Category: Understanding Sports

What does forward progress mean in NFL football?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been watching a bunch of football so far this season. I’m enjoying it and learning to. I do have one question — I’m confused about where the offense gets to start their next play from? I thought it was where the person with the ball’s knee hits the ground. Sometimes it seems like they start much farther down the field. This is sometimes accompanied by the announcer saying something about forward progress. What does forward progress mean in NFL football?

Thanks,
Joel

Dear Joel,

You’re absolutely right. Most of the time in football, when a player is tackled with the ball, their team’s offense starts their next play from the spot (end zone to end zone, not side to side) where the ball was when their knee or butt hit the ground. There are a few exceptions to this rule. Some may be obvious but easy to forget, like what happens when the offensive team scores a touchdown (they get to attempt an extra-point field goal from the 15 yard line or a two point conversion from the 2 yard line), what happens when a team fails to earn a new set of downs on a fourth down play (the other team gets the ball), or what happens when a player goes out-of-bounds (their team gets the ball wherever it was when they first touch the ground out-of-bounds with any part of their body). Another exception is what happens when a player, usually a quarterback, slides feet first. By far the most confusing exception is the one you’ve identified – the rule of forward progress.

The best way to explain forward progress is to start with a fairly absurd scenario. Suppose an offensive player is running with the ball. He gets surrounded by a group of defensive players converging on him. These defensive players wrap their arms around him to stop him from moving forwards. Then, moving in unison, they pick him up in the air and begin to carry him down the field. They eventually deposit him onto the ground in his own end-zone, where his being tackled with the ball earns the defensive team a safety and two points. The forward progress rule addresses and prevents this scenario by declaring the play to be over as soon as an offensive player who is running with the ball has his movement down the field stopped by an opponent. If the play is over as soon as forward movement ends, then what happens afterwards, often the offensive player falling or being pushed backward is no longer relevant to the game.

There is an element of judgement to this call. Each ref must decide for herself when a player’s forward movement is conclusively stopped. Most give the benefit of the doubt to the offensive player. Given how insanely athletic football players are, this makes sense. What would once and for all stop your or my forward progress (and potentially our lives) may be a momentary setback to an NFL running back or wide receiver. Generally, because of this, the way that refs actually enforce this rule is that as long as a ball-carriers legs are still moving in some facsimile of an attempt to run, they are allowed to continue to play, even if they are forced backwards. As long as this is true, refs will give the play a little bit of time to play out, almost like an advantage call in soccer. If the offensive player ends up getting tackled to the ground without ever being able to start moving forward again, the ref gives their team the ball where they originally stopped moving forward. If the offensive player is able to break out of the grasp of the defender and runs forward, the play continues until he is tackled or has his forward progress stopped again.

Like many rules in football, the enforcement of this rule is a balance between ensuring the safety of the players — the faster a ref stops a play, the less likely it is for players to get hurt struggling for an extra yard — and allowing potentially amazing and entertaining feats to happen. For an example of that, check out this run by Dallas Cowboys running back Marion Barber. Watch how he’s able to keep his legs running and therefore the play going as he’s forced backwards several times:

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How does scoring work in rugby union?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does scoring work in rugby union?

Thanks,
Clara

Dear Clara,

There are four ways to score in rugby, a try, a conversion goal, a penalty goal, and a dropped goal. A try is worth five points, a conversion goal, two, and both a penalty goal or dropped goal are worth three points. The three scoring methods with the word, “goal” in their names, all involve kicking the ball, while the try doesn’t. Two of them can happen in the course of normal play, while two are only done during a stoppage in play. Let’s go through each one and describe how it works.

How does a try work?

A try is scored when an attacking player with the ball places the ball on the ground in her opponent’s “in-goal.” The in-goal is rugby’s term for the area that in American football is called the end-zone. As opposed to in American football, where a player just needs to have control of the ball in the end-zone to score, in rugby, a player must get the ball into the end zone and place it on the ground. Two other small matters distinguish how a try works from how a touchdown works in American football. In rugby, a player’s body can be out-of-bounds and still score as long as the ball remains in play. Likewise, a player can be lying on the ground and reach his arm out to score a try. A try is worth five points and triggers the second form of scoring, the conversion goal.

How does a conversion goal work?

A conversion goal attempt is earned by scoring a try. After a team scores a try, they are given 90 seconds to attempt a conversion goal. A conversion goal is a mostly undefended kick that must go over the cross-bar and between the two goal posts of the rugby goal. I say, “mostly undefended” because the defending team is allowed to run, from the goal-line, toward the player kicking the ball, as soon as that player starts their kicking motion. The kick may be taken as a drop-kick (kind of like a punt in football, but the ball must be kicked as it hits the ground instead of while it’s on its way down) or from the ground, where the ball may be supported by a tee or a teammate to keep it upright and in position. The player who scored the try doesn’t have to be the one to take the conversion kick. Any player on the team is eligible to kick it.

The location of the dropkick is decided by where the try was scored. The conversion goal must be attempted from a spot “perpendicular” to where the try was scored. That means, if the try was scored in the exact center of the field, the conversion goal must be kicked from the center. If the try was scored all the way on the left edge of the field, the conversion must also be taken from the far left. The closer to center a conversion goal attempt is, the easier it is to score. That’s why you’ll sometimes see players try to run to the center before placing the ball on the ground for a try. As for the distance from the goal, there’s no requirement at all. In practice, the kicker chooses a distance that is far enough from the goal so that she feels comfortable she’ll be able to get the kick off free from interference by the other team. The farther the kick is from the center of the field, the more difficult it is to make. In order to get a reasonable angle from that wide, the kicker will generally move back a bit.

A conversion goal is worth two points and may only be taken directly after a try. There are two other forms of scoring. Both are similar to a conversion goal but do not follow a try.

How do a penalty goal and a dropped goal work?

A penalty goal is procedurally similar to a conversion goal, with the only real difference being that a player may not use a drop-kick to score a penalty goal. A penalty goal attempt is awarded to a team when the opposing team commits a foul. It is similar to a free kick set piece in soccer. The ref blows her whistle to call a foul, the opposing team must move ten yards away from the spot of the foul, and then the team benefiting from the penalty call can choose what to do. If the spot of the foul is close enough to reasonably score a goal and the game situation calls for it, they may choose to attempt a kick through the uprights. A successful penalty goal is worth three points.

A dropped goal is the active cousin of a penalty goal. Instead of happening when play is stopped, a dropped goal happens during active play. Whenever a player has possession of the ball, they always have the option of drop-kicking the ball through the goal. If they are able to do this successfully, their team scores three points. You’d think this might happen more frequently than it does, but going for a dropped goal means giving up the opportunity to score seven points (a five point try and a two point conversion goal), and giving possession of the ball to the other team. When a dropped goal is successful, the other team automatically gets the ball. When a dropped goal is unsuccessful (the ball misses the goal wide or isn’t high enough), play continues and whoever can get to the ball first (usually the defensive team) takes possession of it.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

 

What happens in rugby union when someone gets tackled?

Dear Sports Fan,

What happens in rugby union when someone gets tackled? Can they get up and keep running? Do the tackler and the tackled player fight for the ball? What can their teammates do to help?

Thanks,
Terri

Dear Terri,

For people who didn’t grow up with rugby, myself included, it’s often helpful to think about the sport as a mixture of soccer and football. Your question gets at one of the essential inflection points where rugby has some elements of soccer and some of football. In soccer, play is not stopped, nor altered in any significant way by a tackle, as long as it’s legal. In football, a tackle brings play to a halt. The whistle blows, the ball is dead, and everyone has to get up, dust themselves off, and receive a new set of instructions before starting the next play. In rugby, a tackle changes the rules of engagement for how players can interact with each other and the ball, but it doesn’t stop the flow of play all together. It’s a blend of soccer and football.

A tackle in rugby happens when the player with the ball is forced to the ground by an opposing player. The ball-carriers knee or butt must touch the ground while she is in the clutch of an opposing player. Once that happens, the phase of play shifts, and the game is now guided by a set of rules which only apply to this particular situation.

  1. The player who tackled the ball-carrier must immediately let go and either get back to their feet or roll, crawl, or slither away from the tackled player and the ball.
  2. The player who just got tackled cannot get back up and run with the ball. He must relinquish control of the ball right away. He can, pass it, release it, or push it toward his teammates as long as the ball doesn’t move forward, in the direction his team is trying to score.

Passing the ball out of a tackle to a teammate is the ideal scenario for the tackled player, but to do so legally, it’s got to happen quickly. As soon as an opposing player comes to try to get the ball, if the tackled player is still holding on to it, a foul will be called against him. In reality, tackled players often have to simply drop the ball, hopefully in the direction of their teammates. What we’re left with, is two players on the ground, neither of whom can pick up the ball and run with it again until they get off the ground and away from the play. Teammates of the tackler and tackled player may get involved to try to win back possession of the ball as long as they follow these rules:

  1. If they want to grab onto one of their teammates, they have to approach their teammate from behind the farthest back point. In other words, they can’t come running in from any direction, they have to circle around to their side of the field and then jump into the pile. Every successive player who wants to get involved has to do the same thing, only this time, they must come into the pile from the farthest back point of the farthest back player.
  2. Once the two players initially on the ground our joined by at least one additional player, this is called a ruck.
  3. Players in the ruck, who are grabbing on to one of their teammates or an opponent, cannot touch the ball with their hands. They can only use their feet, knees, etc. to roll the ball backward.
  4. One player on each side, as long as they are not grabbing on to one of their teammates, can reach into the pile, grab the ball, and pass it backwards to a teammate or run with it.

What often happens, is that the ball remains relatively still while the two sides try to push their opponents backward so that their teammate behind the mass of pushing players has an easier time grabbing the ball. In this way, the ruck resembles the offensive and defensive lines in football engaging at the start of a play. It’s a test of strength for territorial gain. In the case of a rugby ruck, possession of the ball is also at stake.

Watch the first minute of this video. Players from the New Zealand team get tackled over and over again, and each time, their team wins possession of the ball in the resulting ruck. Note how players on both sides have to circle back behind the ruck in order to enter it.

 

Thanks for reading,
Ezra

 

Should I play daily fantasy sports (DFS)?

Dear Sports Fan,

Yesterday you wrote a post explaining how daily fantasy sports work. Thanks! My question is, should I play daily fantasy sports (DFS)? I love fantasy football, so it seems tempting.

Thanks,
Fred (who isn’t me just lobbing a question back at myself. No, really)

Dear Fred,

No. You should not play daily fantasy sports (DFS).

Daily fantasy sports are a hot topic these days. If you watched football at all during the first weekend of the NFL season, you were inundated by ads for the two major daily fantasy sports companies, DraftKings and FanDuel. The two spent more than $27 million combined on television advertising during that period! In the days following that media blitz, there’s been a quick backlash against the industry. This wave was led by Joshua Brustein and Ira Boudway of Bloomberg Business, whose article, You Aren’t Good Enough to Win Money Playing Daily Fantasy Football described a landscape full of predatory professional gamblers armed with advanced statistics and personally designed spreadsheets. Their well researched and convincing argument was picked up by a horde of other newspapers and blogs, all quick to jump on the bandwagon and point out to their readers that they shouldn’t play daily fantasy sports because they won’t win. It was an important article, because it pierced through the advertising campaigns that suggest easy money is just around the corner. But, with apologies to Brustein and Boudway and the many people who agree with them, they are missing the point when it comes to deciding whether or not you should play. Gambling can be fun, as long as you don’t risk more than you can afford to lose. Long odds are not a sufficient argument against daily fantasy sports. The reason why you shouldn’t play daily fantasy sports isn’t because you’re almost certain to lose money, it’s because it’s not fun.

Daily fantasy football takes virtually every element of traditional fantasy football that’s fun and strips it from the game.

  • In traditional fantasy football, you play against your friends. Last weekend I beat my friend Brian in our fantasy league. This weekend, I face a tough game against my friend and old boss, Jack. In my only foray into daily fantasy sports, I came in 158,247 place out of 331,428 entries in a contest for $100,000. Who won? I have no idea, but it certainly didn’t contribute to any friendships. Traditional fantasy football leagues provide a way for distant friends to stay connected and close friends to get even closer.
  • Traditional fantasy football creates lasting ties to players. One of the arguments against getting involved in traditional fantasy football is that it changes a fan’s focus from their favorite team to the set of players who are on their team. Daily fantasy goes even farther in divorcing your rooting interest from the sport itself. In daily fantasy sports, you pick players for your team and discard them the next day. There’s no time to build lasting affection, like I have for some players who I’ve had for full seasons or more on my traditional fantasy team. For example, I might not know that Brandon Marshall is a mental health advocate if I hadn’t been following him carefully because he was on my fantasy team. Daily fantasy sports wouldn’t inspire me to celebrate when one of the young players who I’ve stashed on my bench for weeks gets an opportunity in the starting lineup or feel sad when an elder statesman loses his job.
  • Traditional fantasy sports encourages interaction between people and teaches basic negotiating skills. In a traditional fantasy league, if you want to improve your team during a season, you need to trade with another owner in your league. You need to look at her team and think about what she needs compared to what you need. Most trades happen when one person identifies something the other person needs and offers it to them for something they have a surplus of. It’s not about tricking the other person, it’s about analysis and negotiation. Daily fantasy sports are between you and your computer and that’s it.

So yes, you shouldn’t play fantasy sports because it’s a money pit, but so is taking up ice hockey, owning a boat, or having kids. At least those three things are fun!

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How does DFS or daily fantasy sports football work?

Dear Sports Fan,

I keep seeing ads for DraftKings and FanDuel, two daily fantasy sports (DFS) websites. How does DFS or Daily Fantasy Sports football work?

Thanks,
Ted

Dear Ted,

In the football version of daily fantasy sports also known by its abbreviation, DFS, your job is to predict the combination of real world football players who are going to generate the best statistics in the coming week of games.

You are given a set amount of fake money to build your team with. In DraftKings, this is $50,000. In FanDuel, it’s $60,000. (I have half a mind to set up a competitive DFS site called CamelCaps.) The websites set fictional prices for each real-life NFL football player each week depending on how well they think those players are likely to do. A very well-regarded player in what looks like an easy matchup will be on the expensive end of the spectrum. A relatively unknown player or an unexciting player facing a difficult opposition will be on the cheaper side. Your job is to select nine NFL players (really eight players and one team’s defense) whose cumulative salary is less than or equal to the fictional pot of money you begin with.

Then, you sit back and watch the weekend’s NFL games play out. Just like in traditional fantasy football, your success as a fantasy owner corresponds directly to the success of the real players in their real games that you’ve selected to be a part of your imaginary team. At the end of the weekend, the imaginary team that has accumulated the most points from their players’ real-life performances, wins.

How is daily fantasy sports different from traditional fantasy sports?

If you want a primer on how traditional fantasy football works, read our post on the subject.

One key difference between traditional fantasy sports and daily fantasy sports is that in the daily game, your selections have no bearing on anyone else’s. If everyone in the world decided they wanted Eli Manning on their roster one weekend, they could all have him. In traditional fantasy sports, once a player has been selected by an owner, he is unavailable to everyone else. Traditional fantasy sports are a zero sum game. Daily are not.

This non-zero-sum nature enables DFS to involve far more people than a traditional fantasy league. By the time you’ve reached 14 to 16 people in a traditional league, it gets very difficult to find players who generate enough statistics to be worth using on your team. Think you know football pretty well? Talk to some 16 team (or deep) fantasy football owners and see how many of them are conversant with the fourth wide receiver on each of the 32 NFL teams! In DFS, your choice to have Eddie Lacy on your team doesn’t inhibit my choice to put him on my team, so there’s no upper limit to the number of owners who can compete against one another. Indeed, the competitions we hear the most about in television commercials – the ones that “guarantee a prize” of over a million dollars – have tens of thousands of teams competing directly for that prize. Notice the word “team” instead of person. In a traditional fantasy league, those two terms should be synonymous. In DFS, a single person is allowed up to 500 teams or entries in a single contest.

This brings us to the final key difference between traditional and daily fantasy sports – the stakes and the presence of professionals. Traditional fantasy sports are a bad bet for professional gamblers. First of all, they take a long time to pay out. Compared to a bet on a single game, which will pay out within hours of the game ending, tying your capital up in a proposition that will take 16 weeks (for football and longer for other sports) is virtually a non-starter for someone who wants to use their money to make more money. It’s just too slow. Daily fantasy sports speed up the process so that it is more attractive for professional gamblers. Likewise, the amount of money involved is much higher. Many traditional fantasy leagues have each owner risking $100 for the season. That may seem like a lot, and certainly winning $500 to $1,000 if you win a league is no joke, but spread out over the whole season, that’s only $6.25 a week. That’s less than going out to a movie! That’s less than just the popcorn at some movie theaters. Daily fantasy sports, with its multiple entries per contest and many potential contests per week, facilitate much higher stakes.

Are there Super Bowl rematches every week this NFL season?

Dear Sports Fan,

Is it true there will be a rematch of a prior Super Bowl every week this season?

Thanks,
OmitsWordsByAccident

Dear OmitsWordsByAccident,

Not quite every week, but there are a surprising number of them. In all, there are 19 Super Bowl rematches this season, but not every week has one. The large number of rematches is no coincidence, it’s part of the NFL’s promotional campaign to promote this year’s Super Bowl, the league’s 50th. The exact number of the Super Bowl is always a little confusing. For one thing, the league insists on labeling the game with Roman Numerals instead of numbers. Since most of us were not educated in late 19th century elite prep schools, a number like XLVIII (48) is not intuitively obvious. This year, for the 50th, they are going with the number “50” and not just “L”. For a second level of obfuscation, the Super Bowl for each calendar-year season occurs in the next calendar year. When I was writing a series of posts describing what was special about each NFL team, I was never sure whether to refer to a Super Bowl by the year it was in or the year of the regular season it crowned the champion of. Lastly, the numbering is tricky because it’s hard to remember when the first Super Bowl was.

The NFL is much older than 50 years. It’s first year of competition was in 1920, and by 1930, five of today’s teams: the Chicago Bears, Arizona Cardinals, Green Bay Packers, New York Giants, and Detroit Lions were in existence. The reason why the Super Bowl is not 95 years old instead of 50, is that it began specifically as an end-of-season competition between the NFL and a competing league, the American Football League. The American Football League was founded in 1959 and began play in 1960 in direct competition to the NFL. By 1970, the two leagues had merged. So, if you count back 49 from 2016, you should get one of those years – 1960 or 1970 – right? Nope – you get 1967, a year that hasn’t popped up in conversation yet. Why? The NFL and AFL actually agreed on and announced their merger in 1966, it just took four years for them to merge the operations of the leagues and begin playing as one. The one major element of merging that they decided to act on immediately was the creation of what they called the “AFL-NFL World Championship Game“. It wasn’t until the third such game, in 1969 that the game became known as the Super Bowl.

Celebrating past Super Bowls by inserting rematches into this year’s schedule is a nice idea (although it must have been a tricky scheduling feat). Here, taken directly from the Super Bowl 50 website, with my links, are the games:

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How can my household survive football without going crazy?

Dear Sports Fan,

My husband is a giant football fan — not of the Giants though, of the Miami Hurricanes and Dolphins. And of course he plays fantasy football too. I like football just fine, but I don’t want it dominating my living room every day for the rest of the year. He gets pretty annoyed when I suggest not watching a game. How can my household survive football without going crazy?

Thanks,
Joe

 

Dear Joe,

Your dilemma is not an unusual one. For many people, the start of football season is an exciting time. For non-football fans who happen to live with housemates, friends, partners, spouses, parents, or children who are football fans, it can be a difficult time. There is a solution!

Once upon a time, football followed a predictable and limited schedule. High schools played on friday nights, (thus Friday Night Lights), colleges played on Saturdays, and the NFL played on sunday afternoon. Even the most die-hard of football fans were only occupied by their favorite sport for a somewhat reasonable percent of the weekend. Things are different these days. As of 1970, the NFL featured one game on monday night. In 1987, it added a game on sunday night. Beginning in 2006, the league colonized Thursday night, first only half the time, but now for the entire season. Meanwhile, college football has spread from Saturday to Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It’s not just easy to watch football every day or night of the week in 2015, with dozens of sports channels on television and almost infinite availability of sports on the internet, it’s almost unavoidable. Football every night is not a recipe for domestic tranquility.

Luckily for football fans and for their families, friends, and loved ones, the steady march of time has not brought only the sports-entertainment version of middle-aged spread but also an approach to ameliorating its effects: the small screen! Televisions are no longer the only device capable of showing a football game. Games are available on computers, tablets, and even phones with close to no depreciation in quality compared to a television. At worst, you end up a minute or two behind — a slight annoyance that also carries a benefit as it forces you to get off twitter and stop obsessively checking your fantasy football scoreboard and actually enjoy the game. I find watching a football game on my laptop, particularly using the live TV app through my cable company, is almost exactly as enjoyable as watching it on television. The benefits for my partner are many. Using the small screen means that the living room (and dining room, because our apartment has an open floor plan) is still available for her use. It also conveys the message that I don’t think football is any more important than reading a book, doing a puzzle, sketching, or doing any of the other solitary activities that one might do while sitting in the same room as a family member.

As a member of a mixed household, it’s important for both (or all) sides to take peaceful cohabitation, or not going crazy, as you called it, seriously. The small screen is a valuable weapon in this fight. Use it wisely!

Thanks for reading and let me know how things go this season,
Ezra

Why are some tournaments called opens?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m excited that the U.S. Open tennis tournament is starting this week. I have a question which you might be able to answer though: why are some tournaments called opens? Who are they open to?

Thanks,
Becky

Dear Becky,

In today’s sports language, the word “open” is almost a synonym for the word “tournament”. If you ask a tennis fan what she’s watching in the next couple weeks, she’ll say, “the U.S. Open” not “the U.S. Open tournament”. In a more technical sense, the term does make a distinction between one type of tournament and another. In a non-open (sometimes called an “invitational”) tournament, all of the places in the tournament will be filled by professional tennis players based on a current ranking that is maintained by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). An open tournament doles out most of its places to players based on the same rankings but it reserves a small number of spots (16 for men, 8 to 16 for women) for people who qualify by winning or doing well in a qualifying tournament. (Side note — players who don’t win their qualifying tournament but who make it into an Open field anyway are wonderfully called Lucky Losers.) These qualifying tournaments are open to professional and amateur players. Amateur qualifiers have rarely made an impact in recent years. In men’s tennis, a qualifier named Vladimir Voltchkov made it to the semifinals in the 2000 Wimbledon and during the 2015 British Open (of golf), an amateur qualifier named Paul Dunne was tied for the lead after the third of four rounds. Nonetheless, the inclusive nature of open tournaments adds to their romance. Like an open cup in European soccer, the fact that an unknown could win is enough to justify their inclusion.

Given current use of the “open” moniker, you’d be forgiven for thinking that tournaments have historically been the province of professional players and the opening of open tournaments has always been to allow amateurs to join in. Historically, at least in tennis, it’s actually exactly the opposite. Before 1968 the major tennis tournaments each year were open only to amateurs. In 1968, they all began to allow professionals to compete. This change was reflected in the name of two of the tournaments. The U.S. National Championships became the U.S. Open and the Australian Championships became the Australian Open. In today’s money fueled sports world, it seems crazy to think that professionals were excluded and amateurs preferred, but that’s how things were in tennis before 1968.

Enjoy the U.S. Open! Here are two printable brackets that you can use to track the action. The 16 qualifiers are labeled with a “(Q)” in the men’s draw and the women’s draw as well.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

What does "tale of the tape" mean?

Dear Sports Fan,

You’re good with words and phrases. I was watching Rachael Maddow the other day and she said she was doing a special “tale of the tape” show. What does “tale of the tape” mean? Is it some kind of sports thing?

Thanks,
Ellis

Dear Ellis,

The phrase “tale of the tape” refers to making an objective comparison, particularly between two combatants. It comes from the sport of boxing where fighters are measured and weighed before a fight.

The pre-fight measurement has an important function but it also has its share of pageantry. To make boxing reasonably fair, it is organized into weight classes. For example, the famous fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns in 1981 was fought in the welterweight category. Both fighters had to be less than 147 pounds and more than 140 pounds during the weigh-in, which is usually the night before the fight. For a professional fight, the minimum weight is usually waived, but for amateurs, it’s an important safety element. Why the obsession with weight? Assuming that most boxers are not flabby, weight translates almost directly from muscle and height into punching power. The heavyweight class, the most traditionally prestigious weight class, has no maximum weight, only a minimum of 200 pounds, and even that isn’t enforced. So why do heavyweight fights still have weigh-ins the day before? Part of the answer is that the weigh in has become an important part of hyping or developing interest for the fight. The boxers pose for promotional photos with eyes locked on each other and fists cocked. Often trash talk is exchanged. Sometimes they even come to blows, although that’s usually put to an end quickly. The other reason is that the boxers’ weight, height, and reach are important factors for people who are betting on the fight. Reach, for example, or wingspan, as it would be referred to in a non-boxing context, is important because one fighter being able to punch the other from a distance at which they cannot be punched back is a big advantage.

The word, “tape,” in the phrase, “tale of the tape” suggests that reach or height were the first measurement being referred to. After all, what else do you measure with a measuring tape? Over time, the phrase has expanded, not just to include weight, but also other semi-objective measurements like a fighter’s previous record, what championship belts they possess, as well as biographical information like where they are from. In this context, it combines making an objective comparison with simply describing the fighter. That’s likely the sense in which Rachael Maddow was using the phrase. Did she do a comparison of two candidates which included objective information about their positions as well as stories about their past?

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Dear Sports Fan's Football Fan and Friend Fantasy Football League

Joining a fantasy football league can be an intimidating prospect. It’s a big commitment – usually 16 weeks. Fantasy football seems to require a great deal of knowledge about and passion for football. Then, you add a level of game-play on top of that. Fantasy football is also challenging from a social perspective. Leagues are closed societies with their own culture and expected behavior. The people in them look like they are having a ton of fun but it’s almost impossible to share their enjoyment if you’re not on the inside. All of this adds up to making fantasy football a difficult thing for beginners to break into. This fall, we’re going to try to find a soluton!

Dear Sports Fan’s Football Fan and Friend Fantasy Football League (the DSFFFFFFL for short) is a brand new kind of fantasy football league. Teams will be owned and operated by pairs of people: one a football and fantasy football veteran; the other, someone who is brand new to fantasy football. Throughout the process, we’ll be open and attentive to explaining anything that needs explaining. Both sides will learn a lot and have fun too! I’ll write about the league in Dear Sports Fan and will likely ask for each pair of owners to do a podcast with me about the experience sometime during the year.

  • If you’ve ever wanted to play fantasy football but were afraid to try, find an experienced friend of yours and get her to join with you.
  • If you’re an experienced fantasy owner who has always wanted to share the experience with a friend of yours, invite him to join the DSFFFFFFL.

Send an email to dearsportsfan@gmail.com with a little bit of information about who each of you is and how you know each other. We will be taking applicants until Saturday, August 29.