Category: Football

Why do Some Sports Play Through Bad Weather and Others Don't?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do I always hear about baseball games being delayed or rescheduled due to a light rain and yet soccer games continue around the world in a downpour?

Thanks,
Jesse

Sport, baseball. Hardest material, a wooden bat. Plays through rain? No.

— — —

Dear Jesse,

Thanks for the question! It’s true that sports react differently to the elements. I’m tempted to try to explain this culturally. I’m not the biggest fan of baseball, so it would be fun to bash them for not playing in the rain. A more fair explanation would probably explain that weather affects the trajectory of balls and that this is much more dangerous with a small, hard ball traveling at 95 miles per hour than a big soft ball flying at 35 miles per hour. What is most interesting to me is trying to explain the general phenomenon of why some sports play through bad weather and others don’t and if possible, coming up with a rubric that explains why.

There seem to be two or three simple rules that we can abstract to to explain how each sport deals with weather.

  1. If the sport is played inside, there should almost never be a weather related delay.
  2. The harder the hardest substance used in normal game-play is, the less likely the sport will be to play through bad weather.

Let’s see how these work in practice.

Pro or College Basketball, Volleyball, Boxing, Hockey, Ping Pong — all played inside and all safe from weather delays.

Soccer, Football, Rugby, Cross Country Running — all played outdoors and the hardest material involved is no harder than a soft, inflated leather ball. Their surfaces are all grass or dirt. The only weather that will stop these games is a lightning storm in the direct area of the game.

Golf, Baseball, Tennis, Cricket — all played outdoors and the hardest material is significantly harder than leather. Golf has metal clubs and hard resin balls, baseball has wooden bats and hard leather balls, tennis is played on concrete with fiberglass rackets, and cricket has wooden bats and a hard leather ball.

These rules work pretty well to predict whether a sport will play through bad weather or not with only a few exceptions. You may have noticed that football is in the play through the weather category despite its helmets being much harder than an inflated leather ball. Two possible explanations for this are that historically the helmets were made of soft leather or that because the helmet is attached to the body, its danger is not modified by the weather. Of course if we allow the historic state of sports to enter into the equation, we’d have to admit that tennis used to be played only on grass and clay and that the rackets used to be made of wood. Then again, women’s tennis attire once “included a bustle and sometimes a fur” according to one history of tennis. Basketball’s treatment of weather is modified by its setting. If you are in an outside basketball league, played on concrete, games will be canceled if it is raining. Cycling admittedly breaks this rule entirely. They ride in the rain even though their bikes are made of fiberglass and the roads are made of road. I can only explain this by saying that cyclists are a little crazy and that no rule is perfect.

These rules should help you if you ever need to know whether your tickets to a sport are in danger of being rained out or if you decide to invent a new sport and want to set reasonable weather expectations.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

What Does Games Back Mean in Sports Standings?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does games back mean in sports standings? And how can a team be a half game back?

Thanks,
Greg

— — —

Dear Greg,

That’s a great question! Games back can be a confusing concept. Games back is a metric that attempts to show how far behind a team is, controlled for the number of games they have played. A team can be a certain number of games back from another team or from a position in the standings. In both scenarios, the target is moving. Games back is a concept that confuses many people who follow sports religiously so showing an understanding of this concept gives you a simple way of flashing your sports expertise, even among sports fans!

On the first day of a season, Team A beats Team B. Team A’s record is now 1 win and 0 losses. Team B’s is 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B is behind Team A in number of wins and in games back. So far those are the same thing. On the second day of the season, Team A plays Team C and wins again. Team B doesn’t have a game. Now Team A’s record is 2 wins and 0 losses and Team B’s record is still 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B now has two fewer wins in the standings but they are not two games back of Team A. This is because Team B has played one fewer game and the games back metric tries to control for that. Games back controls for unplayed games by counting them as one half of a win. You may hear these unplayed games called games in hand, so just remember that while a game in hand may be worth two in the bush, it’s only worth half a game in of games back. Team B is said to be 1.5 games back from Team A.

As the season goes on, this metric becomes a little harder to calculate in our heads like we just did for Team B and Team A. Wikipedia has a simple calculation for games back and though I don’t exactly understand why it works, I believe it works. It’s Games Back = ((Team A’s wins – Team A’s losses) – (Team B’s wins – Team B’s losses))/2. In our scenario, that’s ((2-0)-(0-1)/2 which simplifies to 3/2 or 1.5 games back.

In addition to calculating how many games back Team B is from Team A, it’s also common to express games back relative to a position in the standings. Two common ones are games back (or behind or out of) first place or the last team that would qualify for the playoffs. In this case, the calculation is the same, it’s just done by comparing Team B to whatever team represents that place in the standings. If today Team A is in first place, Team B would be 1.5 games out of first place. If tomorrow Team C, D, or E[1] is in first place, the calculation would be done between their record and Team B’s record.

AL StandingsBefore we leave this topic, let’s look at some real standings as of today in Major League Baseball. The WCGB column stands for WildCard Games Back. The way baseball playoffs work is that the three division winners all make the playoffs automatically and then the next two teams with the best records make it as well. These two playoff spots for non-division winners are called Wildcards. The WCGB column is calculating the number of games back a team is from getting that second and last wildcard playoff spot.

Right now the Indians are in the last playoff spot so they are zero games back. They are the target. The Rays have played the same number of games as the Indians and have one more win and one fewer loss so they are said to be +1 games back. Don’t worry about how stupid that sounds, this means they are a game ahead. The Rangers have also played exactly the same number of games as the Indians. They have one fewer win and one more loss though, so they are 1 game behind the last playoff spot as represented currently by the Indians.

We have to go all the way down to the Mariners to find a team that is an uneven number of games back. If you add their wins and losses, you see that the Mariners have played 159 games compared to the Indians’ 158. That explains the .5 in the games back column. The Indians have 18 more wins than the Mariners but because they have a game in hand, they are given an extra .5 when calculating how far back the Mariners are compared to the Indians.

Data visualization guru Edward Tufte uses sports standings to show how much data can be packed into a simple table and remain understandable (even to dumb sports fans is the unspoken ellipses that I hear) and why making a chart for any fewer than a few hundred data points is usually not necessary. As a devotee of his, I’m happy you asked this question. Hopefully this post has made all those tables in the sports section a little easier to read!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. GO TEAM E!!!↵

Plot in Football: A Case Study

Sports fans watch sports more like fans of dramas, sitcoms, or soap operas than one might expect. Sure, the sporting contest itself is interesting, but there is a whole lot of interest driven by plot and character. The NFL football game tonight between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is a particularly good example of this. As is most often the case with football, the most visible and compelling characters are the head coaches and the quarterbacks. Here’s a description of who they are and the plot that intertwines them.

Before this year, Andy Reid, head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, had spent the last 13 years as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. During that time, he led the team to five NFC Championship games (basically the semifinals of the NFL) and one Super Bowl but never won the championship. For the NFL, this is a notably long tenure and a very successful one, only partially marred by a sense that he was responsible for some of the failure to win “it all.” His last few years were saddened by the death of his son from a drug overdose. It’s unclear whether his death was intentional or not. The gravity of that situation and the way Reid handled it[1], his long history with the team, and his close relationship with the owner made his firing at the end of last year surprising despite the flagging success of the Eagles over the last few seasons.

Reid was hired soon after the season as head coach of the Chiefs and has won his first two games this season.

Chip Kelly, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the man who took over for Andy Reid, is a polarizing figure. Before this season, he was head coach at the University of Oregon. While there, he developed an offense that has become known as the “blur” offense because it emphasizes speed in all ways. He likes his players fast, and he has them run plays on offense as frequently as possible. Where most offenses may run a play every 25 or 30 seconds, Kelly’s teams aim for 10 to 15 seconds in an attempt to exhaust the opposing defense. Kelly does this by reducing the amount of thinking his players have to do between plays and increasing it during the play. Instead of calling a play with a voice command, Kelly’s teams use some still unbroken code involving hand gestures and large cardboard cut-outs. During the play, his quarterbacks often choose between handing the ball to the running back, running it themselves, or throwing it to a wide-reciever. Because the quarterback is supposed to make this decision based on what the defense is trying to do, this strategy is called the “read-option.” One of the big stories coming into this NFL season was whether this combination of speed and read would work as well in the pros as it did in college. So far it seems to be working although the Eagles are only 1 and 1.

The plot surrounding the two starting quarterbacks in the game is one of great heights, a great fall, and potential redemption but in very different ways.

The Eagles quarterback, Michael Vick, has prodigious physical talents. I once ran across Vick in an airport and I watched as a man went up to him and said, “Michael Vick??! I love playing with you in [the video game] Madden!” Vick’s talents were rewarded with great fame and fortune until he was charged and convicted for running a dog-fighting ring. He served over a year in prison and returned to the NFL when Andy Reid and the Eagles took a big PR gamble and signed him. His personal redemption has been successful, but he hasn’t reached the playing heights in Philadelphia that he did before his incarceration. Perhaps Chip Kelly can help him get there.

The Chiefs quarterback is Alex Smith. Smith was the first pick in the 2005 draft by the San Fransisco 49ers. Although he showed some promise in San Fransisco, he mostly struggled until last year. Last year it seemed he had finally put it together and was not only playing the best football of his career but also as one of the best quarterbacks, as judged by statistics, in the league through the first half of the season. That’s when Smith got a concussion and had to miss a couple of games. The backup quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, stepped in and played so well that Smith never got back on the field. The 49ers went to the Super Bowl. Alex Smith was sent to Kansas City where he will try, under Andy Reid, to prove that last year’s first eight games were no fluke.

Will the notoriously nasty Philadelphia fans boo Andy Reid when he walks onto the field tonight? Will the new whiz kid Chip Kelly stump the old maestro Andy Reid? Which quarterback will continue on his path to redemption? Tune in tonight at 8:30 to find out. Sports!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Reid did not miss a game↵

How the NFL can Ruin Your Life

Fan is short for “fanatic” and the fanaticism of NFL fans is never too far from the surface. Two articles recently struck me as being representative, in different ways, of just how important sports can be to a fan’s life. Read on to hear about how sports can make you fat and broke or svelte and rich!

One of my favorite quotes about sports, attributed to the late Sam Kellerman, talks about why fans treat sport like a matter of life or death: “Sports is man’s joke on God, Max. You see, God says to man, ‘I’ve created a universe where it seems like everything matters, where you’ll have to grapple with life and death and in the end you’ll die anyway, and it won’t really matter.’ So man says to God, ‘Oh, yeah? Within your universe we’re going to create a sub-universe called sports, one that absolutely doesn’t matter, and we’ll follow everything that happens in it as if it were life and death.” An article[1] from the New York Times by Jan Hoffman, suggest[2] that Kellerman might have been right in a very concrete way:

Researchers found that football fans’ saturated-fat consumption increased by as much as 28 percent following defeats and decreased by 16 percent following victories. The association was particularly pronounced in the eight cities regarded as having the most devoted fans, with Pittsburgh often ranked No. 1. Narrower, nail-biting defeats led to greater consumption of calorie and fat-saturated foods than lopsided ones.

In my life, I observe that it is more the act of watching football that leads to the consumption of nachos, hot-dogs, mozzarella sticks, and other delicious and waist-band stretching foods.

If putting your life on the line is not enough for some fans, there’s now a brand new way for them to put their money on the line. Gambling has long been a central focus for many who follow sports. If you don’t believe me, go watch the 1932 Marx Brothers’ movie Horsefeathers and it’s incredibly contemporary story about the fixing of a college football game. Fantasy sports has brought gambling on sports out of the alley and onto main street, in part because it distances the raw gambling from the outcome of the game. Now startup company Fantex has come up with a new way to gamble (or invest as they would have us think about it) on sports — by investing money in a player. Billy Gallagher reports on this story for TechCrunch:

Fantex strikes deals with professional athletes who give up a certain percentage of their income (presumably over an allotted period of time, like the length of their active career) in exchange for the proceeds of [an] IPO. People can then buy shares of that player’s brand, like a stock… presumably, if San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis has a monster year and looks like he’s going to get a bigger endorsement deal or a larger contract in a few years, his stock would rise and a fan could sell their Davis stock and cash out with a real, monetary profit.

Gallagher argues that this is probably not going to be a great deal for the players (surely they can find something better to do with their money) but he is more optimistic about profit for the new class of fan/investors. I can’t wait until they create a market for people who blog about sports — I might be a penny-stock but who knows…

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Thanks to Patty Gibney for sending me this article!↵
  2. If you believe in the dangers of obesity↵

NFL Pregame Excess

As a sports fan, I am also a big fan of Sundays during the fall. I like nothing more than to have already had a weekend full of social events so that I can sit down on the coach and feel totally wonderful about watching football all day. As a fantasy football owner, I’ve also been known to have my laptop (and my phone, and my ipad, and whatever other screens I can find) propped open so that I can simultaneously follow my fantasy football team and as many of the non-televised games as possible. I’ve tried the NFL Red Zone channel a few times. Red Zone is a term which refers to an offensive team having the ball within 20 yards of the end-zone they are trying to score in. The Red Zone channel flips back and forth between games to show the most exciting parts of all of them — it will even split your screen into three or four games at times. I find it to be a dangerously hyperactive experience that leaves me feeling sort of shaky and not like I’ve enjoyed watching sports at all. But I understand the appeal of the Red Zone channel.

What I don’t understand is the appeal of NFL pre-game shows, so I was really happy to read the recent New York Times survey of them by Richard Sandomir. In it he describes the growth of the Sunday morning NFL shows as an inevitable but ridiculous consequence of the NFL’s popularity[1]

Starting Sunday, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. (all times Eastern), there will be 19 hours of pregame N.F.L.programming. Four of the new hours arrive courtesy of the CBS Sports Network, which is producing “That Other Pregame Show” next to the studio in Manhattan that is used by “The NFL Today,” the CBS broadcast network’s venerable pregame show. This flagrant addition of four hours, in one stroke, is excess piling on extravagance.

Keith Jackson, a retired legend of football broadcasting, was profiled recently in the LA Times by Chris Erskine. Erskine asked Jackson if he had any wisdom to impart on today’s broadcasters and Jackson replied, “They talk too damn much. You wear the audience out.” It’s likely Jackson was thinking about commentators during the game when he said that but I’d like to think he would feel the same about pre-game shows.

If there is one nice thing about all the NFL coverage and promotion, it’s that each channel has it’s own NFL theme song. These constants have become like Pavlovian conditional reflexes to me. They make me sprawl out, relax, maybe freak out a little about fantasy football, but mostly get ready to indulge myself in a day of sports. If you’re conditioned like I am, you might enjoy this inventive YouTube video by Ansel Wallenfang which I found on deadspin.com.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. And the low-cost of studio shows compared to other types of programming.↵

An Introduction to Football for the Curious

Football is America’s favorite sport. The season is anticipated, watched, obsessed over, and celebrated to an incredible extent. From the first week of September to the first week of February, football is almost unavoidable. Football is one of the least accessible sports for new viewers but we believe that with a little care and effort put into explaining it, it can be quite rewarding for a new or beginner viewer. Here is a collection of posts that may spark an interest or explain a long harbored question.

General Questions About Football

Why Do People Like Football
How do I Begin to Enjoy Football
How Should I Feel About the NFL Concussion Settlement
What is a Good Football Book

Rules, Terms, and Other Important Minutiae

How Does Scoring Work in Football
What’s a Down in Football
What is a Fumble in Football

Football Positions

What is a Quarterback in Football
What is a Running Back in Football
What is a Wide Receiver in Football
What is a Tight End in Football
What is an Offensive Lineman in Football
What is a Defensive Lineman in Football
What is a Linebacker in Football
What is a Defensive Back in Football

Fantasy Football

How Does Fantasy Football Work
What are Some Tips for Your First Fantasy Draft
Why Are People Obsessing About Fantasy Football Now

Happy watching! And please submit questions as you think of them. Getting questions is by far my favorite part of this blog and all the best posts come from your questions!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How Should I Feel About the NFL Concussion Settlement?

Dear Sports Fan,

I read over the weekend that the NFL settled a lawsuit out of court with retired players on the subject of concussions. I know concussions are an increasing concern in sports. How should I feel about the NFL concussion settlement?

Thanks,
Tricia

— — —

Dear Tricia,

Every good settlement is going to leave people on both sides with mixed feelings. The agreement that the NFL made to give $765 million to retired players is no exception to that rule, but I think it is more good than it is bad. Here are a few reasons why:

People Need Help Now

Retired football players who are suffering from the result of head trauma need help now. This is clear from the high-profile suicides of former players like Junior Seau, Ray Easterling, and Dave Duerson as well as the heart-wrenching stories of Steve Gleason and Kevin Turner and many others who are alive but severely affected by early dementia and Alzheimer’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease, which has been linked in theory, even on nfl.com, to brain trauma), and other issues. You might expect NFL players to have enough money to take care of their own health care but salaries have only skyrocketed to the current  in the past thirty one years since the 1982 strike and there is still an enormous amount of inequality within NFL player salaries. There are a lot of older players and less successful players out there who never made a lot of money. It’s conceivable for recent retirees to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, but if you look at the bigger picture you will find many stories like Terry Tautolo‘s, who ended up homeless.

Retired NFL Players are Not the Public

One of the best arguments you will hear for why this settlement is a bad thing is that it allows the NFL to avoid being forced to reveal in court how much it knew about the effect of concussions and when it knew what it knew. Daniel Engber of Slate.com makes this case forcefully but I don’t totally buy it. It’s easy to see parallels between this situation and Watergate or cigarette companies. The questions “what did they know” and “when did they know it” are instinctive because of those cases. A key difference is that this is a dispute between employees and an employer, not between a government and its citizens or a group of consumer companies and its customers. In terms of being truthful to the general football-watching public, the breach of trust is happening more now that the NFL is trying to market a softer, safer sport than it has in the past. If the NFL knew that it had an unsafe work environment (okay, obviously it’s unsafe, but I mean…really unsafe) and they actively hid information about the hazards from its employees, they should pay and pay punitively. The NFL owes its former employees but it does not owe the public nor would justice be served by its public humiliation or destruction.

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

This settlement does not preclude future lawsuits. NFL players like Scott Fujita, who wrote a great article in the New York Times about the settlement, know this. Fujita writes that he did not get involved in the lawsuit because he didn’t want to “risk watering down a potential award for so many people who are legitimately suffering. There are numerous former players experiencing a wide range of brain-related health issues. Right now, I’m not really one of them.” If he starts experiencing symptoms he is free to open his own suit against the league. The NFL knows this too, and that’s why the settlement is not just for players who actively participated in the lawsuit. Any retired player suffering from brain injury is entitled through this settlement to up to $5 million depending on their particular ailment.

A timeline of the lawsuits and settlements against cigarette companies over the past fifty years is a good reminder that the first settlement can be followed by later, larger settlements. The deadspin.com timeline of the NFL concussion issue only has one settlement on it so far but otherwise it looks chillingly similar.

It Would Have Been Tricky in Court

Although it seems obvious that a profession that involves being smashed repeatedly in the head had something to do with the damage done to its employees, it might have been very difficult for the players to win this case in court. Brain injury is more clearly understood all the time, but it remains frustratingly elusive both from a medical standpoint and a legal one. Matthew Futterman and Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal made this point convincingly in their article about the settlement:

Legal experts familiar with the case say the plaintiffs’ attorneys didn’t believe they had enough firepower to win in court. NFL lawyers were prepared to probe each plaintiff about his athletic history to try to convince the court the NFL couldn’t be held liable for injuries that could have come from youth, high-school or college football—or substance abuse.

The NFL has virtually unlimited resources to throw against their former employees in court. It might not have been a pretty sight. It still might not be.

Which Lesson Has Been Learned?

It’s easy to point at the overall value of the settlement relative to the wealth of the NFL and argue that the only lesson this will teach the NFL is that they can continue to get away with downplaying the danger of brain injury among their players. This doesn’t seem likely. For one thing, it’s clear from the history of the 2012 NFL referee labor dispute that the NFL often operates on principle instead of or in addition to finance. That the NFL reached a settlement suggests to me that it is ready to understand (or has already understood) that brain injury represents one of the biggest potential threats to its existence as an institution and profit-making machine. If this is true, the league will accelerate its initiatives to create a safer environment for current players.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

 

How Does Scoring Work in Football?

Very little about football is intuitive and that includes how its scoring works. Luckily, unintuitive is not the same as difficult to understand. There are really only three ways to score points in a football game.

A Touchdown

A touchdown happens when a player in the end-zone catches a pass or when a player who is running with the ball pushes the tip of the ball across the goal-line. On its own, a touchdown is worth six points, but it also gives the team that scored it a bonus chance with the ball from the two yard line. A team with this extra point attempt has two ways to attempt to score — they can kick the ball through the goal posts for one point or they can score two points by running a single play which results in what looks like a second touch-down but which is only worth two additional points. In either case, if the team fails to convert their attempt, they get zero points. In this way a touchdown can result in six points (a missed extra point kick or failed two point conversion attempt,) seven points (a made extra point kick,) or eight points (a successful two point conversion.)

By far the most common choice following a touchdown is an extra point attempt. And almost all of them are successful. According to the Washington Post in an article recommending the eradication of the extra point, in the past 12 seasons, NFL teams have succeeded on 99.3% of the extra point kicks they’ve attempted. The high success rate of the extra point is the source of much of the confusion about football scoring. People will commonly refer to a touchdown as being worth seven points, not six because they assume the extra point will be successful. This makes the “two point conversion” much harder to understand because it nets the team eight, not nine points. According to wikipedia, two point conversion attempts are successful around 40% of the time. Most teams have “cheat sheets” with mathematic models that take into account how far the team is winning or more likely losing by and how much time is left to guide the coach to a decision about whether to go for one or two points following a touchdown.

A Field Goal

The team with the ball can choose to attempt to kick the ball to score from any position on the field on any down. If they are successful at kicking the ball between the two uprights and above the cross-bar, their team gets three points. Teams usually attempt this when they are at most forty to forty five yards away from the end zone they are trying to score on. You’ll hear distances quoted that are longer than this because the ball is snapped back about seven yards from the line of scrimmage and the goal-posts are at the back of a ten yard end-zone. Field goal kickers have steadily gotten increasingly strong and reliable from less than 20% successful before 1970 to over 50% since 2000. That said, football fans seem to expect field goals to be successful 100% of the time and are liable to scream at the television when one is missed.

A Safety

A safety is not the only way a defensive player can score (because he can score a touchdown after intercepting a pass or recovering a fumble) but it’s the only way points can be scored by a player who never even touches the ball! A safety happens when an offensive player is tackled with the ball in his own end-zone or when he steps out of bounds from the end-zone. Once in a while a team will intentionally give up a safety[1] but most of the time it’s the result of an exciting, fast moving play where the best plans of the offense are not just thwarted by the defense but laughably imploded like the shark at the end of Jaws.

So, a team can score two points (a safety,) three points (a field goal,) six points (a touchdown,) seven, (a touchdown in conjunction with an extra point,) or eight points (a touchdown in conjunction with a two-point conversion.)

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. There are lots of complicated reasons for why a team would do this but they all boil down to feeling like the certainty of giving up two points is better than the risk of giving up seven if there is an interception, a fumble, or a punt that leaves the other team with the ball really close to scoring a touchdown.↵

How Does Fantasy Football Work?

Fantasy football combines elements of stock market speculation, role playing games, and casino gambling and throws them into the context of the NFL, far and away America’s most popular professional sport. Here, as simply as possible, is how it works.

The start of every September is the beginning of the NFL season. Each team plays sixteen regular season games over the next seventeen weeks. For a traditional football fan, the only thing that matters is what their team’s record is — how many wins and how many losses. A fantasy football fan cares about something different — how individual players perform. During each game, a company called the Elias Sports Bureau keeps official statistics for the NFL. These statistics transform each play into objective,[1] measurable data. For example, the famous helmet catch play from Super Bowl XLI would have been transformed into: Eli Manning +1 completion, +32 passing yards; David Tyree +1 reception, +32 receiving yards; Rodney Harrison +1 tackle.

These statistics have been used for all sorts of purposes in professional sports. Teams might use them to judge player performance, player contracts often have bonuses built in based on statistics. Leagues give out awards to players with the most goals or highest batting average. Player statistics have even been used in contract arbitration settings. Fantasy football looks at each game as a data set made up of the statistical translation of football plays and builds a different type of contest on top of them.

Real Football Game –> Statistics –> Fantasy Football Game

The fantasy football game that is built on top of the statistics generated by football is based on asking normal people to predict before the season begins and then again each week during the season which football players are going to generate better statistics.

Before the season begins the people in a fantasy football league (called owners) get together physically or virtually and pick NFL players to be on their fantasy teams. Fantasy leagues are usually made up of ten or twelve owners; because no NFL player can be picked by more than one team, the more people in a league the harder-core it is. In an eight player league, owners can probably thrive knowing only the star players. By the time you get to a sixteen or twenty person league, owners likely know the NFL rosters better than they know their own friends’ birthdays.

There are a variety of different ways to divvy up players before the season but the most common one is the snake draft. A draft order is set, usually randomly, and then owners take turns picking NFL players until their teams are full. It’s called a snake draft because the person who picks first the first time through picks last in the second round. The order is first-to-last, last-to-first, and repeat.

The fantasy football draft is the most important and exciting day of the fantasy season. If you are joining a fantasy league for the first time, we wrote some tips on how to enjoy and succeed on draft day here.

The predictions don’t stop after draft day. This is because the statistics generated by an owner’s set of NFL players don’t all count for their team each weekend. Instead, fantasy football asks owners to predict which of the real players on their imaginary team will perform the best in their real games each (real) weekend. Before the games begin, owners have to choose a “starting lineup” of players whose stats will count towards the fantasy team’s performance. Leagues vary quite a bit on how a starting lineup is structured, but this is a common form:

One Quarterback
Two Running Backs
Two Wide Receivers
One Tight End
One Kicker
One Team Defense[2]

In most fantasy football leagues there’s one more layer of abstraction on top of all of this. Each weekend two fantasy teams in the league will “play” each other. At the end of the weekend, whoever’s starting lineup has performed better wins. Like lineups, the way fantasy leagues translate football statistics into fantasy points varies from league to league. It’s also too complex to cover completely in this post but the standard basics go something like this:

One rushing or receiving touchdown = 6 points
One passing touchdown = 4 points
Ten rushing or receiving yards = 1 point
Twenty five passing yards = 1 point

Fantasy scoring systems are designed to create a compelling game so they don’t always match the realities of football. Amazing athletic plays don’t count for more than pedestrian plays. Quarterbacks are almost always the most important players on their real teams but not often on their fantasy teams.

Believe it or not, this all adds up to create an experience that millions of people find incredibly compelling. This is due in part to how having a fantasy team changes the way you watch football.[3] The main reason is that fantasy football is a big but knowable closed system. Results are based in part on luck but also on knowledge and skill. Owners feel like the effort they put into their teams has a real effect on their performance; and they get frequent and objective feedback about this each week. It simulates the joys and agonies of running your own business without most of the risk.

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. More or less.↵
  2. Fantasy lumps defensive players together because defensive stats are a little more subjective. Or if you’re cynical you’d say it’s just because people like offense better.↵
  3. Which we’ll cover in more detail in another post.↵

What are Some Tips for Your First Fantasy Football Draft?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m going to be taking part in my first fantasy football draft ever in a few weeks. Do you have any tips?

Thanks,
Sonja

— — —

Dear Sonja,

First off, welcome to the fantasy football club! As of 2010 there were over 30 million people in the U.S. and Canada who play fantasy sports. That fact comes from a Forbes magazine article which sited a study by the FSTA or Fantasy Sports Trade Association. You know, because there’s one of those. Which is all to say that you are in good company and you won’t be the only person new to fantasy football this year. Here are some tips on how to enjoy your first draft and maybe they will help you win as well.[1]

Tips for Your First Fantasy Football Draft

Have a Strategy

Whether you are a die-hard football fan or new to the sport, whether you are Nate-Silveresque in your statistical predictive abilities or flunked out of high-school algebra, you can come up with a strategy for your fantasy football draft. Having a strategy is key to enjoying draft day. Without a strategy, drafting is likely to feel like arbitrarily selecting items off a menu in another language. It doesn’t have to be a good strategy, a friend of mine once decided that he thought players who played in cold-weather would be better than players who played in the heat. Another of my friends has tried for years to get all of the Johnsons who play in the NFL on his team. It doesn’t have to be a good strategy as long as it’s not self-destructive. Here are some simple strategies you can use:

  • Use rankings from some other website than the one you are drafting on. Almost every league will draft using the web interface from ESPN, Yahoo!, CBS, or NFL.com. During the draft, you will be selecting players from an ranked list ordered by “fantasy experts” at that site. Lots of the owners in your league will be more or less making their choices based on these rankings but you don’t have to! Get a ranked list from one of the other sites listed above or from one of the many independent fantasy football websites out there like Fantasy Football Nerd, Fantasy Pros, Fantasy Football Toolbox and use their rankings instead. There’s no knowing whose list is more accurate but using one list while the majority of your league uses the same one as each other gives you an inherent advantage.
  • Figure out players that are going to be more than normally unpopular in your league and take them. This means doing a little research about the people you’re going to be playing with. Are most of them Giants fans? If so, they’re likely to over-value the Giants players and be reluctant to pick players from the Giants’ natural enemies: the Redskins, Cowboys, and Eagles.
  • Take the boring players. People who play fantasy sports like to feel like if they win, they did it because they knew something that no one else did. They like to “discover” players who are about to experience the best year of their careers. So they tend to over-value rookies and players who have just moved teams or gotten new coaches. What they don’t like doing is drafting someone who has played well but not spectacularly for years and is likely to do basically the same thing this year that they did last year. This is where you sneak in and take the boring, reliable performers.

Enjoy Yourself

Fantasy football should be fun! It’s a hobby, after all. To the newbie though it might seem a little strange. Here are a few things that won’t help you win your league but might help you enjoy the experience.

  • Serious doesn’t mean not fun. You’ll probably be surprised at how seriously people take this hobby. Even some of the vocabulary around fantasy football shows this. People who play fantasy football are called “owners.” The guy or gal who runs the league is a “commissioner.” Everyone is seriously trying to win. None of this screams fun but it can be in the same way that a water gun fight or a game of tag is more fun if you suspend disbelief and buy into the idea that you really don’t want to be it or get hit by a tiny stream of water.
  • Go in person. Most leagues get together to do their drafts. Now that it’s so easy to run the process online it’s easy for people to draft from their homes but it’s not nearly as much fun as sitting together in a room with snacks and beer. If your friends and you can’t get together, do a conference call or a google hangout or some other technological solution that allows for banter. If you are in a room with beer and snacks, don’t get too drunk and end up with a team full of players with awesome sounding names who all suck at football.
  • Draft one player from a local team. Even if it is a mid-level tight end, the back-up running back, or a second or third wide receiver, having a player from the local team on your fantasy team will provide you a full fall’s worth of compelling entertainment because it gives you something to root for every Sunday.

At it’s worst, fantasy football can seem like a strange form of voluntary self-flagellation (how could I have thought that Alex Smith would have had a better game than Aaron Rodgers…if only that second tier running back hadn’t fumbled in the fourth quarter of a blowout victory…etc.) but at its best it forms close, consistent communities that continue for years.

Good luck!
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. For full disclosure, I am dating this particular fantasy football newbie. So while I want her to enjoy her first fantasy football experience, I might not actually want her to win the league. A close second is about as high as I can, in good faith, wish for Sonja.↵