Understanding Sports Archives - Page 22 of 43

What do we know about brain injuries or concussions?

The sight of a football player knocked senseless or woozy during a game is common. For years, the culture of football was to celebrate the roughest elements of the game, including those that caused concussion symptoms like these. Of course, the word concussion wasn’t used, players were “dinged up” or “had their bells rung.” Concussed players rarely left the field, and if they did they were back as soon as they could walk straight. Today the way we observe, comment on, and handle brain injuries in football is very different. Now when a player goes down, we gasp, avert our eyes, and talk in hushed voices. We know now that brain injuries have serious short and long-term consequences. They can cause the toughest football players to seize up, be unable to tolerate sunlight, or vomit uncontrollably. In time, they can cause personality changes, aggression, and dementia.

What has changed? Well, we know more about brain injuries and their effects thanks to some powerful investigative reporting and promising scientific work led by the New York Times and Boston University respectively. The twin forces of knowledge and focus shifted public opinion but have not necessarily conveyed the full story in an easily understandable way. If you’ve ever wanted to understand what’s really going on when a brain is injured and how that pertains to football players, here is a summary.

Brain injuries are generally categorized into two groups: concussions and subconcussive events. Both are caused when a person’s head moves rapidly enough for the brain inside to scrape or hit the inside of the skull. In football, this is often the result of a blow to the head from another person’s body or the ground, but it can also happen if the head moves fast enough, even without impact. Of course, every injury is unique but it helps to classify them.

Concussions are injuries that have recognizable short-term symptoms that may not be present immediately after the impact. A concussed player may have a headache, loss of memory, and confusion. They may experience visual symptoms like blurred vision or seeing stars (this actually happens! it’s not just in cartoons). In some cases concussions may cause vomiting or loss of consciousness. Some symptoms of concussions are usually experienced with a short delay of a day to a week. These insidious symptoms include sensitivity to light, trouble sleeping, difficulty with concentration, and depression. Concussion symptoms may dissipate after a few days or may stick with a person for months or even years.
Subconcussive events are simply a description of any head trauma that does not cause a concussion. It’s not a very satisfying definition but subconcussive blows are an important concept because of how frequently they occur in football and their potential impact on the long-term effect of football on its players.

It’s hard to know how many concussions there are in the NFL and in other levels of organized football. Estimates range widely mostly because players and teams both have incentives to not report concussions as they happen. The NFL reported 228 concussions in the 2013-14 season, down slightly from 261 and 252 in the previous two seasons. That means every time a player steps on to a football field, (and 96 do, per game) he has a roughly 1 in a 100 chance of getting a concussion. Just from having watched a lot of football, that frequency feels about right. That would mean there is one reported concussion (too obvious to hide) in almost every game.

Football players certainly suffer concussions at a greater rate than normal people. They also suffer broken bones and torn ligaments at a significantly higher rate than normal people. Broken bones and torn ligaments never have and never will be seen as a pernicious element that could conceivably bring down football. The real problem is that a statistically significantly higher percentage of football players experience another set of physical and psychological symptoms that are almost definitely tied to brain damage. We are now morally certain that these symptoms are the result of a neurological disease called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or C.T.E., and that it has been caused by concussions or other brain injuries suffered while playing football. The New York Times, which did a lot of the earliest and best reporting on C.T.E. thanks to the work of Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist, Alan Schwarz, described C.T.E. as “a degenerative and incurable disease”. Here is the best description of the four stages of the disease from an article by Schwarz’ colleague Ken Belson:

Those categorized as having Stage 1 of the disease had headaches and loss of attention and concentration, while those with Stage 2 also had depression, explosive behavior and short-term memory loss. Those with Stage 3 of C.T.E…. had cognitive impairment and trouble with executive functions like planning and organizing. Those with Stage 4 had dementia, difficulty finding words and aggression.

The popular science author Malcolm Gladwell has also had a big influence on this issue. Gladwell wrote an article about brain injury in football which was published in the New Yorker in 2009. This article was the first one to shift my thinking about the game and it is well worth reading despite its relative age. Here is a quote from the piece which builds on the description of symptoms above:

C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn’t the result of an endogenous disease. It’s the result of injury.

Scientific and medical understanding of C.T.E. has come a long way but it’s still not entirely clear whether concussions or subconcussive events are the main cause of the disease. It’s understandably difficult to figure this out given that almost all football players will experience both types of brain injuries during their careers and that until recently even concussions with fairly dramatic symptoms were largely treated as an unavoidable consequence of playing football which was best ignored.

One of the biggest obstacles to learning more faster about C.T.E. and the brain injuries that cause it is that the disease can only be conclusively diagnosed by examining the brain after death. During a special autopsy, scientists are able to see if the brain shows the degeneration and accumulation of a protein called tau that are characteristic of C.T.E.. As heart-wrenching as it has been to read stories about the handful of football players who have shot themselves in the chest and left instructions for their brains to be studied, they and other players whose families have donated their brains posthumously, have been responsible for virtually everything we know about the disease so far. Luckily, there is some movement on this topic. Researchers at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA have been able to detect evidence of C.T.E. in living brains through the use of a particular dye and a “routine positron emission tomography scan.” In a 2013 Wired article on the topic, Sean Conboy writes that this test “also could help settle the debate over whether CTE is exacerbated by a few major concussions or years of exposure to subconcussive blows. And it could answer the most important question of all: How much tau is too much?

Another facet of testing that is rarely talked about is genetic testing. David Epstein explains in his book, The Sports Gene, that there is a single gene called ApoE that is predictive of Alzheimer’s disease as well as “how well an individual can recover from any type of brain injury.” There are three variants of the gene and everyone has two copies, one from their mother and one from their father. One variant, ApoE4, is particularly bad. People with one copy of ApoE4 are four times more likely than the general population to develop Alzheimer’s, and people with two copies are eight times more likely. Nothing has been proven about any connection between ApoE4 and C.T.E. but, given that people with copies of that gene variant “take longer to recover” from brain injuries and “are at a greater risk of suffering dementia later in life,” it seems likely.

As it stands today, the only sure thing is that C.T.E. is horrible and deadly. Until we know otherwise, I am going to assume that all blows to the head or which cause the brain to hit the skull contribute to the potential development of C.T.E. and that the more violent the impact, the larger its negative consequence. Until the day (and that day may never come) when science can definitively predict which injuries and which players are on the road to C.T.E. and medicine can prevent those players from getting the disease, football has a responsibility to understand how players are injured and to find ways to reduce or eliminate the danger.

This is the first post in a series of posts about brain injuries in football and how to fix the sport. In our next post, we’ll discuss how brain injuries or concussions happen. What kinds of hits cause them? Why do players escape some collisions unscathed and stumble away from others?

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What is a "football move"?

Dear Sports Fan,

What the heck is a “football move”? I think I understand that a wide receiver making a catch has to catch the ball and then make a “football move” to get credit for it but I don’t get what a “football move” is. I mean, we’re watching football players play football, right? Isn’t basically everything a “football move”? Isn’t the catch itself a “football move”?

Thanks,
Alexander

Dear Alexander,

You ask a very reasonable question. It’s one that puzzles most football fans and even some football players. The phrase “football move” doesn’t actually appear in the NFL rule-books at all but it is used popularly to explain a rule that dictates whether a player has caught the football or not. This rule has always been a little controversial and it became even more so when it virtually decided a playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys earlier this year. In plain English, the rule states that in order to be considered a completed catch, a player has to catch the ball and maintain control over it long enough to do something else before the play is considered to be a completed catch. Here’s the rule in NFLese:

A forward pass is complete (by the offense) or intercepted (by the defense) if a player, who is inbounds:
(a) secures control of the ball in his hands or arms prior to the ball touching the ground; and
(b) touches the ground inbounds with both feet or with any part of his body other than his hands; and
(c) maintains control of the ball long enough, after (a) and (b) have been fulfilled, to enable him to perform any act
common to the game (i.e., maintaining control long enough to pitch it, pass it, advance with it, or avoid or ward off an
opponent, etc.).
Note 1: It is not necessary that he commit such an act, provided that he maintains control of the ball long enough to do so.
Note 2: If a player has control of the ball, a slight movement of the ball will not be considered a loss of possession. He must
lose control of the ball in order to rule that there has been a loss of possession.

I know, I know, the NFL is run by lawyers with a distinct flair for the obtuse. Still, the rule is actually not that hard to understand. I’ll do my best to explain it.

The first thing to understand is what this rule is attempting to do and why they are important. This rule is tries to set an objective line between a play that is not a completed pass and one that is. This is important because there are four possible outcomes when a quarterback throws his teammate the ball and they are widely varied in terms of their effect on the game:

An incomplete pass — if the quarterback throws the ball and no one catches it — means that the play stops and the offense gets the ball back where they started that play only instead of first down, now it’s second or instead of third, now it’s fourth.
A complete pass — when the quarterback throws the ball and his teammate catches it — means that the play continues until the receiver of the ball runs out-of-bounds or is tackled.
A complete pass followed by a fumble — after the quarterback’s teammate catches the ball, he runs around and then drops the ball — the play continues but it’s a free-for-all; whoever picks up the ball gets it, including the defensive team.
An interception — when a member of the opposing team catches the ball — the play continues and the defender can run with the ball but when he is tackled or goes out-of-bounds, his team gets to play offense.

These categories seem obvious but they get tricky at the edges. For instance, it’s intuitive that if the quarterback throws the ball and it hits the ground, it’s an incomplete pass. Likewise, if the quarterback throws the ball and it bounces off his teammates head and then hits the ground, it’s still an incomplete pass. But what if it bounces off his teammate’s hands as he’s trying to catch the ball? Still an incomplete pass but now we’re starting to feel less sure of things, right? Now, if the receiver catches the ball and runs for ten seconds, dodging defenders the whole time, and then drops the ball, that’s clearly a fumble. But what if he only runs around for five seconds? Still a fumble? What about four? What about three, two, one? Somewhere, there has to be a line between an incomplete pass and a catch followed by a fumble.

The NFL chose to define that boundary as when a player “maintains control of the ball long enough” after catching the ball and landing in-bounds to “enable him to perform any act common to the game.” Since the game in question is football, that phrase has been condensed in popular usage to a “football move.” In other words, a player has to catch the ball and hold it for long enough for him to theoretically do something else with it before it’s considered a catch. Of course, players on a football field don’t stand still very much of the time when a play is happening. This is why the last twist on this rule came into being. People don’t say that a receiver has to “catch the ball and then hold it long enough to make a football move”, they say that a player has to “catch the ball and then make a football move”. Since the NFL did not define how many seconds (or more likely tenths of a second) would be long enough to make a football move, the rule has shifted (for the purposes of reasonable enforcement) to be that a player has to demonstrate possession while he makes a football move after the catch.

I guess the only question we’re left with is “why should this be the definition of a catch?” I like to think about it like this: until a player is able to show that he’s done catching the ball and is ready and able to do something else on the field, he’s still in the process of catching the ball. Once a player is able to move on from catching the ball to dodge defenders, change direction or speed, or dive forward, then they’re done catching the ball.

Make sense? If it does, you’re ahead of everyone else. I think eventually we’ll see the NFL simply set an amount of time, probably three tenths of a second that a receiver must possess the ball before the play is considered a completed pass. That, plus biological sensors in the ball and everyone’s gloves will solve this issue for us once and for all. Until then, enjoy the debates about what exactly constitutes a “football move” and whether so-and-so made a catch or not.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

The Super Bowl is just around the corner. If you’d like to learn more about football, sign up for our Football 101 course to learn the basics of the game or Football 201 to learn all about football positions.

What is a false start in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a false start in football? I get that it’s a penalty against the offense and that when it happens the play stops before it even starts but what I don’t understand is why it’s called or what a team can do to avoid it.

Thanks,
Chelsea

Dear Chelsea,

You’ve got most of it already but I’ll fill in the rest as best I can. A false start is a penalty in football that can only be called against the team with possession of the ball. The penalty for a false start is that the offense has to move the ball back five yards (or half the distance to their own goal line if they are within five yards of it) and start the play over again. A false start penalizes the offense if one of their players moves in an illegal way before the ball is snapped to start the play. One thing that’s cool about the penalty is that its inflexibility exhibits and reinforces one of the primary characteristics of football: it’s stop and start, tactical nature.

As we covered in our article answering What is a snap in football? every football play begins when the center snaps the ball backwards between his legs to another player. During the time before that happens, there are a separate set of rules that dictate what the teams on the field can do. For example, the offensive team is allowed to gather to talk (called a huddle) but not if there are more than eleven people in the group. The false start is a penalty in that set of rules that dictate what a team, specifically the one with the ball, can do before the ball is snapped. Roughly speaking, the offensive team is supposed to set themselves up in a particular way, pause, and then without moving, snap the ball to start the play. As you might expect, there are some technicalities and exceptions that dictate how this must happen: there must be at least seven offensive players set up right on the line of scrimmage (where the ball is set up at the start of the play); when the ball is snapped, one and only one player is allowed to be running around and he must be moving backwards or sideways and may not be one of the seven players set up on the line of scrimmage. The false start is called when one of a variety of things happen to violate these rules:

A player in the offensive line “moves abruptly” once they are set up. This rule is so minute that even a flinch of the head will be called a false start.
Any player on the offense moves “in such manner as to lead defense to believe snap has started.”
The quarterback moves or acts in a way that is an “obvious attempt to draw an opponent offside”. (on this one, you might rightly be thinking that TV commentators often talk about quarterbacks trying to draw the defense offside by shouting like they are about to start the play. This is true but because those shouts could theoretically convey information to the quarterback’s teammates, they are allowed even though we all know exactly what they’re trying to do. It’s a conundrum wrapped in an enigma.)

The false start is one of the most typical penalties in football. No single penalty defines the sport as well as the false start. If you wanted to explain football to a fan of soccer or basketball or hockey or any number of other sports, the easiest way to do it would be to say that football is like those sports except that everything stops between plays. When a player is tackled or runs out-of-bounds, the teams have forty seconds to set up again for the next play. It’s a stop-and-start game. This makes it look boring to a lot of people used to the fluidity of other sports but it’s also responsible for the complexity and tactical interest that football and really only football of all the sports has. If football is a game where the teams are supposed to stop and then set up in a static way before starting again then the false start is the penalty that makes sure the offense has really stopped before they start the next play.

The false start also represents a failure of synchronization. The players on the offensive side of a football team train tirelessly to move in exact unison. A successful offense is one that moves with precision as one unit. You’ll often see quarterbacks pass the ball to a spot, knowing that by the time the ball gets there, their teammate will be there to catch the ball. Every successful offensive play is a triumph of moving in unison. When players move out of time with each other during a play, the play usually fails. When one player moves out of sync before the play begins, it’s a false start and their whole team is penalized. One of the funniest things to see on a football field is what happens when the one player who moves out of time is the player who starts the play with the ball, the center. When this happens, all his teammates move while he stays still. The mistake is really the center’s but because the play doesn’t start until he snaps the ball, the foul is officially called on his teammates, like this:

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Announcing Football 201: All About Positions

The Super Bowl is coming up quickly but there’s still enough time to impress your friends or family at their Super Bowl party! In Football 101 we went over why people like football, what down and distance are, how football scoring works, the inside scoop on fantasy football and football betting, how to decipher TV scoreboard graphics, and a great way to start having fun while watching football. Today, we’re announcing the release of our newest course, Football 201. This one is all about the mysteries of football positions. You’ll learn all about each of various positions in football: quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end, offensive line, defensive line, linebacker, defensive back, and kicker. Our content covers the basics of how to identify each position when you watch football, what responsibilities players in each position are expected to fulfill, and what characters are usually attracted to playing or rooting for each position. At the end of the course you will get a fully unaccredited diploma of graduation, which you can hang on your wall with pride. If you enjoy the course, (and I hope you do!), I’d be thrilled to have you as a regular subscriber to our daily or weekly digests and for Football 301, coming soon! If you haven’t taken Football 101 yet and would like to, click here, or sign up in the form below.

Get started now

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Why shouldn't football players play the Settlers of Catan?

Kevin Clark wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal this week where he describes, with some glee, how the board game Settlers of Catan has become an obsession of some members of the Green Bay Packers football team this season. The article has gone viral. It’s the number one trending topic on Facebook, which tempts users to click on it with the teaser, “Green Bay Packers’ players ‘completely addicted’ to board game, tight end says.” The article is currently the number one search result on Google’s web search for “Settlers of Catan” and also for “Wall Street Journal.” It’s number one on the Wall Street Journal’s self-reported Most Popular articles right now too. The article clearly struck a nerve.

Wikipedia describes Settlers of Catan as a multi-player board game where “players assume the roles of settlers, each attempting to build and develop holdings while trading and acquiring resources. Players are rewarded points as their settlements grow; the first to reach a set number of points is the winner.” Green Bay Packer’s backup quarterback Matt Flynn is quoted in Clark’s article describing the game as “a nonviolent version of Risk.” The Green Bay Packers, especially their offensive line, love it and seem to approach it with a competitive zeal close to that they show for football. Here’s Clark:

The competitive nature of the Green Bay’s Catan tradition is now legendary in the locker room. Two weeks ago, Linsley won the game, but Bakhtiari, who typically hosts the games at his house, had briefly gone outside to cook a chicken for the group. He furiously protested Linsley’s victory because of this.

If one half of the appeal of the article is the humor in a group of grown men taking a board game too seriously, the other half seems to be pointing out that it’s funny for football players to play a game that is as intellectual and intricate as Settlers of Catan. That’s a theme the article hits from start to finish:

There may not be a more unusual bonding tradition in the NFL than the gang of Packers who get together regularly to play a board game called “Settlers of Catan.”

Any player in the locker room will readily admit that it’s a nerdy endeavor.

“The rules of the game can be complex—making it all the funnier that the Packers have embraced it.”

The Packers’ embrace of the game become such a phenomenon that [a local gaming store, Gnome Games] put a sign up that said “Be cool like [Packers tight end] Justin Perillo, play Catan!” The Packer players quickly noticed it. “We thought it was hilarious,” Linsley said.

The message is clear: it’s funny for football players to play a Settlers of Catan because football is cool but not very intellectual and Settlers of Catan is intellectual but not very cool. I believe that the article has been viewed and forwarded and shared and tweeted so many times primarily because of the perceived incongruity of football players spending their leisure time in an activity that’s so unlike football.

I don’t blame Clark one bit for taking this approach. Not only is this a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” moment but I enjoyed the article. It was well written and it made me want to hang out with the Green Bay Packers. What bothers me is the underlying assumption about football not being an intellectual pursuit. A big part of my rationale for writing Dear Sports Fan is that I don’t believe the gap between sports and non-sport activities is as great as many people think it is and I don’t believe there should be as large a divide between sports fans and non-sports fans as there is. This article and the response to it widens the cultural divide over sports ever so slightly by encouraging people to think it’s unusual and funny for football players to play an intellectual board game like Settlers of Catan.

Football is an incredibly complex game that requires not only amazing physical feats from its players but also remarkable mental acuity. Every player is expected to learn (simple memorization will fail when decisions need to be made so quickly and under such intense pressure) up to a thousand plays in their own time using mostly diagrams. Then, when a play is called in the middle of a football game, they have to recall what they and at least what their neighboring teammates do to execute the play. And it’s not like the play names help very much. Football language is as obtuse as diner short-hand and each team has their own language. Here’s an example of a play call as described by Kansas City quarterback Alex Smith in a Kansas City Star article:

“There’s times I’m in the huddle and I might go, ‘Alright, listen up for the call here fellas,’ and they know it’s gonna be a doozy,” Smith said. “We’ve got ‘shift to halfback twin right open, swap 72 all-go special halfback shallow cross wide open.’”

Understanding a play call is just the start. NFL football players need to be tuned into the exact situation within each game and have an encyclopedic understanding of their opponents. Nowhere is this more true than in New England, where the Patriots head coach Bill Belichick terrorizes his team with his own perfect recall and penchant for impromptu pop quizzes. You know how I know this? Another article by Kevin Clark (and Daniel Barbarisi) in the Wall Street Journal! Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

“According to players, if a younger member of the team offers an answer, Belichick will often ask a studious veteran if that player is correct. Evans particularly remembers Belichick doing this with star quarterback Tom Brady and then-backup Matt Cassel. As Evans tells it, Belichick would ask a detailed question: “Hey, we’re in the high red zone, it’s second-and-six from the 18. What’s Indianapolis’ favorite blitz?” Cassel would answer “overloading the weak side.” Then Belichick would turn to Brady and ask “do you concur?” On the times Brady said the backup was incorrect, the room would erupt with laughter.”

I don’t mean to be a kill-joy. There is something instinctively unexpected about 350 pound world-class athletes sitting down to play Settlers of Catan. Kevin Clark’s Wall Street Journal article captured that humor with grace and not a trace of meanness. The problem is that the article and our enjoyment of it furthers some unnecessary and damaging misconceptions about the nature of sports, sports fans, and athletes. The Green Bay Packers compete in a high-stakes workplace with intense physical and mental demands. Is it really surprising that some of them keep themselves primed intellectually and competitively by playing an brainy board game?

2015 AFC Championship Preview Indianapolis at New England

Hi everyone,

It’s a very exciting time in the football season for football fans and non-fans alike. There are only three games left! That’s right. This Sunday, the four teams left in the playoffs will play in two semifinal games which are confusingly called the NFC and AFC Championship games, and the winners will go on to play in the Super Bowl on February 1st. To preview this weekend’s action, I asked my friend Brendan to come back on the podcast.

The AFC Championship Game

NFL Football — Sunday, January 18, 2015 — Indianapolis Colts at New England Patriots, 6:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

The one thing television commentators are most likely to say about this game.
The one thing we would say if we were television commentators.
The player on each team most likely to be the star if their team wins the game and why. For New England, our choices were Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski (but also Legarrette Blount and Darrell Revis because we had trouble choosing.) For Indianapolis, our choices were T.Y Hilton and Vontae Davis.
Who we want to win and who we think is going to win
And much, much more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

18 days until the Super Bowl

Union Civil War general Phillip Sheridan is credited with saying, “If I owned Texas and hell, I’d rent Texas and live in hell.” A modern day equivalent of that could be, “If I owned an NFL football team and was elected President of the United States, I’d resign immediately and go back to work on my football team.” Football is the biggest sport in America today. The most valuable of the 32 National Football League (NFL) teams has been valued at over $3 billion dollars. 46 of the 50 most watched sporting events on television in 2013 were football games and in recent years, around 75% of all American televisions have been tuned to football for the Super Bowl. It often seems like no matter where you turn, someone is talking about football.

For people who don’t understand or enjoy football, the experience of living in today’s football obsessed world can be, in turns, annoying, frustrating, confusing, or curiously compelling. As a football fan and the founder of Dear Sports Fan, my goal is to make football understandable so that you have an ease in football-laden situations that you didn’t have before. My goal isn’t to convert you into a football fan, but if you find that happening, I’ll be the first to welcome you into the fold.

If you want to learn the basics of football in time for this year’s Super Bowl, sign up for our Football 101 course. It’s the easiest way to learn football, and I promise that by the time you’re through, you’ll be able to impress the football fan in your life with your newfound knowledge.

In this free course, you’ll learn all about why people like football, what down and distance are, how football scoring works, the inside scoop on fantasy football and football betting, how to decipher TV scoreboard graphics, and finally my favorite way to start having fun while watching football. At the end of the course you will get a fully unaccredited diploma of graduation, which you can hang on your wall with pride. If you enjoy the course, (and I hope you do!), I’d be thrilled to have you as a regular subscriber to our daily or weekly digests and for Football 201, coming soon!

Get started now

Three lessons about free thought from the New England Patriots

In football, like many other pursuits, it’s important to abide by the rules of the game. Football is chock full of technicalities; intricate rules which mandate when and where players can move down to the inch, how teams can set up for plays, how players can dress, and even the minute details that determine the difference between a catch, a fumble, or an incompletion. In addition to its deep and complicated rules, football (like so many other aspects of life), also has a set of conventions. These unwritten rules are so woven into the culture of football that they seem as incontrovertible as the rules themselves. Convention has a powerful impact on how football games are played but as long as everyone abides by them they don’t have a significant impact on who wins football games. The New England Patriots, led by their brusquely radical coach Bill Bellichick are the one team that shows over and over again that they know the difference between a convention and a rule and that they are willing (and gleefully excited?) to break with convention in order to win football games. This past weekend, the Patriots beat the Baltimore Ravens 35-31 in the Divisional Round of the NFL playoffs. It was a close game and the Patriots might easily have lost the game if they had prepared for the game and reacted to its events in a conventional way. Let’s examine some of the conventions the Patriots broke and how then benefited from breaking them.

Teams have playbooks and stick to them: In the NFL, the team playbook is a top-secret document of monumental importance. When players are cut, the conventional phrase used is, “Pick up your playbook and go see the coach.” Teams are obsessive about keeping the design and terminology of their offense secret. Minnesota Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway was quoted in an ESPN article saying this of NFL playbooks “you always have it with you. That’s the one thing that’s sacred to football. It has all our secrets.” The issue with all this secrecy is that it creates an assumption that teams run a set of plays that is particular to them from game to game and season to season and that these plays give them an advantage over other teams. The Patriots don’t particularly believe this. In 2006 the Hartford Courant wrote an article about this element of New England Patriotism and quoted Bellichick as saying, “It’s kind of there as a reference manual… I’m sure teams have our playbook.” The Patriots are less protective of their own playbook in part because they are more resourceful than other teams in sourcing and installing new plays. As we’ll see later, one of the biggest factors in their win over the Ravens was a set of plays which were inspired by Alabama’s college football team and one of the Patriots’ NFL competitors.
Lesson: Don’t be a one or even a ten trick pony. Focus on flexibility and fit your tactics to the task at hand.
Balance is good: Offensive football plays are generally divided into two main groups: running plays and passing plays. A running play is when the quarterback takes the ball and hands it to someone behind the line of scrimmage where the ball was when the play started. A passing play is when the quarterback tries to throw the ball across or down the field to one of his teammates. Although football has generally been evolving over the past twenty years into a league where teams pass more and more of the time, most teams abide by the convention that they should use a mix of running plays and passing plays during a game. There’s no rule against a team running all the time or throwing all the time but the common belief is that if you slant your tactics too far in one direction or the other, you give up the element of surprise and a defense that knows what is coming will find it easier to stop what you’re trying to do. In this weekend’s game against the Ravens, the Patriots ran the ball seven out of the 58 offensive plays they used and not a single time in the decisive second half. The Patriots believed they could exploit a Baltimore pass defense that Football Outsiders ranked 15th in the league more easily than their run defense which Football Outsiders ranked 5th in the league and they didn’t care who knew it, nor were they going to stop doing it once it started to work.
Lesson: If you find a competitive advantage, use it. Don’t let convention soften your advantages.
A football team looks like this: Football is a very ritualistic game. In a normal game, the two teams will line up against each other in 100 to 120 plays that each begin from a stand-still. This rigid structure is what makes football perhaps the most tactically interesting of all the major sports but it can also lead to rigidity in thought. Sometimes this rigid thought leads coaches or general managers to believe that a player who does not “look the type” cannot succeed. For decades (and still perhaps to some extent today,) this was played out in the sad discrimination against Black quarterbacks. Even today, players with unusual body types for their position, like short wide receivers (the Patriots have two starting wide receivers under six-feet tall) find their path to the NFL more difficult than their taller competition. Another way this plays out on the football field is in what blend of players a team uses and in what formations they set them up in. The Patriots have been more flexible about this than other NFL teams for years. In the early 2000s, when the Patriots won three Super Bowls, one of their best players was named Troy Brown. During the Patriots first two Super Bowl seasons, Brown was one of their leading wide receivers. In their run to the playoffs in 2004, the team suffered a series of defensive injuries, so they used Brown as a cornerback. They won the Super Bowl again. The Patriots also demonstrate flexibility in how they deploy players. A traditional formation on offense calls for a quarterback, five offensive linemen, one tight end, and a combination of running backs and wide receivers to fill out the eleven man team. In 2010, the Patriots shook up the league by regularly deploying two tight ends that were both threats to catch the ball. They led the league in points scored that season.
Just this weekend, the Patriots subverted the norms of football even farther when they ran four plays against the Ravens with only four offensive linemen on the field. This was extremely clever because the convention of having five offensive linemen on the field is bolstered by a rule which requires that exactly five players on the offense declare themselves as “ineligible receivers” on every play. What this means is that those players cannot catch a pass and run with the ball, nor can they run down the field to hit a defender while the quarterback has the ball. It’s generally assumed that these restrictions apply to offensive linemen but it’s not a rule. When the Patriots used four offensive linemen, they were potentially putting themselves at a disadvantage. There’s a reason why offensive linemen are behemoths with overly developed protective instincts. Without good offensive linemen, the defense would pummel the quarterback before he has a chance to throw the ball. This is especially true if the defense knows the offense is going to pass! By putting a smaller player on the field (and one who could only run backwards and could not touch the ball,) the Patriots were risking the safety of their quarterback and their ability to win. What they relied on and what indeed happened is that the defense was so confused by what was going on and so bound by convention, that they treated the ineligible receiver as a real threat. They took players away from attacking the quarterback to follow this ineligible receiver around. It wouldn’t have confused them forever but it worked for four plays and that might have been enough.
Lesson: Don’t allow convention to blind your common sense and by all means, if you can better your chances by legally and morally taking advantage of someone else’s devotion to conventional thought, do so.

The Patriots radical thought is not all good. It gives them a somewhat cold-blooded approach to personnel decisions. They understand the cost of paying a player a salary during their twilight years in the NFL based on performance in their prime years and so they err on the side of trading or cutting players slightly before the end of their primes. In making these decisions, they don’t seem to care at all if the player is a fan favorite or even very much about whether they are beloved by their teammates. It also means they knowingly choose to take risks on players that other teams may be wary of for off-the-field reasons. Tight end Aaron Hernandez, one of the two tight-ends the Patriots used in 2010 to lead the league in offense, is now awaiting trial for murder. For the most part though, the Patriots are good for the league. They encourage innovation and are a fine exhibition of how intellect and design can win in even the most muscle-bound competitions. Plus, they’re fun to watch. You never know what they’ll try next.

How does icing work in hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does icing work in hockey? No matter how much hockey I watch, I continue to be confused by icing. It seems like the refs will just randomly blow the whistle sometimes when the puck gets shot down the rink and then the announcers say it’s icing.

Thanks,
Gil

Dear Gil,

In hockey there are two types of calls that the refs make. There are penalties and then there are infractions. When the ref calls a foul, he or she sends one or more players off the ice into the penalty box for two or more minutes. Infractions are for lesser offenses. They are like the misdemeanors of the hockey world. Of all the infractions, icing is perhaps the most important one. In this post, I’ll explain what icing is and why it is so important in hockey.

Icing happens a player sends the puck directly from their side of the rink all the way past the goal line on the opposite side of the rink without one of the player’s teammates touching the puck and without any player on the other team having had a chance to play the puck. The team that shot the puck down the ice is penalized for icing the puck by bringing the puck all the way back to their defensive zone to restart play. Additionally, the team that has violated the icing rule is not allowed to change players while the other team can. As you might be able to guess from the rule’s description and penalty, icing is a rule designed to slant the game towards the offense by constraining the defense. Without the icing rule, a team trapped in their own end of the rink, frantically playing defense, would be able to blindly shoot the puck the length of the ice to relieve the pressure the other team is putting on them. With the icing rule, a team that does this is stuck with the same (usually very tired) players on the ice while their opposition gets to roll out a fresh set of players to set up on offense.

One thing that’s a little bit tricky about the icing rule is that it is not based on intent, only geography. It makes no distinction between a desperate defensive player who flings the puck all the way from their own goal line and a player skating up the rink on offense who dumps the puck into their offensive zone intending to retrieve it, but lets the puck go just inches on their side of the ice by mistake. Both players would be called for icing but the second scenario is much harder to see. That could be why the rule seems random to you.

Before we go into why the rule is so important, there are two key wrinkles we should cover. First — a team that is on the penalty kill (is playing with fewer players on the ice because of a penalty or series of penalties) is exempt from icing. Down a man, they can throw the puck all the way down the ice with a clear conscience. Second — it used to be that icing would not be called until the team not icing the puck had skated back to their end of the rink and touched the puck. That led to some exciting races, because remember that if a teammate of the player who iced the puck touches it first, it’s not icing. Unfortunately, it also led to a lot of horrible injuries. Normally players will let up a little if they are skating directly into the boards, but if an icing call was at stake, they didn’t. Two players, skating full speed towards unforgiving boards is not good. So, in 2013, the NHL finally adopted the “no-touch” icing rules that were prevalent in other leagues. These rules dictate that when a puck has been iced, the icing team can still race to negate the icing penalty but the end point of the race is the red face-off dot closest to the puck, not the puck itself.

Icing calls are frequently pivotal in a hockey game because, second to fouls that give one team a numerical advantage, icing is the most punitive rule in the sport. Hockey is not nearly as territorial as, say, American Football, but having a face-off in a team’s offensive zone rather than the neutral zone or defensive zone can be a big deal. The fact that icing creates this situation while also giving the offensive team an opportunity to substitute players while the other team cannot, can be a very big deal. If you want to do a little study, watch a few hockey games and keep track of the number of times your team gets a legitimate scoring chance directly from an offensive zone face-off following an icing call, versus any other offensive zone face-off. My guess is that icing will result in a much higher percentage of scoring chances.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is a corner three in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a corner three in basketball? I hear announcers talking about it and I get that it’s some special kind of three point shot but I don’t know what makes it so special.

Thanks,
Lora

Dear Lora,

This is going to sound a little like a definition by repetition but a corner three is a three point shot in basketball taken from the corner of a basketball court. If you picture a basketball court, the three point line is the largest curve that arcs from the baseline on one side of the basket up towards the center of the court before curving back to the baseline on the other side of the basket. It is not one half of a circle, it’s a part of an ellipse. What this means is that the distance from any point on the three point line to the basket varies depending on its position. If you draw a line from the basket straight up the court, (perpendicular to the baseline), it will hit the three point line at its farthest from the basket. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), that distance is 23.75 feet. If you follow the baseline towards the corner of the court, you will hit the three point line at its closest to the basket. In the NBA, that distance is 22 feet. The corner three is the shortest shot a basketball player can take to earn their team three points if it goes in. Based just on this mundane 1.75 foot distinction, the corner three has become a cultural and tactical lodestone in the NBA.

The three point line was introduced to the NBA in 1979 and it had an instant impact on the game. Before the three point shot, basketball was dominated by big men like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If all shots were worth the same amount, why wouldn’t the game be dominated by the players who could make the closest shots most easily? For the first twenty five years of its existence the three point line gave a measure of equality to smaller players who could shoot three-point shots with some consistency but it didn’t materially change the nature of the game. The most dominant players in basketball were still giants like Hakeem Olajuwon and Shaquille O’Neill or guys half a foot shorter like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant who used their ferocious athleticism to drive to the hoop and convert lay-ups, dunks, or get fouled. Sure, championship teams often had a player or two who specialized in lurking at the three point line, ready to catch a pass and shoot a quick three pointer, and yes, these guys frequently preferred the shorter corner three to the longer threes on the court (and yes, they were stereotypically less athletic and white) but this was a side-show to the main attraction.

In the past five years, this has started to change, and all signs point to us being at the front edge of a basketball revolution sparked by the corner three. When Michael Lewis published his book, Moneyball, in 2003, he didn’t just popularize the statistical revolution in baseball, he also helped legitimize the use of statistics in other sports as well. Basketball has found more success in using statistics than football or hockey, perhaps because its relatively small number of players and high number of scores and scoring attempts create simpler and better data sets than other sports. The relatively clear conclusion of a statistical analysis of basketball shots tells teams that shots from very close to the basket and three point shots from the corner are by far the most effective and efficient tactics in the game. Teams and players have acted on this knowledge and by 2015 probably 26 or 27 of the 30 NBA teams use offenses designed to maximize the team’s chances of ending possessions with either a lay-up, dunk, or corner three. Today, it’s not just the stereotypical unathletic white guy who lurks in the corner and jacks three pointers, now it’s the best players in the league who do that.

No combination of team and player represent this new way of playing better than the Houston Rockets and James Harden. Kirk Goldsberry wrote a wonderful article about this for Grantland. If you want to learn more about how the corner three is changing basketball, I suggest you go read his article! Here’s a short excerpt that summarizes the emotional and perceptual issue that basketball fans over the age of 30 are having with watching this new style.

For those of us who grew up watching Bird, Magic, and Jordan, there’s an increasing dissonance between what we perceive to be dominant basketball and what actually is dominant basketball. Sometimes the two are aligned, but they seem to be increasingly divergent — and perhaps the most tragic analytical realization is that the league’s rapidly growing 3-point economy has inherently downgraded some of the sport’s most aesthetically beautiful skill sets.

Like everything in sports, the corner three is subject to change. Whether it’s a rule change or simply a strategic adjustment, something will come along that threatens the dominance of today’s ascendant basketball shot. Until that time though, watch out for the open player in the corner!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer