Cue Cards 9-19-14

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.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Thursday, September 18

  1. The U.S. Women’s National Soccer team rolls — Our women’s soccer team is to international soccer what our men’s national basketball team is to basketball. Dominant. Perhaps they aren’t quite as overwhelmingly dominant as the men’s basketball team but you wouldn’t know that from the easy 4-0 victory over Mexico last night. This followed an 8-0 win over the same team in their previous game. According to Liviu Bird of Sports Illustrated, these two games against Mexico are actually likely to be more challenging than any teams the team will face in official qualifying games for the 2015 World Cup.
    Line: If only we could develop male soccer players in this country as well as we do women, we’d have been able to give goalie Tim Howard some support in the men’s World Cup in Brazil.
  2. The Atlanta Falcons swoop the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — Last night’s NFL game was compelling like a fender bender is. The Falcons scored the first 56 points of the game. 56!! The Bucs? Well, they fumbled and bumbled and slipped and fell. It was ugly.
    Line: I know they’re professionals and all but how can you not feel sympathy for a group of guys who just had their absolute worst day on the job watched by millions of people?
  3. Auburn survives Kansas State — There was a rare high-profile college football game on Thursday last night. The Auburn Tigers have national championship aspirations and the way college football is set up, teams basically can’t lose more than one game all season if they want a chance at the championship. It’s far better to be undefeated. The Kansas State Wildcats showed a lot of talent and heart by putting a real scare into the Tigers late in the game.
    Line: The good thing about college football is that the regular season is so important, the games feel like playoff games.

Do Not Watch This Game 9.20.14 Weekend Edition

 

sad-raider-fan

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Sunday, 1:00 p.m. ET, NFL Football, New England Patriots vs. Oakland Raiders. It’s on CBS but do not watch this game!

Hmm, let’s see here: Oakland Raiders wins in the last ten seasons: 49; New England Patriots wins in the last ten seasons: 124. It’s just about that simple — both of these teams have been remarkably consistent over the last decade. The Patriots have had one coach and, except for one year lost to injury, one quarterback. The Raiders are on their sixth head coach and something close to their seventeenth starting quarterback. This year, the Raiders are led by Rookie Quarterback Derek Carr, who won the job in training camp from veteran Matt Schaub, who the team signed after what had to have been one of the most ignominious seasons ever for a quarterback. Meanwhile, Patriots coach Bill Bellichick and quarterback Tom Brady just keep on chugging. They’re like a pair of crusty old train engineers who won’t quit shoveling coal. When Brady was recently asked how he would approach retirement, he said, “When I suck, I’ll retire. I don’t plan on sucking for a long time.” Although he is in the tail end of his career, Brady hasn’t started sucking yet, and this game will almost certainly not be the moment he starts sucking.

If you look at team defensive statistics so far this year, the Raiders look like they are pretty good at defending the pass. They’ve allowed the third fewest passing yards. This is a case where statistics lie. They’re not good at defending the pass, they’re just wretched at defending the run. They’re by far the worst run defense in the league, having allowed an average of 200 yards per game against. That’s almost 25 yards more per game than the next worst team and almost four times the best team. Another factor to consider is that NFL teams often run once they have a lead. The Patriots aren’t like most teams. They generally choose what they think is going to work best against their opponent and then they do that mercilessly the whole game, no matter what the score is.

The battle between spiky leather and tricorn hats is going to be over before it starts. Do not watch this game!

Of course, if you or the fan in your life is a New England Patriots or Oakland Raiders fan, this isn’t a good game to skip. As an alternate, skip the Sunday early afternoon game between the New York Giants and the Houston Texans. Why? Because Ryan Fitzpatrick and Eli Manning don’t exactly scream “excitement.” I can see them antiquing together. No, really.

How does the Champions League work?

 

Dear Sports Fan,

You mentioned in today’s Cue Cards that the European soccer tournament, the Champions league started yesterday. How does the Champions League work? Is it a playoffs or more like the World Cup?

Thanks,
Paul,

— — —

Dear Paul,

The Champions League is the most exciting and prestigious tournament of professional or club teams in Europe and therefore, unless you’re an extremely passionate MLS or South American soccer fan, the world. The Champions League format is more like the World Cup than like a playoffs format that we’re used to in the United States. There is a qualifying stage, a group stage, and then a knockout stage. There are some differences between the Champions League and the World Cup though.

The underlying issue which makes the tournament so complicated, is that the organizers are caught between two goals.

  • To include all of the domestic league champions in the Champions League
  • To find the overall best team in the continent.

The first is a hard-and-fast rule: every domestic champion must take part in some way in the Champions League. To achieve the second goal, the tournament has two strategies. First, it allows teams that came in second, third, or even fourth place in stronger leagues to participate in the tournament. The stronger the league, the more Champions League invitations it gets. Second, it stacks the deck so that champions of weaker leagues have to play more games to qualify for the Group Stage of 32 teams than teams from the strongest leagues. The rankings it uses to do this are called the UEFA coefficient in what I can only assume is an attempt to make your brains spill out of your eyes.

Home and Away Games

Throughout the entire Champions League, with only one exception, regardless of whether the tournament is in the qualifying stage, the group stage, or the knock-out stage, teams always play each other twice: once at each team’s home stadium. Three points are rewarded for a win, one for a tie, and zero for a loss. If the tournament calls for deciding just between the two teams playing (in the qualification and knock-out stages) and the two teams have the same number of points after the two games, a system of tie-breakers comes into play. The tie breaking is thankfully not that complicated. Whichever team has scored the most goals in the two games wins. If both teams have scored the same number of goals in the two games against one another, then the team that scored more goals in the game when they played away from their home stadium, qualifies. If that’s not going to work, then the second game of the home and away is extended into overtime. If no goals are scored in overtime, there’s a penalty kick shootout.

The Champions League Qualification Stage

Qualification has four stages: the first qualifying round, the second qualifying round, the third qualifying round, and the play-off round. In each of the four qualifying rounds, the winners from the previous round compete and new teams are added into the mix. For example, the surviving three teams from the six that played in the first qualifying round are joined by 31 teams who have not yet played a game. The play-off round is just like the other qualifying rounds, it’s just called something special because the winners of that round gain admission to the Group Stage of 32 teams. Of the fifty-five teams that take part in the qualifying stage, only ten will make the Group Stage.

The Group Stage

The group stage is when, for casual observers, the tournament really starts. It’s plays out very similarly to the way the World Cup group stage works. The teams are divided into eight groups of four that play each other to determine which sixteen teams (two from each group) make it into the next round. The only real difference is that the home and away game format is used here, so each team plays six games in this stage instead of only three.

The Knockout Round

Again, very similar to the World Cup, the knockout round winnows the field from sixteen teams to eight to four and finally to two. These matches are played like all the preceding matches in the tournament as part of a home and away. The only exception to this is the Champions League final that is played as a single elimination game in a neutral location. Or at least, a pre-ordained location. This year’s final will be held in Berlin on June 6, 2015.

What does it all mean?

It means there’s a lot of great soccer ahead of us! The Group Stage is just beginning, and will continue from September to December. After a civilized winter break, the Knockout round begins in February and dramatically lollygags until the final in June. The deliberative pace of the Champions League reflects the fact that its participating teams are simultaneously involved in their own domestic leagues and tournaments. It’s also reflected in the home and away format and reflective of the slower pace of soccer as a game. This contemplative aspect of soccer is one of the many reasons I love the sport.

Hope you enjoy soccer too, thanks for writing,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-18-14

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.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Wednesday, September 17

  1. Another division has a winner in baseball — The Los Angeles Angels won their division, the American League West last night. When baseball teams win divisions, they sometimes celebrate in wacky, ritualistic ways that involve spraying champagne all over the place. The Angels did that last night but not too many people saw it in person because their definitively winning the division relied on the outcome of a rival team’s game and that game didn’t end until an hour after their game. So, the team waited in the locker room, watched their rival’s game on tv, and then, when it ended the way they needed it to, they “roared up the tunnel and onto their home field, goggles in place and champagne bottles in hand.”
    Line: Did you know that this will be Mike Trout’s (excellent young player with a great name on the Angels) first time in the playoffs?
  2. European Champions League soccer — The Champions League is the most prestigious club soccer tournament in Europe. It matches the best teams from all the domestic leagues, the English Premiere league, the Spanish La Liga, the Italian Serie A, the German Bundesliga, and so on. Even for a sports fan like myself who doesn’t follow European soccer closely, it’s exciting just for the novelty and the romance of seeing teams that normally only play opponents from within their country compete internationally. There were eight games yesterday. The biggest one was probably between English powerhouse Manchester City and perennial German Champions Bayern Munich. Munich won, 1-0. For sheer international mystique, it’s hard to beat Amsterdam’s Ajax playing Paris Saint-Germain or AS Roma vs. CSKA Moscow. The game with the best story was absolutely the 0-0 tie between the Spanish team Athletic Bilbao and Ukrainian Shakhtar Donetsk. There was a great New York Times story about Shakhtar Donetsk this past week. Donetsk, home town to the team, has been in an active war zone for the past six months, so the team has had to relocate to Kiev, where they are followed by a small but passionate group of fans. New York Times reporter James Montague caught one of these fans leaving a game. In place of a line for this, just relay this awesome story:

    “This was the best day of the season!” said one fan, a 21-year-old finance student named Vladyslav, who declined to give his last name. He beamed as he left the stadium. “I don’t know how I’ll get home,” he said. “Maybe I’ll hitch a ride on a tank.”

Is it ethical to keep Adrian Peterson on my fantasy team?

Dear Sports Fan,

This may be out of your wheelhouse, but … ever since Randy Cohen retired, I can’t bring myself to email the Ethicist.

I loved watching football last year, even though I didn’t understand a thing. It’s been suggested to me that in order to really learn what’s happening, I join a Fantasy Football league. So, I have. My friend is helping me and our first-round draft pick is Adrian Peterson… Yeah. So, assuming he eventually plays again this season — what do I do? Is it ethical to keep him on my team?

From,
Erica

P.S. If it helps you decide, I stopped watching the WWE mainly out of ethical concerns. Am I just done with sports?

— — —

Dear Erica,

You are facing an ethical quandary.

For those who don’t know, Adrian Peterson has been accused of child abuse. Peterson left deep cuts on his son’s legs after beating him with a switch (thin tree branch). His son is four years old. The facts in this case are undisputed because Peterson readily admits what he did. In an article from the local CBS in Houston, near where this happened, reporter Nick Wright describes Peterson as “very matter-of-fact and calm about the incident, appearing to believe he had done nothing wrong and reiterating how much he cared about his son and only used “whoopings” or “spankings” as a last resort.” Like in the Ray Rice domestic abuse case, this story is augmented by visual evidence. In this case, photos of a four-year-old’s wounded legs. They’re readily available online but the child’s mother is apparently asking for them to be taken down, so I won’t even link to them. I’ve seen them and they’re fairly deep, long cuts around the thighs. They’re bad, and they reinforce Amy Davidson’s brilliant argument in the New Yorker that this case should not be a part of the cultural conversation about the appropriateness of corporal punishment. About that conversation, she writes:

This is a valuable, crucial conversation, and Carter is an important voice. It’s not, though, what we’re really talking about in the Peterson case. This preschooler wasn’t paddled or, as Peterson put it to police, “swatted”; he was whipped with a stick and left with open wounds on his body.

When this news broke, Peterson’s team the Vikings deactivated him from their roster. Since then he was briefly activated and then, perhaps after some serious meetings on the part of team management, re-deactivated. That’s where we stand now.

To return to your question — is it ethical to keep Adrian Peterson on my fantasy team? It’s an interesting and complicated question. First of all, let’s establish that it is a reasonable question to ask. As I wrote in my post about why fantasy football drafts are so exciting, fantasy owners do sometimes make (one-directional) emotional connections with the football players on their fantasy teams. Your success becomes linked with their success, so as you root for yourself, you root for them. Once you know that’s likely to happen, you do think about whether or not you’ll want to root for a player when you choose to have him on your team. In the past, players like Ben Roethlisberger (accused of sexual assault,) or Riley Cooper (filmed using the racial epithet aimed at black people during a country music show) would give fantasy owners pause during their drafts. In this case, when you chose Adrian Peterson, his record was clear and clean. You certainly were not acting unethically when you drafted him.

Now that you know what you know, is it unethical to keep him on your team? Being on your fantasy team doesn’t help Adrian Peterson in any material way. I suppose you could make the argument that the more fantasy teams he’s on, the more popular he is, and the more popular he is, the more likely it is for companies to sign him to endorsement deals. Rest easy, he’s not going to be getting any endorsement deals any time soon. Playing fantasy football absolutely supports the National Football League, and I could see an argument for not playing fantasy football as part of a larger boycott of the NFL, but that’s not what you’re suggesting here. Likewise, dropping him is not going to punish him in any way. While athletes are often very concerned with their video-game alter egos’ skill ratings, very few seem to care about their fantasy instantiations.

When you play in a fantasy league, there’s another set of people you should think of when it comes to ethics: your friends who you’re playing fantasy football with and against. You owe them some ethical consideration too. Here, the ethics are clear — dropping a player who you think has more value based on the rules of your fantasy league than the player you’re replacing him with is unethical. It’s unethical because it means you’re intentionally not abiding by the spirit of the group activity you agreed to participate in. You’re throwing the competitive balance of the league off. If your league, like many, plays for money, this ethical consideration is reinforced. In fact, with a star like Peterson, you often cannot drop him. Fantasy sites maintain lists of “undroppable players” that protect leagues against unscrupulous fantasy owners who may decide that if they can’t win, they just want to mess it up for everyone. Peterson has been on that list for years but was just taken off either because of people asking your question or because his suspension makes dropping him defensible from a competitive standpoint.

Ethics don’t require you to drop Peterson but they don’t mandate that you can’t either. You may be so angry or upset from reading about this story or seeing the photos that you just flat-out don’t want to see his name near yours. That’s fine, I support you in that decision. If you do decide to drop Peterson for non-competitive reasons, you should email your league first, let them know what you’re doing and why, and give people a chance to chime in. Perhaps they will simply agree to let him sit, unclaimed on the waiver wire, as if he has been put in time-out, which,  come to think of it, is a strategy he might benefit from learning about.

Thanks for the question, let us know what you decide to do,
Ezra Fischer

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football? Fantasy football owners can’t actually control who plays in a real football game, right? So what gives?

Thanks,
Sal

— — —

Dear Sal,

Ha! I can tell from your question that you understand a little more than you’re letting on. No, of course, you’re right that a fantasy football owner can’t control which real players play in real games each weekend. Like many aspects of fantasy football, this is made more complicated by the fact that fantasy vocabulary shares terms with football but they mean slightly different things in different contexts. The choice to start or sit a player on a fantasy football team decides whether or not that player’s real stats will count toward the fantasy team’s score for the weekend. Making these choices is a big part of what makes fantasy football so fascinating and addictively torturous for people who play fantasy football. We already published a comprehensive post on how fantasy football works, so we’ll stick just to your question about starting or sitting a player. Here’s how it works.

Fantasy leagues vary greatly in how they are set up, but a fairly standard fantasy team will consist of 16 players. Of those, each week, only the statistics from nine of them will count towards the fantasy team’s total. The decision of which nine players of the 16 should count each week is the choice you’re asking about. Players that a fantasy owner selects to have their stats count are said to “start” or “be starting.” Players whose statistics an owner chooses not to have count are said to “sit” or “be sitting.” These terms mirror the decisions that real football coaches make about players on their roster for reasons of injury, relative skill, game-plan, or other factors, but they decide different things. In real football, the decision determines who plays in the football game and potentially who keeps their job and who gets fired. In fantasy, the decisions don’t actually affect the players in question, they only affect the fantasy owner and her fortunes that week.

The interesting thing about the start or sit decision in fantasy football is that fantasy owners have to make it before the games start each week. It’s all about prediction. The decision to start one player over another can be a determining factor in a fantasy game. For example, this weekend, I decided to start Jarett Boykin, a wide receiver on the Green Bay Packers, over Brandon Marshall, a wide receiver on the Chicago Bears. Boykin caught one pass for six yards. Marshall? Five catches, 48 yards, and three touchdowns. If I had chosen to start Marshall, and therefore had his stats count towards my totals, I would have won. Instead, I started Boykin and lost. Why did I make this decision? Well, similar to a real coach, I made it based on injury, relative skill, game-plan, and other factors. Marshall had a badly sprained ankle, my twitter feed was telling me he wasn’t likely to even play, and I thought that Green Bay would have an easy time throwing the ball against the Jets and Boykin would benefit from it.

Hindsight is 20/20 but foresight is variable. The more information about football games a fantasy owner has, the more reading and listening and watching and studying they do, and the better they are at compiling the data in their brains and their guts, the better their foresight is going to be. The more work a fantasy owner does, the better his or her start or sit decisions are likely to be and the more likely they are to win. This is the logic that makes start or sit decisions such an integral part of fantasy football and fantasy football such a force in driving interest in the NFL and the sport of football.

Hope this all makes sense,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-17-14

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.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Tuesday, September 16

  1. Two divisions settled in baseball — Yesterday we mentioned that the baseball season is coming to an end soon. Just to prove the point, two of the six division winners in Major League Baseball (MLB) were conclusively settled last night. The Washington Nationals won their National League East division after beating the Atlanta Braves 3-0. The Nationals have now completed their three-year journey from surprisingly good to incredibly disappointing and now to living up to the expectations of being good. Their geographic neighbors, the Baltimore Orioles, also clinched their division after winning 8-2 over the Toronto Blue Jays. The Orioles are in the same division as two giants of baseball, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, so division victories are hard to come by. Congratulations to both teams!
    Line: Are you ready for the baseball playoffs? In case you don’t know how they work, here’s a Dear Sports Fan post explaining it.
  2. Crime and punishment still reign over the NFL — The scandalous season of the National Football League (NFL) continued yesterday with three stories. In the Adrian Peterson story (arrested for child abuse in Texas for beating his four year-old child) the Vikings reversed course. After benching Peterson for a week, they had announced he would practice and play this week but then yesterday they changed their minds and re-benched him. Maybe it had something to do with a major sponsor dropping the team. Meanwhile, the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) is officially appealing Ray Rice’s suspension. When you think of it just from a labor/management perspective and look at the process, it is a pretty messed up process. First he was suspended for two games, then the league changed the rules about domestic abuse so that they called for a six game suspension for a first offense, and then a week or two after that, the league suspended him indefinitely and has still not put a time-frame on the suspension. It’s good that the players’ association is playing their role properly here, no matter how repugnant the crime is. In other policy-changing-after-the-fact news, the NFL and NFLPA is about to agree on more lenient punishment for drug violations which will retroactively lesson the punishment for 20 or so suspended players, including some high-profile ones like wide receiver Wes Welker of the Denver Broncos.
    Line: So, lemme get this straight, Welker’s suspension gets shorter, Ray Rice’s is being appealed, and Adrian Peterson? After one day of practice, he’s “excused” from team functions again.

Why do people like volleyball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like volleyball?

Just wondering,
Jennie

— — —

Hi Jennie,

Volleyball is a funny sport when you think about it. I mean, why shouldn’t the ball hit the ground? Why do teams of people go to such lengths to keep it from hitting the ground that they look like semi-trained seals? Like most sports, once you accept the invented framework of the game, it’s a lot of fun. Volleyball has a few features that make it exceptionally fun to play and to watch. Here they are:

Volleyball has great vocabulary words

How can you argue with a sport that has wonderful words for so many of its actions?

  • To bump the ball is to hit it under-hand with clasped hands, usually to a teammate.
  • That teammate often sets the ball, or hits it gently up with two outstretched hands facing each other.
  • If you’re tall enough or can jump high enough, it’s possible to spike the ball. This is when you make contact with the ball above the level of the net and send it hurtling along a downwards path towards your opponent’s side of the court.
  • If that opponent has the reflexes of the cat and their fearless, springy athleticism, they might be able to rescue the ball right before it hits the ground with a bump. This is called a dig.
  • My favorite term, although I’ve never seen it done personally, is the six-pack. No, not soda or beer, and not stomach muscles either, this refers to the rare occasion when a spike bounces off an opponent’s head, or in the case of this absurd video, three opponents’ heads. In the bad old days of volleyball lore, the spikee owed the spiker a six-pack of their choosing.

Volleyball punishes selfishness

This is probably my favorite part about volleyball, both as a player and a viewer: volleyball punishes selfishness. How does it do that? In volleyball, a team loses a point if the ball hits the ground on their side of the court. Each side of the court is roughly thirty feet by thirty feet and each team consists of six people. This is a reasonably small area for that many players to be at the same time. Compared to soccer or even basketball, it’s very crowded. Keeping the ball in the air is hard enough but if a selfish teammate tries to wander into someone else’s area to hit the ball, it almost always ends badly. The first problem is that there usually isn’t enough time or space for the person being encroached upon to get out of the way. Even if they are able to skedaddle and the poacher hits the ball, he or she is usually out of position to respond to the next hit for the other team.

In this way, volleyball teaches great lessons about teamwork and… revenge. I have fond memories of beating selfish jocks in gym class with a team of kids they wouldn’t ever dream of losing to in a sporting event.

Volleyball scales well with the player

Volleyball is unusually flexible in terms of who can play it. It remains fun whether you play it with young children, on a recreational league team with other aspiring volleyball players, or competitively in college, a professional league, or international play. At all levels, the object remains the same (keep the ball from hitting your side of the court, make the ball hit the other side of the court,) but the challenges vary. When played with beginners, the main challenge is just hitting the ball over the court. With intermediate players, hitting the ball over gives way to working with your team to hit the ball over in a way that makes it more difficult for the other team to respond to. At the highest level, the challenge transforms into out strategizing and executing your opponent. The complexity of the tactics available are impressive. It’s no coincidence that the Wikipedia page on volleyball has pictures of both Buddhist monks and nudists playing the sport.

It has a good mix of competitive and non-competitive aspects

One of the things that turns a lot of people off sports is how thoroughly devoted to competition most sports are. Volleyball, especially at more beginner levels, isn’t really like this. If the biggest challenge in the game, as we wrote above, is just to get the ball over the net, then it really isn’t that competitive of a sport. Sure, the team that fails to get the ball over the net fewer times wins, but that’s really a judged team activity as opposed to a competitive activity. Not until intermediate or expert play does volleyball become a sport where players actively engage with opponents they are trying to beat.

At high levels, it’s incredibly athletic

Watching really great athletes play volleyball is incredibly. Top level volleyball requires incredible reflexes and hand-eye coordination, explosive jumping power, strength and endurance, all of which is exhibited in this wonderful video from 2011 World league play:

That was an amazing play by two great teams playing a very cool sport.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

 

Help fund a sensor that can help diagnose concussions

Jolt Sensor

Before the domestic violence and now child abuse scandals rocked the NFL, the leading concerning narrative was the prevalence of concussions or brain injuries. Concussions are a big problem in sports because we’re beginning to understand how frequently they occur to athletes and how serious their long-term consequences are. My colleague, Dean Russell Bell, wrote a post for Dear Sports Fan a couple of years ago explaining the issue of brain injuries in sports. In it he wrote that:

What also contributes to [the problem of brain injury in sports] is the so-called “sub-concussive” hits – the thousands of times a player will clash with someone and jostle the brain around in the skull just a little bit. This is one of the things that makes football the center of the brain injury story. In football, offensive and defensive linemen clash every single play with the force of a small automobile accident. Turns out these add up too, especially when you consider these guys have been playing football since they were kids. All of those little hits keep accumulating, and the concern now is that this is an issue that’s even bigger than pro football – that college and maybe even high school players may do some long-term brain damage. That issue is much more difficult to address, because you can’t get rid of that type of contact – it happens every play, all over the field.

What do you do if you can’t remove the source of danger? Well, you might look to at least monitor it so that you can pull a player out of a game once he or she has suffered a brain-rattling hit. Two MIT graduates are trying to make that goal a reality and they could use our help for their Kickstarter campaign. Ben Harvatine and Seth Berg started working on the Jolt Sensor while they were students at MIT. Harvatine suffered a concussion while wrestling for the MIT team but, like many athletes, he didn’t identify it as a concussion, and kept playing for a while. In their intro video, the two entrepreneurs mention that “the most dangerous thing an athlete can do after suffering a concussion is to get back on the field and continue playing.” Right after a first concussion, people are more likely to get a second concussion, and those concussions are more likely to have serious effects. In a tiny segment of athletes, unfortunately almost totally young athletes, a second concussion, can lead to second impact syndrome which is often fatal. Preventing secondary concussions by identifying first concussions is a valuable mission.

The Jolt sensor is basically a tiny clip with an accelerometer in it. Clip it to a football helmet or a headband and it will track the motion of an athlete’s head and send off alerts when it senses dramatic and potentially dangerous motion. Not only does the sensor buzz and light up, but more importantly, it sends an immediate alert to a mobile app where a parent or coach can see it and act to take the player off the field. Once on the sidelines, the Jolt app switches over to a diagnostic exam which tests against a player’s baseline scores to see if they have a concussion. I admire the way Harvatine and Berg have thought about the operational problems of brain injuries in sports as well as the scientific and medical ones.

A couple notes of caution about this project. The first, which is made very clear in the Kickstarter campaign page, is that Harvatine and Berg are not doctors, they make no promises that this device can actually diagnose concussions, and they recommend that any athlete who suspects having had a concussion be treated by a real, live doctor. The second is that devices like this have faced an uphill battle in the past. As the Washington Post’s Marissa Payne wrote in her profile of the Jolt Sensor, there have been serious objections from helmet makers, leagues, and schools to other devices like this. It’s hard to understand why anyone would object to a device that tries to make sports safer for everyone but if you think about it in terms of being an authority that could get sued, it makes a twisted kind of sense. The use of a concussion prevention device by a league or school might make it seem like that organization is vouching for the safety of anyone who doesn’t trigger the sensor’s alert. If that person gets a concussion and keeps playing because the sensor didn’t work, then you could perceive it as being the organization that bought the sensors’ fault. As for the helmet makers? Sensors like this simultaneously point out that helmets are virtually useless against concussions and undercut the great new concussion technology that the helmet companies are themselves trying to develop.

All objections aside, the Jolt sensor looks like a great device and its mission is a good one. They’re trying to raise $60,000 by Friday, September 26 to produce a final batch of sensors for testing and certification, and if all goes well, public consumption. If you want to give, even as little as a dollar, to this campaign, go do it here!

Cue Cards 9-16-14

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.

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Yesterday —  Monday, September 15

  1. Eagles beat Colts, no one was arrested — The Monday night football game was between two teams that most everyone thinks are in the top third of the NFL. They played true to form by having a close, tightly contested, high scoring contest. The Eagles won, 30-27, moving to 2-0 (two wins, zero losses) while the Colts moved to 0-2.
    Line: Did you know it’s the first time the Colts have lost two games in a row since Andrew Luck became their quarterback?
  2. Rutgers apologizes for “classless fans” — Over the weekend, my alma mater, Rutgers, hosted their first ever Big Ten Conference game in football against what, geographically speaking, should be our new rivals, Penn State. Rutgers lost the game 13-10 but we upheld our reputation for vulgar behavior when some fans publicly and visually mocked Penn State for its recent sexual assault scandal. I can’t say I condone the behavior… but when I was at school there, we were way better at ceaselessly mocking the other team than we were at beating them in football.
    Line: There’s been so many other scandals lately, Penn State’s issue feels antique in comparison.
  3. Baseball’s checkered flag — In car racing, a checkered flag means ‘one more lap.’ Major League Baseball teams have about twelve games left in their 162 game season. Playoff races are in full swing (pun intended) and last night the first team clinched a playoff spot. That team was the Los Angeles Angels. The Kansas City Royals also helped their playoff cause by beating the White Sox in a “dramatic ninth-inning comeback.”
    Line: Wow, the playoffs are coming up fast. I better start paying attention to baseball!