Omaha is the largest city in Nebraska. It’s also become the focus of an incredible amount of attention leading up to the Super Bowl. Why? Because Peyton Manning, quarterback of the Broncos, screams “OMAHA” at least a dozen times a game. It’s become his signature phrase and a trending topic culturally.
Manning uses the word as part of his snap count. In our post a few months back to answer the questions “What is a Snap in Football?” we wrote this about the snap count itself:
The phrase “snap count” is pretty common but has two only tangentially related meanings. One meaning refers to any vocal cue that a quarterback gives to his own team to synchronize their movement with the snapping of the football. Because only one player on the offensive side is allowed to move at a time before the snap, a good snap count provides the offense with an advantage over the defense; it knows when to start moving and can get a head-start on the defensive players. Once in a while defensive players will mimic a quarterback’s snap count in an effort to get the offense to move at the wrong time. This is illegal and a defensive team may be penalized for “simulating the snap count.” Another meaning of the phrase snap count is the number of plays a player is a part of, usually in a single game. In this use, the snap is representative of a play and the count is just the act of counting the number of plays or snaps someone is a part of.
In Manning’s case, we’re concerned with the first meaning — the vocal cue. Manning uses the word “Omaha” as a vocal cue to his team and its meaning is unknown to everyone but them. Deadspin and the Boston Globe wrote articles recently which tried to decipher the meaning of “Omaha.” Neither got very far. The Globe story contained a retelling of Manning having a little fun with reporters at a recent press conference:
Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning went to the podium Wednesday in Englewood, Colo., and humorously explained that “Omaha” is a running play.
“But it could be a pass play,” he said, “or a play-action pass, depending on a couple of things. The wind. Which way we’re going. The quarter. And the jerseys we’re wearing. So it really varies play to play.”
The truth is, no one except for Manning and his teammates are ever likely to know how they’re using the word “Omaha” but that hasn’t stopped the rest of us from having a ton of fun with it.
The Denver Airport creatively edited their departure board in the spirit of “OMAHA!”
The Omaha chamber of commerce found a way to do good while having fun:
Omaha Chamber Of Commerce pledges $1,500 to Peyton Manning’s charity for each time QB yells “Omaha” during Super Bowl. (via @darrenrovell)
A roadtrippers group created a sincere guide to the city including places to eat, drink, and visit.
And of course, an enormous number of people are betting on how many times Manning will say “Omaha” in the Super Bowl itself. According to this Fox Sports post, the over/under on how many times Peyton Manning says “Omaha” has been set at 27.5 and is the second most popular prop bet behind the length of the national anthem. For what it’s worth, I would take the under — what if he does switch to “Cedar Rapids?” If you need a refresher course on Super Bowl betting, check out our guide from last year.
That’s it for the Omaha edition of our Super Bowl preview. If you missed the British edition, you can find it here. Thanks for reading!
Why this computer generated image of what looks like the Manhattan Bridge has a football field super-imposed onto it, I have no idea. And I’m not even British!
In the midst of all of Dear Sports Fan’s Winter Olympics previews we’ve neglected to cover the big football game coming up this Sunday, the Super Bowl! Luckily, the game between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks has received a lot of coverage from other sources. Some of the coverage has been focused on explaining football to the layperson! And for some reason a lot of it has been focused on British people — maybe because they are a group of people who can safely be assumed to be free of knowledge about football without insult. Here’s a few of the most humorous or most helpful highlights.
From Buzzfeed, found on Deadspin, a group of British people making vague guesses and comments about the nature of the Super Bowl and football in general. My favorite is the description of football as being “like the Matrix but in padding.”
There’s also a wonderful and totally fake (and even more hilarious for being so) impression of what a football game would sound like if announced by a British person who has no idea what’s going on. My favorite line in this one is the droll description of a kick return: “A lucky fullback catches it, runs a bit, gets tired, fallls over.”
This video is written from the perspective of an American American Football fan who tries to explain football to “Liberals, Ladies, and Limeys.” “Limeys” is of course a slang term for Brits which derives (apocryphally?) from the British Navy’s practice of adding lime juice to sailor’s ration of rum to prevent scurvy. The tone of this video is a little obnoxious (we on this site don’t think ladies, liberals, or the British are necessarily ignorant about football) but it’s extremely well animated and manages to cover a lot in just a couple minutes. It’s a fine companion piece to our posts about football, most of which you can find here, including positional descriptions and answers to questions like Why Do People Like Football, How do I Begin to Enjoy Football, How Does Scoring Work in Football, and What’s a Down in Football.
Finally, for the design lovers or soccer people out there, there’s this brilliant website, Football as Football, which re-imagines NFL football teams’ logos as European soccer logos. Each team has a logo in the style of a Spanish, English, German, or Italian football club. If the Super Bowl were being played between the German soccer version of the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks, this is what it would look like:
The play was fast and furious during Puppy Bowl XII
The NFL playoffs begin this weekend. That means four games for the next two weekends, followed by two games the weekend after that, followed by a two week media barrage of pre-Super Bowl stories, followed the Super Bowl itself. This might not sound like a great upcoming schedule for non-sports fans but there are some benefits. Deadspin.com highlighted one of them today with their coverage of a new feature that Animal Planet is adding to their 10th annual Puppy Bowl.
That’s right — it’s the Fantasy Puppy League! As we explained a few months ago, fantasy football is role playing game that millions of people play based on the statistics produced by real-life football games. There aren’t many details about this variant but I can only assume that Animal Planet will generate some kind of arbitrary stats based on the somewhat aimless activity of puppies (according to Wikipedia, in “Puppy Bowl VI, substitutions were made whenever a puppy fell asleep on the field.”)
If you are interested in learning more about the Puppy Bowl, its Wikipedia entry is a wonderful read. It contains the befuddling but compelling line, “The hamsters in the blimp and Meep the “tweeting” cockatiel were retained for the 2013 show, but the piglet cheerleaders were replaced by baby hedgehogs in tutus.”
Why are college football bowl games called bowl games? Is it because of the Super Bowl?
Thanks, Bill
— — —
Dear Bill,
College bowl games actually pre-date the Super Bowl by many years so if one was named after the other, it was the Super Bowl that was named after college football bowl games. Why college bowl games are named bowl games is another question entirely. The simple answer is that they are called bowl games because they are the biggest and most festive football games of the year, and as such are played in the biggest and most festive stadiums — which have historically almost all been shaped like bowls.
According to Wikipedia, the “history of the bowl game” began in 1902 when the “Tournament of Roses Association” sponsored a football game on New Year’s Day that was supposed to match the best college football team from the Eastern half of the country against the best in the West. As would become a tradition for this type of game, it didn’t quite match expectations. The game was a joke with Michigan beating Stanford 49-0 before Stanford quit with eight minutes left! Its lack of competitiveness left an impression on the organizers though and “for the next 13 years, the Tournament of Roses officials ran chariot races, ostrich races, and other various events instead of football.” They brought back football in 1916 and by 1921 it was so popular that a new stadium was commissioned that could hold the 40,000 plus spectators. Architect Myron Hunt copied his design from that of the Yale football stadium called the Yale Bowl because of its distinctive smooth, continuous, bowl-like shape. (A quick aside — the word bowl goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European when it meant “rounded or swollen.”) The stadium was complete by 1923 and the Tournament of the Roses game that year between Penn State and USC was the first to be called the Rose Bowl.
The Rose Bowl stood alone for many years until the mid-thirties when four southern cities decided to emulate the successful tourist attraction by creating their own bowl games. The Sugar, Cotton, Orange, and Sun bowls sprouted between 1935 and 1937. This number has continued to grow throughout the years with a total of eight in 1950, 11 in 1970, 15 in 1980, 19 in 1990, 25 in 2000, and 35 today. The increasing number has created a dispersal of the interest and reverence felt for the original bowl games. It’s just not that big of a deal when 70 of the 120 college football teams play in a bowl game. Even the names of the bowl games feel less important now than they used to. It’s hard to blame the organizers of these games for selling the naming rights to them but one wishes the sponsors would be a little less parochial: San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia bowl, Franklin American Mortgage Music City bowl, BBVA Compass bowl. It’s little wonder that the clever website sellingout.com recommends selling the phrase “bowl game” short in the imaginary stock market of words.
Using the word “bowl” to describe a sporting event has spread far and wide. As you noted in your question, the championship game of the NFL is called the Super Bowl. Other professional American Football leagues have used the moniker. The European Football League calls their championship game the Eurobowl. There is a Mermaid Bowl in Denmark and a Maple Bowl in Finland. In Canada there is the Banjo Bowl which is not a championship game but instead is used to label a rivalry game between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Other rivalry games, even American college football games, have bowl names, like the Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama or the amusingly named Egg Bowl between Mississippi State and Ole Miss. Sometimes the word bowl will be used to retroactively refer to a notable game like the Ice Bowl played in Green Bay, Wisconsin at -15 degrees Fahrenheit.
A historical theme that I find interesting is the transition from having the word “bowl” convey a sense of exhibition (and therefore inconclusiveness if not unimportance in terms of league standings) to almost the exact opposite meaning where “bowl” conveys that a game is of the utmost importance to standings. In todayifoundout.com’s post, Why Championship Football Games are Called Bowls, Daven Hiskey writes that the NFL first stole the word “bowl” for its end-of-year all-star exhibition game, the Pro Bowl. This suggests the earlier, tourist attraction, exhibition meaning. Years later, after the NFL had merged with the AFL, and now had a championship game to name, the league chose to copy Major League Baseball and name it the “World Championship Game.” Nonetheless, the phrase Super Bowl soon overtook World Championship, and by the second or third year of the league, was the de facto name for the final game, and soon after became official.
That’s probably more than you reckoned for about bowls! Thanks for the question, Ezra Fischer
I know, I know, Virginia is for lovers is the line, but three articles popped out at me recently that made me think that really Sports is for lovers too! One is the story behind sports blog Deadspin’s “Favorite Sports Photo of 2013.” The other one, found by another sports blog, The Big Lead, is an obscure scientific study investigating the legend (or reality) of a baby boom in Barcelona exactly nine months after a dramatic soccer victory. The last is a bonus collection of great hockey hugs!
This photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice went viral.
The legend of baby booms nine months after events is common story. The study made reference to the 1965 blackout in New York but I can remember other stories following events like the olympics, big blizzards, and even the election of Barack Obama (although that one, at least, seems to not have been true.) The event these scientists studied was the goal Andres Iniesta scored in dramatic fashion to send Barcelona to the Champions League final. The Champions League is a tournament where the best teams from each of the national leagues in Europe play each other for continental bragging rights. Their conclusion?
We may infer that—at least among the target population—the heightened euphoria following a victory can cultivate hedonic sensations that result in intimate celebrations, of which unplanned births may be a consequence.
That’s some great writing, guys! I love scientific studies of lay subjects!
Might lay also have been the operational word in the story behind the wonderful story of two San Francisco 49ers fans kissing to celebrate their team’s victory in last year’s NFL playoff semifinals? A gentleman never tells — and in this case, both of the people captured in the photo were gentlemen! Photographer Deanne Fitzmauricewrites that the wonderful response the photo received in the days after she took it, “made [her] realize we have gained some ground in terms of acceptance and broader thinking.”
When was the last time you were so happy?
To put the cherry on top of our sports-love-fest, enjoy Yahoo’s hockey blog, Puck Daddy’s “Top 10 Hockey Hugs of 2013.” It’s just great! My favorite is this one between Hurricanes Jeff Skinner and Jay Harrison but there are nine more good ones to check out. Enjoy!
What does it mean to be “mathematically eliminated” from something?
Thanks,
Will
There’s nothing worse as a fan than having your team mathematically elminated
— — —
Dear Will,
“Mathematically eliminated” is one of those phrases that you hear often in sports but not in too many other contexts. A team or player that is mathematically eliminated cannot win or qualify for something in any of the possible permutations of future outcomes. This can happen within a game, within a season, or within a tournament or playoffs. You’re probably hearing it a lot now because the NFL season is in its 16th of 17 weeks and teams are being mathematically eliminated left and right. Let’s explore some of the common forms of mathematical elimination.
Mathematically eliminated from qualifying for the playoffs
A team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs when no possible permutation of wins and losses in all the remaining games in a season result in them qualifying for the playoffs. This is a surprisingly high bar. For instance, with only two games remaining, the 6-8 Pittsburgh Steelers are still alive for a playoff spot according to CBS. What would have to happen for them to qualify? According to the Altoona Mirror, the Steelers need “about 10 things to happen” and the chances of them all happening are around 100 to 10. They detail all of the necessary dominoes here. Stranger things have happened, for sure, but it certainly stretches the imagination to think that all ten of the items are going to happen just the way the Steelers need them to to make the playoffs. One could say they have been plausibly eliminated but as long as there is a single path for them to make the playoffs, the team and their fans will keep hoping.
Other forms of mathematical elimination — shootout edition
Although the phrase “mathematically eliminated” is almost only ever used about the playoffs, as explained above, there are other types of mathematical elimination in sports. A shootout is one example. In many hockey and soccer leagues, if a game is tied the teams play timed overtime periods. If it is still tied after that, the game is decided by a series of one-on-one contests between a player and a goalie. This is called a shootout. The shootout is arranged like you or I would play odds-and-evens or rock-paper-scissors. In the NHL it is a best of three, in Major League Soccer and international soccer, it is a best of five. Both of these contests work in frames — first one team goes, then the other, repeat. This leaves the door open for mathematical elimination within the shootout. If a team has scored more goals than the other team has remaining shots (in hockey, a team would have to score the first two with the other team missing the first two. In the longer soccer shootout, there are more ways for this to happen,) it’s impossible for that second team to win. In this case, the game is over. The final shots cannot possibly have an effect on the outcome of the game, so they aren’t taken.
Other forms of mathematical elimination — playoff edition
The same logic found in the shootout is also used during the best out of five or seven game series found in the NHL, NBA, and MLB playoffs. Earlier this year, we answered the question, “what is a sweep?” A sweep is when a team wins the first three games of a five game playoff series or the first four in a seven game series. In either case, this is a decisive victory because the winless team doesn’t have enough games in the series left to have any chance of winning the majority of games. They are mathematically eliminated from the playoff series. Like the shootout, the final games of the playoff series are not played because they could not possibly have any affect on the outcome.
Other forms of mathematical elimination — end of game edition
Mathematical elimination can also happen during a game in some sports. Baseball games and tennis matches are organized like little miniature playoff series or shootouts. Tennis matches are organized into best-of-three or five set contests. Each set is organized into best of thirteen game contests. In each of these layers, if a player mathematically eliminates their opponent by winning seven games or two or three sets, the theoretical remainder of the set or match is not played. Baseball is roughly the same. The contest is divided into innings that each have a first half (or top as it’s called) and second half (bottom.) The away team bats in the top of the inning and the home team in the bottom. In the ninth and final inning, if the home team is winning at the end of the top of the inning, the game is over. There is no way for the road team to score any runs in the half of the inning when they are in the field, so there is no reason for that half-inning to be played. They are mathematically eliminated from the game.
Football is perhaps the most curious sport when it comes to in-game mathematical elimination. Football isn’t organized into innings or frames or sets and matches. It’s one continuous game but a wrinkle in the rules makes it possible for a team to (more or less) be mathematically eliminated. In football, the clock either runs or doesn’t run between plays based on the outcome of the play. If there is an incomplete pass, a player runs out of bounds with the ball, or there is a penalty, the clock stops. When a player is tackled with the ball within the boundaries of the field, the clock keeps running, and only a time-out can stop it. If a team is winning AND they have the ball AND the opposing team has no time-outs left, the team with the ball can simulate being tackled on the field by snapping the ball to the quarterback and having him kneel down. This keeps the clock running for up to 40 seconds between each play and a team with the ball can do this three times consecutively. Teams use this strategy as a form of mathematical elimination. If there is less time left in the game (40 x 3 = 2:00) than a team can waste by kneeling, the game is effectively over.
This is really only an almost mathematical elimination because the team with the ball could mistakenly fumble the ball during the snap and if the other team picked it up, they could have a chance of winning. Teams on the losing side of the football game almost never even try to make this happen because it’s so unlikely that it seems lacking in common and professional courtesy to shoot for it. In my memory, the only coach to instruct his team to go for this was former Rutgers head coach, Greg Schiano. Trust my alma mater to foster this type of radical (and rude) thinking! All jokes aside, mathematical elimination is a tricky thing for sports leagues to figure out because it undermines a basic motivation for teams and players: once you have been mathematically eliminated, what is the purpose of continuing to try? This problem is most common when teams have been eliminated from the playoffs during a season and, because the order they get to draft players for next season in is set in inverse (or roughly inverse) order of their record in this season, they have an incentive to lose as many games as possible. This is called tanking and is a scourge to the sports world roughly equal to the flu in the normal world or sarcoidosis on House.
It’s a scourge for another post though, so until then, happy holidays!
Ezra Fischer
On Thursday, December 5, at 8:25 ET, an NFL football game between Jacksonville and Houston will be televised on the NFL network. Do not watch this football game! This is a blog about sports, written by a sports fan for non-sports fans, but today, I’m writing to all the sports fans out there. If you are a regular non-sports fan reader pass this along to the sports fans in your life! Unless they are from Jacksonville or Houston, there’s no reason for them to watch this football game and there are plenty of good reasons not to. Here are some of the reasons:
1. Do not watch this football game because the teams playing are horrible
The Jacksonville Jaguars have three wins and nine losses so far this year. They are last in the league in total points scored per game and third to last in total points allowed. Their average game sees them giving up 29.3 points and scoring only 14.5 points. (Football scoring can be complicated, but even it cannot produce decimals — these are just averages.) They have been blown out of many of the games they’ve played this year. Beyond being bad, they’re also uninteresting. Early in the season, Jaguars fans held a rally to urge their team to sign popular but probably incompetent quarterback Tim Tebow. Even this was ineffective at driving interest in the team. Almost no one showed up. Tebow, despite fake rumors of the contrary from eyeofthetiber.com, remains unsigned.[1]
If it’s possible, the Houston Texans are an even more depressing team. Their record, two wins and ten losses, is worse than the Jaguars. The Texans are fourth worst in the league in terms of points scored (19.2) and sixth worst in points allowed (26.9). Unlike Jaguars fans, fans of the Texans were not prepared for this type of season. The previous two years, the Texans were 10-6 and 12-4 and won their division both times. There were no real hints that things were going to go so badly this year, but they did. Their starting quarterback caught a bad case of the yips (according to Wikipedia, “the apparent loss of fine motor skills without apparent explanation, in one of a number of different sports”) and threw interceptions that were returned for defensive touchdowns in four straight games before getting injured and subsequently benched. Their star running back, Arian Foster, is out for the rest of the year after back surgery. Their best defensive player, Brian Cushing, is also out for the year with a torn ligament in his knee and a broken leg. To add injury to injury, their head coach suffered a “warning stroke” at halftime of a game.
2. Do not watch this football game because it will be bad for your social life
Here’s the deal. It’s getting late in the season. Your friends, family, and significant others have lived through thirteen weeks of football so far and you KNOW that you’re going to want to watch a bunch more football because now it’s the fantasy football playoffs (more on that later) and the real playoffs will follow shortly after that. Last week was Thanksgiving, so there were not one, not two, but three football games on Thursday and though we argued for the inclusion of football in Thanksgiving celebrations, it’s an accommodation that your non-sports fan friends and family made for you. Don’t push it. Make dinner, go to a movie, play a card game, studiously avoid decorating the festivus pole. Do anything, but do not watch this football game.
3. Do not watch this football game because it doesn’t even have any fantasy implications
I know, I know, it’s not a good game, it’s not an important game, but it’s the fantasy football playoffs! In most fantasy leagues, the playoffs begin this week and normally this would drive people to pay close attention to even the most mundane football game. Seriously though, if you have been counting on a player from one of these teams, it’s unlikely your team has qualified for the fantasy playoffs. There’s really not too many players in this game who should be starting on your fantasy team this week anyway. Sure, wide receiver Andre Johnson and running backs Ben Tate and Maurice Jones-Drew are decent plays most weeks, but it’s a reasonably well-studied fact that players perform worse during Thursday games. I say, don’t count on any of these players, do not watch the game, and thank me later.
4. Do not watch this game because watching it is bad for football and terrible for football players
This is the most interesting and most compelling argument for why you should not watch this game. Playing a game on Thursday night, just four days after the previous Sunday’s game, is absolutely brutal. MMQB.com ran a wonderful article about this by Robert Klemko, which initially inspired this post. In it, Klemko quotes Texans offensive lineman, Duane Brown:
“That Friday, everything was hurting; knees, hands, shoulders,” he remembers. “I didn’t get out of bed until that night. I didn’t leave the house at all. You talk about player safety, but you want to extend the season and add Thursday games? It’s talking out of both sides of your mouth.”
“Knees, hands, shoulders” are one thing but heads are another entirely. We’re still learning about concussions but a few things are reasonably clear. Players will hide concussions from their teams and try to play despite them. The most dangerous thing that can happen to a player who is concussed is to get concussed again and this is more likely the less rest they have after their first concussions. Playing games with less than six days of rest is painful and dangerous.
If we give the NFL the benefit of the doubt (which I’m not positive we should) about being sincerely concerned for player safety, how can we rationalize their expansion of the NFL schedule to include more and more Thursday games? Klemko writes that the value of those games to the league is enormous — estimated at over $700 million dollars per year on top of making the NFL network (which televises most of the Thursday night games) a viable network. And it’s our viewing, particularly of bad match-ups like this one, that drives that value. Klemko writes:
Putting aside for a moment the injury concerns, who would actually want to watch these 14 games featuring fatigued players, often pitting bad teams against good ones, or worse, the 2-10 Texans vs. the 3-9 Jaguars (8:25 PM ET, Thursday, NFL Network)?
Answer: EVERYBODY.
“You have Houston and Jacksonville, which no one is looking forward to,” Ourand says, “but even that game is going to win the night on cable within the male demographics everybody sells, and it will be one of the top 5 or 10 shows on TV. The power of the NFL and why they want to go to Thursday is more evident in this game than in any other.”
So far at least, that seems to be true. Fans, including myself, have watched the Thursday games faithfully. I can’t say I’m completely happy about it though. I think it seriously dilutes the NFL experience. There’s something special about isolating all of the games on Sunday (and Monday night.) It makes every Sunday an anticipated event; a miniature holiday of the football denomination. I am particularly frustrated about the Thursday game’s impact on my enjoyment of fantasy football. Part of the fun of fantasy football is approaching a Sunday full of football knowing that, like in each game that day, you start 0-0 and anything could happen. The Thursday game almost always means that instead of that “anything could happen” feeling, you have a “oh, I’m ahead, I should win this” feeling or a “oh man, I’m definitely not going to win” feeling. It’s a lot less fun that way.
For this Thursday, at least, let’s do our part for the players, for our relationships, for our sanity, and not watch the football game.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
Thanks Dad for passing me this delightful article↵
I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, signed up for our email list or followed us on Twitter or Facebook, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year. Writing this blog has been a really great part of my year. I hope everyone has a wonderful day today whether it’s full or devoid of sports!
Here are several posts I wrote to help prepare for more football filled Thanksgiving celebrations. Enjoy!
This post explains why football is an important part of celebrating Thanksgiving for many sports fans: how football is about tradition, how it’s a marker of time passing, and how it makes me feel like I belong.
I also wrote plot summaries of each of the three games today:
As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.
I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.
Thanks and have a wonderful holiday, Ezra Fischer
Pittsburgh Steelers at Baltimore Ravens, 8:30 on NBC
The Ravens in purple and black play the Steelers in black and yellow
The turkey’s been brined, basted, braised, and broiled. The pie has been eaten. The family has been feuded with. Just when you’re ready to sneak back into the kitchen for a turkey sandwich… BOOM! another football game begins.
When the people who create the NFL schedule put this one on the docket for Thanksgiving night, they probably thought they were pretty clever. Baltimore had just won the Super Bowl and Pittsburgh, although it had just missed the playoffs, was a perennial power that had made it to the Super Bowl three times in the past ten years and won it twice. As two of the four teams in the AFC North, Baltimore and Pittsburgh were natural rivals known for playing close and fierce games against one another. Finally, both teams were known for being led by smothering, violent defenses whose aim seemed equally to prevent their opponents from scoring and from finishing the game without broken bones. They were the perfect choice to lure fans back to the television after a long day and to keep them alert through a haze of tryptophan.
In the NFL, the best laid schemes of men and schedulers often go awry. The defending champion Baltimore Ravens started the season by getting blown out by the Denver Broncos, rallied a bit, and have now lost four of their last six games. They’re really struggling and at 5-6 are two games back from the division leading Cincinnati Bengals. The Steelers are in exactly the same position at 5-6 but got there very differently. They started the season with four straight losses and looked like they were doomed to a painful few years of losing a lot while slowly rebuilding the talent on their team. After their second loss the veterans on the team decided to ban the rookies from playing ping-pong or pool in the locker room. After the fourth loss, the coach tried to “unify” the team by banning everyone from playing any games[1] in the locker room. This seems to have had[2] the intended effect and from that point on the Steelers have won five of their last seven games.
Based on the team’s identical records and their both being two games behind the division lead with only four games to play, their game on Thanksgiving night will have a big impact on whether or not they will make the playoffs. In every sport, there is a palpable difference in play between a regular season game and a playoff game. The NFL is less different from other sports because its short 16 game season makes every regular season game proportionally more important than one of 82 in the NHL or the NBA or one in 162 in the MLB. Still, the hitting will be harder, the scrambling more desperate, and the decisions even more agonized over in this game.
With the millions of factors that go into the outcome of every play, it’s just as good to attribute turns in the fortune of a team to this as anything else.↵
As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.
I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.
Thanks and have a wonderful holiday, Ezra Fischer
Oakland Raiders at Dallas Cowboys, 4:30 ET on CBS
The Raiders in black and silver play against the Cowboys in blue and silver
This is probably the weakest game of the three on Thanksgiving this year, which is good because, plopped right down in the late afternoon, it’s likely the most disruptive to every single non-football related element of your Thanksgiving celebration. This doesn’t meant that there aren’t compelling stories surrounding the game, nor that the sports fans in your life won’t be compelled to watch it. Here are some of the plot points for this game.
The first thing to understand is that everything about the Dallas Cowboys is a big deal. The Cowboys are the most popular, most profitable team in the NFL. According to Wikipedia, they have an estimated value of $2.1 billion and annual revenue around $269 million. Their nickname is “America’s team” which, beloved as they are by their fan-base, makes virtually every other football fan seethe. They are simultaneously the most loved and the most hated team.
The Raiders are an almost perfect foil for them plot-wise. As hated as the Cowboys are, they think of themselves as wearing the white hat. The Raiders don’t just pride themselves on wearing black hats, they like to think they have black souls. For most of their history, the Raiders took their cues from now deceased owner Al Davis. Davis was famously antagonistic. He sued several cities in California as he moved the team from one to another. He sided with another football league in an anti-trust suit against the NFL. His imprint was seen on the style the Raiders favored which was aggressive on offense and especially on defense. Chuck Klosterman wrote a wonderful obituary of Davis in which he describe him as “a hard man — a genius contrarian who seemed intent on outliving all his enemies in order to irrefutably prove his ideas were right.”
Unfortunately, neither team is that good this year. The Raiders are 4-7 and have almost no hope of a playoff spot. The Cowboys are 6-5 and because the rest of their division hasn’t been very good either, tied for first place in their division. The Cowboys are much more talented than the Raiders and should absolutely win this game but, like the Lions from the first game of the day, are known for being consistently unpredictable. More than that, they are known specifically for losing games in embarrassing ways. The Cowboys quarterback, Tony Romo, takes most of the criticism for this. If it is a close game, listen for the fans in the room to start talking about how Romo “always messes up at the last-minute to lose the game” or how he “just isn’t clutch.”
