Category: Understanding Sports

What are Red and Yellow Cards in Soccer?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are red and yellow cards in soccer? How do they work?

Thanks,
Paul

Donovan Yellow
Soccer players, like Landon Donovan here, often react with disbelief when given a card.

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Dear Paul,

Cards are soccer’s answer to fouling out in basketball. They are representative of a two stage process that allows a referee to punish misbehaving players with one of the most punitive measures in sports. If a player receives one red card or two yellow cards within the same game, that player is thrown out of the game (“sent off the pitch” or just “sent off” in soccer terms) and his team must play the remainder of the game with one fewer player than they started with. This can mean that a team plays 10 on 11 for 30, 60, or 75 minutes. That’s a long time to play down a man and soccer is already the sport that allows for the fewest substitutions (only two) during a game. It can make for some very tired players.

In World Cup competition, the penalties for receiving cards have implications beyond the game a player receives them in. Any ejection from a game due to a red card or two yellows carries with it an automatic one game suspension that must be served the next time the team plays. Suspensions based on red cards can be lengthened by soccer’s governing body, FIFA. Two yellow cards in different games can also result in a one game suspension if they come between the first game of the tournament and the quarterfinal game. After that, the yellow card counts reset so that any player “carrying” a single yellow card from earlier in the tournament doesn’t have to worry about picking up another in the semifinals and thereby missing the final match. The fact that red and yellow cards carry such enormous penalties probably accentuates soccer’s already dive-happy culture by rewarding players who can trick a referee into giving their opponent a card.

There aren’t really specific fouls that necessitate a red or yellow card, it is up to the referee’s discretion, but there are two key themes which the website football-bible.com does a nice job explaining: violence and “unfairly denying an obvious goal-scoring opportunity.” Violence can come in a few different forms. A player could get a card for being a little too violent intentionally or unintentionally within the course of play, like tripping a player from behind or sliding into an opponent with the studs on his boot facing dangerously up. Likewise, a player could be given a card for being violent in a non-soccer kind of way. Perhaps the most infamous example of this is Zinedine Zidane head-butting an Italian player in the 2006 World Cup Finals. As for “unfairly” denying the opponent an “obvious goal-scoring opportunity,” this could come in the form of tripping a player when he has a clear path to the goal or reaching out and deflecting the ball with your hand as it’s flying towards the goal.

Soccer is not the only sport that uses penalty cards. Wikipedia has a fascinating entry that lists a bunch of sports from volleyball to field hockey to race walking to rugby that uses yellow and red cards as markers of penalties. It also describes the use of other penalty cards like the green card (a lesser warning than a yellow card,) the blue and white cards used in bandy to denote a five or ten minute penalty (editors note: what the hell is bandy,) and the black card used in fencing and badminton for only the worst infringements that require immediate expulsion from play.

In moments of idle reflection, I like to imagine red and yellow cards worming their way out of sports and into everyday life. I dream of being able to halt a disruptive colleague in a meeting by holding up a yellow card. I think it would be great to be able to red card someone who merges badly and have him or her sent off the highway. If you could, how would you use penalty cards in real life?

I hope this has shed some light on the subject of red and yellow cards in soccer for you. Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

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? and What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer? The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13.

What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer?

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? and Why Do Soccer Players Dive so Much? The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13.

baggio kick
The weight of a country’s hopes weighs down penalty kick takers in the World Cup.

Soccer is often called the beautiful game because it consists of almost constant fluid motion by twenty two players; because of the way players seem to dance over the ball to fake each other out; because of the way the ball dips and swerves when shot with power. So why is it that so much of the scoring involved in the game happens when one player starts from a stand-still right in front of the goalie and takes an unobstructed shot?

A penalty kick is an unobstructed shot on goal taken 12 yards from the center of the goal with only the goalie present to stop the shooter. It is awarded to the attacking team when they are fouled within the big rectangular area called the penalty box or the 18-yard box. Penalty kicks are often decisive moments in a soccer game because soccer is such a low scoring game and penalty kicks so frequently result in goals. In the World Cup, penalty kick competitions called shoot-outs are used to determine the winner of a game in the knock-out round if it is tied after two fifteen minute over-time periods. In a shoot-out the two teams alternate taking penalty kicks until one team has scored more than the other. It begins with a best-out-of-five-rounds competition and then if both teams have scored the same number after five penalty kicks each, it moves to a best-out-of-one-round format which continues only as long as both teams make or both teams miss their penalty kick.

One of the great things about the World Cup is that each national team has its own distinct personality and that personality reflects the nation it represents. This holds true with how they fare taking penalty kicks and in shoot-outs. Among the traditionally strongest teams, there are some that excel at penalty kicks and some whose fans dread them because their team almost always flubs them. For example, Brazil and Argentina have won 66% of shootouts and Germany 60%. Those three teams have won 10 of the 19 World Cups ever. Then there’s a group in the middle that are neither good nor bad at shootouts: Italy, France, and Spain are all around 50%. Finally there are the two traditional powers notorious for their poor showing in shootouts: England and The Netherlands are a combined 2-12 in shootouts all-time.

As you might expect for something that is so important to so many people, there’s been a fair amount of research on what makes a good penalty kick and what makes a good penalty kick taker. Scienceofsocceronline.com tells us that penalty kicks are successful 85% of the time and that the most successful strategy for goalies is not to dive to one side of the net or the other on a hunch but to stay in the middle of the net. Too bad that this is the least common strategy for goalies… maybe because if it doesn’t work, you look like the idiot who “didn’t even try” to stop the penalty kick. The Telegraph has a great interactive graphic that lets you choose where to place the kick and shows you the success rates of each part of the goal. The New York Times ran an article before the 2010 World Cup which argued that success and failure in penalty kicks was mostly about psychology and confidence. They noted that the success of a penalty kick declines in each round of a shootout from “86.6 percent for the first shooter, 81.7 for the second, 79.3 for the third and so on.” More dramatic was their finding that “Kick takers in a shootout score at a rate of 92 percent when the score is tied and a goal ensures their side an immediate win. But when they need to score to tie the shootout, with a miss meaning defeat, the success rate drops to 60 percent.” One of their most interesting findings was about what a player who scores early on in the shoot-out can do to help his teammates:

One of Jordet’s conclusions deals not with the run-up to a kick, but what occurs afterward. A player who celebrates demonstratively after scoring, he said, increases the chance that his teammates will score later in the shootout and also increases the likelihood that the opposing player who shoots immediately after him will miss.

“I make this point every time I work with a team,” said Jordet, who was an adviser to the Dutch national team from 2005 to 2008. “Some players score and look like they’re at a funeral because they’re still nervous.”

So there you have it — it pays to celebrate, even in soccer!

Soccer traditionalists hate the shoot-out because it decides important games with something that really isn’t soccer. When tournaments were less focused on television and a game ended in a tie, the two teams would go home, rest for a couple days, and then come back and play another game to see if a victor could be determined. This just isn’t practical anymore. Viewers want to see a winner and the schedule must be kept to for an international audience of billions. The shoot-out has become an integral part of World Cups and even though I am a grouchy old traditionalist who roots for games to be decided in regulation time or in over-time, even I have to admit that shoot-outs are nerve-jangling, edge-of-your-seat, exciting television.

 

How Does the World Cup Work?

Dear Sports Fan,

The soccer World Cup is coming up soon in Brazil. I know it’s a big deal for sports fans — how does the World Cup work?

Thanks,
Bobby

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Dear Bobby,

The World Cup is the world’s biggest soccer tournament between National teams representing their countries. It is, like you said, a big deal. Almost a billion people worldwide watched the final match of the tournament in 2010. Like the Olympics, the World Cup only happens once every four years. The World Cup is separated into three phases, each of which has its own setup: qualification, the group stage, and the knockout stage. We’ll walk you through how each phase works.

World Cup Qualification

The month-long tournament which, this year, starts on June 12 and ends on July 13, is actually the culmination of an international competition which may have started up to three years before. This preliminary competition is called World Cup Qualification and determines (with one exception) which teams get to play in the World Cup Finals. The qualification format is bewilderingly complicated and involves both “continental zones,” a “hexagonal round,” and finally “intercontinental playoffs.” It’s honestly not worth getting too deep into it but the principles are fairly simple — it attempts to take the 200+ countries who are hoping to be one of the 32 teams to play in Brazil and select the best teams while also finding a geographic balance so representatives from all around the globe can compete. All the complicated mumbo-jumbo of qualification is an attempt to meet this internally conflicting end. Some regions (Europe and South America) are much stronger than other regions (Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the complicatedly named North and Central America and the Caribbean) so there are more qualifying spots for the stronger regions. This year Europe and South America combined have 19 of 32 teams, or more than half. Every other region is represented by teams, except for Oceania which lost out on its one spot when New Zealand lost in a playoff to Mexico. Even though the two best teams in Europe that didn’t qualify — Sweden and the Ukraine — could almost certainly beat any of the qualifying teams from Asia and most of the North American or African teams, it’s a more exciting world celebration the way it is and it does more to foster soccer as a global sport. Oh, yes, and the one exception to all this? The host country automatically qualifies.

The Group Stage

The World Cup finals begin as a round-robin tournament in eight groups of four teams each. In a round robin tournament, each team within a group plays all of the other teams, and the team or teams with the best results in those games advance to the next round. In the World Cup, that means each team plays three games in the group stage against the other three teams in their group. The way the results are tabulated, a win is worth three points, a loss, zero, and a tie is worth one point. As you can probably imagine, with only three games, there are frequently teams with the same number of points after the group games have been played. To break ties, since only the top two teams in each group move on to the next stage, the World Cup has a series of factors which they use:

  1. Goal difference in all group matches
  2. Greater number of goals scored in all group matches
  3. Greatest number of points in matches between tied teams
  4. Goal difference in matches between tied teams
  5. Greatest number of goals scored in matches between tied teams
  6. Drawing of lots by the FIFA Organizing Committee

I know, I know, that seems really complicated. It is. Sometimes I think that people who love sports mostly just love technicality. In any event, all these tie-breakers basically favor teams that play in a more risky style. Try to score goals, the rules say, even if that means you give up more goals, because that makes for more entertaining soccer, and when in doubt, we’d rather advance teams that are more entertaining to watch.

The Knockout Stage

The top two teams from each of the eight groups enter the Knockout Stage. This stage is similar to March Madness or Wimbledon in that it is single elimination. The first place team from each group plays the second place team from another group. Win, and you move on to the quarter-finals (eight teams left.) Win again, and you’re in the semi-finals (four teams left.) Win once more and you’ve made it to the World Cup Finals (two teams left) — have fun playing soccer while a billion people watch! The one wrinkle with the World Cup is that the two losing teams from the semi-finals play each other in a game to determine third place.

Over the next month, we’ll be publishing more to help prepare you for the World Cup. Tune back in!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra

What Does "Ball Don't Lie" Mean?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “ball don’t lie” mean? I’ve heard the phrase used in basketball but I’m not exactly sure what it means.

Thanks,
Dot

ball don't lie
Rasheed Wallace, the most devoted follower of the “ball don’t lie” way.

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Dear Dot,

“Ball don’t lie” is a great basketball phrase that means roughly “you get what you deserve.” Its meaning is similar to other common phrases like “karma is a bitch” or to saying someone got their “just deserts.” While it’s true that basically every human endeavor can be interpreted through the lens of karma or just deserts, sports, because they set up high pressure situations and then resolve them with a high degree of luck involved, are uniquely suited to being interpreted through this lens. Of all the sports, basketball is the most well suited to embracing this philosophy.

Basketball is the highest scoring major sport, so if you’re looking to confirm a theory, you’re more likely to find evidence for it in a basketball game than any other sport — there’s just more stuff happening! Of all the major sports it also has perhaps the most subjective (or arbitrary) foul calls. This leads to players and fans on both sides feeling righteously indignant about the calls that went against them. They express it by screaming, “BALL DON’T LIE” and then, no matter which way the next play goes, one side will feel vindicated and consequentially have their belief in the existence of just basketball gods verified.

As one of basketball’s signature phrases, “Ball don’t lie” pops up in unexpected places. Yahoo’s NBA blog is called Ball Don’t Lie and there was a selling novel by that name by Matt de la Pena which was turned into a movie. Retired basketball player Rasheed Wallace was the world’s foremost proponent of “ball don’t lie” as a way of life. Before he retired, he left behind this exemplum of the phrase’s use. Someone put together a six and a half minute compilation of Wallace yelling “ball don’t lie” and more or less acting like a total lunatic goofball basketball yogi. There’s even a t-shirt of the phrase with Wallace’s likeness on it. My favorite example though comes from Hedo Turkoglu in an often misunderstood post-game interview from 2010. During the interview the sideline reporter asks him what he did differently that night that lead to him having such a good game (usually the best player in the game is chosen to do the on-court post-game interview) and Turkoglu responds simply, “ball.” The reporter tries to interpret this mysterious comment as best he can, but I like to think it was more mystical than mysterious — Turkoglu felt that he had worked hard or been unjustly slighted in a previous game and that according to the basketball principle of “ball don’t lie,” the basketball gods owed him one.

Now that you know what it means, you should feel free to shout “ball don’t lie” as much as you can. Watch out for those wonderful moments when the person who cut you off on the sidewalk while texting bumps into a light-post or when that guy who keeps moving your laundry from the washer mistakenly dyes his underwear pink. Ball don’t lie!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra

What is Selection Sunday?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is Selection Sunday?

Thanks,
Siobhan

031311_SPT_Selection Sunday_MRM
Teams get together with fans to see if their team gets selected for March Madness.

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Dear Siobhan,

Selection Sunday is the day that the 68 teams who have qualified for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament (March Madness) are announced. It’s also today, so let’s get down to the business of explaining how it works.

Like another facet of college, the admissions process, not all 68 open spots are open to every team equally. In college admissions, some spots (a majority at some schools, I believe) are reserved for the children of University employees, legacies whose parent attended the school, or star athletes. In the case of Selection Sunday, 32 of the 68 teams are reserved for conference champions. There are so many schools in the top division of college basketball with teams that they can’t all play each other in the regular season. Instead, their schedules are largely driven by what conference they are in. Conferences are federations of schools who agree to play with and against each other — one day soon we will write a post all about conferences. In the week leading up to Selection Sunday all but one of these conferences hold championship tournaments of their own. These conference championships are miniature versions of March Madness — single elimination tournaments that end in a championship game. The one exception is the Ivy League who disdains tournaments and simply declares the team with the best regular season record to be their champion. Each of the 32 conference winners are guaranteed a spot in the field of 68 teams that make it into the NCAA tournament. These 32 spots are called automatic bids.

The other 36 spots in the 68 team field are called at-large bids and are chosen by a selection committee. The selection committee is made up of ten college athletic directors or conference commissioners and functions just like committees everywhere. It creates controversy. According to a post about March Madness on howstuffworks.com the committee selects based on the following factors:

  • Rating Percentage Index (RPI) (For more information on RPI, go to CollegeRPI.com.)
  • Ranking in national polls
  • Conference record
  • Road record
  • Wins versus ranked opponents
  • The way a team finishes the regular season

Also, I would add, just like the college admissions process, the factors of instinct based on having watched the team during the year, luck, and how much coffee the committee member has had in the last half hour.

Conference is one of the most visible factors in the selection process. There’s a few conferences like the Big 12, Pac-12, Big Ten, and Atlantic 10 that are likely to get five or more teams into the tournament, then there’s a small middle of conferences that will get two or three teams, and a long tail of conferences where only the winner of their conference championship tournament will make the NCAA tournament. These three groups of conferences can colloquially be referred to as power conferences, mid-major conferences, and one-and-done conferences. Traditionally the overall winner of March Madness has almost always come from a power conference but the mid-majors are getting stronger every year. This year a mid-major, Wichita State, won every game throughout the regular season and conference championship and is thought to have a good shot to win the big tournament. The one-and-done conferences are called that because they usually only get one team into March Madness and that team usually loses in its first game.

The excitement of Selection Sunday is mostly about the ten or so teams that realistically don’t know whether they will be selected for the tournament or not. These teams are called bubble teams or are said to be on the bubble which is a nice visual. In addition to the secret whims of the selection committee these teams are effected by the outcomes of the conference championships. This is because of the automatic bids that conference champions receive. In most conferences, the team (or teams depending on what type of conference this is) with the best regular season performance are pretty much locks to get into the NCAAs. If a team outside of this group surprises everyone and wins the conference tournament, they will get the automatic bid, and, if the selection committee doesn’t subtract one of the teams from that conference from their selection, then all of the teams from that conference that were going to get in will get at-large bids, the under-dog upstart will get the automatic bid, and there will be one fewer at-large bid for the bubble teams to fight over. An example of this happened last night in the Big East when Providence upset Creighton. Creighton is still likely to make the tournament but as an at-large team. Providence, which wasn’t likely to qualify, now will on an automatic bid. And a bubble team like Minnesota or Xavier, as The Big Lead supposes, will not qualify as a result.

The selection will be announced on CBS around 6 p.m. ET after the conclusion of the SEC championship game. Enjoy!

Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals

2014 Paralympic Winter Games - Day 4
Nikko Landeros shields the puck from a Russian opponent

The Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals will be televised at 1 pm on NBC! The United States will play host country Russia in what’s is invariably going to be an exciting rematch of their preliminary round game from earlier in the tournament. For the Russian fans, it will likely also have some revenge-factor for their team’s Olympic defeat to the U.S. in the Olympics last month.

In case you’ve never seen sled hockey, here’s a highlight reel of hits to get you pumped up. The action is fast and inspiring. Nikko Landeros, pictured here, is one of two Coloradans who lost their legs seven years ago when they were high school classmates. They were changing a tire on the side of the road when a passing car hit them. Now they are both representing the United States in the Paralympics.

The Denver Post has a wonderful profile of Landeros and Tyler Carron which I highly recommend reading. NBC always markets the Olympics by focusing on stories of athletes overcoming obstacles but the Paralympic stories trump them by a mile. I can’t wait to watch today. Go USA!

 

Why is March Madness the Best?

As one of my oldest sports-watching-friends and a big college basketball fan, I thought Brendan Gilfillan could help me answer the question, “why is March Madness the best?” What follows is a rambling email exchange between the two of us marginally focused on that question. My writing is in italics, Brendan’s in plain text.

typing— — —

Obviously it’s hard to objectively say what sporting event is the best to watch but people who love college basketball are often quite passionate in arguing that the men’s college basketball postseason tournament commonly known as March Madness, is the absolute greatest sports experience of the year. Why do you think that is?

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The first four days: no matter when you turn on a TV, you’ll see hundreds of 18-22 year-olds put under an incredible amount of pressure. Needless to say, that results in some pretty incredible stuff: heartbreaking, skull-thumping mistakes, once-in-a-lifetime performances, and absolute unparalleled chaos. Because of the format, it’s the sporting playoff where sheer unpredictability reigns most supreme (the NFL comes closest, in my opinion). There are other, lesser reasons: unlike the NBA most players aren’t talented enough to score consistently, which forces coaches to use some diverse and creative offenses; and for a lot of these players, this is the end of their athletic career, which adds an additional sense of desperation.

But for me, the central reason is the sheer nuttiness that ensues when you put kids under the spotlight in a single elimination tournament many of them have been looking forward to their entire lives. It’s kind of like why the Olympics are so intense, but magnified because the sport is more accessible and easier to follow/invest in over the course of a season.

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The question of unpredictability is a good one — I think we had a post answering the question “are predictable sports more popular” but I don’t think we came to any real conclusion. The NBA is known as the most predictable sport. Funny that basketball can be the most and the least predictable just at different levels. The difference has something to do with the skill and ability to withstand pressure of the players but there are some important format differences too. The college game is shorter (forty minutes instead of forty-eight,) and the shot clock is longer (35 seconds instead of 24.) This leads to lower scoring games with fewer possessions and therefore more chance for an on-average weaker team to come out victorious. The format of the playoffs (single elimination instead of a seven game series) is also a big factor in making college basketball less predictable. How do you rationalize the obsession of sports fans with determining who the best team is with an enjoyment of unpredictability which inevitably leads to a less conclusive champion?

You’re absolutely right about the first four days though. They are so exciting. The first four days of the tournament winnows the field from 64 teams to 32 and then to 16. So that’s… 40 games in four days. I remember a time when I was at work… but keeping an eye on the games on one side of my monitor… and a colleague of mine on the opposite end of the office and I let out a yell at the same time when someone hit a buzzer-beating shot to win a game. Classic moment in lost productivity. How do you think the advent of streaming games on computers and tablets has changed how people consume the tournament, especially those hectic first four days?

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Do you think sports fans are obsessed with determining who the best team is? I guess every fan is after something different in sports. I’m in it for the experiences and moments, not for justice.

Although I’d argue that the best team is the team that performs best when it matters most. This is an age-old argument, but I don’t understand how you can have the best team if you lose when the stakes are the highest (even in the event of injury, horrific officiating – great teams overcome!). You may have the most talented collection of players, but whatever thing you need to put you over the top when there’s no margin for error is what makes a team the “best.” Do you (or fans you know) end up disappointed when the “wrong” team wins, assuming they don’t have a direct rooting interest in that team? I guess I can understand that…it’s just not how I experience sports.

re: streaming games – I don’t how much it’s changed it for the diehards, cause they are more likely to skip work altogether, buy a case of beer and a family-size bag of Doritos and camp out on the couch in a tee-shirt, tube socks and sweatpants(if they’re wearing pants at all), moving only to perform the most urgent bodily functions. There’s nothing nastier than the smell of an NCAA-tourney diehard on that first Sunday night. But more fans watching more games early on means they’ll be more invested in those teams as they advance. They get invested in individual players, know their stories, and ultimately end up feeling genuine disappointment/elation at their performance – feelings that are completely out of proportion to any actual impact on their own lives.

Another thing on college sports (in my experience, basketball) in general: the fun of college basketball isn’t in seeing the guys who are just stopping over on their way to the pros. The fun is in seeing a guy like Markel Starks – Georgetown’s starting point guard. I remember watching him in person his freshman year, when he only got in during garbage time. I somehow ended up sitting next to some of his friends/family – they were cheering for everything he did despite the fact that it had no impact on the outcome of the game. And he wasn’t very good then – he sat behind better players for most of his career, and spent his time getting a little better each year, without any guarantee other than his coach’s word that it’d work out.

Watching him progress over those four years – and then watching him this year, when he’s all Big East first team, when he was amazing on senior night in an upset win over Creighton that we absolutely had to have – is what college sports is all about. There’s usually guys like that on every team – guys who may or may not go pro, here or abroad – and this is their time in the spotlight.

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I do think there’s some serious interest in at least the appearance of determining who the actual best team is. For evidence of this, look at the enormous mess that has been made of college football in the past twenty years in an attempt to create a post-season format that better determines the national champion. Not to pour salt in a very old wound but if the NBA was a single elimination tournament, your 76ers would have beaten the Lakers in the 2001 finals and the lasting image would have been Allen Iverson stepping over Tyrone Lue. Instead, the Lakers won the seven game series decisively 4-1. There’s truth to the narrative about players and teams playing their best when it counts but there’s a whole lot of luck involved too.

Technology has definitely changed the way even die-hard fans consume March Madness. Even the earliest streaming websites and apps allowed for the consumer to choose which game to watch. On TV, the games were only on one channel, and someone at the station would decide who saw what game and when to switch from a less competitive game to a closer one. Now I believe that every game is televised in full by CBS Sports taking over a bunch of networks in their… network. This puts the onus on the viewer just like in a streaming type situation. I have to say, I miss the more curated experience of watching whatever was on CBS the whole weekend. What do you think? Has technology made the viewing experience better or worse for you?

Great point about feeling a connection with the players. That’s something that’s more difficult to do with professional sports because the life of a millionaire professional athlete is so far from identifiable for most of us, unfortunately. Not that the life of a stud college athlete is all that different but at least many of us went to college and can identify with some of the elements (exams, hormone-driven obsession with romance, weekend drinking, etc.) of their lives. You can also identify with Starks because you went to Georgetown but for people like me whose colleges don’t have top-level basketball programs, there’s always a team to latch on to during the tournament whether it’s an exciting Cinderella story, a regional team, a friend’s alma mater, or just a team we favor for our bracket.

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Red herrings, all! I think the issue with college football is that the champion is too frequently not being determined on the field, which means there can’t be any sort of justice. I also think the Lakers/Sixers argument is flawed, as much as I enjoy picturing that step-over (top 3 highlight of my sports fan existence…picturing now…that little head nod where he almost looked down, then seemed to decide Lue didn’t even warrant it). The question those teams were trying to answer was who would be best over a seven game series, not in a single elimination game. Everyone’s approach to that game changes if it’s winner take all. And as much as I love AI, I don’t think he’s able to drag that team over the hump when both Kobe and Shaq know it’s all or nothing.

The streaming thing has been net positive for me – I think anything that gives fans more agency is better. What non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…not only in the beginning but potentially in real time.

Your favorite playoffs – at least I think – are the Stanley Cup playoffs, right? Is it cause the familiarity built up over seven games yields such intense/high-level play?

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Hey now, “what non-fans/more casual fans need in a world with that many teams and games is help sorting through where to watch and what to watch for…” That sounds like something Dear Sports Fan should be doing! Maybe we can do that this year.

You’re right, my favorite playoffs are ones based on seven game series. It’s not so much that they are better at determining which team is better (although they are dramatically better at that) it’s more about the drama that they produce. Seven games is an eternity for two teams to play against each other at the highest level with elimination at stake. Invariably, players start to hate each other; a dirty hit in game one will be retaliated for in game five. The tactics that worked one game will be countered the following game. There’s so much more depth to watching a series than a single game. And in terms of raw excitement, every series ends with an elimination game — sometimes, in the case of game sevens — for both teams. That’s really the perfect mix, a single elimination game with six games of history before it.

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Well but just as often the elimination game comes at 3-0 or 3-1 or something – there’s no guarantee of a game 7, whereas with the NCAA it’s all elimination games. I do think the seven game series is uniquely suited for hockey – it’s kind of a grind in baseball, where the strategic changes are much less interesting and teams’ retaliation is limited to pointless milling about in each other’s vicinity. Basketball is closer but you don’t necessarily see the intensity you do in hockey – or, that you saw in the NBA 30 years ago. Everyone’s competitive but you don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of hatred there.

What about Olympic hockey, though? Did you enjoy that less than the NHL playoffs cause of the format?

[some time elapses]

And now I’ve tasted my own mutton…how do I like the taste? Georgetown lost a single-elimination game in the Big East tournament to a “lesser team,” meaning they will definitely not go on to the NCAA tournament. It’s pretty disheartening. Georgetown is clearly “better” than DePaul – they’ve played and beaten better teams, have a better record, have more talent. But when it came down to a single game with real stakes, DePaul flat-out outplayed them. No excuse, no fluke, they were the better team last night.

So justice was done. The same things that plagued Georgetown all year – and put us in the position of needing this win – did us in last night. No front-line scoring cause of the suspension of Josh Smith, who was clearly way too integral to our plans for a transfer with a shaky past; offensive droughts and the occasional, incredibly poorly timed defensive lapse; and generally playing down to the level of our competition. How else to explain a season sweep to Seton Hall? A loss to Northeastern?

Sigh.

— — —

I think we’ve come full circle here. I’m sure you’ll still be able to enjoy watching March Madness starting next week. Maybe even more now that the excitement and unpredictability can’t harm your rooting interests any further.

How Tough is Too Tough in Sports?

There’s a great scene in the Marx Brothers movie, Monkey Business, where a mobster mistakenly hires Chico and Harpo as henchmen. He asks Chico how tough the two of them are and Chico responds:

You pay little bit, we’re little bit tough.
You pay very much, very much tough.
You pay too much, we’re too much tough.
How much you pay?
I pay plenty.
Then we’re plenty tough.

We all know that people who play sports are tough — it’s one of the things most sports fans admire about the players — but how tough is too tough? And what is the right way to respond as fans to that toughness?

Boston Bruins v Vancouver Canucks - Game Seven
If Rich Peverley does have to hang them up for good, hopefully having won the cup a few years ago with Boston will soften the blow of early retirement.

This question came to the forefront this week when Rich Peverley, an ice hockey player on the Dallas Stars, collapsed during a game. His heart had stopped but thanks to the quick action of team doctors and his teammates who immediately piled onto the ice en masse in a successful effort to stop the game and signal the seriousness of the situation as quickly as possible, Peverley’s heart was restarted and he is in stable condition. Peverley had been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in a pre-season physical and had a procedure designed to fix it. The game was (rightly, in my mind) postponed by the NHL following the incident.

Soon after it was reported that Peverley was in stable condition, a story started floating around, sourced from the Dallas Stars twitter account:

 

As Deadspin commented, “The most Hockey dude ever is in stable condition at a Dallas hospital.”

And indeed, there is something admirable about Peverley’s determination to get back into the game at all costs. It’s similar to the admiration we have for hockey players like Patrice Bergeron who played the final game of last year’s playoffs for the Boston Bruins with broken ribs, torn rib cartilage, torn rib muscles, and a separated shoulder. It’s the admiration we have for basketball players who “walk-off” ankles that we’ve just seen bend in ways that shouldn’t allow their owners to be upright, much less playing a sport. It’s not limited to men either, who can forget gymnast Kerri Strug landing a vault on a broken ankle for the U.S. Women’s gymnastics team or U.S. Women’s National Team player Abby Wambach going up for headers while blood streamed down her head from an earlier injury. A big part of a fans enjoyment of sports comes from admiration for people willing and able to do things that you, the viewer, could not do. Playing through injuries is part of that.

There’s a flip-side to this toughness though. There are some injuries that shouldn’t be played through: head injuries and heart injuries or conditions seem like obvious candidates to us but they are routinely ignored and even hidden by players. Bruce Arthur of the National Post wrote an article about this (as well as the strange need of some hockey fans to denigrate other sports as less tough) yesterday. He writes of Peverley, “Asking to go back in wasn’t so much about toughness as a form of insanity.” He also reminds the reader that two basketball players, Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis both died of heart problems on the court. When Peverley went down, many people thought of Jiri Fischer, a hockey player who was similarly brought back to life after a heart issue during a game, but there are other examples: Corey Stringer was a prominent football player who died of complications from heat stroke but there have been many others, Kris Letang, a player on the Pittsburgh Penguins, had a stroke this year resulting from a small hole in his heart. He is recovering now but managed to get to the training facility and fly with the team to an away game before the trainers found out and hospitalized him. The concussion story is well documented but it’s worth repeating that a big problem with preventing concussions, particularly the far more damaging second and third concussions in a short period, is that players at every level actively hide them from their coaches and trainers.

So, how tough is too tough in sports? I guess the answer is: when it comes to heads and hearts, don’t be tough; when it comes to anything else, be as tough as you want. That’s a pretty hard psychological change to ask athletes to make though: put the team before your knees, your legs, your arms, but not your head or your heart. It would be better to put structures in place in all sports that, without increasing the incentive of players to hide head and heart injuries, identified them and treated the players medically as people first and players a far distant second. I think it’s okay to enjoy a player whose heart tells him to get back into the game even after it’s just been shocked back to life as long as, as Barry Petchesky of Deadspin wrote, his coach, teammates, team doctors, and the league itself were all determined that it was “never, ever going to happen.”

When is a Conference Not a Conference? A Sports Theseus Paradox

This Wednesday, March 12, the Big East Men’s College Basketball Tournament starts at Madison Square Garden in New York City as it has every year since 1983. This year though, the tournament is different enough that it has many sports fans asking the question, “is this the same tournament?” Similar questions about the consistency of existence have been asked throughout history in the form of a paradox called the Theseus Paradox.

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Syracuse and Pitt, who faced each other in the 2006 finals, are both gone from the Big East.

The Theseus Paradox, first posed by Plutarch in his first century Life of Theseus, asks whether Theseus’ ship, having been preserved by replacing one by one, every single board, is truly the same ship? This question is also commonly asked about “my grandfather’s ax”: This is my grandfather’s ax. My father replaced the head and I replaced the shaft. (As an aside, this is one of the many quotations on my father’s classroom wall. I guess the tree doesn’t grow far from where the apple falls…) The question the paradox asks is about the nature of existence — in the case of a sports conference, what makes the Big East the Big East? Is it the conference name, the location of its tournament, or the teams that play in it?

The Big East was formed in 1980 as a collection of schools, many Catholic, mostly in the Northeast of the country, whose priority when it came to sports was basketball. It quickly became a powerhouse college basketball conference in part because of its television contract with an up and coming network called ESPN. For almost two decades, it drove college basketball and was driven by college basketball but then the rise of college football as the big money-maker for college athletics caught up to it. From the mid-1990s the economics of college sports forced the Big East to start making moves to improve its standing in College Football even at the expense of its basketball history. It added schools like Miami, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech which were not only far from being in the Northeast but were also primarily football schools. This emphasis on football mixed with the Big East’s tendency to be stronger in basketball than football despite its best attempt to conform eventually led, starting in 2004, to the slow but steady flight of football-strong schools from the conference. One of my favorite sports writers, Michael Wilbon, wrote a good article about this in 2011. The conflict came to a head last year when seven of the original members of the Big East (all Catholic and all primarily basketball schools) petitioned the league to break away from the remaining schools and form their own league. They succeeded in seceding and because they represented a majority of the remaining charter members, were able to take the Big East name with them.

This year’s Big East consists of those seven teams plus three more they poached from other leagues. It’s this league that will be having their postseason tournament in Madison Square Garden this week but its unclear how much the new tournament will “feel” like the old one. It will be missing most of its biggest teams and rivalries. Syracuse, UConn, Louisville, and Pitt are gone and with them seventeen of the thirty four Big East historic championship teams. The last remaining historic powerhouse, Georgetown, is robbed of its main rivals and having an unusually weak year. According to Forbes, ticket sales are down 11%. The New York Post argues that what the current tournament has “lost in star power” it has “made up in drama.”

Coming back to the metaphor of the ax, the parallel to the paradox is not complete. Seven of the ten schools in this iteration of the Big East were charter members of the original Big East. So, while the head of the ax may have been changed, at least the shaft is the same piece of wood. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes added a question to the paradox using the metaphor of a ship — what, he posed, if the original planks had been collected on their way out of the ship, and assembled back into another ship? Which would be the “real” ship? Luckily we don’t have to answer this question about basketball because the teams that have left the Big East have mostly scattered into other conferences.

What’s the answer? Is the Big East still the Big East? Perhaps there’s a clue to be found in (the all-knowing, all-powerful,) Wikipedia having two seperate entries for the Big East, one pre-2013, one post? Perhaps there is no answer? Perhaps the only way to know will be to tune in and watch the tournament…

Why do Sports Fans Care More Than the Players?

The other day I was talking to my Mom about the post I wrote following the United States’ loss to Canada in the Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey semi-finals. She complimented me (thanks Mom!) on how well I expressed the emotions of a fan who has just watched their team lose. Our conversation led into a discussion of why it seems like fans take losses harder than the athletes themselves. I decided to turn that conversation into this short essay on why sports fans care more than the players.

sad fans
Toronto Maple Leaf fans react in horror to their team’s collapse in last year’s playoffs.

The day before the U.S. vs. Canada game, I had the opportunity to hang out in the USA house in Olympic Park. There I met the mother of an Olympic Snowboard Cross competitor. When I asked her how he did, she grimaced and said “Not so good.” I commiserated with her and when it was clear that she hadn’t let the loss get in the way of her enjoying the Olympic experience, I asked her if her son was able to enjoy himself after the loss too. Of course he was, was her answer. She explained that he usually takes fifteen minutes to a half-hour to get over a bad performance and that she and her family have learned to give him space until he’s done processing. By the time another American racer had won the competition, her son was already able to enjoy it with him, grinning and lifting him up in celebration.

At the depths of my despair about the fate of the United States Men’s Ice Hockey team, I felt as though I had come thousands of miles for nothing — just to see them lose. But then I thought of this woman and her son. If he was able to get over his loss, which he had traveled thousands of miles for, not to mention the thousands of hours of training, then certainly I should be able to get over my feelings of loss. That’s when my Mom mentioned that when my brother and I were kids and our soccer teams lost, she was always more upset, for longer, than he or I was. She said that our behavior was a lot like the snowboarder’s — by the time we got home from the game, it seemed like we had moved on.

Why is that, we wondered? Why do sports fans care more than the players?

The common answer to this common question, usually asked about professional athletes, is that they care less than the fans because it’s a job for them while it’s a passion for the fans. There’s probably some truth to this. There have been lots of stories in the past year that clarify that locker rooms are workplaces and being an athlete is a job. The Jonathan Martin, Richie Incognito story was about workplace harassment. The brain injury story has been about assumptions of safety and fair disclosure of risk in the workplace. The Michael Sam and Jason Collins story has been about freedom of preference expression in the workplace. Meanwhile, players are being traded and cut by their teams left and right, each one clarifying that athletes are hires, not members of a team family. I’m suspicious of the logic that adds all of this evidence together and comes out with the conclusion that this is why professional athletes don’t seem to care about losses as much as fans. First of all, if this were true, then we wouldn’t expect to see fans of youth or amateur sports care more than the players. Secondly, the selection process to make it into a professional league in a team sport is so competitive that I think it selects for people who care more about the team than most rational people would.

My explanation is that fans care more than the players because they have less agency. Another thing I did on my trip was read a lot. My girlfriend (this is turning into quite a family post!) recommended The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. In it, a psychologist treats victims of what they called “shell-shock” or “hysteria” during World War 1 and, despite mixed feelings on the matter, tries to cure them so they can go back to the front. Dr. William Rivers (who was a real person — much of the books is based on his and some of his patients’ writings which have survived) uses his few free hours to theorize about the nature of the psychological disorders that he’s working on. He theorizes that the connection between the common incidence of shell-shock among men at the front and the hysteria that during peace-time was a more common female issue, is lack of agency. He doesn’t think that what pushes soldiers or house-wives over the edge is the horror of war or an abusive husband but instead it’s the feeling of being completely invested in something that you have absolutely no power to influence in any material way.

The same, do a much lesser extent, of course, is true of sports fans. We sit in the stands or on our couches and invest ourselves in the success or failure of our teams but we have absolutely no control over what happens to them. As much as we try with lucky jerseys, lucky food, or other rituals, we know that we’re just observers and not a part of the action. My guess is that that is psychologically harder than what the athletes go through during most losses. At least they impacted the game — even if they kick themselves for a bad catch or an errant pass or a missed defensive assignment, they know that they did some good things and some bad ones; they know they had an effect on the game. The athlete who loses doesn’t feel the helpless meaningless feeling of the fan who knows that she cares so deeply about something completely uncontrollable… and that she’s going to continue to next season.