Category: Football

Plot in Football, Thanksgiving Edition: Packers at Lions

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.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

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

Green Bay Packers at Detroit Lions, 12:30 ET on Fox

Packers Lions
The Packers in green and gold play against the Lions in silver and blue

The first game of Thanksgiving Day begins early in the day, when the turkey is just starting on its eighteen hour journey to being slightly over-cooked when you serve it. The Detroit Lions are one of the two traditional teams (along with the Dallas Cowboys) that always host games on Thanksgiving. Since 2000 this has often meant that there wasn’t much drama to the game they were involved in. Since that year, the Lions have only had one winning season, and more often than not they were out of the playoff hunt and, frankly, a bit of a joke. This year is different. The Lions are tied for first place in their division and their opponent, the Packers, are only a half game back. We covered what “games back” means in a post recently but in this case the half game is because the Packers tied last week, not because they’ve played fewer games than the Lions.

The Lions are a predictably unreliable team. They are undeniably talented but prone to dumb mistakes and run-away tempers. They score the seventh most points in the league behind an exciting offense featuring quarterback Matthew Stafford, running back Reggie Bush, and wide-receiver Calvin Johnson. Sports writer and media mogul, Bill Simmons, recently wrote an ode to Johnson on his website Grantland that is worth reading. In it, he makes the case that Johnson is not only one of the best wide receivers ever but also, amazingly, almost totally non-controversial. Johnson wears 81 and truly is exciting to watch. Here’s how Simmons describes him:

And other than Randy Moss, I can’t remember being more excited about a receiver during that split second when his quarterback is heaving a football downfield, and the light bulb flickers on, and you say to yourself, “Wait, he’s going deep!”

When Stafford throws the ball deep to Johnson, tear yourself away from the potato chips and sneak a peak of a wide receiver who is a uber-talented physical freak.

The Green Bay Packers have had much more success over the last few decades than the Lions but they are missing their most important player. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers fractured his collarbone a few weeks ago and isn’t going to play tomorrow. That leaves the Packers reliant on rookie running back Eddie Lacy who has been performing excellently and in one of the most curious stories of the year, replacement quarterback Matt Flynn.

Here’s the story with Matt Flynn. He backed-up Aaron Rodgers from 2008 to 2011. In 2011 the Packers were so good that they had their playoff spot clinched before the last game of the season. They chose to hold Rodgers back from playing the game and played Flynn in his place both to prevent Rodgers from injury but also, I’d like to think, to pay back the long-time backup Flynn by giving him a chance to showcase himself to other teams before he became a free-agent at the end of that season. Showcase himself, he did! Flynn passed for 480 yards and 6 touchdowns, both of which set all-time team records. Sure enough, in the offseason he signed a three-year, $20.5 million dollar deal with the Seattle Seahawks. But before he played a game with Seattle, he lost the starting job to rookie Russell Wilson and at the end of the year, was traded to the Oakland Raiders. That brings us to this year when he AGAIN lost his starting job in training camp, this time to a second-year player, Terrelle Pryor. After a few poor performances when Pryor had a concussion, Flynn was cut. A few weeks later, the Buffalo Bills had some quarterback injuries themselves and signed him briefly but only as a last resort and then cut him a week or two later. And that’s when Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone.

Now Flynn is starting on a nationally televised game with first place in the division and the playoff hopes of the team and their fans riding on the outcome. He played the second half of the last Packers game and did quite well, but it will be very interesting to see how he plays now that he’s the starter. Is there some special magic for him on the Packers that will transform him from the player who lost his job twice to unheralded younger players back to the record-setting backup? Or will he fail and go down in history as one of the weirder footnotes?

Thanksgiving's Three Fs: Family, Food, and Football

As a companion to this 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.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

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

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It’s got everything you could want in a holiday: family, food, and football. All three of those F-related aspects of Thanksgiving can be the cause of great joy and the cause of much F-word inducing consternation as well. Of the three, the football has perhaps the lowest stakes, but for many of us, it’s an important part of the day. Tradition, inclusion, time, and snacks are a few of the reasons why.

Thanksgiving is about tradition and so is football

Every holiday is about tradition: the way your family decorates the Christmas tree, the references to childhood that only your family would understand, your mother’s baked ziti. Thanksgiving is perhaps the most purely tradition oriented holiday because it doesn’t have any religious underpinning. The NFL has been playing football on Thanksgiving since 1920. It’s a tradition that’s remained a predictable part of Thanksgiving for many households since 1953 when it was first televised. Other sports lay claim to holidays. The NBA plays marquee games on Christmas day. New Year’s day was traditionally a day for college football until the NHL began televising their outdoor “winter classic” that day. Only the NFL doubles down on tradition by having the same two teams host games every year. The Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys always host games on Thanksgiving. A few years ago the league added a third game at night with a rotating cast but the day games remain a constant. There’s real comfort in consistency, particularly when it comes to family. From generation to generation, through births, deaths, marriages, divorces, estrangements, and reconciliation, when Thanksgiving rolls around, you can count on seeing the Lions and the Cowboys play football.

Football on Thanksgiving makes me feel like I belong

I’m proud to be different. I used to revel in switching between Hot 97’s hip-hop and NPR when I commuted to work by car. I love that in past years my family has cooked quesadillas, Chinese food, and corned beef and cabbage[1] for Thanksgiving dinner. I wouldn’t change any of it for the world[2] but I am also drawn to feeling like I belong. On a holiday that is about the shared history of all Americans, (whether your family immigrated by land strait thousands of years ago or by air a few days ago,) I want to feel like I am unified in some way with the rest of the country. Unity through football is a funny concept and has a few meanings. There’s the literal unity — I’m guessing more people in the United States will be watching the football games than any other single shared experience excepting, perhaps, the Macy’s Day Parade and arguing with your family. There’s also an amorphous unity — football fans come in all shapes, genders, socio-economic statuses, sizes, language preferences, sexual preferences, colors, and intensities. Watching football on Thanksgiving, as odd as it may seem, makes me feel like I belong in this country, and I like it.

Sports are a marker of time

One thing that people who aren’t sports fans often marvel at is the way that some sports fans can remember the most minute details of sporting events that happened years ago. I am not one of those fans but I use sports as a marker of time in my life. Sometimes it’s a remarkable game that, like a popular song, gets lodged in my head and becomes evocative of that time in my life. I’ll always remember watching game six of the Lakers v. Kings NBA playoff series on a television resting on the floor of my first apartment in 2002 or stumbling out of a bar (from bewildered excitement, not drink) mid-afternoon after the United States’ miraculous injury-time goal against Algeria in the 2010 World Cup. Sometimes the games aren’t memorable but they help me remember important times in my life, like the death of my Uncle Pete (it was first game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, not that I watched it, but I remember that the Penguins beat the Tampa Bay Lightning 3-0).

Football on Thanksgiving marks time in a different way by staying the same while other things change. Football wasn’t a big part of my experience of Thanksgiving but I remember being a kid and rooting for famous and somewhat mythical Lions running back Barry Sanders to score every time he touched the ball. Later on, I remember ducking into a girlfriend’s living room to enjoy the oasis of watching football with her grandfather. And I have fond memories of being at my own grandparents house for our big annual get-together on the Saturday after Thanksgiving and hoping there was an hockey game between the Islanders and the Rangers so I could enjoy the way my cousin Jared rooted for his beloved Rangers in what was definitely an Islanders household.

Snacks!!

I know, I know, there’s turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and pie. But don’t you want some potato chips and pretzels? I do! If any of this has opened you up to enjoying some of the Thanksgiving football this year, tune in tomorrow for plot summaries of the games.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1.  (CB&C as we call it)↵
  2. Okay, maybe some of the conversations my brother and father have about music theory or advanced mathematics do get a little dry for me, but…↵

Martin, Incognito and Class in the NFL

The Jonathan Martin, Richie Incognito story, which we summarized a couple of days ago on this site, continues to fascinate the sports world and has had far-reaching cross-over appeal to the rest of the world as well. One of the notable aspects of the situation is Johnathan Martin’s background and how that may have played into his being victimized in an NFL locker room.

Martin’s parents are both lawyers and graduates of Harvard. He also has a grand-parent and even a great-grandparent who graduated from Harvard. Martin attended an elite prep school in California before deciding to go to Stanford instead of Harvard because it offered him the opportunity to play college football at the highest levels. People have used these facts, coupled with Martin’s decision to leave the Dolphins after more than a year, to argue that Martin was either a larger target for harassment or less able to stand up to the normal level of harassment than he would have been had he not come from a fairly rich, fairly stable, extremely well-educated background.

For example, the Jason Reid story in the Washington Post abstracted the argument by noting that:

Being an outsider can make you a target in the unforgiving, alpha-male world of the NFL — especially if you’re African American. Generally, the league’s black players come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. If not for football scholarships, many never would have attended college. They share a bond that comes from the all-encompassing role the game has played in improving their lives, both financially and in social status. In reaching the NFL, Martin took a road less traveled.

NPR noted that:

Basically, the story… is one in which the massive, otherwise intimidating black guy is being picked on by his better-compensated white teammate for not being ‘hood enough. (Wait, what?)

Fox Sports brought on another former NFL player who had gone to Stanford, Coy Wire, to address the question of “Do “Stanford guys” or “smart guys” fight an uphill battle when trying to prove their worth…?” Unsurprisingly, Wire argued that although he didn’t think “anyone ever feels universally accepted in an NFL locker room,” he didn’t believe that being intelligent, or coming from a privileged background should be thought of as a show-stopper.

All of this made me think of an article in the New York Times I had read a few weeks ago: “In the NBA, Zip Code Matters” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. In it, Stephens-Davidowitz gives the results of a statistical study he had done on the statistical likelihood of reaching the NBA. The results may surprise you:

 Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men. Is this driven by sons of N.B.A. players like the Warriors’ brilliant Stephen Curry? Nope. Take them out and the result is similar.

Admittedly, basketball and football are different sports and I don’t know if the same logic can be applied to football. It’s possible that the greater risk of physical harm one must accept in football skews it more heavily toward disadvantaged participants. But it’s enough to make me have second thoughts about the basic, underlying “facts” of the Martin, Incognito story. How sure are we that we even understand the makeup of an NFL locker room? Before we paint the story with a broad brush, let’s take time to listen again to people who have been there, like Coy Wire, who describes the environment as “a melting pot of people from different parts of the country, with differing cultural roots, moral compasses and socio-economic upbringings.”

Hazing or Harassment? What the Incognito, Martin Situation Reveals

Since October 30 a scandal has been swirling around the Miami Dolphins football team. The facts of this situation are clear but the implications are not. The two main characters are both offensive linemen; second year tackle, Jonathan Martin, and ninth year guard, Richie Incognito. USA Today has a useful timeline of how the story was uncovered, beginning with Martin leaving the team to seek “professional assistance for emotional issues,” progressing to allegations followed quickly by proof of Incognito’s harassment of Martin, and followed by Incognito’s indefinite suspension by the Dolphins. That action was taken on November 4th and since then not much has happened but much has been written, analyzed, and discussed. Surprising though it may seem, the reaction has been mixed, with almost as many voices, including many of the Miami Dolphins’ players, taking up Incognito’s case as Martin’s. We’ll listen to both sides and then attempt to identify an underlying question about sports that might account for the mixed reaction.

Incognito and the culture that fostered him is flat-out wrong

The case against Incognito is clear. He was a powerful figure on the team, a member of their leadership counsel, an experienced veteran who had been honored last year with a trip to the NFL’s all-star game, the pro-bowl. He abused that power by mocking, intimidating, and threatening a younger, less established teammate. On the way, he was recorded on Franklin’s voicemail threatening to slap Franklin’s mother and using racial slurs to denigrate his bi-racial heritage. The fact that this was allowed to continue in an NFL team for months if not years is an indictment of the NFL and the Miami Dolphins organization. The fact that many, (even any would be too many, according to this argument,) NFL connected people are defending Incognito at all is an indictment of football culture.

Two interesting takes on this argument come from Jason Whitlock of ESPN and Brian Phillips of Grantland.com. Whitlock places the incident in a racially and culturally charged context and his lead paragraph is as effective as any I’ve read:

Mass incarceration has turned segments of Black America so upside down that a tatted-up, N-word-tossing white goon is more respected and accepted than a soft-spoken, highly intelligent black Stanford graduate.

Whitlock argues that the Dolphins were a particularly bad organization for someone with Martin’s background and personality to end up in, that their locker-room was a “cesspool of insanity.”

Phillips places the incident into the larger narrative of mental illness, particularly the mental illness experienced by NFL players that shows every likelihood of being caused by brain injuries sustained while playing football. Phillips spends much of the article railing against what he describes as the “room-temperature faux-macho alpha-pansy nonsense” culture that makes it possible to vilify someone for seeking help for an emotional or mental issue. He’s most effective though when he advocates for what he believes should be the outcome of this episode:

There are boundaries in locker rooms, same as anywhere else, and those boundaries are culturally conditioned, same as anywhere else, and they change with time, and they can be influenced. And it would be really good, it would be a really good thing, if the NFL moved its boundaries in such a way as to show some minimal respect for mental health.

There’s more to it, maybe Incognito was a little right

The argument that Incognito was right, or at least not completely wrong, usually starts with a caveat something like the one Andrew Sharp, also of Grantland.com makes in his article on the case, that “the daily life of elite athletes exists with codes and behaviors so alien to normal life, it’s impossible to peer in and expect it to make sense.” A former teammate of both the men, Lyndon Murtha, wrote an article in MMQB.com which he begins by claiming that he doesn’t have a “dog in this fight” because he played with both of them. But he does, his dog is football, and its existing culture. The website rightly uses Murtha’s comment that “Playing football is a man’s job, and if there’s any weak link, it gets weeded out. It’s the leaders’ job on the team to take care of it.” as a pull-quote. It is the core of his argument in favor of Incognito — that Incognito was doing a positive act of service to the team by making Martin prove his toughness and that Martin failed that test.

How true is that? It is absolutely true that playing football requires great toughness. And it is true, particularly for linemen, that they are responsible for the quite literal physical safety of their teammates. Michael Lewis makes this point indelibly clear in his book The Blind Side which begins with the story of haw a mistake by an offensive lineman led to a terrible compound leg fracture which ended quarterback Joe Theisman’s career. Writer turned pundit Tony Kornheiser expressed this general perspective on his radio show, (while also being careful to admit he was concerned it made him sound like an ogre,) and connected this need for absolute trust to the need among soldiers. Phillips argues convincingly against this in his article by pointing out that the U.S. military has evolved to have “a system in place to keep this in check.” When he heard that the Dolphins’ coaches may have played a role in encouraging Incognito’s behavior, as confirmed in this Sun Sentinel article, Kornheiser immediately made a referential connection to the 1992 movie, A Few Good Men, and Jack Nicholson’s famous speech in defense of behavior in some situations that would not be tolerated in others. While everyone remembers “you can’t handle the truth,” the money line for us is “my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives” because it could be used just as easily to defend Incognito’s behavior today as Col. Jessup’s behavior in 1992.

What’s this all about? How can reasonable people be on both sides?

I believe that there is an underlying question about sports, that unanswered, explains why reasonable (some might say, otherwise reasonable) people can defend Incognito’s behavior. That question is “how much are professional sports just a job for the people who play them?” If sports are a job for athletes, then this behavior is not only unacceptable, it’s not controversial. We have clear rules and laws about workplace harassment, and since the days of Mad Men, our culture has been fairly uncompromising about enforcing those rules. If Incognito had done what he did to Martin in a shoe store or a law firm, he would have been fired by the end of the day. It is only if one thinks of sports as “more than a job” or the athletes as “grown men playing a child’s game” that it is possible to apply different codes of conduct to the controversy. I think you see evidence of this exceptionalism throughout much of what has been written about the case: the use of the word bullying or hazing instead of the more adult and professional words “harassment” or even “assault”; the consistent description of locker-room culture as some kind of club that people who have never been in cannot understand and which settles disputes only from within. You see this more generally in how people think and talk and write about sports: it’s a compliment to a player to say he or she would “play for free, (s)he just loves the sport so much;” fans disparage players who leave a team in free-agency “just for more money” elsewhere.

If playing professional sports is a profession then locker rooms are workplaces and Incognito’s behavior is indefensible. It is only through the underlying belief that sports are an exception that there can be any reasonable debate about the ethics of this situation. Just like with the medical treatment of players with concussions or the use of offensive words in team names, this incident is forcing sports to conform to the rules that govern the rest of the culture when it comes to issues of workplace harassment.

What is a Snap in Football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a snap in football? I hear it all the time in what sounds like many different contexts. Can you explain them all?

Thanks,
Ollie

— — —

Dear Ollie,

You’re right, there are a lot of different uses of the word snap in football. There’s a snap count, there’s a person on a football team called the “long snapper,” and a snap can refer to the act of snapping or the moment of the snap. In this post, we’ll go through them all and connect them to other elements of football. Finally, we’ll ask why it’s called a snap and what it tells us about football.

The Act of Snapping a Football

When a football play begins, the ball is motionless on the ground, positioned on an imaginary line which stretches from side-line to side-line, called the line of scrimmage. One player grabs the ball with his hand and moves it backwards between his legs to another player. That action is called the snap. The player who performs the act of snapping is the center. There are two main kinds of snaps, referred to by the position of the quarterback. A quarterback is either “under center” to receive the snap or “in the shotgun.” With a quarterback under center (right behind the center, so close that he rests one hand on the under-side of the center’s butt,) the center quickly hands him the ball through his legs. When a quarterback is in the shotgun formation, he is a between five and seven yards behind the quarterback. Snapping the football in this formation is a more challenging task — it requires spinning the football while throwing it backwards between his legs so that it flies in a straight, easy to catch spiral. You may also hear that there was a “direct snap.” This is a totally normal snap — either under center or shotgun but instead of a quarterback receiving the ball, it is a running back.

The act of snapping the football connects football to its past when, like rugby, throwing the ball forwards was not allowed. Although the majority of plays in most football games today involve throwing the ball forward, all of them begin with a backwards pass in the form of a snap. In case you’d like to learn how to snap a football, wikihow.com has a great tutorial.

Snap Count

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.

The Snap as a Moment

As described in the first paragraph, before a play begins, the football is motionless on the ground. The act of snapping the football begins the play and, confusingly, the moment that this happens is also called a snap. This is important because the exact moment a play begins is vital for a couple of important rules in football. Aside from the one offensive player who is allowed to move before the snap (said to be “in motion”) if any other player moves before the snap, they are offside. If a defensive player moves across the line of scrimmage and is not able to get back to his side of that line before the snap, he has encroached and will be called for a penalty. Dear Sports Fan covered both of these rules in our post on offside rules in various sports. Football, similar to basketball, has a play clock that counts down and requires a team to make an offensive play. In the NFL, the play clock is forty seconds long. If the clock runs out before the snap, there is a delay of game penalty.

The Snapping Specialist

While most snapping is done by someone playing the center position, there are some snaps that are so critical and so technically difficult that teams pay someone to perform them, even if that is almost all they can do on a football field. This player is the long snapper. He snaps the ball for punts and field goal attempts. For a punt, the long snapper needs to spiral the ball backwards to someone standing closer to 15 yards behind him than the five yards of a shotgun snap. The mechanics of a field goal snap are even more exacting because the snapper has to snap the ball in such a way that it spins exactly the right number of turns. This way the field goal holder has an easy job of placing the ball with the laces facing away from the kicker’s foot so that the kick flies true. The New York Times produced an amazing multi-media feature on this a few weeks ago.

Why is it called a snap? And what can we learn about football from it?

There doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus about why the snap is called this snap. This delights me because making up derivations runs deep in my family. Google defines snap as “a sudden, sharp cracking sound or movement” and as a secondary meaning, “in football: a quick backward movement of the ball from the ground that begins a play.” Football can be inaccessible or less pleasing to fans of other sports because it lacks the fluid motion and continuous play present in sports like soccer, basketball, and hockey. Instead of fluid play, football is characterized by quick bursts of action beginning from a standstill and creating havoc in a matter of seconds before coming to a halt. It’s no wonder then that we call the act that initiates these sudden, sharp bursts of movement a “snap.”

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

 

Should the Washington Redskins Change their Name?

Today the Washington Redskins beat the Chicago Bears in a back and forth, exciting 45 to 41 game. Although they were able to outlast the Bears in a contest with very little effective defense, the Washington professional football team may not be able to outlast their opponents in another contest. Proponents of keeping the team name, Redskins, find themselves, like their team, without an effective defense.

The Redskins began their existence in 1932 in Boston under the name of the Braves which matched the name of the Boston baseball team they shared a field with. The next year, according to Wikipedia, the team moved to Fenway park where the Boston Red Sox played (and still do,) and changed their name to Redskins to match Red Sox better. In 1937 the team moved to Washington D.C.

It’s not completely clear why a movement to change the name has picked up momentum over the past year but it has. In recent weeks there has been a flurry of comments from prominent figures about the name. Television commentator Bob Costas used his platform on Sunday Night Football to argue that the name is “an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present day intent.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer claimed that the team should follow the trend of common usage which suggests that most people wouldn’t use the word Redskins “because the word [is] tainted, freighted with negative connotations with which you would not want to be associated.” President Obama even said in an interview that if he were the owner he would think about changing the name.

A few voices have come out in defense of the name. Foremost among them is the team owner, Daniel Snyder, who wrote a public letter to fans that was reprinted in many newspapers. Snyder sites public polls that show that most people, even most Native Americans are not offended by the use of the word “Redskins” in the team name. He also takes what I consider to be an unbelievably wrong-headed tack in arguing that the name should be preserved because of its great and historic legacy during the 81 years of the team’s existence. I can’t believe that in arguing for the preservation of a name with connections to a genocidal history that anyone thinks playing to its history is a good idea. Often vilified ESPN columnist Rick Reilly makes an interesting case for the name by (after first giving himself the street cred to make this argument without being accused of being racist by name-dropping his “father-in-law, a Blackfeet Indian”) sharing stories of mostly high-school teams with similar names whose predominantly Native American population are proud and defensive of. Reilly’s best line addresses Native Americans who defend the name, “Too late. White America has spoken. You aren’t offended, so we’ll be offended for you.” This paradox is also addressed in the best article I’ve read on the issue. Published on Deadspin.com and written by a Blackfeet Indian, Gyasi Ross, the article looks at what he believes the larger issue is — the unequal treatment of Native Americans as compared to other minorities by the mainstream public. He writes, “NO non-black person has ever gone rummaging through American cities in search of a black person who’s not offended by the word “nigger,” and then held them up as proof that the word isn’t so bad. ”

Of course this controversy has stirred up some of people’s best, worst, and most comedic instincts. Design company 99 Designs ran a contest to redesign the team’s logo with three name suggestions: Griffins, Warriors, and Renegades. They received 1,887 submissions in one week. PETA shamelessly stole an idea from a Tony Kornheiser column in 1992 and suggested that the team keep their name but change their logo to the potato of the same name. The Onion put its stamp on the issue with a fictional quote: “We’ve heard the concerns of many people who have been hurt or offended by the team’s previous name, and I’m happy to say we’ve now rectified the situation once and for all,” said franchise owner Dan Snyder, adding that “Washington Redskins” will be replaced with “D.C. Redskins” on all team logos, uniforms, and apparel.”

One common reaction to the controversy from many writers, bloggers, and podcasters has been to stop using the name Washington Redskins and instead go with the awkward “Washington Professional Football team” or the euphemistic “‘skins.” This seems as likely to help the team avoid the issue as it does to force them to change it. At Dear Sports Fan we’re going to keep using the name Washington Redskins until the team changes it, which we hope they do soon. Of all cities, the capital of the United States should be the most careful when it comes to team names that send racist or violent messages. Dan Snyder should emulate the former owner of the professional basketball franchise in Washington D.C., Abe Pollin, who got rid of the name “Bullets’ because of his feelings about gun violence.

Why do Sports Teams Report Injuries?

Dear Sports Fan,

One thing I’ve never understood about sports fans is why they seemed to be obsessed with injuries? Why do sports teams even report injuries?

Thanks,
Rhea

injury
This player is likely to get a Probable (neck) designation on next week’s injury report.

— — —

Dear Rhea,

Like many artifacts of sports culture, the reporting of injuries has historically been driven by gambling. Sports and gambling have a long and curious symbiotic relationship and even omnipresent elements of sports like the injury report often have gambling origins. An injury can affect a player’s performance and therefore the outcome of the game. Information about which players are injured therefore is helpful if you are predicting what will happen in a game, which is essentially what sports gambling is. In the major American professional sports leagues, teams are required to give information about their players’ injuries to the press. I always believed that this was evidence of the hypocrisy of the leagues. How can you claim to be anti-gambling when you require teams to publish information that is only really useful to sports gamblers? In fact, this is only partially true. The requirement of reporting injuries began in the late 1940s as a response to a plot to fix the 1946 championship game. Then NFL commissioner, Bert Bell, figured that publishing who might not play in a game or who was likely to play at less than 100% effectiveness was a good way to prevent gamblers or bookies from profiting from inside information.

Fantasy football is a form of sports gambling and is similarly, if not more, obsessed with injury reports. Fantasy owners pay very close attention to the injuries of their players. Because of how fantasy football works, owners get a chance each week to choose from among the players on their team those who they think are going to perform the best. Injuries to their players or to players who affect their players, like the quarterback who throws the ball to one of their wide-receivers or the linebacker whose job it is to hit their running back go a long way to helping decide whose stats to have count each weekend.

Injury reports have their own peculiar vocabulary. Here’s some of the common words and phrases and what they mean:

  • Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
  • Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
  • Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
  • Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.
  • Upper/Lower Body Injury — Searching for a way to avoid exposing injured players from being targeted by their opponents, hockey teams are now only required to release whether an injury is an “upper body” or a “lower body” injury. This is silly in an era when players can watch replays of plays that happened five seconds ago or five months ago equally easily on team ipads.
  • (body part) — In sports that do give a little more specific information about where the injury is located than hockey does, you’ll often see this: Player Name, Probable (knee). This has led to the convention of announcers saying that a player is “out with a knee.” Sports columnist Bill Simmons has been poking fun at this convention for years.
  • (neck) — In the past few years there has been an increasing understanding of the seriousness of head injuries, particularly concussions. As a result, I believe that teams have started defaulting to the neck when reporting any head injury when they are not absolutely sure it is a concussion. Calling an injury a neck injury instead of a concussion allows the team more freedom in how and when the player returns to play. Crooked and dangerous but true.

One last thing to think about when it comes to injury reports is that they are evidence of how cooperative sports truly are. Sports has the reputation of being a refuge for the extremely competitive but the sharing of injury reports belies that to some extent. If the Jets were really trying to put the Dolphins out of business, they wouldn’t tell them about their injuries on their offensive line before playing them. Sports teams are at least as much collaborating with one another to make a communal profit within agreed-upon guidelines of behavior as they are competing to win at all costs. 

Hope this has answered your question,
Ezra Fischer

Portraits of the Manning Family

If you’ve been exposed to any NFL football in the past few weeks or years, you’ve probably heard of the Manning family. Father Archie was a well-respected quarterback whose personal brilliance was always undermined by the mediocre to terrible teams he played on, first in college at Ole Miss and then in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints. He married the college home-coming queen, Olivia, and they had three sons, Cooper, Peyton, and Eli. Peyton and Eli have both had successful college and professional football careers. The long-time quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts and for the last two years of the Denver Broncos, Peyton is generally thought of as one of the top five or ten quarterbacks of all time. Eli, his younger brother, has been the Giants starting quarterback since he was drafted in 2004 and has won two Superbowl championships; one more than Peyton. The oldest brother, Cooper, was diagnosed with a spinal abnormality in high school and had to give up playing football. The Mannings are the “first family” of football.

This year the Mannings have been a particularly prominent part of the football season. Peyton’s team, the Broncos, is undefeated and he has been playing some of the best football of his career… or anyone else’s. Eli has been having exactly the opposite kind of season. His team, the Giants has lost every game so far and he has thrown 15 interceptions — the same number he threw all of last season. Coincidentally ESPN released a documentary about the Mannings two weeks ago called The Book of Manning.

Brian Phillips is one of my favorite writers on the Grantland staff and has an absolutely fabulous Twitter feed. Phillips in his own abstract way often seems to have a direct line to the Zeitgeist so I wasn’t surprised to see he had written an article about each of the Manning brothers last week. I’m going to excerpt from each of the articles but I recommend you read them in full.

Peyton:

You look at his stats and you have no choice but to deploy weapons-grade verbiage… Peyton Manning crushes. Peyton Manning burns. Peyton Manning annihilates. And yet … have you ever seen a football player less likely to crush, burn, or annihilate anything than Peyton Manning? It’s possible to imagine, say, Ben Roethlisberger, if a night took a weird swerve, actually wielding a torch in anger; Peyton Manning would spend that same night at home, in his sock-folding room, folding his socks. I doubt he has ever shredded anything in his life. (Maybe a document.) On the field, he’s Genghis Khan as portrayed by your 11th-grade trigonometry teacher. The language that best describes his accomplishments is also the language that most completely misrepresents his style.

And Eli:

Eli is more Archie’s natural heir than Peyton will ever be — like Eli, his dad was a fun and scrambly quarterback, more a seat-of-the-pants adventurer than the lucid math-compulsive then playing in Indiana — but because Peyton came along first, the definition of Manningness has somehow shifted in a way that includes Eli out… Eli is the un-Manning. He is the Manning who makes mistakes, and thus, as a Manning, he is unlike himself.

This is the kind of sportswriting I enjoy! I hope you do too.

Fantasy Football and Sports Reporters' Objectivity

As I’ve been immersed in the football and fantasy football season for the past weeks, a thought has been sneaking up on me bit by bit. If financial reporters are not allowed to purchase stocks and political reporters are not allowed to make contributions to candidates or even make their own political views public… why are we okay with sports reporters participating so passionately in fantasy football leagues?

And participate, they do: At the 13 minute mark of the 10-10-13 edition of ESPN’s fantasy football podcast (yes, I listen to it) fantasy sports pundit Matthew Berry mentioned that sports reporter Ed Werder tweeted:

To his credit, Berry told the audience that this was not official reporting from Werder but instead was conjecture. Berry built off of this with his own conjecture that perhaps Werder has some inside information on the situation based on his long history covering the team and the fact that Werder had picked up Terrance Williams to be on his fantasy team in a league with Matthew Berry. Berry often refers to a sixteen team league he plays in with other ESPN employees called the War Room. This league (if this isn’t a clever hoax) can actually be viewed here and its membership includes reporters and analysts like Adam Schefter, Michael Smith, Trent Dilfer, Mark Schlereth, Ed Werder, Chris Mortensen, and Stephania Bell. Is there money riding on the outcome of this league? Although that is common in most fantasy leagues, it’s hard for me to imagine ESPN would allow their employees to gamble on sports in this way. Then again, ESPN has moved off it’s traditional ignore-that-gambling-exists stance and now has a gambling blog and allows its top personality, Bill Simmons, to openly talk and write about gambling. Regardless of the money, given how often and publicly the War Room league is talked about, it seems to be fiercely competitive.

Berry’s  investigative reporting into reporters’ fantasy actions seems to be becoming a habit. On the same day he tweeted about a fantasy trade made by ESPN reporter Chris Mortensen and former NFL player, now ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer:

What can we make of this? Berry’s job is helping readers and listeners get an edge in their own fantasy leagues. He is suggesting that we use the information that reporter Ed Werder thinks it’s possible that Dallas receiver Terrance Williams supplants Miles Austin in the starting lineup or that Chris Mortensen thinks a lot of tight end Ed Dickson or not very much of running back Rashard Mendenhall to help our fantasy teams. I am open to that use of this information (Terrance Williams is now on my fantasy team) but I am suspicious of it at the same time.

My suspicion is multi-faceted:

  1. Fantasy owners get attached to the players on their teams. As I mentioned in a post on the arrest of Aaron Hernandez for murder, I found it harder to believe that he was capable of that crime because he had been on my fantasy team for years. Fantasy owners become fond of their players and are often prone to overvaluing them when engaging in trade negotiations with another fantasy team. Is it possible that a sports reporter would write favorably about a player because of the unconscious instinct to overvalue the players on one’s own fantasy team?
  2. Fantasy owners promote their players in an effort to convince other people to trade for them. The honorable art of trading in fantasy is finding a team whose strengths match your weaknesses and vice versa so that a trade can work out to benefit both teams. The disreputable art of trading in fantasy is convincing someone that a player who you think is not that good is going to be REALLY REALLY GOOD. I’ve certainly embellished my belief about a player’s prospects to a friend I was trying to trade him to. Is it possible that a reporter might use his or her twitter account to drive up the value of a player they are trying to trade? What about filing an article for the same purpose?
  3. Finally, (and here’s where it gets really crazy,) whether as part of an intentional act of fantasy negotiation or through unconscious bias generated by owning a player, isn’t it likely that something a member of the media says or writes about a player will eventually affect how a real football game is played? A negative article can motivate a player to vengeful greatness or shake a player’s confidence and cause his play to suffer. A carefully placed rumor could cause a divide between teammates or modify how a coach thinks about a player.

It is possible that I’m on to something incredibly profound or that it’s 11:11 pm on a Friday, it’s been a long week, and I’ve watched the Matrix too much. Either way, I not sure I’ll ever be able to listen to an “NFL rumor” again without thinking “I wonder whose team that player is on in the reporter’s fantasy league…

 

Why You Shouldn't Spend All Day Watching Football

One of the joys of working on this website is that the WordPress software I run the site with tracks many of the search terms people have entered that lead them to Dear Sports Fan. Yesterday someone viewed the site after searching google for “why men shouldn’t watch NFL football every Sunday.” This is pretty exciting because it means that our core audience (non-sports fans who have important sports fans in their lives) exist and that they are curious or frustrated enough to take their questions to the internet and that once there, Dear Sports Fan’s content is relevant enough to pop up in searches and to be read! So, in honor of you, whoever you are, here are some thoughts about spending all day watching football and some tips on negotiating the topic with your favorite football fan.

Less is More

There’s different modes of football watching and one that is extremely enjoyable is the viewing of a single, important game. Watching football all day sometimes means you never really focus in on one game and enjoy it’s drama, it’s plot twists, it’s ups and downs as fully as you could. If the fan in your life has a favorite team, why not make it into a special occasion for him or her? Expressing the desire to watch with that person is likely enough to make it special but it wouldn’t hurt to add some props to the equation. Throw on some color coded clothing to support a team. Clear away distractions half an hour early. Get involved by cooking or ordering appropriate food. Football team names are often fun to play with in a themed event kind of way. When I was in college, my friends and I would throw a themed super bowl party. When the Buccaneers played the Raiders it was PIRATE BOWL. There’s no reason why you can’t steal this idea on a normal Sunday. Cook some gumbo for a Saints game, make some wings for a Bills game, or cook a corned beef (but start early) for a Patriots game. Making an occasion out of a game is a good way to make a single game the occasion.

Take a Bye Week

If the sports fan in your life has a favorite team there is at least one, probably two or three weeks during the football season where the negotiation for a football free or football light weekend will be significantly easier than others. In the NFL, every team plays 16 games over 17 weeks. The one week a team does not play is called their bye week. This is a great week to suggest that your favorite fan take a bye week too! Go away for the weekend or get some yard work done! Every team also has at least one prime-time game on Thursday, Sunday, or Monday night. These weeks are also good bets to suggest a Sunday day activity.

Plan Ahead

One of the under-appreciated elements of the sports business is how effectively is markets itself. Most of the time sporting events are generally unremarkable. Once in a while they’re drama and unpredictability make them transendent experiences for sports fans. ESPN, NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, and the sports leagues themselves do a great job of promoting upcoming games to convince sports fans that despite all probabalistic evidence to the contrary, this game is going to defy logic and has a 100% chance of being transendent. Think of the way big food companies market desserts and then double it. By the day of the game most sports fans have been looking forward to watching particular games for days. If you want to do something else with them, talk to them about it before they’ve bought the hype.

Lose the Battle, Win the War

Sometimes, it is great to watch football all day. As bizarre as it may sound if you are not a fan, planting your butt on a couch and watching football all day is an experience many of us prize. It’s an indulgence like spending the day at a spa or an amusement park or in a casino. And like all indulgences, it’s only really enjoyable if you feel good about doing it! So give the football fan in your life the gift of support some Sundays and make them feel good about indulging themselves. Tell them you understand how they enjoy a full day of football and that you want them to choose some Sundays to have that and some Sundays to share the day with you. I’ll leave it to you and your sports fan to figure out exactly what the right ratio is.

Good luck and happy negotiating.