Understanding Sports Archives - Page 31 of 43

Why Are U.S. Open Tennis Courts Blue?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are U.S. Open tennis courts blue? What happened to the normal green and red variety that we all played on growing up?

Thanks,
Simon

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Dear Simon,

U.S. Open tennis courts have been painted blue since 2005 primarily because the organizers of the tournament thought they could make more money with blue courts than the traditional green and red variety. The blue court is good for its organizers for reasons of branding and visibility. Since 2005, many other tennis tournaments have copied the U.S. Open and made their own court color changes.

The most understandable reason why the U.S. Open and other tournaments switched from green and red painted asphalt to blue is that it makes the tennis ball easier to see for players and spectators. The tennis ball itself is a shocking neon green-yellow. This is the kind of green-yellow normally found in road signs or reflective vests because it’s very easy to see. Still, tracking a green ball going a hundred miles an hour or more is likely to be easier if done against a background that provides a good contrast. A duller green isn’t going to offer must color contrast. Red is opposite green in a color wheel but the green of the tennis ball is a lot closer to yellow than it is green green.

In this clever color wheel from asmartbear.com, you can see that blue or purple are better opposites for a tennis ball than red or green.

Therefore, a blue or purple is going to create the best contrast to spot a moving tennis ball. This contrast is particularly important for television viewers. Not only are television viewers the largest group of people to watch the game, they’re also the one that injects the most money into the sport. No wonder their viewing experience was at the core of the decision in 2005 to shift to blue courts.

The other key reason to paint the U.S. Open courts blue is branding. In 2005, when the United States Tennis Association made the decision to move to a blue court, they did so, not just for the U.S. Open, but for all the major tennis tournaments played in the U.S. and organized by their group. As USTA executive Arlen Kantarian was quoted as saying in this espn.com article:

In addition, it provides an instant visual link between the US Open Series tournaments and the U.S. Open, helping to create a unified ‘regular season’ for tennis leading up to the U.S. Open.

If the USTA can create a visual signature, they may be able to promote their lesser tournaments as being just like the popular U.S. Open. Using color to promote a sports brand is nothing new, even in Tennis, as Christine Brennan pointed out in her 2005 USA Today article on the subject, the failed World Team Tennis league tried the gimmick in 1974. This time though, it seems to have succeeded. Or at least, the trend of colored courts has become very mainstream. The Australian Open changed from green to blue in 2008. Other big tournaments have experimented with purple courts. On a smaller level, on municipal and personal courts around the country, the demand for unique colors has increased. According to Andrew Cohen for Athletic Business resurfacing in green and red has dropped from about 95 percent of the market to between 50 and 75 percent. It’s common now for “sales reps [to] have to step in… to perhaps dissuade a court owner from choosing garish or excessively loud color combinations”

To close on a personal note, my instincts are often traditional when it comes to sports. The biggest change in tennis surfaces over the past fifty years hasn’t been the colors, it’s been the surfaces themselves. Until 1974, all four of the major tennis tournaments were played on grass or clay. When the U.S. Open and later the Australian open moved to asphalt, they kept the green and red surfaces of grass and clay as a way of connecting with their pasts. Shifting the color to blue doesn’t have much of an effect on the way I watch or think about them but it does make me treasure the natural grass of Wimbledon and traditional red-clay of the French Open.

Whatever the surface, enjoy watching the tennis!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How to Enjoy a Fantasy Football Draft

This post is about fantasy football. If you don’t play fantasy football or don’t understand it, read this post on how fantasy football works.

If you’re new to fantasy football, you may feel unprepared during your fantasy football draft. The people you’re drafting with and against probably seem like they know a lot more than you do. They are familiar with the players names and nick-names; their reputations and their past performances. There’s likely to be some good-natured trash-talking while the draft is going on. People may disparage a choice you or someone else makes or show congratulatory agreement for what they perceive as a good pick. Towards the end of the draft, some people may start congratulating themselves on how great of a team they’ve put together. Put together, this exhibition of knowledge may be intimidating and could even spoil some of the enjoyment of choosing your own fantasy football team. I’m here to tell you it shouldn’t. There are lots of easy ways to make sure you enjoy a fantasy football draft.

The first thing to remember about fantasy sports is that they work as a form of enjoyment only because people cannot predict the future. No one actually knows which football players are going to produce the best stats this year. Lots of people think they know but they’re really only gambling on which players seem the most likely to produce the best stats. You can feel completely confident in your choices, knowing that they can only be proven to be wrong in hind-sight and by the time that hind is in sight, every other fantasy owner in your league will have at least one decision they are kicking themselves for having made. You won’t be alone. Football, of all the sports, is the least predictable and the most subject to chance. With only 16 games in a season, the margin between a great player and a good player can easily come down to luck.

I think fantasy drafts should be collegial and relaxed. I don’t really think that psyching another owner out, even if you could do it, is worth the effort. Not everyone feels the same way though. Every time someone groans or nods knowingly after a pick, think to yourself — this person may be faking this emotion for their own purposes. If they can make you second guess yourself by making fun of your pick in the fourth round, they might be able to get you to pick badly in the seventh round and because of that get to draft their favorite player who you otherwise might have taken. This type of psychological warfare is silly but it happens all the time. My recommendation is to ignore it but if you want to take part in it, steal a page from my childhood chess-teacher: bring a delicious looking sandwich and break it out half-way through the draft. Don’t share it but make sure everyone knows just how delicious and satisfying it is. A hungry mind is a distracted mind.

The other thing you can do to avoid feeling like you’re drafting from a position of weakness is to have a plan. This was one of my key suggestions in a post last year on tips for your first fantasy draft. I even suggested a few simple plans to follow. This year I came across another very simple way to create a plan. The Fantasy Fix offers this three-part flow chart (say that ten times fast) that you can follow. It tells you which position to take in each round given what you choose to do in the first round. For example, if you start out by taking a running back in the first round, you should then take two wide receivers and then either another wide receiver followed by three running backs, a quarterback, and a tight end, or two running backs, a wide receiver, another running back, and then a quarterback and a tight end. I think these are quite reasonable paths to follow and narrowing your choices by position in each round formulaically will lend you a ton of confidence in your choices.

Hope you enjoy your fantasy drafts. Shoot me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com to tell me how they go, what they feel like, and what questions you have.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How Do Defensive Positions Work in Football?

Although most of the glory goes to the offensive players on a football team, who we covered yesterday, I prefer defenders. It probably goes back to when I was a kid and played defense on my soccer team but I think playing defense is harder and more glorious than playing offense. After all, especially in football because of its complexity, the offense has a big advantage. It knows what it’s going to try to do. The defense has to make up for that knowledge gap through savvy anticipation and quick and flexible reactions.

Although there is a lot of variation from team to team, here are the three major groups of defenders:

Starting from the closest to the line of scrimmage where the ball starts each play are the defensive linemen. Defensive linemen vary from huge to gigantic based on their team’s strategy. Their assignment is to prevent the opposing team’s running back from sneaking through their line or, if the attacking team tries to throw the ball, to find a way to hit the quarterback before he can throw the ball.

The next defenders back are called linebackers. Linebackers are usually faster than defensive linemen but still almost as big. They make the majority of the tackles on the field.

Last are the defensive backs. Defensive backs may well be the best athletes on the field. Their job seems almost hopeless. They need to mirror everything the fastest players on the offensive side, the wide receivers, do to prevent them from catching the ball. Defensive backs need to do this without knowing what pattern the wide-receivers are going to run in and do it running backwards. It sounds impossible, and often it is — so defensive backs will team up amongst themselves to cover a single wide receiver or an area of the field. The best among them though, don’t need any help to shut down a wide receiver, and this can be a big strategic advantage for their team because it frees up another defender to do something else.

How Do Offensive Positions Work in Football?

The end of summer means one particular thing to most sports fans in the United States: Football! Football today is the dominant sport in the United States. Even meaningless professional football preseason games are reliably the highest rated television programming of the week. One the season starts in earnest, people will be talking about it left and right. Even if you’re not all that interested in the sport, it’s useful to get to know a little about how it works so that you don’t feel left out in conversation or if you find yourself watching games with friends or family.

Last year I wrote in-depth but high-level descriptions of how each position in football works. Today we’ll run through just the players on the offensive side. (In football these days, almost no player plays offense and defense.)

The quarterback is the leader of the team. He spends the most time with the ball in his hands and is usually seen as the key to winning or losing. His most important characteristics are quick decision making and fearlessness.

The running back comes in many shapes and sizes from agile star to laboring workhorse. He takes the most punishment of any player, and because of this, it’s more common now for teams to rely on several running backs with varying skills than a single transcendent one.

Although you might think that the quarterback is the smartest position on the field, it’s usually the giant offensive linemen that top the IQ chart. The offensive linemen are the construction vehicles of the game, plowing defenders out of the way for running backs and building protective dikes around vulnerable quarterbacks.

In the closely interdependent world of football, the wide receiver is the most dependent position. As the player whose job it is to catch passes, the wide receiver doesn’t have a chance without a good quarterback to throw the ball and a good offensive line to protect them.

The tight end is a hybrid between a wide receiver and an offensive lineman. Bad tight ends are jack of all trades but masters of none. Great tight ends are masters at both disciplines.

That’s a quick rundown of the offensive positions in football. Next time we’ll tackle my favorite side of the game, the defense.

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

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Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

Why Does One Player Wear a Different Color in Volleyball?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the World Cup Championships of Men’s Volleyball the other day between the United States and Brazil. Why does one player wear a different colored jersey in Volleyball?

Thanks,
Nora

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If you’re interested in other Olympics sports, I’ve written about all the events and have worked on some schedules too. Find it all here.

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Dear Nora,

I’ve been wondering about the person in volleyball who wears a different colored jersey for years. I’ve known they were called a libero and that they played by a different set of rules but I didn’t know what they were. Now I do!

The libero is a defensive specialist by nature and by rule. He or she is usually the best player on the team at keeping the play alive by digging the opposing team’s best shots before they hit the floor. The libero, which literally means “free” in Italian, is something of a magical position because it is allowed, by rule, to ignore most of the normal rotation and substitution rules in volleyball. Like soccer, volleyball limits the number of substitutions allowed. Teams are allowed six substitutions per set in international play but the libero may substitute infinitely. This allows a team to protect their front-court specialists (usually really tall players who like to spike the ball but aren’t great at getting down on the floor and defending the other team’s spikes) from having to play the back line. The libero can also play the whole game while normal court players must rotate off and then back on after they serve.

As is often the case, with great freedom comes great restriction, and that is true with the libero. The libero is only allowed to play in the back line and cannot attempt any truly aggressive maneuvers like blocking or spiking a ball. The libero usually bumps the ball (hits it with her hands below her chest) but is also allowed to set the ball (hit it up gently using two open hands,) but only from more than three meters behind the net. If the libero sets the ball from closer than three meters, play is allowed to continue but the libero’s team has to just hit the ball over the net, they cannot try to spike it. The libero never gets to serve the volleyball. There can only be one libero, he or she is designated before the game by the coach (and by coming to the game wearing a different shirt,) and must remain the libero the entire game unless injured.

The libero is a recent addition to volleyball. It was added on April 20, 1998 by the president of FIVB, the organizing body of international volleyball. Soon after it was introduced, the libero rule was adopted by U.S. high schools and colleges who, in addition to the benefit of longer, more exciting rallies, found that another benefit of the rule was inclusion. Volleyball is a sport that rewards height. Smaller players cannot play nearly as well near the net as their taller counter-parts. The angles just don’t work well up there unless you’re tall enough to get your hands above the net. The libero gives an opportunity for at least the best of the shorter players to succeed. Said 5-foot-4 libero pioneer Kirstin Higareda to the Washington Post, “It’s a big deal. It’s really given shorter people the opportunity to play volleyball.”

It’s fun to think about it in the context of rule changes in other sports that are intended to offset an imbalance favoring either offensive or defensive play. In NHL hockey, the offensive zones were enlarged to create more scoring opportunities. In the NBA, the most obvious example is the introduction of the three-point shot to increase offense but other examples abound. Major League Baseball probably comes the closest to having a libero in the form of the designated hitter. The designated hitter or DH is a position who, like the libero, only plays one half of the game. Unlike the libero though, the DH only plays offense, batting regularly but having no responsibility in the field.

The libero has cultural parallels that reach far beyond sports. It seems like every group of people and every pastime has that one person who’s a little different; who plays by another set of rules. Shakespeare’s plays are full of these kind of characters, the most famous of which is probably Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In a deck of cards, there’s four of every card plus a couple of jokers. The unique character is called the fool in some traditional English dance forms like rapper and molly. Every group of friends needs a good oddball, just like every volleyball team needs a good libero. So, if you’re ever trying to remember what a libero is, just remember: a libero in volleyball is just like Ol’ Dirty Bastard was in Wu Tang… except less offensive.

Groan inducingly yours,
Ezra Fischer

Why Don't They Race the Last Stage of the Tour de France?

Dear Sports Fan,

Something a little strange happens on the last stage of the Tour de France: the riders drink champagne. Why is this? What is going on? Why don’t they race the last stage of the Tour de France?

Thanks,
Julio

— — —

Dear Julio,

You’re absolutely right, the last stage of the Tour de France isn’t much of a race and some of the cyclists will have champagne in hand during the race. The Tour de France is a 21 stage race held over 23 days. The total distance of the course is 2,276 miles and the overall result of the Tour is the cumulative time it takes to complete all 2,276 of these miles. The primary reason why the last stage is largely ceremonial is because the standings are almost always set in stone by the time the riders get to the last day. For instance, this year, the leader, Vincenzo Nibali is 7:52 ahead of the second place rider, Jean-Christophe Peraud.

The time gaps between second and third and third and fourth are much closer — each around a minute. This leads us to the second reason why the last stage is not often the setting for any real racing: the course. The course of the last stage varies from tour to tour but it is almost always easier than a normal stage. It is flat and it ends with several loops around city streets in Paris with the finish line on the historic Champs-Élysées. On this type of course, winning the stage by more than a few seconds is almost impossible, even if the riders were to try to do so. The main way that cyclists pick up time on one another in the Tour de France is by making sprints up mountains that their competitors literally cannot force their bodies to keep up with. Cycling is a brutal sport because you usually can’t win by being more clever than your rivals and you usually can’t lose unless your body hurts so badly that it simply refuses to keep up with the winner. This isn’t to say that there are no tactics in cycling — there are — but they all involve applying pain to rivals. There’s just no way to do this on a flat stage.

The third reason why they don’t race the last stage of the Tour de France is tradition. To try to improve your overall standing in the last stage is thought to be highly uncouth and against the ethics of the sport. How can top-flight, insanely competitive athletes put up with a tradition that involves not trying? It’s perhaps not as rare as one might think, especially in situations where the chances of success are very low — where the game is basically over. This happens in American Football when the team leading the game has the ball and because of the minutiae of how the clock works, doesn’t really need to do anything to win. In this case they “kneel it out” — simulating plays by hiking the ball to the quarterback and then kneeling down. In NBA basketball, it’s common for a trailing team to intentionally foul the leading team in the last couple minutes of the game because, although they give up free throws, they stop the clock which gives them a better chance to catch up. Teams that are down by more than 10 points or so don’t normally do this, even in elimination playoff games where there is no competitive reason to give up. Nonetheless, the power of tradition, professional ethics, and social mores outweighs the competitive truth that .00001% chance of winning is better than 0%.

This doesn’t mean that the last stage of the Tour de France is a bore. It’s not. The last ten or fifteen minutes of the race are fascinating and exciting! While the overall standings won’t change, it is extremely prestigious to win the last stage of the tour. Teams with sprinting specialists who have survived the mountains of the tour will be desperately trying to set them up to win the last stage. The way a team can help a sprinter is by racing really, really fast (but not as fast as he can go) in front of him until the very last moment when he bursts out from behind his teammates and powers himself up to almost 50 mph. As a consequence of all these teams attempting to lead their sprinters out at precisely the right moment, the peloton (large group of cyclists) looks like this massive, lunatic monster that is trying to burst out of its own skin. It’s a sight to behold.

The final stage of the 2014 Tour de France will air live on NBCSN beginning at 9:00 a.m. EDT, Sunday July 27. Tune in at 9:00 for pageantry and scenery but if you want to see the final sprint, 12:45 p.m. EDT might be a good time. The race is predicted to end somewhere between 1 and 1:20 p.m. EDT.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Top Three Reasons Why You Should Watch the World Cup Third Place Game

Maybe the title of this blog post should really be “three reasons why the sports fan in your life wants to watch the World Cup third place game that might be good enough to convince you to watch it too.” It’s admittedly a thin line I walk, as a sports fan writing about sports for people who are more curious about the sports world than obsessed by it and who like to know enough to be conversant in sports but perhaps don’t really want every conversation they have to be focused on sports. I do, however, have some record of telling it how it is when I absolutely do not think a game is worth watching, and I happen to actually think the World Cup third place game between the Netherlands and Brazil on July 12, 4 pm, on ESPN is well worth the time. Here are some reasons why:

1. Third place games are usually great.

I will not go as far as to argue that the third place game is “often the best game” as the New Yorker does, but I will say that it’s often one of the most enjoyable games.

One of the unavoidable truths about soccer which influences almost every facet of the game is that every offensive move a team makes leaves it more vulnerable defensively than if it had not attacked. This is one of the reasons why soccer is so low scoring. A team that commits itself thoroughly to not being scored on, like the Netherlands did in their semifinal against Argentina by keeping as many players between Messi and their own goal as possible, can make it nearly impossible for the other team to score. In the third place game, there’s less reason for anyone to care that much about whether or not their team gets scored on. It’s for this reason that the third place game can be very high scoring. Since 1990 the World Cup championship game has averaged only 1.5 goals scored but the third place game has averaged 4 goals.

As long as a team you root for has a chance to win the World Cup, most fans are happy to make the trade-off of watching defensive soccer for the excitement of imagining that your team will actually win the World Cup. Once that possibility is gone however, it’s nice to watch soccer for its essential beauty — great athletes doing things with a ball and their feet, head, or chest, that given a million years you would not be able to replicate.

2. Brazil is like a roller coaster baby, I want to watch.

There have probably already been millions of words written in reaction to Brazil’s 7-1 loss to Germany in the semi-finals. My favorite article about it is from Grantland’s Brian Phillips. Here are just a couple of choice bits:

This wasn’t a match like other matches, wasn’t a loss like other losses… You could feel it wherever you were. It was the sense — obviously irrational, tautologically irrational, but still strong — that we were outside the realm of things that can occur.

Comparing it to an NFL game doesn’t work, for instance, because no NFL team is fanatically supported by a nation of more than 200 million people… And then, I’m sorry, but the scene in that stadium after the match, the intensity of the weeping — and not just the crowd’s, the players’ — did not, in deep and basic ways, resemble a big home playoff loss at Sports Authority Field. You knew as you were watching that Brazilian soccer’s idea of itself would never be quite the same, that the lives of these players would never be the same.

Knowing that Phillips is potentially underplaying the impact of that game on Brazilian players, coaches, and fans, how can you not be interested to see how they look and act and play a mere four days later, playing in the consolation game of a World Cup that they wanted to win so badly?

3. Swan song or cygnet chirp

First of all, baby swans are called cygnets. I have no idea how this is possible, but the internet tells me so. There’s always a little sadness in sport because players have such short careers. Soccer players are a little long in the tooth by 30 and well past their prime by 32. By 35 they are unlikely to be playing at the highest level anymore. (In fact, they are more likely to be playing in the U.S. professional league, the MLS, but that’s another story.) Events like the World Cup and the Olympics only heighten this bittersweetness because they only happen once every four years. I certainly felt a little sad thinking that their wonderful effort against Belgium might be the last time we see Clint Dempsey, DaMarcus Beasley, and Tim Howard play at a World Cup. For Dutch fans, the trio that they are feeling sad about is a trio of great players, Robin Van Persie, Arjen Robben, and Wesley Sneijder. This trio has lead the Orange attack for the last decade but seem sure never to win a World Cup. The closest they got four years ago when they lost in the championship game to Spain.

On the other side of things, time and age are also one of the reasons why hope springs eternal in sports. Again, because winning the third place game is not so important and because some of the more outspoken veteran players have openly groused about the existence of the game, we may see younger players in this game whose talent has been just raw enough to keep them on the bench for the tournament so far. You never know who might explode onto the scene.

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To celebrate the World Cup in Brazil, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a set of posts explaining elements of soccer. We hope you enjoy posts like Why do People Like Soccer? How Does the World Cup Work? Why Do Soccer Players Dive so Much? What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer? What are Red and Yellow Cards in Soccer?, Why do World Cup Soccer Players Blame the Ball? and Reflections on the 2014 World Cup for the United States. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13.

What is Stoppage Time in Soccer?

To celebrate the World Cup in Brazil, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a set of posts explaining elements of soccer. We hope you enjoy posts like Why do People Like Soccer? How Does the World Cup Work? Why Do Soccer Players Dive so Much? What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer? What are Red and Yellow Cards in Soccer? and Why do World Cup Soccer Players Blame the Ball? The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13.

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been loving the World Cup this year! One thing I don’t understand though — what is stoppage time in soccer? If the game is 90 minutes, why isn’t it over when the clock hits 90? How does it work?

Thanks,
Andrew,

Colombia v Cote D'Ivoire: Group C - 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil — “Your delaying tactics will not work here,” says the ref. “I keep the only official time!”

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Dear Andrew,

Stoppage time is the time between when the clock shows that time is up in a half, period, or game, and when it is really over. It’s definitely a strange wrinkle that exists only in soccer and it’s typical of the type of absolute power that soccer gives the referee. It also encourages bad behavior among the players and hints at some of soccer’s darkest moments. Here’s how it works.

At the start of a game, the clock starts counting up from zero. The first half is forty-five minutes long; same with the second. In the knockout stage of the World Cup, a game that is tied at the end of regulation time will play two fifteen minute halves to try to decide the game. If it is still tied after that, the game will be decided by a penalty kick shootout. During all of this, the clock that you see on your television is unofficial. I mean, I guess it’s official, but it’s basically meaningless. The only time that matters is the one on the watch of the referee on the field and the “fourth official” who stands on the sidelines. The refs are allowed and supposed to stop their watches whenever various things happen. According to FIFA, the international body that runs soccer, these things are:

substitutions
assessment of injury to players
removal of injured players from the field of play for treatment
wasting time
any other cause

FIFA’s rules go on to say that “the allowance for time lost is at the discretion of the referee.” The clock on the television may count up to 46 minutes or 48 minutes or 49:36 before the ref blows his whistle to end the first half. When the second half begins, the clock has been reset to 45 minutes? Why? In soccer, the ref’s watch is what matters, and a half is 45 minutes no matter how long it actually takes. If your watch or the television clock told you the first half took longer, you were mistaken. It took 45 minutes. Yep — the amount of time that a soccer game is played for is totally up to the ref who is explicitly allowed to add time to the game for literally anything.

You might be thinking that this is a lot of power for the ref to have. It is! Soccer generally gives more power to the ref than other sports. In NHL hockey there are two refs on the rink, in NBA Basketball there are three, and in NFL football and MLB baseball there are a gaggles of officials big enough for a healthy poker game if not a square dance. In soccer, the ref is alone on the field with the players. He or she makes every important call, and because soccer is such a low scoring game and fouls can result in penalty kicks that almost always result in goals, foul calls are often extremely important. The fact that the ref also is the only one with the power to end the game fits into the pattern of the nearly all-powerful ref. When combined with gobs of money, the power of the ref can easily become problematic. If you’re interested, read this recent Telegraph article about how an investment company planned to fix the result of international soccer games by hiring corrupt refs.

hublot stoppage time — Roughly two minutes added to this half

A downside of the stoppage time rules is that it encourages players to waste time if their team is winning. You see them do this by choosing to stroll off the field by a scenic route to the sidelines when being replaced by a substitute, by taking their time to put the ball back into play on a throw-in or a goal kick, and by rolling around on the ground in agony for what seems like hours after being touched lightly on the ankle by a passing butterfly. It seems counter-intuitive that this would work. If anything, the fact that the ref can stop the official clock whenever he or she wants should prevent delaying tactics from being effective, but the truth is that refs only ever really add between one and five extra minutes to a half. I’ve seen six but I can’t remember ever seeing seven minutes added, no matter how silly the players were being. So, delaying the game when your team is up can be an effective strategy if you do it flagrantly enough. The Wall Street Journal just released a statistical analysis of the games in the group stage of the 2014 World Cup and found that:

“The amount of histrionics your players display during a match correlates strongly to what the scoreboard says. Players on teams that were losing their games accounted for 40 “injuries” and nearly 12.5 minutes of writhing time. But players on teams that were winning—the ones who have the most incentive to run out the clock—accounted for 103 “injuries” and almost four times as much writhing.”

Stoppage time has been around for a long time, although like the actual duration of a soccer game, no one is exactly sure how long. The Chicago Tribune claims that timekeeping in soccer has been done this way since at least 1913. The custom of publicly estimating how many minutes of stoppage time will be added (this is what’s going on when the fourth official on the sideline holds up a sign with a number on it at the end of the half or game) has only been around since 1996. I’m not sure that the customs are connected but soccer stadiums invariably take the time off their scoreboards ten or fifteen minutes before the end of the period as a form of crowd control. Given the long and horrible history of soccer stadium disasters, this is a common sense maneuver. Although the uncertainty about when the game is going to end adds a certain type of drama, it also takes the edge off the craziness that a last second attempt on goal could create.

I hope this post has helped take the edge off the craziness of stoppage time,
Ezra Fischer

Why do World Cup Soccer Players Blame the Ball?

To celebrate and prepare for the World Cup in Brazil, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a set of posts explaining elements of soccer. We hope you enjoy posts like Why do People Like Soccer? How Does the World Cup Work? Why Do Soccer Players Dive so Much? What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer? and What are Red and Yellow Cards in Soccer? The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13. Today we have the special treat of a guest post about World Cup soccer balls by an early adopter of Dear Sports Fan, Al Murray. Enjoy!

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Adidas Footballs — Each one of these balls was inevitably complained about during its World Cup. What will the complaint be this time in Brazil?

International football players, like most any athlete, praise their own skill when things go right and blame the tools when they go wrong. The last few World Cups have continued this tradition with the introduction of some high-tech balls. Each demonstrated the Law of Unintended Consequences in their own unique way.

In 2006, it was that the Teimgeist, German for “Team Spirit”, ball had too much lift and soared over the goal. It was designed to be smooth to reduce drag, but that meant the ball didn’t react well to the wind and it lifted more than anyone wanted. Interestingly it didn’t curve especially well, but its low drag kept it in the realm of higher velocity for long portions of its flight.

In 2010, it was that the Jo’bulanmi, “To Celebrate” in isiZulu, ball “knuckled” at normal kicking speeds thus making goal tending more difficult. It was designed with special panels to induce better roundness and reduce the sailing of the 2006 ball. While it curved fairly well at both high and lower kicking speeds, the seams caught the air at 45-60 MPH (normal free kick speeds) and caused it to not spin but rather “knuckle” at high speeds. For reference, a traditional soccer ball knuckles at~30 MPH, much slower than anyone kicks.

NASA used the 2010 World Cup as a opportunity to engage students in aerodynamics and posted several studies on soccer balls in flight including a nifty simulator: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/soccer.html

And for you more mathematically inclined: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/flteqs.html

There is a really good explanation, with minimal math, at http://www.soccerballworld.com/Physics.htm#world-11-6-8-3

Basically it boils down to this:

When you kick a ball, it is given velocity and spin.
At a given spin rate, low velocities/high drag result in high curve rates while high velocities/low drag result in longer flight.
At a given velocity, higher spin rates impart more curving.
A good kicker will use both velocity and spin to control the ball.

How a kick works:

A kick is taken with initial high spin and a velocity (speed & direction) of 45-60, in some cases >70 mph.
With high velocity the airflow is turbulent, the velocity effect is stronger than the spin, and the ball has low drag and flies high.
Eventually the velocity drops, as drag effects increase, the air flow becomes more laminar and the spin induces a Magnum force which causes the ball to curve in the direction of the spin usually as it reaches and then comes down from the apex of flight.
As the ball’s velocity decrease, assuming the rotation speed stays the same, the ball curves more confounding goal keepers (and the occasional outfielder) the world over.

A Good free kicker can shoot the ball outside the defender wall and have it bend back on the goal, sometimes as much as 3 meters! You can see this in long fly balls in baseball and in both free and corner kicks in soccer. Brazilian left fullback and part-time wizard, Roberto Carlos, demonstrates in this video: http://youtu.be/3ECoR__tJNQ?t=1m20s

For 2014, the ball will be the Brazoca, “Brazilian or The Brazilian Way of Life” in Portuguese. I understand they’ve redesigned the ball, getting rid of the flat panels, adding dimples for reduced drag like a golf ball and faster travel with “propeller” patches to add more spin and greater curve at lower speeds. Will this mean more curves? More diving action? More Lift? Or perhaps, given the Law of Unintended Consequences, something completely different?

Guest Author – Al Murray