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How does the Ryder Cup work?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does the Ryder Cup work? I know it’s an international golf tournament but I’m not sure how it’s different from other golf tournaments.

Thanks,
Alf

— — —

Dear Alf,

The Ryder Cup is a men’s golf competition that happens every two years between a team made up of golfers from the United States and a team of European golfers. It’s quite a bit different from most golf tournaments but I think that it’s actually more exciting and accessible for people (like me,) who aren’t golf fans ordinarily. Although it’s funny to joke about how complicated the event is — Bleacher Report’s intro to the Ryder Cup by Tyler Conway made me laugh out loud at its introductory statement, ” The 2014 Ryder Cup begins in less than a week, which means it’s time for one of the best biennial traditions in golf: explaining how this strange event works.” — but I don’t think it’s all that hard to understand. Let’s run through how it works and you can tell me what you think.

The Teams

Each team is made up of 12 golfers. Each team has a captain who, as part of his responsibilities, gets to choose three of the 12 players. Somewhat interestingly, although both captains are picked by continental golf league leaders (the PGA executive committee in the U.S. and the European Tour Committee in Europe,) only the European players get a chance to vote to ratify the selection. If a U.S. player doesn’t like his captain, too bad. The other nine players are selected automatically by selecting off the top of ranked lists of top golfers intended to reflect performance.

Tournament Format

The tournament is held over the course of three days. During those days, 28 separate competitions, called matches, are played. Each match is worth one point: a win gives a team one point, a loss, zero, and a tie, one half point. Whichever team has the most points after the 28 matches are complete wins the Ryder Cup. It is possible for the two teams to end the tournament with 14 points each. If that happens, the side that won the tournament two years ago keeps the title! This seems like a shockingly unsatisfying way to resolve a tie but, really, so many ways of resolving ties in sports, like shootouts in soccer, are unsatisfying. There’s something traditional in sports about the idea of having a tie favor the reigning champion. In boxing, this unwritten rule goes at least as far back as 1973. It states that, “you can’t dethrone a champion unless you beat him badly.”

There are three different formats for matches during the Ryder Cup: singles, fourballs, and foursomes. Of the 28 matches, eight are foursomes, eight are fourballs, and 12 are singles. Each of the 12 players on both sides must play one of the 12 singles matches but the captains have free-reign to select whoever they want to play in the foursome and fourballs matches with the only restriction being that no single player is allowed to play more than five total matches.

Singles

Players are paired against a single opponent. They play eighteen holes of golf together in direct competition. For each hole, whoever completes it successfully in fewer strokes gets one point. If they take the same number of hits to compete a hole, they each get half a point. Whoever has the most points at the end of the round wins the match for their side.

Fourballs

Fourballs is just like singles, except instead of two players, there are four in two teams of two. Each of the four players plays each hole but for each hole, only the best score from each team counts. For example, if USA 1 gets a six and USA 2 gets a four while Europe 1 gets a 3 and Europe 2 gets an 8, the scores from USA 1 and Europe 2 would be discarded and only the two best scores from each team would be compared. USA 2’s four would get lined up against Europe 1’s three and Team Europe would get the point for that hole. This format is also called “best ball.” It’s theoretically possible that a player could go through an entire round of fourballs and never have their score count if their partner does better on every single hole.

Foursomes

Foursomes is an even more intertwined teamwork based format. Like fourballs, each match is played with teams of two, but instead of both teammates playing each hole, they use a single ball and alternate strokes. If USA 1 drives the ball off the tee, USA 2 has to hit the second shot on the hole. They continue alternating until they get the ball in the hole or one of them sues for divorce. Just kidding, there’s no divorce allowed, but I can’t imagine a sports format more clearly designed to create friction between partners.

How Score is Kept

Unlike regular golf tournaments, the total, cumulative number of strokes a golfer takes doesn’t matter. Teams and players concentrate only on beating their opponent, so the score is kept relativistically between the two golfers or teams. CBS Sports’ guide to the Ryder Cup format does a great job with the scoring vocabulary for this tournament and match play in general:

2 up thru 11: A player/twosome who is 2 up thru 11 has won two more holes than their opponent(s) through 11 holes.

All Square thru 15: The match is tied through 15 holes.

Just like within a playoff series or soccer shootout, once a team is mathematically eliminated, the match is over. If a team is up by more strokes than there are holes left, the players pack up their bags and walk off the course. The exception to this is if a team is up by more matches than there are matches left — no matter what, teams play all 28 matches.

So When is it On?

The 2014 Ryder Cup is from Friday, September 26 to Sunday, September 28. It’s being televised on the Golf Channel (there’s a golf channel? yes, a golf channel) and NBC. The thing is… it’s in Scotland, still a part of the United Kingdom and still between five to eight hours from the continental United States. Play starts at 2:35 a.m. ET on Friday, 3 a.m. ET Saturday, and a civilized 6:15 a.m. ET on Sunday. If you do decide to watch some of it, I would recommend the foursomes matches on Friday or Saturday which have the highest potential for excitement and comedy and begin at 8:15 a.m. ET.

Good luck waking up and watching, let me know what you think,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-23-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, September 22

The Bears ground the Jets — There’s really only one thing in the sports world that happened yesterday which will create conversation today, and that’s the Chicago Bears beating the New York Jets 27-19 on Monday Night Football. It wasn’t an unexpected result, the Bears seem like they are pretty good and Jets seem like they’re tragically flawed in many of the ways they often are: mediocre quarterback, unreliable wide-receivers, slightly dysfunctional organization. The most notable aspect of the game last night was how many injuries there were on particular positional groupings. By the end of the game, the Bears were scraping the bottom of the barrel for their defensive backs but the Jets were missing their best wide receiver so it was hard for them to take advantage of it.
Line: [Jets quarterback] Geno Smith shows just enough promise to keep luring you in without delivering.
Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy — Tuesdays after otherwise quiet Mondays are the perfect time for fantasy football owners to crow or gripe about their teams. They “absolutely crushed” their league this week or they “lost by a fraction of a point because [name of player] had a touchdown called back because of [penalty, usually offensive holding]” or because they started [player] when they should have started [other player.]
Line: [Nod head, make sympathetic noises, and then launch into telling them about your hobby of fishing/crocheting/model trains/historic reenactment. Fair is fair.]

Is your team mascot offensive?

In today’s New York Times, there’s a very enjoyable little guide to determining whether your team’s mascot is offensive. By Neil Irwin, I recommend reading, “ A Super-Simple, Step-by-Step Guide to Determine if Your Team Mascot Is Offensive.” Like the best comedy, there is essential truth lying underneath. My favorite part was his second step:

Step 2: Is your team mascot an inanimate concept? You’re in good shape here, too. If you are the Boston Red Sox, your name is fine because it is a color of footwear. Miami Heat? You are named for thermal energy, which does not have an opinion on whether it is an appropriate name for a basketball team.

What is the magic number in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the magic number in baseball?

Thanks,
Mike

— — —

Dear Mike,

The “magic number” is a calculation used to state how far a team is from achieving a goal. Most frequently, it’s a metric that show how close a team is to winning their regular season division or conference title, or to making the playoffs.

The term “magic number” is used in other sports as well as baseball, but these days, with the baseball playoffs quickly approaching, we’re seeing it most often in baseball news stories. Some recent examples are this article on The Detroit Sports Site which begins, “The Detroit Tigers’ Magic Number to clinch the AL Central stayed stuck on seven with Sunday’s loss in Kansas City.” or this article on SB Nation’s LA Dodgers blog, True Blue L.A., entitled, “MLB standings 2014: Dodgers and Giants both lose, magic number now 5.” There are websites devoted completely to following the magic number, like Playoff Magic. We’ll look at their Major League Baseball (MLB) section later. First, let’s talk about how the magic number works.

I find the easiest way of thinking about the magic number is that it is the number of games a team needs to win for them to achieve a goal no matter what another team does. This makes some intuitive sense. Let’s take a simple scenario. There are two games remaining in a season. My team, the Flywheels, is ahead of the Steampunks by two games in the standings. All I have to do is win a single game to make it impossible for the Steampunks to catch up. My magic number to end the season ahead of the Steampunks is therefore one. Let’s say though, that the Steampunks play one of their remaining games before our team, the Flywheels, does. If they lose, then they only have one game left and they are still down by two games in the standings. My magic number moves from one to zero. I don’t need to win any more games to assure myself that I’m going to finish the season ahead of my rivals. A team’s own result can change their magic number but so can another team’s win or loss. The magic number is a relative calculation.

In more complex situations, the magic number is harder to derive by instinct. Luckily, there are a few easy formulas to follow to calculate it. The best follows the logic of our previous example. It’s the second option on the Wikipedia entry about the magic number:

The magic number can also be calculated as WB + GRB – WA + 1, where

WB is the number of wins that Team B has in the season
GRB is the number of games remaining for Team B in the season
WA is the number of wins that Team A has in the season

This second formula basically says: Assume Team B wins every remaining game. Calculate how many games team A needs to win to surpass team B’s maximum total by 1.

Let’s use this formula on our example of the Flywheels and the Steampunks. We didn’t say how many games there had been in the season, only that there were two left. Let’s say it’s a 20 game season. The standings today look like this:

Team A: Flywheels – 12 wins, 6 losses, 2 games remaining
Team B: Steampunks – 10 wins, 8 losses, 2 games remaining

To calculate the Flywheel’s magic number, we take the number of wins the Steampunks have (10) add the number of games remaining for the Steampunks (2) subtract the number of wins that the Flywheels have (12) and add one to get… one! It works!

One important thing about the magic number that makes more sense when you see how it is calculated, is that it can only ever measure the distance between two teams. In a three way race for a division title, the leading team will have a magic number in comparison to each of the teams chasing them. If someone says that a team has a single magic number showing how far they are from achieving a goal, it’s safe to assume that every other team other than the one used to calculate that number has been mathematically eliminated from contention.

Returning to Playoff Magic’s MLB page, here’s one example of how the magic number is working in this year’s run to the baseball playoffs.

The AL or American League Central still has three teams in contention. The Tigers are in the lead with 86 wins after 155 games. The Royals are in second place with 84 wins after 154 games. The Cleveland Indians are running third with 81 wins after 155 games. There are 162 games in a baseball season, so the Tigers and Indians have seven games left while the Royals have eight. The magic number is most easily understood as how many games does a team need to win to stay ahead of the teams behind them even if they win every remaining game. If the Royals win all their remaining games, they’ll end the season with 92 wins. If the Indians win every remaining game, they’ll end the season with 88 wins. To end the season ahead of the Indians, the Tigers need to win a total of 89 games or three more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Indians is three! To end the season ahead of the Royals, the Tigers would need 93 wins or seven more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Royals is seven! Those magic numbers show up in the table on the Tigers’ row. The 5 on the Royals row in the Cleveland Indians column is the Royals magic number in relation to the Indians. In this case, the achievement is not winning the division but ending the season ahead of the Indians.

I hope that helps explain the magic number. In case you’re wondering what the GB means in the standings table, it stands for “games back.” Games back is another story completely but luckily, I wrote all about what “games back” means last year.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-22-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, September 21

Another rollicking NFL Sunday — As with most Mondays in the fall, this will be the dominant conversation topic among sports fans. Prepare yourself for water-cooler talk with our NFL One Liners that not only give you a little information about what happened in each game but also a line to say if asked what you think.
Line: The highlight of yesterday’s games was when the rematch of last year’s Super Bowl, between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos, went into overtime.
Jeter’s last weekend game — Yankees star, Derek Jeter, has been on a retirement tour all season. Every last is celebrated. Yesterday, he had his last weekend home game at Yankee stadium. The Yankees won, 5-2 over the Blue Jays, and Jeter had a very good game.
Line: I’m glad Jeter is playing well again, it was a little sad when it looked like he’d be leaving the game playing so poorly.
Manchester United stink — Talking about the Yankees, the Yankees of British soccer, Manchester United, continues to have a nightmare of a season. They lost 5-3 to Leicester yesterday. This leaves them with one win in five games this season. That’s like the Yankees going 5-28 to start a season!
Line: The bigger they are, the harder they fall, eh… eh…?

Week Three NFL One Liners

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by Google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

Week 3

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 1:00 P.M. ET

San Diego Chargers 22, at Buffalo Bills 10

After beating the defending champion Seattle Seahawks last week, the Chargers went on the road and subdued the undefeated Buffalo Bills. Buffalo fans are up there in terms of nervous fan bases, so prepare to do some comforting if you’re friends with a Bills fan.
Line: The Chargers might be for real this year.

Baltimore Ravens 23, at Cleveland Browns 21

Heartbreak for the Cleveland fans after their team gave up a late lead to big-brother-rival Baltimore Ravens.
Line: Cleveland deserves good things after the way they’ve started this year. I hope this is a bump in the road, not a fall into the same old pit of despair.

Tennessee Titans 7, at Cincinnati Bengals 33

The Chargers might be for real, the Bengals ARE for real. This game was no contest. The Titans might as well have saved themselves the trip if it weren’t for the frequent flier miles they racked up. (NFL teams have chartered planes, there are no frequent flier miles.)
Line: The Bengals are for real.

Dallas Cowboys 34, at St. Louis Rams 31

The drama-drama-drama Cowboys went down 21-0 before stumbling back to a close victory over a team starting its third quarterback of the year.
Line: Sure, the Cowboys won, but they shouldn’t feel good about winning like that.

Green Bay Packers 7, at Detroit Lions 19

The Packers are normally the victor in games against the Lions but they weren’t able to keep their star quarterback, Aaron Rodgers upright consistently enough to win this week.
Line: Do we give the Packers too much respect on reputation? Maybe they’re not that good this year.

Houston Texans 17, at New York Giants 30

The heretofore horrible Giants took out their frustration on the undefeated Texans.
Line: In past years, the Giants have been like one of those horror movie villains that just won’t die. Can they pull it off again?

Indianapolis Colts 44, at Jacksonville Jaguars 17

The Jaguars are terrible. Our “good cop” was right though, we did see rookie quarterback Blake Bortles get his first NFL playing time in this game. He looked half-decent and has already been announced as next week’s starter.
Line: It’s Week 3 and the Jaguars are already playing for next year.

Minnesota Vikings 9, at New Orleans Saints 20

The Saints were desperate after losing their first two games and they showed it, jumping up to a 13 point lead and never really letting the Vikings back into the game.
Line: Okay, the Saints are back!

Oakland Raiders 9, at New England Patriots 16

This game was way closer than most people would have expected. The Patriots, although 2-1, are not inspiring a lot of confidence the way they’re playing.
Line: What is going on up there in New England? They only beat the Raiders by seven?

Washington Redskins 34, at Philadelphia Eagles 37

This game was an offense lover’s paradise, with both teams scoring a lot and failing to defend very much. There was a rare bench-clearing brawl between these two teams which resulted in not much other than a couple of ejected players.
Line: [Former Eagle] Desean Jackson may have gotten some revenge by catching a long touchdown but the Eagles had the last laugh.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

San Francisco 49ers 14, at Arizona Cardinals 23

The Cardinals were widely thought of as the best team to miss the playoffs last year. The 49ers have made it at least to the conference finals the last three years. If the results of this game are to believed, things could be turning around in their NFC West division.

Line: This might be the Cardinals’ year!

Denver Broncos 20, at Seattle Seahawks 26

I mistakenly turned this game off two separate times when I thought the Seahawks had conclusively won it. Instead, Peyton Manning led the Broncos back and back and back… and then lost in overtime.
Line: I’m not sure if losing this way is better or worse for the morale of the Broncos than losing by a wider margin would have been.

Kansas City Chiefs 34, at Miami Dolphins 15

Just when you think you know something about the NFL, the results of a game seem to prove you wrong. We thought the Chiefs were falling apart. We thought the Dolphins were strong. Now, we just don’t know.
Line: The more you know, the less you know.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Pittsburgh Steelers 37, at Carolina Panthers 19

After looking like it was going to be a close, low-scoring game during the first half, the Steelers broke the game open with 28 points in the second half. Despite Carolina’s defense being thought of as one of the best in the league, the Steelers were able to run all over them. On the other side of the ball, the Steelers defense really beat up on Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.
Line: The Panthers better protect Cam Newton better if they want him to play for the rest of the year.

News Clippings: NFL in Trouble & Swimming Superheroes

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me. We start with two articles about the ongoing scandal in the NFL, and then move over to two profiles from Grantland.com, one about a champion Armenian fin-swimmer who became a hero when a trolley crashed into a lake and one about a teenager who may be one of the greatest athletes we’ve ever witnessed.

How Adrian Peterson Is Helping the NFL Avoid a Real Reckoning

By Bethlehem Shoals in GQ

In a lot of ways, Adrian Peterson has made Ray Rice less of a problem for the NFL. The narrative becomes one about violent athletes, not Roger Goodell’s backward attitudes and cold-blooded agenda.

The connection worth exploring isn’t the one between the behavior of Rice and Peterson, but the ways in which Goodell’s handling of the Rice situation—concealment, minimizing, double-speak, and dissimulation—mirrors the way the league continues to deal with the long-term effects of the sport on its athletes.

— — —

Giving Up on Goodell: How the NFL lost the trust of its most loyal reporters.

By Stefan Fatsis in Slate

In his book The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism, Dean Starkman describes two conflicting strains of American journalism: access reporting and accountability reporting. The former involves getting inside information from powerful institutions, the latter telling inside stories about them. “Access tends to transmit orthodox views; accountability tends to transmit heterodox views,” Starkman writes. Like Wall Street and other big institutions, the NFL prefers and—in the case of reporters like Schefter, ESPN’s Chris Mortensen, and Sports Illustrated’s Peter King—facilitates access reporting. It’s good business.

With the NFL’s possible perfidy the biggest story in all of American media right now, accountability journalists will rush in from outside the sports beat to dig for dirt. And inside the league’s formerly cozy media bubble, the men and women with access are going to start demanding answers, too. If he wants to keep his job, Goodell better hope that the answers he provides are the right ones, no matter which reporters he’s talking to.

— — —

The Plunge

By Carl Schreck in Grantland

Just as Karapetyan reached the bridge, the sound of metal smashing against concrete tore through the cool evening air. He looked toward the commotion, through the blizzard of dust that had kicked up from the hillside below, and saw a trolleybus disappear below the surface of Lake Yerevan. Its two electric trolley poles poked up from the water like antennae. If Karapetyan gave any thought to his next move, he doesn’t remember it. He sprinted down the hill, ditched the weighted backpack, stripped to his skivvies, and dove into the lake.

— — —

This Is Katie F---ing Ledecky: A Thesis About Kicking Ass

By Brian Phillips in Grantland

There’s a special kind of lightness you feel when you realize you’re seeing a truly great athlete for the first time. When you understand that what you’re watching is not someone who is merely very good, or very tough, or very skilled relative to her peers, but someone to whom the normal rules do not apply. When your imagination runs the math on an athlete and returns an error sign.

NFL Week 3 Good Cop, Bad Cop Precaps

The NFL season has started but how do you know which games to watch and which to skip? Ask our favorite police duo with their good cop, bad cop precaps of all the Week 3 matchups in the National Football League this weekend. To see which games will be televised in your area, check out 506sports.com’s essential NFL maps. If you’re worried about watching too much football or if you’re negotiating for a little break during the weekend, read our weekly feature, Do Not Watch This Game.

Week 3

Sunday, September 21, at 1:00 p.m. ET

San Diego Chargers at Buffalo Bills

Good cop: Whoa, are we starting off this week with a humdinger! These teams are so hot, I wouldn’t watch this game without sunglasses! The Chargers just beat the defending champion Seahawks last week and the Bills are off to a great 2-0 start!

Bad cop: You again? Every week, I have to deal with your unrealistic expectations for football games. The Bills are a mirage that’s due to disappear any moment and the Chargers are a West Coast team flying east for an early game. Their biological clocks won’t be ticking “like this” and neither is mine over this game.

Baltimore Ravens at Cleveland Browns

Good cop: The surprising 2-0 Browns host a divisional opponent! I’m overwhelmed with enthusiasm!

Bad cop: Name a non-quarterback that plays offense on either team. Okay, you can’t, huh? There’s a reason for that. This game isn’t that exciting.

Tennessee Titans at Cincinnati Bengals

Good cop: Any entertainment featuring players named Giovanni Bernard and Bishop Sankey, whether it’s a football game or an exhibit on 14th century Italian art is worth paying attention to!

Bad cop: Cincinnati’s defense eats renaissance painters for lunch. 35-7, Bengals.

Dallas Cowboys at St. Louis Rams

Good cop: The Cowboys have one of the best offenses in the league, the Rams, one of the best defenses! I can’t wait!

Bad cop: What are we supposed to do when the Rams offense is out there against the Cowboys defense? Talk about a movable object meeting a stoppable force. Pshh.

Green Bay Packers at Detroit Lions

Good cop: These divisional opponents always have exciting, high scoring games! Packer Aaron Rodgers makes me proud to write in green! Lions’ wide-receiver Calvin Johnson makes me wish I wrote in blue!

Bad cop: Ink? Color? What is this, the NICL? National Ink Color League? What are you talking about?

Houston Texans at New York Giants

Good cop: The Texans are off to a great start, 2-0, after going 2-14 last season! They’re the model the Giants need to look at for how to recover! And they’re playing each other!

Bad cop: Sheesh. Wasn’t this game on last week? I swore the Giants played some boring team and lost last week, why would anyone want to watch it again?

Indianapolis Colts at Jacksonville Jaguars

Good cop: Will this be the week we see Jaguars exciting rookie quarterback Black Bortles!!?

Bad cop: Bortles? You’re trying to get me to watch this game by saying the word “Bortles?” I don’t even know what a Bortles is.

Minnesota Vikings at New Orleans Saints

Good cop: It’s the season’s first “must win” game! At 0-2, the Saints have to win!

Bad cop: They will.

Oakland Raiders at New England Patriots

Good cop: It’s a rematch of the famous “tuck rule” game that launched Tom Brady’s career!

Bad cop: That was 13 years ago. Since then, these two teams have taken slightly different paths. Do not watch this game.

Washington Redskins at Philadelphia Eagles

Good cop: I am so excited for this game! Rival teams! A player (DeSean Jackson) who was ceremoniously dumped from the Eagles and signed by the Redskins who wants his revenge! What a great game!

Bad cop: It’s a good plot but will the game live up to it? It’s a shame Jackson hurt his shoulder and his quarterback dislocated his ankle the last time Washington played. Might be a bust.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

San Francisco 49ers at Arizona Cardinals

Good cop: Wow, the 49ers were humiliated by the Bears last week! They are going to be ready for this game against their rival, the Cardinals.

Bad cop: Were they embarrassed or are they just not very good?

Denver Broncos at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: It’s the game of the week! A rematch of the last Super Bowl! This is the first time that there’s been a Super Bowl rematch during the regular season since 1997!

Bad cop: If the Broncos got crushed in a neutral field, what makes you think they’ll be able to put up a fight in Seattle, where the Seahawks are virtually unbeatable. Also, look over there!

Kansas City Chiefs at Miami Dolphins

Good cop: I love this game! Ahhhemshghsghs!

Bad cop: What was that? You love it because you don’t have to watch it since you’ll be watching the Broncos play the Seahawks?

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Pittsburgh Steelers at Carolina Panthers

Good cop: Two of the biggest, strongest quarterbacks to ever play the game face off in a national showdown!

Bad cop: It’s not a size-off of quarterbacks, it’s a football game. The Steelers defense isn’t very good anymore and the Panthers’ is virtually unbeatable. Too obvious.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears at New York Jets

Good cop: These teams always have dramatic games! The Jets just lost because one of their coaches, named Mornhinweg, I might add, mistakenly called a time out! The Bears roared back in the second half of last week’s game to beat the 49ers!

Bad cop: Loving dysfunctional teams? Isn’t that supposed to be my schtick?

A Note to my email subscribers

First of all, thank you! It’s really wonderful to have an audience for the work I’m doing. I hope that you have been enjoying the writing and finding the content useful.

As you may notice from the slight change in format, I’ve switched the software I’m using to send out these emails from Feedburner to Mailchimp. From now on, you shouldn’t get anything from Feedburner. If there’s any issues with this, let me know at dearsportsfan@gmail.com. My goal is to eventually offer more options: full text or digest and daily or weekly at least. I’m also going to try to split out the morning Cue Cards from everything else so that you can get those before work every day if you’d like.

Again, thanks so much for subscribing. I’m working on lots of exciting new features, so watch out for that in the next couple months. Until then, keep your ear to the grindstone and please, forward this to your friends and family who are or who live with a sports fan!

-Ezra

What does probable or questionable mean on the NFL injury report?

Dear Sports Fan,

First time playing fantasy football here. What does it mean when someone is listed as Probable or Questionable? If someone (say Andre Ellington) has a Sunday game and has not been seen in practice till Wednesday, is it a sign they won’t start that week? Also, what kind of injuries are the worst? Ankle?

Best regards,
Mengster

— — —

Dear Mengster,

It sounds like you’ve really caught the Fantasy Football bug! As I wrote in my recent post about what it means to start or sit a player in fantasy football, predicting which players on your fantasy team are most likely to play well in their real games is a big part of playing fantasy football. A player who is too injured to play is 100% positive to not score any points for your team, so researching and following your players’ injuries is important business. Luckily for us, NFL teams are required to put out injury reports every day which file all of their players as either healthy or under one of the four possible standard injury designations: out, doubtful, questionable, and probable. It’s actually not luck, the NFL requires teams do this because having this information makes gambling on football and fantasy football games possible. Oh, the NFL wouldn’t say that if you asked it^[1] but it’s true nonetheless.

NFL injury designations are officially tied to percentages. Out = 0% likely to play. Doubtful = 25% likely to play. Questionable = 50% likely to play. Probably = 75% likely to play. In reality, that’s not actually the case. The Wall Street Journal ran an article a few years ago about what the real percentages for these labels were. In it, they discovered that Doubtful players played less than 3% of the time, Questionable was closest to its “proper” percentage, just a little higher than 50% — around 55%. Probably players played more than 90% of the time. Although the article is from 2011 and the stats go back to 2006, I don’t think much has changed. I wrote my own qualitative descriptions of what each designation means in an answer to similar question last year from someone who asked about the injury report:

Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.

When thinking about fantasy football, I generally assume that players listed as “probable” are fine. For players listed as “questionable,” I dig in and do some research about their specific situation. Have they, like you said, been practicing? What kind of injury do they have? Did it knock them out of the last game or were they able to finish? You can generally learn a lot about a “fantasy relevant” player’s injury. For example, in Andre Ellington’s case, I can tell from Rotoworld.com that he “remains on track to play in this week’s game against the 49ers.” So, he’s probably fine for this week. A lot of players, especially running backs (who take the most hits) and veterans will regularly skip a day of practice. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. What you want to watch out for is someone who’s designation gets worse during the week (moves from Probably to Questionable) or someone who wasn’t on the injury at the start of the week but is by the end. Those are both bad signs for their likelihood of playing on Sunday.

In terms of what injuries are the worst, that’s probably worth its own post. I can say from having played fantasy football for years and followed a lot of sports in general, that the injuries which seem to keep players out for the longest are (excluding obvious things like broken bones, torn ligaments, and concussions): high ankle sprains, turf toe, and foot sprains. I know, those things sound less serious than rib or hip injuries, but an athlete lives and dies by his or her ability to plant off one foot and switch directions. You need your ankles, toes, and feet healthy to do that!

Good luck in your fantasy game this weekend,
Ezra

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

It would probably say, “AHH!! A talking league??!”↵