Category: Understanding Sports

Why You Shouldn't Spend All Day Watching Football

One of the joys of working on this website is that the WordPress software I run the site with tracks many of the search terms people have entered that lead them to Dear Sports Fan. Yesterday someone viewed the site after searching google for “why men shouldn’t watch NFL football every Sunday.” This is pretty exciting because it means that our core audience (non-sports fans who have important sports fans in their lives) exist and that they are curious or frustrated enough to take their questions to the internet and that once there, Dear Sports Fan’s content is relevant enough to pop up in searches and to be read! So, in honor of you, whoever you are, here are some thoughts about spending all day watching football and some tips on negotiating the topic with your favorite football fan.

Less is More

There’s different modes of football watching and one that is extremely enjoyable is the viewing of a single, important game. Watching football all day sometimes means you never really focus in on one game and enjoy it’s drama, it’s plot twists, it’s ups and downs as fully as you could. If the fan in your life has a favorite team, why not make it into a special occasion for him or her? Expressing the desire to watch with that person is likely enough to make it special but it wouldn’t hurt to add some props to the equation. Throw on some color coded clothing to support a team. Clear away distractions half an hour early. Get involved by cooking or ordering appropriate food. Football team names are often fun to play with in a themed event kind of way. When I was in college, my friends and I would throw a themed super bowl party. When the Buccaneers played the Raiders it was PIRATE BOWL. There’s no reason why you can’t steal this idea on a normal Sunday. Cook some gumbo for a Saints game, make some wings for a Bills game, or cook a corned beef (but start early) for a Patriots game. Making an occasion out of a game is a good way to make a single game the occasion.

Take a Bye Week

If the sports fan in your life has a favorite team there is at least one, probably two or three weeks during the football season where the negotiation for a football free or football light weekend will be significantly easier than others. In the NFL, every team plays 16 games over 17 weeks. The one week a team does not play is called their bye week. This is a great week to suggest that your favorite fan take a bye week too! Go away for the weekend or get some yard work done! Every team also has at least one prime-time game on Thursday, Sunday, or Monday night. These weeks are also good bets to suggest a Sunday day activity.

Plan Ahead

One of the under-appreciated elements of the sports business is how effectively is markets itself. Most of the time sporting events are generally unremarkable. Once in a while they’re drama and unpredictability make them transendent experiences for sports fans. ESPN, NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, and the sports leagues themselves do a great job of promoting upcoming games to convince sports fans that despite all probabalistic evidence to the contrary, this game is going to defy logic and has a 100% chance of being transendent. Think of the way big food companies market desserts and then double it. By the day of the game most sports fans have been looking forward to watching particular games for days. If you want to do something else with them, talk to them about it before they’ve bought the hype.

Lose the Battle, Win the War

Sometimes, it is great to watch football all day. As bizarre as it may sound if you are not a fan, planting your butt on a couch and watching football all day is an experience many of us prize. It’s an indulgence like spending the day at a spa or an amusement park or in a casino. And like all indulgences, it’s only really enjoyable if you feel good about doing it! So give the football fan in your life the gift of support some Sundays and make them feel good about indulging themselves. Tell them you understand how they enjoy a full day of football and that you want them to choose some Sundays to have that and some Sundays to share the day with you. I’ll leave it to you and your sports fan to figure out exactly what the right ratio is.

Good luck and happy negotiating.

 

How do the Major League Baseball Playoffs Work?

I went to a Mets game this year and took this photo. They did not make the playoffs.

The Major League Baseball playoffs are among the most confusing playoffs for me because they have the most variety of format of all of the major sports’ playoffs. The MLB playoffs consist of four rounds and three different formats. It’s also confusing to me because it’s the sport I follow the least but since it started yesterday I’ve done some reading, some watching, and some listening and I am ready to report back to you what I’ve learned and then comment on what makes sense about it and what doesn’t. Let’s travel backwards through the playoffs starting with the most famous and familiar element, the World Series.

The World Series

The World Series determines the championship of the MLB. It is a best of seven series where the first team to win four games wins the series. This format is the one the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League use throughout their playoffs. Instead of dividing the league into East and West as the NBA and NHL have done for years, baseball (like football) uses history to divide their league in two. The National League was formed in 1876 and the American League in 1901. Teams from the two leagues have been facing each other in the World Series since 1903.[1] The first two games are played at one team’s home stadium, the next three at the other’s, and the last two, if necessary, at the first team’s stadium. Instead of using regular season record to decide who gets four potential games at home and who three, since 2003, this advantage was granted to the team representing whichever league won in the mid-season all-star game, an otherwise meaningless exhibition.

The Championship Series

To make it to the World Series, a team has to make it through the semi-final round, confusingly called either the American or National League Championship Series, again for historic reasons. This series follows the same seven game format as the World Series. Another oddity of baseball that stems from its history as two separate leagues is that each league plays under slightly different rules. The biggest difference is that in the National League, pitchers are required to bat whereas in the American League teams have the option[2] to replace the pitcher in the batting order with a player who only has to hit, never field. That “position” is called the designated hitter. These rules have all sorts of tactical consequences which deserve their own post but which become even more interesting in the World Series when both teams must play by the home team’s rules.

The Divisional Series

The four teams that make it to the ALCS or the NLCS have won the previous round, the Divisional Series. The divisional series’ are the quarterfinals and consist of eight teams. The format is a five game series where the first team to win three games wins the series. Each League is made up of three five-team divisions. The team in each division with the best regular season record is a division winner and automatically gets a place in the divisional series. The other two teams that make it to this round are called wild-cards and until 2012 were the two teams, one from each league, with the highest win total among non-division winning teams.

The Wild Card Playoff

Since 2012 the two extra teams to make it into the Divisional series have been the winners of the Wild Card Playoff. The Wild Card Playoff (surprise, surprise) follows a third format. It is a single elimination game. One game, the winner of which advances to the next round of the playoffs. The four teams that make it to to the Wild Card Playoff, two from each league, are the teams with the highest and second highest win total in the regular season among non-division winning teams. In 2013, the Wild Card Playoff games were between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in the National League and Tampa Bay and Cleveland in the American League.

What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t

There are elements of this complicated setup that make sense and some that don’t. Increasing the number of games in a series as the playoffs go on makes sense because the longer a series is, the more likely it is that the better[3] team will win, and it feels more important to get the championship right than it does the quarterfinals. Varying the length of the series’ also makes sense because it maximizes the number of teams involved while answering critics who say that the playoffs are too long to sustain interest. Maximizing the number of teams involved is great for fans who may wait years for their team to even make the playoffs and great for owners who might earn more money from one playoff game than a dozen regular season games.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the Wild Card Playoff. Reducing a series from seven games to five as a trade-off between getting it right and making it worth watching seems reasonable to me but going all the way down to one game sacrifices too much. Any one game between professional teams, especially ones that are good enough to make it to the playoffs, approaches a coin-toss. The coin may be weighted in one direction or another but at most it’s probably a 40-60 proposition. One game is simply not statistically significant enough to be a reliable indication of who is better. This is particularly unsatisfying in a sport that takes statistical significance so seriously that it plays 162 games in its regular season as opposed to 82 in professional hockey and basketball and 16 in football. On an emotional level, I can’t imagine following a team for 162 games over six months only to have it end with one bad game.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Believe it or not, the two leagues only merged as corporate entities in 2000!!↵
  2. Which they basically always take.↵
  3. It’s easy to twist yourself into knots about this one. If the worse team wins then aren’t they the better team? It can be an endless argument or an unspoken agreement.↵

What Does Games Back Mean in Sports Standings?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Greg

— — —

Dear Greg,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. GO TEAM E!!!↵

Why Do People Like Soccer?

There’s a lot said about soccer by people who don’t like it: it’s too low scoring, it’s too slow, it’s too liberal, people are diving constantly, etc. Supporters of soccer or football as it’s called in the rest of the world call it “the beautiful game” and flock to it in record numbers. As someone who will happily watch or participate in virtually any sport from water polo to olympic handball to Australian rules football[1] I’m not particularly interested in advocating for one sport over another but I will list some of the reasons I think people like 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? 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.

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People Like Soccer Because it is Incredibly Hard to Score

This may be counter-intuitive because one of the complaints of many people about soccer is that it’s too low scoring but I think it’s a feature not a defect. One of the primary reasons why people enjoy watching sports in general is to watch athletes do things that they themselves could not do. For that reason, the harder it is to score in a game, the more wonder scoring should create in its fans when it does happen. And it is hard to score in soccer — this is what an attacking player in soccer faces:

  • First they take away the most dextrous limbs at your disposal, your arms. No using your hands or arms.
  • Then they put a ball on the field that, if you kick it hard enough, bends and dips in all sorts of fairly unpredictable ways.
  • Controlling this ball without using your hands means that your top speed with the ball is way slower than a defender can run without the ball.
  • Finally, they allow one player, the guy who is there with the sole purpose of preventing you from scoring, to use his hands.

All of these difficulties (and we didn’t even mention the offside rule) make scoring an impressive feat.

People Like Soccer Because of the Buildup Before the Release

One of the unexpected adjunct pleasures of watching a game where scoring is so rare is that by the time a team does score, it’s fans have built up an enormous store of pent up will, rage, and yearning that explodes into celebration to a degree unknown in higher scoring sports. According to Chris Anderson and David Sally of Slate Magazine the average number of goals in an English Premiere League soccer game is around 2.6. In a ninety minute game a team will usually score one or two goals. That’s a ton of time for fans root without having a celebratory release. Compare this to sports like tennis where the play rarely lasts 30 seconds or basketball where a team must shoot every 24 seconds and scores a little less than half the time it shoots. I can say that the goal the United States scored against Algeria after ninety scoreless minutes of a 2010 World Cup game that the U.S. needed to win was one of the most glorious sports moments of my life.

There are two downsides to this characteristic of soccer that I would be remiss not to mention: one is that the despair of seeing the opposing team score is equally acute. The second is that, mostly in the past in Europe but still once in a while in other parts of the world, the extremity of emotion combined with a heady mixture of alcohol, antagonism unrelated to sport, and unwisely designed stadiums can lead to rioting. In 1989 in Sheffield, England 96 people were killed and another 700 plus were injured in a riot of this sort. Called the Hillsborough disaster, these deaths did lead to significant reform in England.

People Like Soccer Because of its Teamwork and Fluid Play

This is probably also related to the advantages that not being able to use your hands give defense has over offense but soccer teams play more as a team than almost any other sport. It’s not unusual for there to be a string of ten or even fifteen passes that lead up to a goal. There are absolutely star players but even they exist within a team frame-work. For every star striker (player who exists solely to score) there is a star playmaker whose greatness is seen most clearly in the passes he or she makes to teammates. If you watch a soccer match in person, try to sit farther up than you imagine is ideal. From there you will get a good view of how the twenty-two players on the field move in swoops and cycles. The play continues this way almost unimpeded for ninety minutes. As the patterns that players make (overlapping runs on the wing, forwards retreating to pick up a pass, etc.) make their way into your brain as tactics instead of the aimless wandering you first might perceive them as, you will come to appreciate them.

Some Other Reasons People Like Soccer

  • More than other sports, national soccer teams have clearly defined historic styles that usually remain constant and which relate in some way to the national character (or at least are thought to.) The Brazilians dance with the ball like no one else and win, the Italians play rugged, dirty, defensive soccer and win, the British lose gallantly, the Germans play disciplined soccer and win a lot, and the Dutch play the most beautiful soccer in the world and lose consistently in the end.
  • There’s less difference between the men’s and women’s game than in most sports. Although I won’t often watch women’s basketball, I will watch the U.S. Women’s National team whenever it’s on. The rules of the game are almost identical and I get as much enjoyment from watching their games as I do the Men’s team.
  • The U.S. Men’s team is not that good. I’m one of those weird fans that enjoys watching bad teams, but even people who don’t have that problem might enjoy a break from being an overwhelming favorite like the U.S. is in many international competitions.
  • Most people in the world (even here in the United States) grew up playing soccer so they’ve internalized the game more than other sports.

There are some reasons why I think people like soccer. Do you like soccer? Why?

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Although I will admit I do not understand the rules that the name of that sport refers to↵

How Does Scoring Work in Bowling?

One might ask why, on a day full of incredibly exciting sporting events like the U.S. Open men’s semifinals and the second full Saturday of college football, I am sitting on the couch writing about bowling. Let me explain.

There is a great bowling alley about 20 blocks from my apartment. Unlike most of the bowling alleys in New York city, this alley has remained true to the bowling alleys of my youth. It is slightly tawdry, mostly empty, and absolutely comfortable. My birthday was a few weeks ago and I decided to invite a few friends to join me for an afternoon of bowling and general tomfoolery. It was great fun but I was frustrated by my lack of bowling skills. I told myself that I would return some day when I had nothing else to do and bowl by myself to see if I could improve my score. I did this the other day and bowled by far the best game I’ve ever bowled! I scored a 163! This made me realize that I didn’t really understand how scoring works in bowling. While watching tennis and football today, I did some research…

I’m not the only one who spends most of his time trying to find the perfect ball?

It feels like the hardest part of bowling is understanding the score but it doesn’t need to be so complicated! Scoring in bowling[1] is simpler than it seems. The point of the game is to roll the bowling ball down the lane and knock as many of the pins down as efficiently as possible. A game consists of ten standard frames. In each frame the bowler is given two chances (like downs in football) to knock the pins down. If the bowler knocks all the pins down his or her first attempt, the second attempt or ball in that frame is discarded. At the end of each frame, no matter what has happened, the pins are reset to start the next frame. In a standard game, if the bowler never is able to knock all of the pins down in a frame, the score of the game will be exactly the number of pins knocked down.

So far, so good; two pins knocked down equals two points scored. Here’s where things get a tiny bit tricky[2] Knocking down all of the pins in a frame earns the bowler more chances to bowl. If the bowler knocks all of the pins down in their first roll (a strike) they get two bonus chances. If the bowler knocks all ten pins down but it takes two attempts to do it (a spare) they get one bonus roll. Bonus rolls are taken right after they are earned. Here’s how it works for a strike:

Frame 1 || Ball 1 — 10 pins knocked down (strike!) || Bonus Ball 1 || Bonus Ball 2

And here’s how it works for a spare:

Frame 1 || Ball 1 — any number of pins knocked down less than 10 || Ball 2 — all the remaining pins knocked down for a total of 10 || Only Bonus Ball

The score for the frame in both scenarios is simply the total number of pins knocked down in the standard frame and the bonus balls. Another way to think about this is that knocking all the pins down in a frame means the score for that frame will be made up of three rolls instead of two. Note how this is true for strikes (one standard plus two bonus) and spares (two standard plus one bonus.) This concept is important because it means there’s really only one rule to learn, not two!

This seems to suggest that a perfect game (a score of 300) would be achieved by throwing 30 straight strikes. That’s not true. Actually it only requires 12 straight strikes. That magical shrinking effect is created by transposing one frame on the next within the standard ten frames. Instead of this pattern:

Frame 1 || Strike || Bonus Ball 1 || Bonus Ball 2
Frame 2 || Strike || Bonus Ball 1 || Bonus Ball 2
Frame 3 || Strike || Bonus Ball 1 || Bonus Ball 2

Bowling follows this pattern:

Frame 1 || Strike || Bonus Ball 1 || Bonus Ball 2
Frame 2               || Strike            ||
Frame 3                                         || Strike 

The next roll after a strike counts as both the first bonus roll AND the first roll of the next frame. The second bonus roll after a strike will either be the second roll of the next frame OR the first roll of the one after that if the second frame is cut short by a strike. The single bonus roll after a spare is always the first roll of the next frame, regardless of the outcome of that roll.

If a bowler throws a strike in the last frame they are owed two bonus rolls but there is no standard next frame to overlap with. Instead the game reverts to how we originally explained it and the extra rolls are counted in the tenth frame regardless of their outcome. If there is a strike in the first bonus roll, the pins are reset before the second bonus roll.

Phew! There it is. There’s no multiplication, division, or subtraction[3] in bowling, just addition and one particularly tricky transposition.

Thanks for reading and if you’re ever in Queens, let’s bowl!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. My Boston-proud girlfriend would want me to specify that this is Ten-Pin bowling and not any of the other regional variants of the game like Candle-Pin. For most of us, Ten-Pin is the only kind of bowling we know.↵
  2. If you know how bowling works, bear with me — I’m about to describe it in what I think is a very clever way… but which is going to seem wrong-ish initially to experienced bowlers.↵
  3. I hope!!↵

An Introduction to Football for the Curious

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

General Questions About Football

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

Rules, Terms, and Other Important Minutiae

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

Football Positions

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

Fantasy Football

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

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

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How Should I Feel About the NFL Concussion Settlement?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Tricia

— — —

Dear Tricia,

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

People Need Help Now

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

Retired NFL Players are Not the Public

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

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

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

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

It Would Have Been Tricky in Court

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

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

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

Which Lesson Has Been Learned?

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

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

 

How Does Scoring Work in Football?

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

A Touchdown

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

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

A Field Goal

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

A Safety

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

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

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

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

How Does Fantasy Football Work?

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

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

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

Real Football Game –> Statistics –> Fantasy Football Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

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

What are Some Tips for Your First Fantasy Football Draft?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Sonja

— — —

Dear Sonja,

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

Tips for Your First Fantasy Football Draft

Have a Strategy

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

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

Enjoy Yourself

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

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

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

Good luck!
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

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