Understanding Sports Archives - Page 29 of 43

How do punts work in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

How do punts work in football?

Thanks,
Sara

— — —

Dear Sara,

The punt is a unique and important play in football. Punting is the most common way that possession moves from one team to the other. As such, it’s a transitional moment, and like many transitional moments, it’s fascinating because it has so many different possible outcomes.

To understand the punt, it’s important to have a quick refresher on how downs work in football. In the National Football League, whenever a team has the ball, they have four downs or attempts to move the ball ten yards. Thus, first down and ten means they are on their first chance of four to move the ball ten yards. If they run the ball two yards on their first try, the next down will be called second down and eight (to go). If they try four times and don’t travel ten yards, the other team will get the ball wherever the first team had it when they failed to get those last yards. Instead of allowing that to happen, a team can (and often does) choose to kick the ball. If they are close enough to their opponent’s end-zone, teams will usually try a field goal (kick the ball between the uprights, get three points.) If not, they usually make the decision to punt the ball.

When a team lines up on fourth down to punt the ball, instead of a quarterback behind the center, there’s a specialist player called the punter back there. Being a punter in the NFL is pretty awesome. Last year, punters in the NFL made between $495,000 and $3,250,000! It’s a nice job, but there are only 32 of them around. Punters don’t have quite the pressure on them that field goal kickers do but, like their field goal kicking brethren, they rarely get hit. The punters job is to stand about fifteen yards behind the line of scrimmage, catch the snap that comes spiraling back to him, and then punt the ball.

Lots of things can happen once a team begins to punt:

If it goes out of bounds, the team that didn’t punt (the receiving team) gets the ball wherever it left the field, no matter how high above the ground it was.
If the ball lands on the field and no one from the receiving team touches it, the punting team will race down the field and touch the football. The receiving team gets the ball wherever the punting team first touches it.
If the punt lands in the end-zone or goes out the back of the end-zone, it is a touchback and the receiving team gets the ball on the twenty yard line.
If a player from the receiving team catches the punt (or picks it up from the ground) he can run with the football. Wherever he gets tackled or goes out of bounds is where the receiving team gets to start with the ball. Normal rules apply to this runner, so if the kicking team can knock the ball out of his hands, that’s a fumble and fair game for anyone to pick up.
If someone on the receiving team tries to catch the ball but he flubs it and it falls to the ground, or if the punt just bounces off anyone from the receiving team, then the kicking team can grab the ball and they get it back for their offense! There’s usually a wild free-for-all when this happens.
Because it’s potentially pretty dangerous to be looking up in the air to catch a punt while players from the kicking team are sprinting at you trying to hit you as hard as they can, the player from the receiving team who is tasked with catching the ball can call a Fair Catch by waving their hand up in the air before catching the punt. If they call a fair catch, the opposing team is not allowed to hit them but they cannot run with the ball either. The receiving team gets the ball wherever it is caught.
The punt can be blocked by the receiving team before it gets going. When this happens, there’s a scramble to grab the ball. If the receiving team, which blocked the ball, gets it first, they can run with it as far as they can. If the kicking team gets it, they give up possession wherever they get control of the ball. In the odd case that the kicking team catches the blocked punt before it hits the ground, they can run with it!

Football is all about technicalities, isn’t it? They’re more fun when you understand them. Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how punts can be exciting for each team.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

How does the Ryder Cup work?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does the Ryder Cup work? I know it’s an international golf tournament but I’m not sure how it’s different from other golf tournaments.

Thanks,
Alf

— — —

Dear Alf,

The Ryder Cup is a men’s golf competition that happens every two years between a team made up of golfers from the United States and a team of European golfers. It’s quite a bit different from most golf tournaments but I think that it’s actually more exciting and accessible for people (like me,) who aren’t golf fans ordinarily. Although it’s funny to joke about how complicated the event is — Bleacher Report’s intro to the Ryder Cup by Tyler Conway made me laugh out loud at its introductory statement, ” The 2014 Ryder Cup begins in less than a week, which means it’s time for one of the best biennial traditions in golf: explaining how this strange event works.” — but I don’t think it’s all that hard to understand. Let’s run through how it works and you can tell me what you think.

The Teams

Each team is made up of 12 golfers. Each team has a captain who, as part of his responsibilities, gets to choose three of the 12 players. Somewhat interestingly, although both captains are picked by continental golf league leaders (the PGA executive committee in the U.S. and the European Tour Committee in Europe,) only the European players get a chance to vote to ratify the selection. If a U.S. player doesn’t like his captain, too bad. The other nine players are selected automatically by selecting off the top of ranked lists of top golfers intended to reflect performance.

Tournament Format

The tournament is held over the course of three days. During those days, 28 separate competitions, called matches, are played. Each match is worth one point: a win gives a team one point, a loss, zero, and a tie, one half point. Whichever team has the most points after the 28 matches are complete wins the Ryder Cup. It is possible for the two teams to end the tournament with 14 points each. If that happens, the side that won the tournament two years ago keeps the title! This seems like a shockingly unsatisfying way to resolve a tie but, really, so many ways of resolving ties in sports, like shootouts in soccer, are unsatisfying. There’s something traditional in sports about the idea of having a tie favor the reigning champion. In boxing, this unwritten rule goes at least as far back as 1973. It states that, “you can’t dethrone a champion unless you beat him badly.”

There are three different formats for matches during the Ryder Cup: singles, fourballs, and foursomes. Of the 28 matches, eight are foursomes, eight are fourballs, and 12 are singles. Each of the 12 players on both sides must play one of the 12 singles matches but the captains have free-reign to select whoever they want to play in the foursome and fourballs matches with the only restriction being that no single player is allowed to play more than five total matches.

Singles

Players are paired against a single opponent. They play eighteen holes of golf together in direct competition. For each hole, whoever completes it successfully in fewer strokes gets one point. If they take the same number of hits to compete a hole, they each get half a point. Whoever has the most points at the end of the round wins the match for their side.

Fourballs

Fourballs is just like singles, except instead of two players, there are four in two teams of two. Each of the four players plays each hole but for each hole, only the best score from each team counts. For example, if USA 1 gets a six and USA 2 gets a four while Europe 1 gets a 3 and Europe 2 gets an 8, the scores from USA 1 and Europe 2 would be discarded and only the two best scores from each team would be compared. USA 2’s four would get lined up against Europe 1’s three and Team Europe would get the point for that hole. This format is also called “best ball.” It’s theoretically possible that a player could go through an entire round of fourballs and never have their score count if their partner does better on every single hole.

Foursomes

Foursomes is an even more intertwined teamwork based format. Like fourballs, each match is played with teams of two, but instead of both teammates playing each hole, they use a single ball and alternate strokes. If USA 1 drives the ball off the tee, USA 2 has to hit the second shot on the hole. They continue alternating until they get the ball in the hole or one of them sues for divorce. Just kidding, there’s no divorce allowed, but I can’t imagine a sports format more clearly designed to create friction between partners.

How Score is Kept

Unlike regular golf tournaments, the total, cumulative number of strokes a golfer takes doesn’t matter. Teams and players concentrate only on beating their opponent, so the score is kept relativistically between the two golfers or teams. CBS Sports’ guide to the Ryder Cup format does a great job with the scoring vocabulary for this tournament and match play in general:

2 up thru 11: A player/twosome who is 2 up thru 11 has won two more holes than their opponent(s) through 11 holes.

All Square thru 15: The match is tied through 15 holes.

Just like within a playoff series or soccer shootout, once a team is mathematically eliminated, the match is over. If a team is up by more strokes than there are holes left, the players pack up their bags and walk off the course. The exception to this is if a team is up by more matches than there are matches left — no matter what, teams play all 28 matches.

So When is it On?

The 2014 Ryder Cup is from Friday, September 26 to Sunday, September 28. It’s being televised on the Golf Channel (there’s a golf channel? yes, a golf channel) and NBC. The thing is… it’s in Scotland, still a part of the United Kingdom and still between five to eight hours from the continental United States. Play starts at 2:35 a.m. ET on Friday, 3 a.m. ET Saturday, and a civilized 6:15 a.m. ET on Sunday. If you do decide to watch some of it, I would recommend the foursomes matches on Friday or Saturday which have the highest potential for excitement and comedy and begin at 8:15 a.m. ET.

Good luck waking up and watching, let me know what you think,
Ezra Fischer

What is the magic number in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the magic number in baseball?

Thanks,
Mike

— — —

Dear Mike,

The “magic number” is a calculation used to state how far a team is from achieving a goal. Most frequently, it’s a metric that show how close a team is to winning their regular season division or conference title, or to making the playoffs.

The term “magic number” is used in other sports as well as baseball, but these days, with the baseball playoffs quickly approaching, we’re seeing it most often in baseball news stories. Some recent examples are this article on The Detroit Sports Site which begins, “The Detroit Tigers’ Magic Number to clinch the AL Central stayed stuck on seven with Sunday’s loss in Kansas City.” or this article on SB Nation’s LA Dodgers blog, True Blue L.A., entitled, “MLB standings 2014: Dodgers and Giants both lose, magic number now 5.” There are websites devoted completely to following the magic number, like Playoff Magic. We’ll look at their Major League Baseball (MLB) section later. First, let’s talk about how the magic number works.

I find the easiest way of thinking about the magic number is that it is the number of games a team needs to win for them to achieve a goal no matter what another team does. This makes some intuitive sense. Let’s take a simple scenario. There are two games remaining in a season. My team, the Flywheels, is ahead of the Steampunks by two games in the standings. All I have to do is win a single game to make it impossible for the Steampunks to catch up. My magic number to end the season ahead of the Steampunks is therefore one. Let’s say though, that the Steampunks play one of their remaining games before our team, the Flywheels, does. If they lose, then they only have one game left and they are still down by two games in the standings. My magic number moves from one to zero. I don’t need to win any more games to assure myself that I’m going to finish the season ahead of my rivals. A team’s own result can change their magic number but so can another team’s win or loss. The magic number is a relative calculation.

In more complex situations, the magic number is harder to derive by instinct. Luckily, there are a few easy formulas to follow to calculate it. The best follows the logic of our previous example. It’s the second option on the Wikipedia entry about the magic number:

The magic number can also be calculated as WB + GRB – WA + 1, where

WB is the number of wins that Team B has in the season
GRB is the number of games remaining for Team B in the season
WA is the number of wins that Team A has in the season

This second formula basically says: Assume Team B wins every remaining game. Calculate how many games team A needs to win to surpass team B’s maximum total by 1.

Let’s use this formula on our example of the Flywheels and the Steampunks. We didn’t say how many games there had been in the season, only that there were two left. Let’s say it’s a 20 game season. The standings today look like this:

Team A: Flywheels – 12 wins, 6 losses, 2 games remaining
Team B: Steampunks – 10 wins, 8 losses, 2 games remaining

To calculate the Flywheel’s magic number, we take the number of wins the Steampunks have (10) add the number of games remaining for the Steampunks (2) subtract the number of wins that the Flywheels have (12) and add one to get… one! It works!

One important thing about the magic number that makes more sense when you see how it is calculated, is that it can only ever measure the distance between two teams. In a three way race for a division title, the leading team will have a magic number in comparison to each of the teams chasing them. If someone says that a team has a single magic number showing how far they are from achieving a goal, it’s safe to assume that every other team other than the one used to calculate that number has been mathematically eliminated from contention.

Returning to Playoff Magic’s MLB page, here’s one example of how the magic number is working in this year’s run to the baseball playoffs.

The AL or American League Central still has three teams in contention. The Tigers are in the lead with 86 wins after 155 games. The Royals are in second place with 84 wins after 154 games. The Cleveland Indians are running third with 81 wins after 155 games. There are 162 games in a baseball season, so the Tigers and Indians have seven games left while the Royals have eight. The magic number is most easily understood as how many games does a team need to win to stay ahead of the teams behind them even if they win every remaining game. If the Royals win all their remaining games, they’ll end the season with 92 wins. If the Indians win every remaining game, they’ll end the season with 88 wins. To end the season ahead of the Indians, the Tigers need to win a total of 89 games or three more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Indians is three! To end the season ahead of the Royals, the Tigers would need 93 wins or seven more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Royals is seven! Those magic numbers show up in the table on the Tigers’ row. The 5 on the Royals row in the Cleveland Indians column is the Royals magic number in relation to the Indians. In this case, the achievement is not winning the division but ending the season ahead of the Indians.

I hope that helps explain the magic number. In case you’re wondering what the GB means in the standings table, it stands for “games back.” Games back is another story completely but luckily, I wrote all about what “games back” means last year.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What does probable or questionable mean on the NFL injury report?

Dear Sports Fan,

First time playing fantasy football here. What does it mean when someone is listed as Probable or Questionable? If someone (say Andre Ellington) has a Sunday game and has not been seen in practice till Wednesday, is it a sign they won’t start that week? Also, what kind of injuries are the worst? Ankle?

Best regards,
Mengster

— — —

Dear Mengster,

It sounds like you’ve really caught the Fantasy Football bug! As I wrote in my recent post about what it means to start or sit a player in fantasy football, predicting which players on your fantasy team are most likely to play well in their real games is a big part of playing fantasy football. A player who is too injured to play is 100% positive to not score any points for your team, so researching and following your players’ injuries is important business. Luckily for us, NFL teams are required to put out injury reports every day which file all of their players as either healthy or under one of the four possible standard injury designations: out, doubtful, questionable, and probable. It’s actually not luck, the NFL requires teams do this because having this information makes gambling on football and fantasy football games possible. Oh, the NFL wouldn’t say that if you asked it^[1] but it’s true nonetheless.

NFL injury designations are officially tied to percentages. Out = 0% likely to play. Doubtful = 25% likely to play. Questionable = 50% likely to play. Probably = 75% likely to play. In reality, that’s not actually the case. The Wall Street Journal ran an article a few years ago about what the real percentages for these labels were. In it, they discovered that Doubtful players played less than 3% of the time, Questionable was closest to its “proper” percentage, just a little higher than 50% — around 55%. Probably players played more than 90% of the time. Although the article is from 2011 and the stats go back to 2006, I don’t think much has changed. I wrote my own qualitative descriptions of what each designation means in an answer to similar question last year from someone who asked about the injury report:

Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.

When thinking about fantasy football, I generally assume that players listed as “probable” are fine. For players listed as “questionable,” I dig in and do some research about their specific situation. Have they, like you said, been practicing? What kind of injury do they have? Did it knock them out of the last game or were they able to finish? You can generally learn a lot about a “fantasy relevant” player’s injury. For example, in Andre Ellington’s case, I can tell from Rotoworld.com that he “remains on track to play in this week’s game against the 49ers.” So, he’s probably fine for this week. A lot of players, especially running backs (who take the most hits) and veterans will regularly skip a day of practice. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. What you want to watch out for is someone who’s designation gets worse during the week (moves from Probably to Questionable) or someone who wasn’t on the injury at the start of the week but is by the end. Those are both bad signs for their likelihood of playing on Sunday.

In terms of what injuries are the worst, that’s probably worth its own post. I can say from having played fantasy football for years and followed a lot of sports in general, that the injuries which seem to keep players out for the longest are (excluding obvious things like broken bones, torn ligaments, and concussions): high ankle sprains, turf toe, and foot sprains. I know, those things sound less serious than rib or hip injuries, but an athlete lives and dies by his or her ability to plant off one foot and switch directions. You need your ankles, toes, and feet healthy to do that!

Good luck in your fantasy game this weekend,
Ezra

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

It would probably say, “AHH!! A talking league??!”↵

How does the Champions League work?

Dear Sports Fan,

You mentioned in today’s Cue Cards that the European soccer tournament, the Champions league started yesterday. How does the Champions League work? Is it a playoffs or more like the World Cup?

Thanks,
Paul,

— — —

Dear Paul,

The Champions League is the most exciting and prestigious tournament of professional or club teams in Europe and therefore, unless you’re an extremely passionate MLS or South American soccer fan, the world. The Champions League format is more like the World Cup than like a playoffs format that we’re used to in the United States. There is a qualifying stage, a group stage, and then a knockout stage. There are some differences between the Champions League and the World Cup though.

The underlying issue which makes the tournament so complicated, is that the organizers are caught between two goals.

To include all of the domestic league champions in the Champions League
To find the overall best team in the continent.

The first is a hard-and-fast rule: every domestic champion must take part in some way in the Champions League. To achieve the second goal, the tournament has two strategies. First, it allows teams that came in second, third, or even fourth place in stronger leagues to participate in the tournament. The stronger the league, the more Champions League invitations it gets. Second, it stacks the deck so that champions of weaker leagues have to play more games to qualify for the Group Stage of 32 teams than teams from the strongest leagues. The rankings it uses to do this are called the UEFA coefficient in what I can only assume is an attempt to make your brains spill out of your eyes.

Home and Away Games

Throughout the entire Champions League, with only one exception, regardless of whether the tournament is in the qualifying stage, the group stage, or the knock-out stage, teams always play each other twice: once at each team’s home stadium. Three points are rewarded for a win, one for a tie, and zero for a loss. If the tournament calls for deciding just between the two teams playing (in the qualification and knock-out stages) and the two teams have the same number of points after the two games, a system of tie-breakers comes into play. The tie breaking is thankfully not that complicated. Whichever team has scored the most goals in the two games wins. If both teams have scored the same number of goals in the two games against one another, then the team that scored more goals in the game when they played away from their home stadium, qualifies. If that’s not going to work, then the second game of the home and away is extended into overtime. If no goals are scored in overtime, there’s a penalty kick shootout.

The Champions League Qualification Stage

Qualification has four stages: the first qualifying round, the second qualifying round, the third qualifying round, and the play-off round. In each of the four qualifying rounds, the winners from the previous round compete and new teams are added into the mix. For example, the surviving three teams from the six that played in the first qualifying round are joined by 31 teams who have not yet played a game. The play-off round is just like the other qualifying rounds, it’s just called something special because the winners of that round gain admission to the Group Stage of 32 teams. Of the fifty-five teams that take part in the qualifying stage, only ten will make the Group Stage.

The Group Stage

The group stage is when, for casual observers, the tournament really starts. It’s plays out very similarly to the way the World Cup group stage works. The teams are divided into eight groups of four that play each other to determine which sixteen teams (two from each group) make it into the next round. The only real difference is that the home and away game format is used here, so each team plays six games in this stage instead of only three.

The Knockout Round

Again, very similar to the World Cup, the knockout round winnows the field from sixteen teams to eight to four and finally to two. These matches are played like all the preceding matches in the tournament as part of a home and away. The only exception to this is the Champions League final that is played as a single elimination game in a neutral location. Or at least, a pre-ordained location. This year’s final will be held in Berlin on June 6, 2015.

What does it all mean?

It means there’s a lot of great soccer ahead of us! The Group Stage is just beginning, and will continue from September to December. After a civilized winter break, the Knockout round begins in February and dramatically lollygags until the final in June. The deliberative pace of the Champions League reflects the fact that its participating teams are simultaneously involved in their own domestic leagues and tournaments. It’s also reflected in the home and away format and reflective of the slower pace of soccer as a game. This contemplative aspect of soccer is one of the many reasons I love the sport.

Hope you enjoy soccer too, thanks for writing,
Ezra Fischer

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football? Fantasy football owners can’t actually control who plays in a real football game, right? So what gives?

Thanks,
Sal

— — —

Dear Sal,

Ha! I can tell from your question that you understand a little more than you’re letting on. No, of course, you’re right that a fantasy football owner can’t control which real players play in real games each weekend. Like many aspects of fantasy football, this is made more complicated by the fact that fantasy vocabulary shares terms with football but they mean slightly different things in different contexts. The choice to start or sit a player on a fantasy football team decides whether or not that player’s real stats will count toward the fantasy team’s score for the weekend. Making these choices is a big part of what makes fantasy football so fascinating and addictively torturous for people who play fantasy football. We already published a comprehensive post on how fantasy football works, so we’ll stick just to your question about starting or sitting a player. Here’s how it works.

Fantasy leagues vary greatly in how they are set up, but a fairly standard fantasy team will consist of 16 players. Of those, each week, only the statistics from nine of them will count towards the fantasy team’s total. The decision of which nine players of the 16 should count each week is the choice you’re asking about. Players that a fantasy owner selects to have their stats count are said to “start” or “be starting.” Players whose statistics an owner chooses not to have count are said to “sit” or “be sitting.” These terms mirror the decisions that real football coaches make about players on their roster for reasons of injury, relative skill, game-plan, or other factors, but they decide different things. In real football, the decision determines who plays in the football game and potentially who keeps their job and who gets fired. In fantasy, the decisions don’t actually affect the players in question, they only affect the fantasy owner and her fortunes that week.

The interesting thing about the start or sit decision in fantasy football is that fantasy owners have to make it before the games start each week. It’s all about prediction. The decision to start one player over another can be a determining factor in a fantasy game. For example, this weekend, I decided to start Jarett Boykin, a wide receiver on the Green Bay Packers, over Brandon Marshall, a wide receiver on the Chicago Bears. Boykin caught one pass for six yards. Marshall? Five catches, 48 yards, and three touchdowns. If I had chosen to start Marshall, and therefore had his stats count towards my totals, I would have won. Instead, I started Boykin and lost. Why did I make this decision? Well, similar to a real coach, I made it based on injury, relative skill, game-plan, and other factors. Marshall had a badly sprained ankle, my twitter feed was telling me he wasn’t likely to even play, and I thought that Green Bay would have an easy time throwing the ball against the Jets and Boykin would benefit from it.

Hindsight is 20/20 but foresight is variable. The more information about football games a fantasy owner has, the more reading and listening and watching and studying they do, and the better they are at compiling the data in their brains and their guts, the better their foresight is going to be. The more work a fantasy owner does, the better his or her start or sit decisions are likely to be and the more likely they are to win. This is the logic that makes start or sit decisions such an integral part of fantasy football and fantasy football such a force in driving interest in the NFL and the sport of football.

Hope this all makes sense,
Ezra Fischer

Why do people like volleyball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like volleyball?

Just wondering,
Jennie

— — —

Hi Jennie,

Volleyball is a funny sport when you think about it. I mean, why shouldn’t the ball hit the ground? Why do teams of people go to such lengths to keep it from hitting the ground that they look like semi-trained seals? Like most sports, once you accept the invented framework of the game, it’s a lot of fun. Volleyball has a few features that make it exceptionally fun to play and to watch. Here they are:

Volleyball has great vocabulary words

How can you argue with a sport that has wonderful words for so many of its actions?

To bump the ball is to hit it under-hand with clasped hands, usually to a teammate.
That teammate often sets the ball, or hits it gently up with two outstretched hands facing each other.
If you’re tall enough or can jump high enough, it’s possible to spike the ball. This is when you make contact with the ball above the level of the net and send it hurtling along a downwards path towards your opponent’s side of the court.
If that opponent has the reflexes of the cat and their fearless, springy athleticism, they might be able to rescue the ball right before it hits the ground with a bump. This is called a dig.
My favorite term, although I’ve never seen it done personally, is the six-pack. No, not soda or beer, and not stomach muscles either, this refers to the rare occasion when a spike bounces off an opponent’s head, or in the case of this absurd video, three opponents’ heads. In the bad old days of volleyball lore, the spikee owed the spiker a six-pack of their choosing.

Volleyball punishes selfishness

This is probably my favorite part about volleyball, both as a player and a viewer: volleyball punishes selfishness. How does it do that? In volleyball, a team loses a point if the ball hits the ground on their side of the court. Each side of the court is roughly thirty feet by thirty feet and each team consists of six people. This is a reasonably small area for that many players to be at the same time. Compared to soccer or even basketball, it’s very crowded. Keeping the ball in the air is hard enough but if a selfish teammate tries to wander into someone else’s area to hit the ball, it almost always ends badly. The first problem is that there usually isn’t enough time or space for the person being encroached upon to get out of the way. Even if they are able to skedaddle and the poacher hits the ball, he or she is usually out of position to respond to the next hit for the other team.

In this way, volleyball teaches great lessons about teamwork and… revenge. I have fond memories of beating selfish jocks in gym class with a team of kids they wouldn’t ever dream of losing to in a sporting event.

Volleyball scales well with the player

Volleyball is unusually flexible in terms of who can play it. It remains fun whether you play it with young children, on a recreational league team with other aspiring volleyball players, or competitively in college, a professional league, or international play. At all levels, the object remains the same (keep the ball from hitting your side of the court, make the ball hit the other side of the court,) but the challenges vary. When played with beginners, the main challenge is just hitting the ball over the court. With intermediate players, hitting the ball over gives way to working with your team to hit the ball over in a way that makes it more difficult for the other team to respond to. At the highest level, the challenge transforms into out strategizing and executing your opponent. The complexity of the tactics available are impressive. It’s no coincidence that the Wikipedia page on volleyball has pictures of both Buddhist monks and nudists playing the sport.

It has a good mix of competitive and non-competitive aspects

One of the things that turns a lot of people off sports is how thoroughly devoted to competition most sports are. Volleyball, especially at more beginner levels, isn’t really like this. If the biggest challenge in the game, as we wrote above, is just to get the ball over the net, then it really isn’t that competitive of a sport. Sure, the team that fails to get the ball over the net fewer times wins, but that’s really a judged team activity as opposed to a competitive activity. Not until intermediate or expert play does volleyball become a sport where players actively engage with opponents they are trying to beat.

At high levels, it’s incredibly athletic

Watching really great athletes play volleyball is incredibly. Top level volleyball requires incredible reflexes and hand-eye coordination, explosive jumping power, strength and endurance, all of which is exhibited in this wonderful video from 2011 World league play:

That was an amazing play by two great teams playing a very cool sport.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Why do quarterbacks slide?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do quarterbacks slide? I guess there’s some rule that you can’t touch the quarterback if he slides with the ball? Seems kind of unfair to me.

Thanks,
Fred

— — —

Dear Fred,

Why do quarterbacks slide? It’s a good question. You’re right that they are taking advantage of a rule when they do slide but it might not be as unfair as you think. We’ll look into the rule, discuss why it is that quarterbacks slide and other positions don’t, and check out a couple creative ways that players really do look to get an advantage out of sliding.

The sliding rule comes from a set of scenarios that end a play in football. In the NFL, that list includes criteria like, “when a forward pass (legal or illegal) is incomplete,”when the ball is out-of-bounds,” and the one that we care about in this post, “when a runner declares himself down by sliding feet first on the ground. The ball is dead the instant the runner touches the ground with anything other than his hands or his feet.” This rule applies equally to all the players on the field, quarterbacks are not special when it comes to sliding. Anyone who has the ball, can at any time for any reason, make the play end by sliding feet forward on to the ground. Once the play is over, of course, no one is allowed to hit the player with the ball unless they’ve already committed irrevocably to the motion of hitting the ball-carrier before the play ended. When we talk about rules on this site, we often end up categorizing them into rules intended to create even and exciting competition and rules intended to create relative safety for a sport’s participants. This one is definitely a safety rule but it has a competitive wrinkle built-in. As opposed to when a player dives forward with the ball, a player that slides feet forwards only advances the ball to the place where they first started their dive. Their team therefore loses out on a territorial advantage if a player decides to slide feet first.

The reason why sliding is commonly thought of as something only quarterbacks can do is because it’s usually something only quarterbacks actually do in practice. Part of this is tactical — there’s often a much greater difference between the starting quarterback and the backup compared to the starting running back or wide receiver and the next one on the team. It’s more harmful for a team to lose a quarterback than virtually any other position. Part of it is also cultural though. It’s simply not accepted for a running back or a wide receiver to voluntarily end a play by sliding the way it is for a quarterback. Quite the contrary, even running backs or wide receivers who run out-of-bounds or dive head first to avoid a hit are looked on slightly askance. As the impact of brain injury becomes more well understood, (and perhaps more importantly for this conversation, the protocols for handling potential brain injuries, because they take players off the field for a time, become more seriously enforced,) this cultural norm about sliding might change.

Some of the leagues craftier quarterbacks still look to get an advantage out of sliding. Not only do they protect themselves but, they think, what else can I get out of this process for my team and me? In Tom Brady’s case he thought, “maybe I can injure (or at least either scare or anger) my opponent while sliding.” So, he slid with his cleats up, like way up… like a baseball player sliding into second trying to cancel out a double-play. That’s a pretty perverse thing to do — to turn a move designed to guarantee one’s own safety into an attack. Smart man. Andrew Luck, quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts seemed to have been working the rules in a preseason game this year when he kind of slid sideways in a rolling kind of movement. Backup quarterback and connoisseur of treachery, Matt Hasselbeck, had this to say about it:

“It was sneaky,” backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said through a wry smile. “It wasn’t really a slide and it wasn’t really a dive.

“I thought he was trying to get away with the barrel-roll. I think he was trying to score. (If) nobody tags him down, he gets back up and runs. Watch the film. Genius.”

The slide in football is pretty much a quarterbacks only move now but I think we’ll begin to see that change over the next couple of years. My concern with the sliding rule, as a person with bad knees, has always been that sliding feet first, with cleats on, isn’t actually a safe move even if the rules say it’s safe. It’s way too easy to catch a cleat on the turf and end up with an injured knee. In college football, sliding is unnecessary because any contact with anything but hands or feet when a player has the ball immediately ends the play. That’s a safer rule and it doesn’t steal much excitement from the game at all. Maybe we’ll see that migrate to the NFL in time as well.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

How does the coin toss work in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does the coin toss work in football?

Thanks,
Tod

— — —

Hi Tod,

When I was a kid, I played a lot of soccer, and I was often the captain. The captain’s one job was to go to the center of the field before the start of the game and be a part of the coin toss. It was pretty simple: one team, I think the away team, called ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. Whoever won the coin toss could choose to select either whether they wanted the ball first in the first half or the second half OR they could choose which side of the field they wanted to start on. The other team got the choice which was left over. If you won the toss and took the ball, the other team got to choose which side they started on. If it was windy and you wanted to choose a side, they got to choose which half they started with the ball. Simple, right?

The NFL’s coin toss is a little complicated but it’s not so hard to understand. Take a deep breath and… here we go!

The coin toss helps facilitate a set of decisions that need to be made before the start of an NFL game and before the start of the second half. The decisions are as follows:

Who kicks the ball and who receives the ball?
Which side does each team play on. (The teams will switch sides between the first and second and the third and fourth quarters no matter what.)

Each time these decisions are made, one team gets first choice on one of them and the other team gets first choice on the other. So, if you choose who kicks and who receives, I get to choose which side I want to play on. To make things fair, one team will get to choose which decision to make first in each half.

The coin toss exists only to decide which team gets to choose which decision to make first in the first half versus the second half. The team that wins the coin toss gets to decide: do I want to choose first between kicking and having the side I want in the first half or the second? If they choose the first half, then they get to make that choice immediately. Would they like to kick or receive or would they rather leave that choice to their opponent in the first half and instead choose a side to start on. If the team that wins the coin toss decided they’d rather make that decision in the second half, that’s their right to decide. Choosing to choose in the second half is called “deferring.” Here’s a diagram that shows the set of choices the team that wins the coin toss has:

For more information, the official NFL rulebook is succinct and logical on the subject of the coin toss but not very understandable. Instead, I suggest the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

One of the things that’s interesting to me how the coin toss works in football is that it reveals something about the history of the game. Given the rules, one team could get the ball to start the first and second halves, if they choose to receive in one half and their opponent would rather choose a side to start on in the other half. It’s not necessarily the case, like in my youth soccer experience, that one team starts with the ball in one half and one in the other. This reveals that having the ball wasn’t always seen as an advantage. Football is often said to be a “field position” game, which means that it’s more important where the ball is on the field than who has it. That’s not really true anymore because offenses are so proficient at moving (or matriculating, to use a football cliché) the ball down the field. Now, most teams really do want the ball. In the old days though, football games often went back and forth, with each team having the ball, getting a first down or two, and then punting. If you don’t expect to get several first downs each time you have the ball, then it’s more reasonable to want to start half with your opponent in possession of the ball but way down at their end.

In today’s NFL, teams that win the coin toss almost always defer their choice to the second half. The losing team almost always chooses to receive the kickoff in the first half and the winning team almost always chooses to receive the ball in the second half. This is because it’s a winning strategy. In fact, according to this Bloomberg article, teams that won the coin toss had a .530 winning percentage in 2013. The fact that this has become so formulaic is actually part of why it’s hard to understand how the coin toss works in football. It seems like the team that wins the coin toss by rule gets to receive the kickoff in the second half. It’s more complicated than that but now you know how it works.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Have sports become politics?

Recently, I’ve been divided over what to write on Dear Sports Fan. How much space should I give to the various cultural issues around and within the sports world and how much should I stick to writing about the just the games. In my mind, there’s a three-tier setup being created. There’s the core of sports, which remains the games themselves, and then there’s the next layer that consists of all of the non-game stories that directly affect the game, like trade rumors, injuries, free agency, team chemistry. Finally, there’s the outside layer that consists of stories about athletes or other sports figures but not about sports. The core of my enjoyment of sports remains the games but increasingly, the headlines on most publications covering sports seem to be in the third group. Will Leitch, the founder of Deadspin.com, wrote a wonderful piece on this for New York Magazine recently. The piece is called, “From Mo’ne Davis to Michael Sam, the Culture Wars Have Invaded the Sports World.” I’m excited to share some of my favorite parts of it here but I suggest you read it in full over at nymag.com.

Leitch begins by talking about how little fun it’s been to cover the Michael Sam story for the past couple months because of how polarizing the response has been:

It isn’t just Sam. He’s just the most prominent symptom of a subtle but undeniable change in modern sports discourse, which is basically, and maddeningly, turning into politics.

He then moves over to sharing his memory of how loving, obsessing over, and covering sports used to be:

The fun of sports debates has always been how, even when they’re spirited and a little rancorous, they’re essentially harmless… Yankees fans and Red Sox fans hate each other, but only theoretically, and only on the surface: Their rancor was real but empty. Sports has allowed us to exercise our tribalist passions in basically trivial ways … and therefore productive and healthy ones… Not anymore. Now sports, like everything else, has been conquered by political tribalism.

I loved reading this article. I hope you do too.