be forgetting about the amazing balletic footwork of wide receivers to make a catch while falling out of bounds. There are two types of kickers on a football team. Here’s who they are and what they do.

What is a kicker in football?

I know what you’re probably thinking. How can we have a subset of an article called “What is a kicker in football?” called “What is a kicker in football?” I agree, it’s strange. but here’s the thing: one of the two kicking positions on a football team is called “kicker.” The kicker is the one who kicks field goals and extra points. A field goal is the one long-distance way to score points in football. At any point in the game, a team can decide to attempt a field goal. When this happens, the kicker runs on the field, accompanied by his key accomplices, the long-snapper and a holder. The long-snapper snaps the football seven yards back where the holder catches it, places it on the ground vertically, and then the kicker kicks it. If the kick goes through the goal-posts and above the upright (football goal posts are shaped like a U sitting on top of an I. A successful field goal has to fly within the U part of the goal.) If the field goal is good, the team gets three points. An extra point is just a specialized field goal that happens after a touchdown. It’s from very close to the goal-line and it’s worth one point. Good kickers almost never miss extra points. As for field goals, a good NFL kicker should always make a field goal from less than 40 yards. 40 to 50 yard field goals are difficult but are usually made. Over 50 yards is a real crap-shoot.

Three points is a significant number and many, many games are decided by a field goal. The difference between a good kicker and a great kicker may be how calmly he can perform under pressure. Close games often end with a long-distance field goal attempt. Kickers who make these are heroes… until the next time, at least.

What is a punter in football?

The punter doesn’t get the glory (or the blame) that a kicker gets but the position is at least as important. Football is said to be a game of field position. This means that if a team can control where it and its opponent starts each possession with the ball and manipulate it so that their opponent has to consistently travel farther than them to score a touchdown, they have a good shot at winning. The punter is the key player in this stratagem. When a team is going to give the ball up to the other team, instead of giving the ball to them wherever it starts the play, they can punt the ball down the field and give it to their opponent there. I recently wrote a whole post about how punts work in football and why are punts exciting? I love the punt, so I recommend reading those posts.

What is a kickoff specialist?

The only other time a football gets kicked during the game (on purpose, at least,) is at the start of each half and following any score, when one team kicks the ball to the other. Even with 53 people on a team, most NFL teams don’t employ a separate kicker just to kick kickoffs. It’s a relative luxury that in 2014 only the Buffalo Bills gave themselves. On most teams, the kicker kicks the kickoffs but there are a few punters who do it too.

Do Not Watch This Game 11.1.14 Weekend Edition

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Sunday, 1 p.m. ET, NFL Football, All the Games but mostly San Diego Chargers at Miami Dolphins and Arizona Cardinals at Dallas Cowboys. They’re on CBS and Fox but do not watch these games!

Most weeks I make an argument that a specific game on the NFL calendar is a clear cut choice for skipping if you’re going to skip a game. I try to make the game I choose one of the prime-time games so that you have a chance to skip an entire time-slot as opposed to skipping one game just to watch another. If I dip into the 1:00 or 4:30 Sunday time-slots, I do it with a game that most of the country is going to get. This weekend is a little different. This weekend, there’s a game on the calendar that’s so good, I’m suggesting that the ideal way to watch football this weekend is to skip the entire 1:00 Sunday afternoon slate. That’s seven games to skip but the majority of the country will only be getting two, the San Diego Chargers at the Miami Dolphins and the Arizona Cardinals at the Dallas Cowboys. The reason to skip these games is to rest up, relax your mind, and prime yourself for the game the entire country, excluding Arizona, the Pacific Northwest, and Northern California will get at 4:25, the titanic matchup between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos; Tom Brady and Bill Bellichick on one side, Peyton Manning and Peyton Manning on the other.

It’s a tough suggestion to make. Both the 1:00 games look to be good ones. The Chargers and Dolphins find themselves in similar positions at this point in the season. They both have winning records but are looking up, way up, in the standings at the Broncos and Patriots respectively. They’re good teams but they’re likely to be fighting to make the playoffs this year as wildcard teams, not division winners, which means they’re actually direct rivals for a playoff spot. Head-to-head results are one of the top tie-breaking factors, so this game could become very important by the end of the year. The Cardinals and Cowboys are also similarly situated. They’re both at the top of their divisions but are looking over their shoulders at high-powered teams in their division. The Eagles are lurking right behind the Cowboys and the 49ers and Seahawks are chomping on the Cardinals’ tail. Neither is secure in their positions.

All that said, if you want to experience the 16th matchup between Tom Brady and Peyton Manning in all its nostalgic glory and its very current drama, you might want to come into that game fresh and ready to focus. If that means blowing off a couple of good but not great games before-hand, that might just be the thing to do. Take a longer brunch than you might otherwise do. Mow the lawn. Get to the bar early to claim a stool for the 4:25 game. Stay home and cook a New England Dinner AND some green chili enchiladas so you don’t run out of victuals during what might be, not a good, but a great game!

Alternate: If you or the sports fan in your life is a fan of one of the teams that plays at one, then this isn’t a good plan. Instead, skip the ESPN Monday Night game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New York Giants because Andrew Luck going against Eli Manning is going to feel like the under-card of the Manning-Brady fight.