Category: Football

It's the first college football Saturday. What's worth watching?

A couple days ago, to celebrate and brace myself for the first weekend of the college football season, I wrote a post and created an infographic showing which of the top 25 teams have scheduled legitimate games against teams of relatively even strength. There are sixty college football games on today’s schedule but only two of them show up as “spinach” games according to our logic. So, if you want to see some college football today, I recommend you watch Georgia vs. Clemson or LSU vs. Wisconsin.

 

Dear Sports Fan College Football Cupcakes

When American sports go abroad

Gilas Blatche
From Brooklyn to the Philippines — Andray Blatche

In the spirit of one last Summer vacation before the season is over, I’m excited to bring you two wonderful stories about American sports going abroad. One story explores the recent and rapid adoption of American Football in Poland while the other profiles the National Basketball Team of the Philippines and their newest countryman, Andray Blatche, who was born in New York and has played his whole life in the United States.

“What happened in the championship of the Polish American Football League” sounds like the first line of a pre-political correctness ethnic joke but actually it’s a legitimate question for the tens of thousands of people who follow American Football in Poland. Rick Lyman of the New York Times brings us a gripping story about how Poland has embraced American football. It’s a wonderful window into how another culture views the game of football, free from some of the cultural implications and the pressure of billions of dollars that weigh down the conversation in the United States. Some of my favorite parts were the description of how family oriented the live experience of the games are:

At the game against the Goats, besides a bouncy castle, there was an inflatable sliding board, a giant dinosaur, a Starbucks tent, a bubble tea concession, a very popular burger van, a kielbasa grill, a small beer garden beyond the end zone and a “Zibi & Steczki” (steak and potatoes) stand run by the Harley guys.

“We also encourage picnicking,” Mr. Steszewski said. “Of course, we are not up to the standards of American tailgating.”

and a brief look into the one all-women’s team in the league, the aptly named Warsaw Sirens:

“Our colors are pink and black,” said Kamila Glowacz, 29, the team’s president. “You know, because we’re girls.”

The team got started when some of the women visited America and happened to see a game. “Many men told us we should go to the kitchen, not to the field,” she said. “But women, you know, we do what we want to do.”

It’s a wonderful article and is well worth reading to the final, hysterical line. I’ve definitely taken note of Lyman as a writer to follow and I’d love to watch some Polish football if it were ever on TV.

The second story about what happens when American sports go abroad is about the successful recruitment of American Andray Blatche by the Filipino National Basketball team and the process of introducing him to the team. Written by Rafe Bartholomew for Grantland.com, this article is a fun look into a wacky basketball player in a completely curious situation.

International basketball allows for one naturalized citizen to play for each country’s national team. This often means that American college players who either couldn’t make an NBA team or who have tried and failed in the NBA get recruited to play for another country. Recruitment in sports isn’t unusual, it happens at every level, but it is notable when signing up means not just signing a contract but becoming a citizen of a foreign country. In this case, Andray Blatche had to be the subject of a law that passed through the Philippines congress and signed by their president before he could begin playing with the Filipino team.

Once Bartholomew ably tells the tale of how Blatche was courted and signed, he moves on to the important question of how a talented but unreliable 6’11” NBA American center will fit into a team of undersized relatively lesser skilled Filipinos. The answer seems to be, “Pretty well.” The Filipino coach, team, and fans are refreshingly (for our stats obsessed sports landscape) focused on playing with heart and passion. For whatever else you can say about Blatche, he’s got both of those in droves. I loved the parts of the piece when Bartholomew focused on Blatche’s growing relationship with his Filipino teammates and staff. Here’s one choice bit:

Blatche even seemed to develop a genuine closeness with Gilas ball boy Bong Tulabot — and not just because Bong spent the 15 minutes before every practice massaging weapons-grade menthol liniment into Blatche’s calf muscles. “Where’s my guy?” were often the first words out of Blatche’s mouth when he’d enter the gym, and he’d jockey with Alapag for Bong’s attention. The unlikely bond between Blatche, the 28-year-old, 6-foot-11 NBA center, and Bong, the 48-year-old, 5-foot-6 Filipino team handyman who used to sell rice porridge in the street, was consummated when a morning practice ended with a visiting SBP official placing $200 at half court and inviting everyone in the gym to shoot for it. Blatche launched his half-court attempt, and when the ball rattled through the rim Bong leaped in celebration.

“DAT’S MY MAN! DAT’S MY MAN!” Bong shouted in a peculiar falsetto as he ran in circles around the gym. Blatche melted to the floor in laughter, then got up to meet Bong for a running, jumping chest bump, although their height disparity made the maneuver look more like Bong delivering a flying head butt to Blatche’s waist. Nevertheless, the moment was enough to make “DAT’S MY MAN!” the team catchphrase for the rest of its time in Miami.

So far, so good in Blatche’s time with the Filipino national team. The true test comes over the next week when the Philippines will try to upset the world and qualify for the knock out round of the FIBA Basketball World Cup. We’ll be running an article on how that tournament works later today, so keep your eyes to the grindstone.

When is a football game a cupcake?

The 2014 college football season starts this weekend. College football is a peculiar sport in a few ways. It’s a very short season — most teams play 11 or 12 games. There’s no real pre-season, so teams don’t get that much of a chance to warm up. Any loss during the regular season almost eliminates most teams from championship contention. Add to these three factors, the fact that colleges are able to schedule their own opponents for the first three or four weeks of the year, before conference play begins, and you get a recipe for… a pretty boring first weekend of football.

Why is that? Well, there’s a real incentive for the top teams to win their first several games. There’s a ton of money involved. Top teams are expected to go almost undefeated every year and the financial difference to their university between going into the fifth or sixth game of the season undefeated or with one early loss is immense.  So, many top teams schedule what they think are going to be very easy games for the first few weeks of the season. They actually pay smaller or weaker teams to go on the road and play them in their home stadiums. Last year the biggest single game payment was made by Alabama to Colorado State. Alabama paid $1,500,000 for Colorado State to travel to Tuscaloosa where they lost, as expected but not arranged, 31-6. Losing is not part of the deal, but it’s part of the deal.

This isn’t all bad, it gives small teams a chance to make lots of money and also to play spoiler. Some of them can make a name for themselves by playing better than expected or even upsetting the host team. But it does mean that big established teams play a lot more at home than smaller teams which doesn’t seem fair if you think about the players as people who have families and friends who want to see them in person. It also means that a LOT of the games in the first few weeks are really not worth watching.

Using the preseason Associated Press Preseason Top 25 and Jeff Sagarin’s ranking of all teams, I put together an analysis of the opening weekend games to see which of the top 25 teams had scheduled easy games, moderate games, and which had scheduled games against opponents of relatively even strength to them. The term cupcake is a commonly used term to refer to a game a good team schedules against a weaker team and should win. I rolled with it and invented the terms “dinner roll” to refer to the not-so-unfair games that some teams scheduled and “spinach” to refer to an evenly matched game. From my perspective, it’s these spinach games that we should watch this weekend.

Without further ado, here is the first ever Dear Sports Fan infographic:

Dear Sports Fan College Football Cupcakes

How to Enjoy a Fantasy Football Draft

This post is about fantasy football. If you don’t play fantasy football or don’t understand it, read this post on how fantasy football works.

If you’re new to fantasy football, you may feel unprepared during your fantasy football draft. The people you’re drafting with and against probably seem like they know a lot more than you do. They are familiar with the players names and nick-names; their reputations and their past performances. There’s likely to be some good-natured trash-talking while the draft is going on. People may disparage a choice you or someone else makes or show congratulatory agreement for what they perceive as a good pick. Towards the end of the draft, some people may start congratulating themselves on how great of a team they’ve put together. Put together, this exhibition of knowledge may be intimidating and could even spoil some of the enjoyment of choosing your own fantasy football team. I’m here to tell you it shouldn’t. There are lots of easy ways to make sure you enjoy a fantasy football draft.

The first thing to remember about fantasy sports is that they work as a form of enjoyment only because people cannot predict the future. No one actually knows which football players are going to produce the best stats this year. Lots of people think they know but they’re really only gambling on which players seem the most likely to produce the best stats. You can feel completely confident in your choices, knowing that they can only be proven to be wrong in hind-sight and by the time that hind is in sight, every other fantasy owner in your league will have at least one decision they are kicking themselves for having made. You won’t be alone. Football, of all the sports, is the least predictable and the most subject to chance. With only 16 games in a season, the margin between a great player and a good player can easily come down to luck.

I think fantasy drafts should be collegial and relaxed. I don’t really think that psyching another owner out, even if you could do it, is worth the effort. Not everyone feels the same way though. Every time someone groans or nods knowingly after a pick, think to yourself — this person may be faking this emotion for their own purposes. If they can make you second guess yourself by making fun of your pick in the fourth round, they might be able to get you to pick badly in the seventh round and because of that get to draft their favorite player who you otherwise might have taken. This type of psychological warfare is silly but it happens all the time. My recommendation is to ignore it but if you want to take part in it, steal a page from my childhood chess-teacher: bring a delicious looking sandwich and break it out half-way through the draft. Don’t share it but make sure everyone knows just how delicious and satisfying it is. A hungry mind is a distracted mind.

The other thing you can do to avoid feeling like you’re drafting from a position of weakness is to have a plan. This was one of my key suggestions in a post last year on tips for your first fantasy draft. I even suggested a few simple plans to follow. This year I came across another very simple way to create a plan. The Fantasy Fix offers this three-part flow chart (say that ten times fast) that you can follow. It tells you which position to take in each round given what you choose to do in the first round. For example, if you start out by taking a running back in the first round, you should then take two wide receivers and then either another wide receiver followed by three running backs, a quarterback, and a tight end, or two running backs, a wide receiver, another running back, and then a quarterback and a tight end. I think these are quite reasonable paths to follow and narrowing your choices by position in each round formulaically will lend you a ton of confidence in your choices.

Hope you enjoy your fantasy drafts. Shoot me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com to tell me how they go, what they feel like, and what questions you have.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How Do Defensive Positions Work in Football?

Although most of the glory goes to the offensive players on a football team, who we covered yesterday, I prefer defenders. It probably goes back to when I was a kid and played defense on my soccer team but I think playing defense is harder and more glorious than playing offense. After all, especially in football because of its complexity, the offense has a big advantage. It knows what it’s going to try to do. The defense has to make up for that knowledge gap through savvy anticipation and quick and flexible reactions.

Although there is a lot of variation from team to team, here are the three major groups of defenders:

Starting from the closest to the line of scrimmage where the ball starts each play are the defensive linemen. Defensive linemen vary from huge to gigantic based on their team’s strategy. Their assignment is to prevent the opposing team’s running back from sneaking through their line or, if the attacking team tries to throw the ball, to find a way to hit the quarterback before he can throw the ball.

The next defenders back are called linebackers. Linebackers are usually faster than defensive linemen but still almost as big. They make the majority of the tackles on the field.

Last are the defensive backs. Defensive backs may well be the best athletes on the field. Their job seems almost hopeless. They need to mirror everything the fastest players on the offensive side, the wide receivers, do to prevent them from catching the ball. Defensive backs need to do this without knowing what pattern the wide-receivers are going to run in and do it running backwards. It sounds impossible, and often it is — so defensive backs will team up amongst themselves to cover a single wide receiver or an area of the field. The best among them though, don’t need any help to shut down a wide receiver, and this can be a big strategic advantage for their team because it frees up another defender to do something else.

How Do Offensive Positions Work in Football?

The end of summer means one particular thing to most sports fans in the United States: Football! Football today is the dominant sport in the United States. Even meaningless professional football preseason games are reliably the highest rated television programming of the week. One the season starts in earnest, people will be talking about it left and right. Even if you’re not all that interested in the sport, it’s useful to get to know a little about how it works so that you don’t feel left out in conversation or if you find yourself watching games with friends or family.

Last year I wrote in-depth but high-level descriptions of how each position in football works. Today we’ll run through just the players on the offensive side. (In football these days, almost no player plays offense and defense.)

The quarterback is the leader of the team. He spends the most time with the ball in his hands and is usually seen as the key to winning or losing. His most important characteristics are quick decision making and fearlessness.

The running back comes in many shapes and sizes from agile star to laboring workhorse. He takes the most punishment of any player, and because of this, it’s more common now for teams to rely on several running backs with varying skills than a single transcendent one.

Although you might think that the quarterback is the smartest position on the field, it’s usually the giant offensive linemen that top the IQ chart. The offensive linemen are the construction vehicles of the game, plowing defenders out of the way for running backs and building protective dikes around vulnerable quarterbacks.

In the closely interdependent world of football, the wide receiver is the most dependent position. As the player whose job it is to catch passes, the wide receiver doesn’t have a chance without a good quarterback to throw the ball and a good offensive line to protect them.

The tight end is a hybrid between a wide receiver and an offensive lineman. Bad tight ends are jack of all trades but masters of none. Great tight ends are masters at both disciplines.

That’s a quick rundown of the offensive positions in football. Next time we’ll tackle my favorite side of the game, the defense.

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

Football is Coming

Football is coming. As inevitable as winter in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, college and NFL football is rapidly approaching and when it does, it’s going to wipe every other topic in sports off the landscape. Already it’s beginning to dominate. The first two stories of my favorite show in the genre of sports guys yelling at each other, Pardon the Interruption, were about NFL football. Four of ESPN’s top eleven stories right now are about football. At si.com it’s seven of fifteen. Fantasy football preview magazines fill the newsstands as passionate owners begin their preparation for the upcoming season. If you don’t believe me, there’s even a website, howmanydaystillfootball.com that just lists how many days till football there are. Football is coming.

Football is coming and I have mixed feelings about it. I love football. It’s not a sport I grew up with but it’s become one of my favorite to watch. I once answered a friend who asked, “Why Do People Like Football?” and I listed a bunch of reasons. Among them were the fascinating tactics, the obscure technicalities that are so much fun to argue about, the crazy athleticism of its players, and even the violence. I also listed “fantasy football” and “sitting on the couch” in the list. Here’s what I had to say about them:

  • Fantasy Football — A subset of gambling, fantasy football has taken off in the last five years in a crazy way. Around twenty million people now play fantasy football, there’s a half hour television show on ESPN dedicated to fantasy football owners and our own blog has already had a fantasy football post!

  • Sitting on the Couch — There’s really nothing better than sitting down on the couch on Sunday knowing that you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything for the rest of the day. The mid-afternoon football induced slumber is also a glorious feature of the sport.

It’s these two factors that I feel the most divided about. It’s not that I don’t love playing fantasy. I do. I’m even messing around with my own idea of an innovative new fantasy game, but more on that another time. And you know I like sitting on the couch. I’m doing it right now! It’s just that I don’t love the extent of the power football has over me. I enjoy watching other sports. The recent World Cup was so much fun and it didn’t dominate my life the way the NFL can. I enjoy reading and seeing friends and family outside of the context of sports. I’ve been enjoying listening to non-sports podcasts on my commute, like This American Life, Risk!, and Ask Me Another. I like traveling on weekends without fighting off the urge (or giving in, more likely) to compulsively check my phone. Most of all, I like having my brain free from thinking about how to win at fantasy football so it can think about what moves to make next in my career or how to be a good friend, partner, brother, son, and grandson.

So this year, when football swarms over the landscape like the zombie populated winter storm in Game of Thrones, I’m going to weather it more gracefully than before. Maybe I’ll plan a few weekends of travel now so I lock myself into not watching every weekend. Maybe I’ll do a better job picking and choosing only the games I think are legitimately interesting each week to watch. Maybe I’ll go out more to watch with friends instead of hiding in my living room. Football is coming and I can’t wait, I just want to find a way to savor it without letting it sabotage me.

The "Gang Ties" Dilemma

desean-jackson-93a4893d71e95192
Desean Jackson escapes a tackle.

People often say sports brings people together, which is true in many ways. Bringing people from all walks of life together also often serves to highlight the gaps and misunderstandings that separate them, which can be a good thing as well.

Recently, a professional football team – my Philadelphia Eagles – released a star wide receiver amid rumors that he had “gang ties.” The cause and effect here is unclear: the Eagles have not, and likely will not, say that is why they released him. In fact, they will likely not ever discuss these “gang ties” at all. (Note: “gang ties” will be in quotes throughout this column, because no one anywhere has published anything remotely conclusive tying the player to actual gang activity).

But this happens from time to time in sports because many athletes come from impoverished backgrounds and grew up in circumstances that seem alien to the fans who follow and root for or against them.

It’s much easier for a kid from the suburbs (New Jersey, in my case) to shake a finger at someone for having “gang ties” – I couldn’t have found a gang to join or gang members to hang out with if I’d wanted to (Note: I did not want to and no gang would’ve had me). But too many kids who grew up in Compton, or Chicago, or Camden couldn’t help brushing shoulders with other kids who were in gangs, whether they wanted to or not. Another athlete with a similar background – Richard Sherman of the Seahawks, who has walked into the cultural buzzsaw a couple of times himself – made this point particularly well in a recent column.

I don’t think commentators and fans usually judge a person’s actions without stopping to consider how different their life experiences or circumstances maliciously; they do it because they’re people, and people view the world through the lens of their own experience. I also don’t subscribe to some notion of absolute moral relativism: I love David Simon more than any living artist not named Allen Iverson, but I don’t agree that I’m incapable of judging someone else’s moral choices simply because their life experiences are drastically different than mine.

But incidents like this highlight the sheer hypocrisy in criticizing people for having “gang ties” without stopping for a second to ask why gangs have taken root in so many of our cities – let alone what we would have done growing up in the same situation.

This reminds me of the cultures-colliding aspect of rap music, which for years was derided as not real music, exploitative, violent, and reflective of society’s moral decay – with the critics somehow managing to miss, or ignore, the fact that those lyrics were frequently a reflection of the world that surrounded the rappers. The fact that rap has been around for thirty years and a portion of the population still doesn’t get it suggests that the Desean Jacksons and Richard Shermans of the sports world will continue to make waves simply by putting their life experiences front and center.

Thanks for reading,
Brendan

On Michael Sam's Coming Out: Why we Should Feel Proud, Ashamed, and Old

This past week, a major college football player, projected to be taken in the third or fourth round of this Spring’s NFL draft came out of the closet to the media. His name is Michael Sam. He’s a defensive end and spent the last few years wreaking havoc on offensive linemen in the SEC. The SEC is widely recognized as the best conference in the country and it’s strength is defense. Sam was named as co-Defensive MVP of the league this past year. If drafted, Sam will become the first openly gay player in the NFL.

This story makes me feel proud. It makes me ashamed. And it makes me feel old. I’ll tell you why.

Sam coming out makes me proud in the same way (but to a lesser extent) as the election of Obama. I’m against any exclusion based on an unchosen personal characteristic not germane to the task at hand. If you want to keep the NFL free of people who can’t do more than five push ups, fine. For most people, that’s a choice (I’d rather write than lift weights) and it’s not hard for them to change that choice if they want. But race, homosexuality, gender, hair color (Andy Dalton, trailblazer,) etc. should not be held against someone. I’m proud to have lived through the election of the first black president and hopefully soon, the drafting of the first openly gay football player.

Then again, it’s about time, isn’t it? This is where the shame comes in. As Jason Whitlock pointed out in his fine on Sam, (http://m.espn.go.com/ncf/story?storyId=10437883&src=desktop) sports is really, really behind the curve on this cultural shift. We’ve had gay congress people for years, gay television stars, favorite gay characters (hell, Obama’s favorite character in the Wire is a gay hold-up artist named Omar.) When Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, he was the head of the arrow of integration. Sam is somewhere amidst the fletching. This is not his fault, but everyone involved in sports should feel at least a little shame that this took so long; that major sports are, (at least on this issue,) woefully behind.

From shame I transition seamlessly to old. Look, it’s a shame that still real weight of being the first is going to fall on a yet-to-be-drafted college senior. Really? With close to 3,000 men on and off NFL rosters each year, that group of grown, professional men is going to let a young-adult bear the burden of this? The truth is though, that the generation ten years younger than me has grown up under different circumstances and with different values. They were eight the last time anyone could reasonably think that America was not only a force for good but that everyone in the world felt that way too. They were fifteen when the State of the Union was first given by a black man. They couldn’t care if Michael Sam was straight, gay, identified as queer, identified as a woman, or was asexual.

When new values line up with mine, as they do here, it’s great, but it makes me feel a little old that my generation couldn’t have achieved this. It makes me think of some talking head’s comment on one of President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speeches that focused a lot on education — even in the “Jobs” section of the speech. What he’s saying, this talking head said, is that there won’t be a solution for the current generation of workers; the future will be the future.

Michael Sam is taking the sports world to the future and I’m proud, I’m ashamed, and I’m feeling just a little old.

Of course… that could have been the roughly 16,000 steps I climbed today on a hike from Vernazza to Corniglia. Thanks for reading,
Ezra