Category: Understanding Sports

Have we had presidents who were athletes?

Dear Sports Fan,

I know we’ve had presidents who were actors (well, at least one) and presidents who were generals, and lots who were lawyers. Have we had presidents who were athletes?

Thanks,
Richard

Dear Richard,

We have had presidents who were athletes. Off the top of my head, I know that Gerald Ford played center for a big-time college football team, which makes it doubly funny that his Saturday Night Live parody was almost completely based on his clumsiness. Barack Obama’s skill on the basketball court is probably a little overstated, but its importance to him cannot be. I believe Teddy Roosevelt overcame a fairly severe asthma condition to become an avid outdoorsman and big game hunter. And we all know how much exercise he got on the stairs in Brooklyn. I don’t think George W. Bush played a sport at the collegiate level, but the first pitch strike he threw out in the World Series after 9/11 was a chill-inducing presidential athletic moment in my memory. You deserve an answer with a little more weight though, so I researched the topic. Here is what I found.

I’ll stick with my original answer. Gerald Ford was one of our most athletic presidents. He not only played center for the University of Michigan, but he also played linebacker and long snapper. In 1932 and 1933 his University of Michigan Team was undefeated and won the national championship. Even more impressively, in 1934, Ford briefly quit the team in protest for the racially motivated benching of his best friend on the team, an African-American running back named Willis Ward.

George H. W. Bush also played college sports. He was first baseman and captain of the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series ever held. Oddly enough, he was also a member of the Yale cheerleading squad, something his father, and his son, future president George W. Bush, also did at Yale.

Dwight D. Eisenhower has a compelling athletic back story. While attending the U.S. military academy at West Point, he played football, starting at running back and linebacker in 1912. He either made or missed a tackle on the legendary Jim Thorpe, (sources seem to disagree, but even today, a tackle is a highly subjective statistic, so we’ll give it to him.) He also injured his knee badly enough to need to give up football… although Wikipedia claims he then moved on to “fencing and gymnastics,” which are both highly knee-dependent sports, so who knows. There’s also the mysterious matter of the Eisenhower baseball controversy. In the summer before he went the West Point, he may or may not have played semi-professional baseball under the pseudonym, “Wilson.” If he did, then he may be our only president who personally violated the NCAA ban on paying “student athletes.”

Many other presidents have been athletes. George Washington apparently had a hell of an arm. John F. Kennedy was on the swimming team at Harvard, an avocation which may have saved his life when his patrol boat went down in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. But my favorite piece of presidential athletic trivia that I picked up was from this article on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was not only a champion wrestler who took on all comers and a fair number of wagers during his life, but he was also an excellent handball player! In a moment that parallels and foreshadows President Obama’s tradition of playing basketball on election days by almost 150 years, Lincoln played handball (and was injured slightly) while waiting for news of the 1860 Presidential nominating convention.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra

What does third and long mean in football? How does it happen?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m learning a lot! I understand the downs to an extent but my question is, what does it mean when it’s 3rd and long or 3rd and 18? Does it mean that on 3rd down the offense has to cover over 10 yards? Does 3rd and 18 means that they didn’t pick up 8 yards on 2nd down so now the 8 yards are added to the 10 yards on 3rd down?

Thanks,
Susette

Dear Susette,

I’m so happy that you are enjoying and benefitting from our Football 101 email course. Thanks for sending me this question. You’ve definitely picked up the basics about down and distance which is covered in the article that first appeared on this website under the title, “What’s a down in football? I’ve been pretending to know but I don’t!” As a quick review for people who may be seeing this article without having read that one, the football team on offense has four chances to move the ball ten yards. If they can meet that geographic goal, they earn another set of four chances with a new ten yard target. The four chances are called downs, with first down being the first of the four chances, second being the second, and fourth being the last. The number expressed after the down, is the number of yards remaining to meet that original ten yard target. In most cases, as a team works on offense, that number will go down. For instance, a team that runs the ball three yards on first down only needs to move seven more yards to earn themselves another first down with a new target. This would be expressed as 1st and 10 followed by a three yard run followed by 2nd and 7. The scenario which intrigued you is what happens when the distance number goes up instead of down. How did that happen? What does it mean?

When you see a distance number that is greater than 10, the one thing you can be sure of is that something bad happened for the offense. The two categories of bad things that account for this are penalties and negative plays. If you missed the play that caused the offense to be put in its bad situation, you may not be able to tell which of the two categories it was. If you had to guess, one guide would be the number of yards to go. Because penalties are usually assessed in five yard increments, if the distance is a number divisible by five, it was probably due to a penalty.

A negative play is one that resulted in an offensive player being tackled or running out-of-bounds with the ball behind the line of scrimmage where the play started. It seems strange at first to think that an offense would ever put itself in a position to suffer such an outcome, but it’s actually quite common. For example, almost every time a quarterback takes the ball from the center, he either retreats backwards a few yards or is already positioned four or five yards behind the line of scrimmage. This distance gives him a short time (sometimes only a second or two) to survey the field and decide where to throw it. Sometimes, the defense gets to the quarterback before he can decide and tackles him. This is called a sack. The offense would have to start the next play from the location where the quarterback was tackled, behind the original line of scrimmage. If the first play was a 2nd and 10, the next one might be a 3rd and 14 if the quarterback was tackled four yards behind the original line of scrimmage. The same logic holds for plays where a running back or wide receiver is tackled behind where the ball originally started.

A penalty is another explanation for why an offense might move backward. Most offensive penalties make that down not count. Most penalties offensive penalties supersede whatever the result of the play was and force that down to be replayed. This is why you sometimes see a team “decline” a penalty. This is a decision the team that the foul was called in favor of might make if the result of the play was more favorable to them than the penalty would be. A penalty on first and 10 could result in a first and 15, 20, or even 25 depending on the infraction.

While it’s impossible to say exactly what lead to a team having a 3rd and 18, my guess is that it resulted from a 10 yard penalty on a play that was run from 3rd and 8. Eight yards seems like too far to be the result of a common negative play, and a 3rd and 8 is not an uncommon situation. Third and “long” is just an expression. It doesn’t really have an exact meaning, but I would say that anything over seven yards could be considered “long.” Certainly anything over ten yards — which you now know to be the result of a penalty or negative play — would be considered “long.”

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

 

 

It is okay to see football as a battle between two quarterbacks

In the days leading up to a big football game, you will often hear people discussing a game as a matchup between two great quarterbacks. This description has great appeal. Quarterback is the single most important position in football, and quarterbacks are often the most well-known personalities on the team. How well a team fares usually has more to do with how well the team’s quarterback plays than the performance of any other single player. When the dominant narrative of a game is about the two opposing quarterbacks, there is always a backlash against the idea. This counter-narrative, put forth by fans in a knowing voice, reminds us that players of a single position in football, quarterback or otherwise, don’t actually play against each other. Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, two legendary quarterbacks whose teams will play each other in the AFC Championship Game this weekend, won’t even be on the field at the same time, unless it is for the coin flip or an awkward pre- or post-game hug. Fans who argue against the legitimacy of a quarterback vs. quarterback narrative have the full weight of literalness and snark on their side, but they’re missing the point.

Two athletes don’t need to play directly against one another or even perform at the same time to engage in epic competitions. Take the many fantastic duels in Olympic sports like figure skating, gymnastics, or any of the skiing disciplines. The one after another format of all three of these sports only acts to heighten the drama as one athlete tries to best the mark set by a previous competitor. Even in team sports, like basketball and soccer, where two opposing great players are usually on the court or pitch at the same time, they don’t necessarily come up directly against each other. In the past year’s NBA finals, the two best players on each team were LeBron James for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Steph Curry for the Golden State Warriors. James is 6’8″ and over 250 lbs. Curry is 6’3″ and 185 lbs. They barely interact more on a basketball court than players of the same position in football would on a football field, it’s just that football makes this division more explicit.

If we are going to personalize a football game, perhaps it’s more literally correct to talk about the matchup between a great quarterback and a great defensive player. For example, we could talk about the battle of wits and bodies between Peyton Manning and Patriots linebacker Jamie Collins. Or even more directly, between Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski and cornerback Aqib Talib or whoever the Broncos decide to have guard him. Those are all fascinating sub-plots and one-on-one battles, but in the end, they’re not as compelling as Brady vs. Manning. There’s something more compelling about watching two people try to achieve the same thing. It’s why we often find that Presidential primaries are more interesting than general elections. No matter how interesting the candidates are in a general election, over 80% of everyone who watches, roots, and votes will do so based on party. In a primary, everything is up for grabs. That’s how it is in football. It’s fascinating to watch a great offensive player play against a great defensive player, but each of their successes and failures is so contextual. In a battle between two quarterbacks, even though the battle is not literal, the figurative battlefield is much more level. One quarterback may have better receivers or a better offensive line than the other, one quarterback may be up against a tougher defense than the other, but their goals are the same.

Simplifying football to a matchup of two quarterbacks is not a lazy simplification, it’s a convenient way of capturing one of the most exciting aspects of the sport.

What is an audible in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is an audible in football?

Thanks,
Ruben

Dear Ruben,

One of the things that separates football from most other sports is the degree to which its coaches control the action. Football stops and starts all the time, and each time it does, coaches on both sides have the opportunity to tell their players what to do. In the NFL, coaches are actually able to talk between plays through a microphone to one offensive player on their team and one defensive player. These players are identified by having a small green dot on their helmets. These messages from the coaches to their players are simple codes that refer to plays which the players have learned in practice. Each one is complex enough to tell each of the eleven players on offense or defense what to do during the upcoming play. All of this happens quickly, in ten to fifteen seconds, and then the two teams run to the line of scrimmage and set up opposite each other. Here’s where things get interesting and where the audibles come into play.

Once the two teams set up to run their plays, as pre-determined by their coaches, a new and vast array of information is available. The offense can see where the defense has lined up. The defense may be able to guess what the offense is going to do. The problem for football coaches is, at this point, they are no longer able to talk to anyone on the field. Some coaches, usually in college football, get around this by having their players set up, pause, and then look to the sidelines where the coach will be signaling a new play to them through some large visual code that is easily understood by them but complex enough to mean nothing to their opponents. Most coaches, especially at the professional level, simply trust a player on the field to decide whether to change the play or go with the original one. If a player on the field (always the quarterback on offense and often a linebacker on defense) decides to go with a new play, that play and the process of deciding to change the original call and communicate that decision is called an audible.

One common example of an audible that television commentators often talk about looks at the number of defensive players “in the box” or set up to defend a run. If there are a lot of defensive players “in the box” and the original play was a run, the quarterback may decide to audible to a pass play. If there are only a few and the original play was a pass, the quarterback may audible to a run. Usually the relevant numbers are five and eight. Five men in the box is an open invitation to run the ball. Eight players guarding the run is a tempting situation to audible to a pass play.

As you may have guessed from the word, audible, which also means something you can hear, the change to the original play call is usually accomplished by SHOUTING! The quarterback on offense or the designated player on defense will scream a new instruction to their teammates. This instruction, like the original play call, will be in code so the other team can’t figure out what it is. Screaming is the easiest way to perform an audible but it’s not always possible. Football crowds are wise to the advantages easy audibling gives an offense, so when the opposing team’s offense is on the field, especially during important third downs or at the end of games, the crowd will scream as loud as they can to make audible audibles impossible. When this happens, a team will revert to hand signals to communicate. Audibles are still possible but the chance of miscommunication is greater.

One amusing element of audibles is that quarterbacks will often scream fake audibles just to make the defense wonder whether the quarterback has seen something nifty and is changing the play to take advantage of it. This adds some of the chatter we often hear from quarterbacks, like Peyton Manning’s famous “OMAHA!” What’s a real audible call one game or series may be a fake one the next. If all this sounds confusing, it is! It’s just one of the small things that makes playing football such an intellectually as well as physically challenging feat. You can understand how football players might want to pause the game and just ask whether an audible is real or not. They don’t do that though, at least… almost never. A microphone at a recent NFL football game caught a Carolina Panther asking quarterback Cam Newton if the audible, “Even Janitor” was a real thing. This is what it sounded like:

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Happy New Year 2016 from Dear Sports Fan

Happy New Year!!

2015 was a wonderful year in sports and a great year for Dear Sports Fan! Thank you for being a part of this experiment with me. I feel lucky to have been able to share so much of what I was thinking about with you during the past year. Here are some of the highlights of the year. Read to the bottom for a special treat for 2016.

In February, right before the Super Bowl, I published a series of heartfelt and deeply researched articles on the topic of brain injuries in football… and also what the top ten dirtiest sounding football phrases actually mean. In March, the madness of the NCAA basketball tournaments inspired me to share four business lessons one can learn from the sport and also four ways to fill out a tournament bracket if that’s more your speed.

In May and June, I came down with a bad case of World Cup fever and wrote dozens of articles about the 2015 World Cup. My non-gendered profiles of each of the women on the U.S. Women’s National Team were popular, which I was proud of, even if some of the most common search terms for them was “is [insert player name, most frequently Megan Klingenberg] married?” I fleshed out Dear Sports Fan’s coverage of soccer in general and shaped the articles into three email courses which are still available today: Soccer 101, Soccer 201 – Positions and Logistics, and Soccer 202 – Culture. A personal high point was my trip to Montreal to watch the USA vs. Germany semifinal match.

After I moved to the Boston area in the spring, I decided to take Dear Sports Fan into the real world by starting a Meetup group. We’ve had a great time at our viewing parties, watching sports in an environment friendly to questions and welcoming to people who approach sports from all angles.

Throughout the year, I kept an eye out for moments when sports and the larger culture intersect. This has taken serious forms, like when shared my disgust with the drafting of Jameis Winston, and silly forms, like before the Kentucky Derby when I mined the world of musical theater for horse racing and betting tips, As always, the heart of the website has been a desire to make it easier for sports fans and non-fans to co-exist. With the NFL playoffs coming, it’s worth revisiting my thoughts on how a household can survive the football season without going crazy.

As one year comes to a close, another is just beginning. As a token of my appreciation for all the support I received during 2015, here is a New Year’s guide to the top 16 sporting events of 2016!

Are sports trying to ruin Christmas?

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s up with the NFL football game on Christmas Eve and the five freaking NBA basketball games on Christmas Day? Are sports trying to ruin Christmas?

Thanks,
Bonnie

Dear Bonnie,

Sports leagues aren’t trying to ruin Christmas, but they are trying to profit off of them. At least, the National Basketball Association (NBA) is. There’s a simpler reason for why the National Football League (NFL) has a game on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is a Thursday this year, the NFL decided years ago to have games on Thursdays, and they’re not going to change their plans for anything, not even Christmas. The NFL’s general attitude seems to be that they are bigger than any other institution in the world, why would they worry about Christmas? As for the NBA, it’s worth a closer look at why they want to profit off of Christmas, what the model of success is, and how should we feel about it.

One of the biggest questions for most sports leagues is how to create or maintain interest during their long regular seasons. Each NBA team plays 82 games during the season; the National Hockey League (NHL) plays the same number. Major League Baseball (MLB) plays almost twice that number, a whopping 162! Football is too dangerous to play that much or that often. College football teams play from 10 to 12 games during their regular season and the NFL plays only 16. As a result, football doesn’t need to try quite as hard to sustain interest during their season. The other sports are not so lucky. Even the most die-hard fan feels a little lull of interest during the long middle of the regular season. So, leagues are always on the lookout for ways to create intrigue and interest during their season.

Ironically, the league that has been most successful at creating a spike of interest int he middle of their season has been the league that needs it the least, the NFL. As we’ve covered in great length on this site, the NFL owns Thanksgiving. Since the 1950s, when the Detroit Lions became the most common host team for Thanksgiving games, and certainly since 1970 when the Dallas Cowboys joined them and the two teams basically monopolized all of the Thanksgiving hosting, NFL football has become part and parcel of how many Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. In the past seven years, the NHL has been wildly successful in replicating the NFL’s approach on New Year’s Day with its visually breathtaking outdoor Winter Classic Games. Hockey is a less popular sport, but “owning a holiday” has still proven to be a strong tactic. The Winter Classic games are watched by between three and five million people each year — around ten times more than other regular season hockey games, even the nationally televised ones.

Interest in unique sporting events can, at times, approach levels of interest that make them seem like holidays. The first two days of the men’s college basketball tournament, called March Madness, feel like a holiday, observed by office workers everywhere who develop fake colds or schedule elective surgery so they can watch, or just stream the games onto their work computers, slowing down the network for everyone. The NBA has already had some success with this, their All-Star Weekend is only half-jokingly called “Black Thanksgiving.” Still greater success, they hope, will be found by owning a real holiday rather than creating one of their own. That’s why, each Christmas, the NBA stacks as many games between their best and biggest teams as possible. This year, it’s five games in a row and the highlight is the first game between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers since they played in the finals last spring.

Now we get to the heart of your question — is the NBA right to do this? Does having so many (and so high-profile) basketball games televised on Christmas ruin the holiday? It doesn’t. Sure, it may ruin the holiday for players, coaches, and their families, but that’s a small segment of the population and one (since they are mostly very well compensated,) that most people don’t feel a ton of sympathy for. Aside from doctors, nurses, midwives, police, EMTs, fire fighters, and other essential workers, most of us have off on Christmas and if we don’t want our family celebrations sullied by sports on TV, we can either keep the TV off or change the channel.

Another segment of people who work on Christmas are people who work at Chinese restaurants and movie theaters too. Those are both traditional Christmas activities for people (stereotypically Jews.) That brings us to one point in favor of the NBA having games on Christmas: not everyone celebrates Christmas, and the NBA has a long history of inclusion. Back in the 1930s and 40s, professional basketball was mostly a Jewish endeavor. Even in the modern era of the NBA, three of the top ten scorers (Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neill, and the #1 scorer of all time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) of all time have been Muslim. Of all the big American sports leagues, the NBA has the most international fan base. This includes a big contingent in China, a country with around a billion non-Christians.

For people who don’t celebrate Christmas and live in a predominantly celebrating country, like the United States, the holiday can be alienating. Having a football game to watch on Christmas Eve and more than 12 hours of basketball to watch on Christmas Day is a comforting thought. If you celebrate and the games get in your way, just remember — these teams will play roughly fifty times again this season before the playoffs start. There’s really no need to give too much attention to any one game in December, no matter what the NBA wants us to do.

Thanks for reading and Happy Holidays, however you celebrate,
Ezra Fischer

Why do once in a generation things happen so often in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

My girlfriend convinced me to watch a Golden State Warriors game last night by saying that teams as good as them only come along once every twenty or thirty years. I watched the game. They were legitimately great but it seems like sports fans have something they need to watch for that reason pretty frequently. Why do once in a generation things happen so often in sports?

Thanks,
Cesar

Dear Cesar,

The Golden State Warriors are a magnificent basketball team. They won the championship last spring and, unlike many championship winning teams, have started this season strong. They’ve won their first 23 games. In doing so, they obliterated the previous record for consecutive wins to start a season, which two other teams had set at 15. They’re closing in on the Los Angeles Lakers record for wins in a row, (any time during the season,) which is 33 and has been since the 1971-72 season. Their start also has the folks over at Five Thirty Eight frantically modeling to see how likely it is that the Warriors match or beat the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls season record of 72 wins and 10 losses. The conclusion they come to is that the Warriors certainly can but will probably choose not to, since breaking that record is likely to be a harmful distraction from their true goal of winning another championship. The Warriors streak is so impressive, that the Harlem Globetrotters (who were once a very real, very formidable competitive basketball team but who now only play exhibition games against a team of stooges called the Washington Generals,) jokingly worried on Twitter about the safety of their own “record”:

Beyond numbers, the Warriors are a wonderful collection of characters to root for. Their super star, Steph Curry, is barely big enough to make you look twice at him if he passed you on the street, and yet he’s as unstoppable a force as any the NBA has known. He is the best long-range shooter in NBA history and plays with a fluid, captivating style. He’s surrounded by teammates who benefit from and augment his skills. Klay Thompson, who pales in comparison to Curry, may also be one of the top 20 shooters in NBA history. Draymond Green was a popular college basketball player who most thought would not amount to much in the pros. Now he’s the new prototype for a power forward, one who can do a little bit of everything well enough to be extraordinarily effective. The next five best players on the team, Andrew Bogut, Harrison Barnes, Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livington, and Festus Ezeli all have their own talents and their own attractive stories. From a sports fan’s perspective, the Warriors really are a comet passing through space: rare and wondrous. To give you a sense of how much people want to see them, their presence as the away team playing against the Boston Celtics this Friday has launched tickets on the secondary market from starting at between $13 and $20 to starting between $150 and $200.

Your question wasn’t about whether the Warriors were amazing, it was about how rare they are. There’s a saying I love: “You’re one in a million… which means there’s a thousand people just like you in China.” One in a million seems like a giant rarity, but not when viewed against a country with a population of over a billion! The same thing is true about sports. Say the Warriors truly are a generational team. That would put them alongside the Chicago Bulls that set that 72-10 record in 1996. That’s awfully convenient, because it was 20 years ago, exactly the number most people use in estimating a generation. Go back farther, and most people point to the 1985 Celtics as another generationally good team. That’s only 10 years before the Bulls, but that’s okay, sometimes data falls randomly in clumps. No big deal. The thing is, sports fans follow many sports. Most fans follow at least three of the big four American professional leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL) pretty closely. Add a college sport or two, international competitions like the Olympics and World Cup, as well as a few individual sports like tennis, golf, boxing, or car racing. That’s close to 10 sports that a fan will follow. The chances of a generational event (one every 20 years) happening in a sport, if you follow 10 of them, is 50% in any given year.

Of course, when something this eventful happens in a sport a fan doesn’t follow closely, there’s a good chance that she’ll hear about it on Twitter, Facebook, Sports Center, from a podcast or a friend, etc. And anything so magnificent, so rare, as a generational sporting event is worth following, even from an unusual sport! There are also two or three close calls for every one truly generational event (the Carolina Panthers are 12-0 in the NFL right now… if they get to 16-0, they will be only the second team to ever do it. Earlier this year Serena Williams almost became the first person to win all four major tennis tournaments in a year – called the Grand Slam – since 1988). So, if you’re a sports fan who wants to see something with the potential to be truly remarkable, you’ve legitimately got a chance to watch one every couple of months at most.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

 

Why does an NFL ref throw his hat on the field?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the football game between the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers last night and noticed that a ref had thrown his hat on the field. I know what i means when refs throw yellow flags, but why does an NFL ref throw his hat on the field?

Thanks,
Ana

Dear Ana,

Being an NFL ref is not a full-time job but it can be fun — for one thing, they do get to throw a bunch of different objects! As you mentioned, the most common thing for a ref to throw is a yellow flag. This symbolizes a foul that he has seen and intends to call. At times, you may also see refs throw a small, blue bean bag onto the field. No, it’s not the 1990s again, the ref isn’t about to sit down on the bean bag! The bean bag is thrown to the spot where a change of possession happened, because a penalty called after that time will often refer to that spot – i.e. five yards from the spot of the interception, fumble recovery, or kick return. Throwing things is fun, as is explaining why NFL refs throw things, but you didn’t ask about flags or bean bags, you asked about hats. Let’s get down to the hat.

The simplest reason for a ref to throw her hat is because she’s already thrown her flag! That’s right. Instead of carrying a backup flag, if a ref sees a second penalty to call after throwing his flag for the first one, his only recourse is to throw his hat. This is simply a brilliant move. Not only is throwing a hat a fun thing to do, but it’s also what cartoonishly angry people do in old comedies or cartoons to show their anger. I love thinking about the original ref who believed so firmly in law and order that he got super angry at seeing a second (a second!!) foul on the same play that he threw his hat in anger… and it became the standard for dealing with that situation. You might ask what happens if a ref sees a third foul. I don’t know, but Jerry Markbreit and Alan Steinberg’s book Last Call: Memoirs of an NFL Referee suggests an amusingly scatalogical solution.

Seeing two fouls on one play does happen, but more frequently the cause for an NFL’s hat throwing is something different. Football players are expected to stay on the football field while play is going on. This is not normally a problem, except perhaps with very young children who are prone to wandering. Sometimes though, a player running down the sideline, especially someone on the offense who is trying to get in position to catch a pass, will step out-of-bounds inadvertently or in an attempt to get around a defender. When this happens, that player becomes ineligible to catch the ball. Just stepping out-of-bounds is not against the rules, so no flag should be thrown, but if the player who goes out-of-bounds catches the ball, then there’s a penalty. So, in order to help remember that the player has gone out-of-bounds, the ref watching him throws his hat to the ground and later, if the catch is made, throws his flag. The one exception to this rule is if the offensive player has been pushed out-of-bounds by a defender. In this case, he is allowed to catch the ball as soon as he re-establishes himself in bounds by touching the field with both feet or some part of his body other than his hands. No hat need be thrown in this situation.

What other sport requires their officials to throw so many things! Ah, football.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is a squib kick in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching football this weekend and I thought I heard one of the announcers say something about a “squid kick.” Turns out, it was a “squib,” not squid. What is a squib kick in football?

Thanks,
Samantha

Dear Samantha,

Oh, I really wish there was something in football called a squid kick! What would the squid kick be? Maybe one that utilized a formation with a few people close together and then a bunch of people trailing behind them? Alas, what you did hear was squib kick. A squib kick is kickoff play in which the kicking team intentionally kicks the ball close to the ground and about half as far as they normally would on a kickoff.

The primary reason for using a squib kick is that it limits the likely range of outcomes from the play. On a normal kickoff, the returning team will get the ball close to or in their own end-zone. If the player who gets the ball tries to return the kick, he usually has about five to ten yards of space before the players on the kicking team who are “covering” the kick are able to reach him. This gives him some time to pick up speed, choose a direction to run in, and have his teammates set up to block for him. If everything goes well, he’s able to weave his way between all the players trying to tackle him and sprint down the field for a touchdown. More often, he gets brought down between the 15 and 25 yard line. Sometimes, trying to return a kickoff is a terrible idea and the return man gets tackled right near his own end zone. The range of outcomes from a normal kickoff is quite big. A squib kick shrinks this range. The ball doesn’t go so far down the field, and instead of flying through the air in a nice, easy to catch arc, it bounces around of the ground. This means that by the time someone on the receiving team corrals the ball, they’ve got little to no time and space to try to return it. They usually get tackled almost as soon as they touch the ball. As a bonus, since the best returners are set up at the back of the receiving team’s formation, the player who catches a squib kick is usually bigger, slower, and less used to returning kicks. The downside is that the ball doesn’t go as far, so the receiving team cannot be tackled close to their own goal-line. But they’re also very unlikely to return the kick for a touchdown.

The word squib comes from the world of explosives. In explosive terms, a squib is a device that resembles dynamite but packs a much smaller punch. It’s been used for controlled explosions in mining, film stunts, and even devices like automobile air bags. The difference between a squib and a dud is that a squib’s meekness is intentional. You can understand how this meaning came over to football. The squib kick is not as strong and doesn’t travel as far as a regular kickoff.

There are two main situations when teams will use a squib kick. The first is situational – if the kicking team is winning and would only really be threatened by a return touchdown, they may choose to use the squib in order to reduce the likelihood of that happening. The second is based on personnel – if the returning team has a supremely good kick returner, the risk of having the return any kick for a touchdown may not be worth the opportunity to trap them close to their own end zone. In this case, a team may squib every kickoff during a game.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What are some hurling vocabulary words I should know?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m going to my first hurling match tomorrow at Fenway park and I want to sound like I know what I’m talking about, even if I have no idea. What are some hurling vocabulary words I should know?

Thanks,
Chester

Dear Chester,

In my last post about hurling, I tried to explain how the sport worked, but I didn’t get into vocabulary at all. I just called the stick a stick and the ball a ball and so on. My goal was to arm you (and me) to understand the basics of the sport so we could enjoy watching it in person more. If we really want to sound knowledgeable though, you’re right, we need to learn the lingo. So, here’s a list of words to learn:

  • Camogie – this is to hurling as competitive softball in the United States is to baseball. It is the women’s version of hurling, which has its own ancient origins and slightly different rules.
  • Hurley – nope, not the fat dude in Lost, in hurling, the hurley is the stick. You can also call it a hurley stick.
  • Bas – the bas is the flat end of the hurley, used to hit the ball.
  • Sliotar – pronounced sly-o-tar, this is a hurling ball.
  • Block, hook, and side pull – these are the three acceptable forms of physical contact that a player is allowed to make with the opposing player who has the sliotar. A block is when a player uses his hurley to trap the ball between it and the opposing player’s hurley. A hook is when a player uses his stick from behind to snag the opponent’s stick before he can hit the ball. A side pull is basically a shoulder check – when two players collide side to side with their shoulders taking the brunt of the force.
  • Puckout – this is a restart of play which happens after a goal or a shot that misses the goal and goes out of bounds. It’s a free pass from the goalie, like a goal kick in soccer.
  • Lash – to lash is to hit the ball while it’s on the ground. Not necessarily in anger, although this may be where the phrase, “to lash out” comes from!

Enjoy the game tomorrow! And have fun deploying some of your new vocab words!

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer