What is a national sport?

This question was transcribed from Stack Exchange’s sports site, sports.stackexchange.com. Stack Exchange is one of the premier question and answer sites. I’ve re-written the question a little and anonymized the name of the person who asked the question. The original question is here.

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a national sport? What criteria must a sport meet to be said to be the national sport of a country? For example, I think soccer is the national sport of Italy but I’m not sure. Is there a list of official national sports?

Thanks,
Sandy from Stack Exchange

— — —

Dear Sandy,

Your question is an interesting one. What makes something a national sport? There are two answers, one straightforward and one complex and hypothetical at best. Which answer you care about depends on how much you care about obscure laws.

“Laws?” you say. That’s right, laws! There are a small number of countries in the world and states within the United States that actually have official sports. Just like the national flower of Sri Lanka is the blue water lily, the national sport is volleyball. Canada has two national sports, lacrosse for the summer and ice hockey for the winter. As for states, the state bird of New Hampshire, the Purple Finch, is joined by its state sport of skiing. North Carolina made the sport of stock car racing officially its state sport in 2011. Perhaps North Carolina has a thing for droning, buzzing sounds because its state insect is the honeybee! These are just a few examples of sports that have become officially, in law, representative of a nation or state.

It’s a funny concept though, a national sport. One of the lovely things about sports is how they so frequently are able to cross boundaries of culture, ethnicity, race, and nation. The Olympics, the World Cup, even the Little League World Series, which might seem like the most American thing around, has been international since the 1950s. How can a country claim a sport that’s loved world-wide? Indeed, that seems to have been on some countries’ minds when they selected a national sport. Take Brazil, which, if you watched the World Cup this past summer, you know is one of the most soccer crazed countries in the world. Why is Brazil’s national sport capoeira not soccer? Or the Philippines, a country who loves basketball more than anyone, but whose national sport is Arnis, a weapons based martial art? I honestly don’t know, but my guess is that soccer and basketball seemed too international and therefore not suitable to become the national sport.

That leads us back to your initial question. What criteria must a sport meet to be said to be the national sport of a country? Reasoning from the sports chosen as official national sports, I would say these criteria are important:

The sport should have been invented in the country. Example: lacrosse in Canada.
The sport should be extremely popular. Example: kabaddi in Bangladesh.
If it’s not popular, the sport should be “important” in some cultural way and therefore worthy of conservation, reenactment, and reverence. Example: Charreada in Mexico.
When possible, the sport should convey something meaningful about the country, ideally in a kick-ass way. Example: Varzesh-e Bastani in Iran.

These same factors are important when talking about unofficial national sports too, but here I think that popularity takes precedence. There’s no need for unofficial national sports to be unique to each country. One could easily say that soccer is the unofficial national sport of Brazil and Italy and the Netherlands and many other countries. Cricket would be another popular choice as an unofficial national sport in former British colonies in Asia or the Caribbean. Then there are some countries which, for reasons of nature or nurture, seem to produce an inordinate number of skilled athletes in particular sports. These too could be said to be unofficial national sports, like marathoning in Kenya, sprinting in Jamaica, or Cross Country Skiing in Norway.

National sports may shift over time, especially if they are left unofficial, as most are. Forty years ago, baseball would have been the most likely unofficial national sport for the United States. Some sports fans still reflexively call it the “national pastime.” Today, that sport is football. Things change. As we covered a few weeks ago, the unofficial national sport of Poland has been soccer but American football is rapidly gaining steam there. Who know, in time any sport could gain in popularity pretty much anywhere, or maybe even a brand new sport could take over!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Gifts for Sports Fans: Quirky products for tailgating

No, not that kind of tailgating! We at Dear Sports Fan don’t encourage tailgating in your car unless you’re a professional race car driver. Today we’re talking about tailgating before a sporting event! Google defines tailgating as “eat[ing] an informal meal served from the back of a parked vehicle, typically in the parking lot of a sports stadium.” That’s a good definition but it doesn’t capture the sheer enthusiasm and total seriousness with which true tailgating sports fans regard the tradition of tailgating. If you’ve ever gone to a game five hours early to be wined and dined (or should that be beered and fed?) with some of the most elaborate in-car or under-tent cooking you’ve ever seen, then you know what I’m talking about.

Yesterday I got an email from Quirky advertising a few of their quirky products for tailgating and I thought I would pass them on to you. Quirky is a unique company that brings aspiring inventors and product managers into a community of people who love great stuff and then pairs them with the production wherewithal to create, market, and sell unique, orginal products. Everything they sell on their website was invented, designed, and created from within the Quirky community. If you’re interested, sign up here! Many of these inventions would make great gifts for the sports fan in your life, whether that’s your boyfriend, wife, son, or mother. Or even yourself!

The Grill Wrangler

If you’re serious about tailgating, then you’re serious about conserving space in your car. Every extra tool you bring for cooking means one fewer beer or burger. This is a zero sum game, people! Paul A. Wachtel, the inventor of this product knows what I’m talking about. The grill wrangler is a three tools cleverly packaged together. It’s a spatula, a fork, and tongs. I know that when I cook, I love my tongs so much that I use them even when the task at hand is much more suited to another implement. I bet I’m not the only one who does this. With this tool, I could have my tongs and flip things without breaking them too.

Metal Sliders

This next invention is perfect for germ-phobic kebab lovers. It’s a set of metal skewers that have a built in metal tag that slides down the skewer, pushing the now perfectly cooked skewered food off the skewer as it goes. It’s one of those solutions to a problem that has bugged you for ages that seems so obvious once someone else (Tim Hayes, in this case) invents it and shows it to you.

Cyclone

Sometimes, like with the last product, inventions solve long unsolved problem. Other times, like with this sweet little gadget, they make something perfectly good, even better. Everyone knows the best part of a hot-dog is the outside, where it makes contact with the grill and picks up all those wonderful charcoally, slightly burnt flavors. The Cyclone takes a normal hot dog and transforms it into something with three or four times the surface area to get all charcoally and slightly burnt on the grill by spiral cutting it. That’s right, it’s (as its inventor, Zoli Honig writes on the website,) a “clever tool that spiral-cuts any wiener in seconds.” Used with sausages, as opposed to the pre-cooked hot dog, the spiral cut creates a more even, safer way to grill them to perfection.

Cue Cards 9-10-14

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 — Tuesday, September 9

U.S. Basketball Advances — It seems more and more like neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stay our national basketball team from its appointed FIBA Basketball World Cup championship matchup with Spain. Slovenia fought the good fight but by the third quarter, the U.S. team had run them ragged. The final score was United States 119, Slovenia 79. In the other quarterfinal, Lithuania toppled Turkey 73 to 61. Serbia plays Brazil today at noon ET and France plays Spain at 4 p.m. ET. You can catch those games on ESPN3.
Line: Rooting for the U.S. team is an exercise in rooting for the other team to keep it exciting for the first three quarters and then, if necessary, rooting for the U.S. in the fourth quarter.
Game two of the WNBA Finals — Okay, truthfully, almost no sports fans that you bump into during the day today will be talking about this. But they should be, so here’s a few facts you can use to get the conversation started. The finals are a best three out of five series between the Chicago Sky and the Phoenix Mercury. Game two was last night and the Mercury won big, beating the Sky 97 to 68. This was the single largest margin of victory in WNBA finals history. The Mercury are also on a 20 game winning streak which started before the playoffs even begun. Phoenix stars Diana Taurasi at point guard and Brittney Griner who plays center. During last night’s game, “Chicago scratched Brittney Griner across the eyelid, chipped one of her teeth and bloodied her lip.” She barely missed any playing time and finished the game with 19 points, six rebounds, and four blocks. After the game, her teammate Candice Dupree reported that, Griner’s teammates, “huddled around her, and were saying, ‘Come on, BG, you’re all right.’ Sometimes you gotta give people tough love. I think, emotionally, it would have gotten to her last year. If nothing is broken and you’re not bleeding to death, then you’re OK.” Game three is on Friday night, 8 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
Line: Hey, did you watch game two of the WNBA finals last night? Heck of a game… [insert factoid from above] Want to get together to watch game three on Friday?

Read This: On Roger Goodell & Ray Rice

What Does it Take to Get Roger Goodell Fired?

By Andrew Sharp for Grantland.com

The problems in the real world are bad enough, but if we can’t even get things right in this alternate universe full of fake laws and uniform policies and codes of conduct, that just makes everything seem twice as hopeless. Sports are supposed to be an escape, not a reminder of everything that’s unfair and hypocritical everywhere else.

Why do people like fencing?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like fencing? I went to my cousin’s fencing tournament and I couldn’t follow it at all. It looked like people just jumping at each other and arbitrarily scoring. What am I missing?

Thanks,
Frances

— — —

Dear Frances,

Good for you for supporting your cousin, even if it was hard to tell what was going on and to enjoy the fencing tournament. You’re absolutely right that fencing can be bewildering to watch if you don’t know what’s going on or are far away. That said, there are lots of good answers to your question of “why do people like fencing?” Here are just a few:

Fencing is the Paleo of sports — what is more “natural” than fencing? I suppose boxing or any of the track and field events are on the same level with fencing, but it doesn’t get much more instinctive than grabbing a long object and trying to hit the other gal before she hits you. There’s an appeal to sports like fencing that abstract a real-world (and in the case of fencing, absolutely vital) activity and puts it into a sports context. If you care to learn more than you ever thought you’d know about the history of fencing while seriously enjoying yourself, Richard Cohen’s By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions is your best bet.
So many awesome cultural parallels — If there was ever a sport to capture the imagination of children and adults alike, it would be fencing. In our days of seemingly constant, low-grade but disturbing armed conflict, there’s something romantic about the days when combat was done face to face between people armed with swords. Not that war was ever actually romantic in any way but it certainly seems that way from the way it shows up in our culture. From the lightly satiric The Princess Bride to the many versions of Robin Hood (I grew up with Errol Flynn’s version and, of course, the comedy, Robin Hood: Men In Tights) to one of the consensus top ten movies ever filmed, Seven Samurai, to the modern classic of revenge, Kill Bill, sword-fighting has been at the center of many of our favorite movies. Even our best science fiction movies like Star Wars take fencing into the future to grab viewers’ attention. In terms of books, there’s almost an entire genre (fantasy) that leans on the appeal of fencing to draw its audience in. I’ve recently enjoyed a new epic series called the Mongoliad that’s chock full of sword fighting and describes in great detail different styles of fencing from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean to Mongolia. LARPing or Live Action Role Playing is an increasingly popular activity for people interested in sword fighting. None of these things are fencing but any of them could be a reason for picking up the sport and giving it a try.
Fencing is incredibly fast and graceful — As you mentioned in your question, it’s sometimes hard to see what’s happening because fencers are so fast and it’s definitely hard to tell how precise, measured, and graceful their movements are because great fencers package seven distinct motions in the time it takes most of us to think about getting off the couch. A practiced fencing fan, likeRay Glickman, the grandfather of top U.S. Junior Boy’s fencer Ethan Mullennix, can learn to appreciate fencing in person. “It’s just beautiful to watch. They move like ballet dancers,” Glickman said to Mike Kepka for his article on Mullennix in SFGate.com. For the rest of us, luckily, we can watch videos of fencing in slow motion like this amazing one
http://youtu.be/Z86tpjRaiK8?t=1m36s
It’s an amazing workout — I did a couple weeks of fencing camp when I was a kid, so I can personally attest to this benefit of fencing. It may not look like it would be as much of a workout as some other sports, but the main challenge is not one that’s easy to see if you’re not looking for it. Virtually every move in fencing, from the start of a bout to the end, is done in a full-on deep knee bend position. It’s like playing a sport while doing squats. After just a minute or two of fencing, your quads begin to burn and they don’t stop. If you’ve got bad knees or are trying to protect yourself from ever having bad knees, fencing is the perfect sport for you. According to www.findthebest.com, you can burn 430 calories for 150 lb person in one hour of fencing.
Technicalities and technology — One of the common themes that runs through enjoyment of sport is understanding and enjoying the technicalities of an activity. Fencing has an enormous number of technicalities! First of all, there are three types of fencing, each which has a different weapons and a different set of rules about where you are allowed to hit your opponent. Even more delightfully technical are the right-of-way rules that dictate who gets the point if the two fencers hit each other at exactly the same time. The action is so fast and the rules so precise that most guides to watching fencing, like this one from Crimson Blades fencing academy, suggest watching the referee to see what has happened. Even this takes some work to learn how to interpret the referee’s hand signals as you can see in this awesome poster:

This wonderful illustration of the referee signals in fencing (one wonders if, in action, they look just a little like this,) comes from fencing instructor and author Massimiliano Longo who is currently raising money for a US and UK version of his wonderful illustrated guide to fencing for children. Please give his Indiegogo page a look and think about helping to fund it. I donated today!

So, there you have it — five answers to the question, “Why do people like fencing?” I hope these give you a reason to go back to your cousin’s next fencing tournament or even think about starting to fence yourself! If you’re interested, U.S. Fencing is a good resource for finding a fencing club near you.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-9-14

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 7

Ray Rice Released — TMZ.com released video of NFL player Ray Rice assaulting his then fiancee in an elevator. The emotional (and PR) power of the video led to Rice being immediately released by his team and suspended indefinitely by the league. A full summary and my take on this can be found here.
Line: Ray Rice was unequivocally in the wrong since the minute he struck his fiancee but the law and the NFL didn’t have to be. Their inappropriate response now puts them at the center of this story.
U.S. Open Winner — Marin Cilic defeated Kei Nishikori in the men’s finals of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open is the last of the four major tournaments of the year, so, although tennis season officially continues, casual coverage of it basically stops until next Spring. As pointed out by Kyle Jurczak on Fancred, Cilic won in three straight sets, all six games to three, which was the same score Serena Williams won her straight set final in. Weird! Also from Kyle, this means that 2014 saw eight different people win the eight (four men’s, four women’s) available major tournaments. Weird!
Line: Did you know [insert one of Kyle’s cool stats here.]
The last two NFL games (until Thursday) — I’m not sure why but for some reason the NFL always starts with two Monday night football games on the first weekend of the professional football season. Maybe it’s shock treatment to get used to having football back in our lives? The earlier game between the Giants and the Lions was a yawn, as predicted by it being featured in our Do Not Watch This Game column, but the second game was a close one that came down to the last few minutes. The Arizona Cardinals just squeaked by the San Diego Chargers, 18 to 17.
Line: It’s too soon to make any real conclusions from week one. The Cardinals and Chargers might both be really good or both be pretty mediocre. The Lions could be great or the Giants could be so terrible that they made them look great.

What did Roger Goodell know about Ray Rice and when did he know it?

Warning — the subject of this post is domestic violence and many of the links in the post contain videos of domestic violence.

A short recap of the Ray Rice story

This past February, National Football League running back Ray Rice assaulted his then fiancée, now wife, Janay Rice in an elevator. Soon after, video acquired by tmz.com showed Rice dragging Janay’s limp, unconscious body out of the elevator following the assault. In May, according to Justin Fenton of the Baltimore Sun, New Jersey (where the assault happened) courts assigned Rice to a “Pretrial intervention” program that “comes with between six months and three years of probation in addition to enrolling in rehabilitation programs that New Jersey courts say focus on personal, cultural, economic and social issues that contributed to the criminal act.” Two months later, in July, the NFL suspended Rice for two games. Following a generally furious response to this punishment, the league’s commissioner, Roger Gooddell, admitted that he “didn’t get it right” and announced a new, stronger set of punishments for domestic assault. Today tmz.com once again drove this story forward by releasing new video from the inside of the elevator which shows Ray Rice knocking Janay Rice unconscious with a single punch. Showing the power of video, within a few hours of its release, Rice’s team, the Baltimore Ravens fired him and the league has announced that he is suspended indefinitely.

There already has been and will be an enormous amount of traditional coverage about this topic. I’m going to leave most of that to the New York Times, the Washington Post, tmz.com, and Sports Illustrated. People should be discussing why there was no stronger response from the legal system. By all means, we should be talking about how unfortunately and infuriatingly common domestic assault is and what we can do to address it. J. A. Adande made a great point on twitter today when he asked how women with no video evidence are supposed to expect justice when Rice, with video evidence was punished so little. We should be critical of the coverage as well. What’s real indignation and what is face-saving indignation? Is it just an artifact of sports media covering an assault that we keep seeing the punch described in technical boxing terms as a “left hook” or is there some hidden agenda? What language should we use to describe it? All of that is important but today, I want to share a single thought process that went through my head when I saw the video and heard the news.

What I thought of when I saw the Ray Rice video

The single question that I asked myself when I saw the video of Ray Rice assaulting his wife Janay Rice was “What did he know and when did he know it?” What did Roger Goodell know about Ray Rice and when did he know it? What evidence of the assault did the Commissioner of the NFL have, specifically the video that tmz.com released today, when he made his disciplinary decision about the situation?

For those of you who lived through the sixties or the eighties, this is a familiar question. It first entered the culture during the Watergate hearings when Senator Howard Baker repeatedly asked it of Richard Nixon. What did he know and when did he know it? During the Iran-Contra scandal in the eighties, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush felt its sting. What did they know and when did they know it? It’s the key question when evaluating a leader or an organization suspected of covering something up. Already it’s being asked of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell about the video released today. Had he seen the video when he chose to suspend Ray Rice for only two games?

The absolute authority on the subject of knowing is Ben Cramer who wrote the amazing history of the 1988 Presidential race, What It Takes: The Way to the White House. In it, he follows six of the presidential hopefuls from childhood through the campaign, including George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden. Let’s listen to him on the subject of knowing:

Then there is another shade of the verb, To Know, in the sense of awareness. It is about what’s going on right now, and as such it is Washington’s highest branch of knowledge… But as the highest form of capital-knowing, this quest for awareness is also the most dangerous. Clearly, the lack of this knowing can undermine reputation or power, especially if one’s position, or one’s connaissance, indicates that one ought to know. To be unaware, to be Out of the Loop, is allied in the tribal consciousness with impotence, inability, imbecility… and ultimately with the fatal affliction of ridiculousness. But there is also, in success, in wide awareness, a danger just as mortal. For this is the brand of knowing that is closest to Eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and can result in expulsion from Eden. When things foul up in a massive way… then this is the knowing implied in the most portentous of capital questions:

What did he know and when did he know it?

And so, there has developed… a kind of knowing without being known to know, for which there is no word at all. It is a nonoperational, untraceable knowing, which can seldom be proven or disproven… It is knowing all about the thing without being culpable of knowing the thing itself.

The parallel between politics and sports sports may seem over-the-top to some and I will admit the scale is slightly different but the principles remain the same. The individuals who perpetrate a crime should be punished and rehabilitated but it’s addressing the institutions that permit the behavior and the people in charge of them that is of greater social importance. What did he know and when did he know it? I think Roger Goddell had access to that video when he decided to suspend Ray Rice for two games. I think he was trying to practice the art of knowing without being known to know, like Ben Cramer described above, and I think he’s going to be caught red-handed. When we find out that Roger Goodell saw the video, he should resign or be fired, and I believe he will be sooner or later.

Retired NBA center Yao Ming saves elephants

There’s a cliche in basketball that you “can’t teach height.” What people mean by that is no matter how much practice and coaching and hard work a basketball player puts into his or her craft, if they’re not tall, there’s only so good they can get. The flip side of this, of course, is that if you are very, very tall, there’s a place for you in basketball as long as you are coordinated enough to run. As a consequence, NBA centers, the tallest of the tall, are often very interesting people. As a group they tend to be less single-mindedly obsessed with basketball. They may not have needed to be that obsessed to have successful NBA careers. If you follow sports, you get the sense that some of them might not even like basketball very much.

Yao Ming towered over his NBA counterparts but his biggest contribution may be off the court

Retired NBA center Yao Ming is very, very tall. He’s seven and a half feet tall or, as they would best understand it in his native China, 2.29 meters. He’s absolutely not of the type that did not like basketball, on the contrary, I think he loved it, but he is a well-rounded person. I’ll always remember his comment in response to media concerns that he would be devastated if forced to retire because of foot injuries:

“I haven’t died,” he said. “Right now I’m drinking a beer and eating fried chicken. What were you expecting, a funeral?”

Recently Yao Ming’s name popped up in the news for his role in an effort to save Africa’s “dwindling elephant population.” Simon Denyer brings us this story in an article in the Washington Post and it is well worth a read. I was impressed to find out that Yao Ming’s effort to save elephants from poaching by reducing Chinese demand for illegal ivory has a precedent for success. He’s done the same for sharks by “pressing the Chinese people to give up shark fin soup.” In fact, after his campaign against shark fin soup, “prices and sales of shark fins in China [went] down by 50 to 70 percent.”

I wish Yao Ming success in his new drive against ivory sales and elephant poaching. Saving animals in Africa from extinction is a worthy cause for everyone who loves the earth but especially for retired NBA centers. Why? Because as Yao Ming jokes, he loves Africa because in Africa, many animals are even bigger than him!

Cue Cards 9-8-2014

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 7

The National Football League Makes its triumphant return — With all the off-season mess: players being suspended, players being suspended, owners being suspended, etc. it was easy to wonder why professional football has such a pull on us all. Yesterday’s football games reminded us why — because they are exciting! Full tiny synopses in our NFL One Liners column.
Line: That’s why the NFL is the most popular sport — two overtime games, comebacks left and right, fantasy football excitement!
Serena reigns supreme over nearly everyone — Serena Williams never lost more than three games in a set (you need to win 6 to win the set) during the entire U.S. Open tournament. Fittingly, she beat her opponent in the final, Caroline Wozniaki, 6-3, 6-3. Serena Williams is great.
Line: It’s amazing that Serena Williams is still so dominant at an age (32) when most other tennis players are on their way to retirement.
The Basketball World Cup gets serious — The round of 16 in the FIBA Basketball World Cup is complete after four games yesterday. There were no enormous surprises — the U.S. and Spain still seem fated to meet in the finals. The most hotly contested game was between neighbors and rivals Brazil and Argentina. Possibly seeking a little cosmic revenge for the soccer World Cup, the Brazilian team won 85 to 65. The next round of the tournament begins on Tuesday.
Line: Brazil had too much size inside, with Anderson Verejao, Tiago Splitter, and Nene, for Argentina to handle.

Week One 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 1

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, AT 1:00 P.M. ET

Buffalo Bills 23, at Chicago Bears 20

Overtime games are relatively rare in the NFL but this was one of two in the first week of the season. The Bears don’t often get the benefit of the doubt from the sports media and they certainly won’t after a first game like this one.

Line: Let’s not overreact to the first week. I still think the Bears are good and the Bills are not.

Cincinnati Bengals 23, at Baltimore Ravens 16

The ugliest win of the day, the Bengals didn’t impress anyone and the Ravens impressed even less. Bengals scored five field goals before winning the game on a long pass to their best player, A. J. Green.

Line: If there was such a thing as an immoral victory in football, this would be it.

Cleveland Browns 27, at Pittsburgh Steelers 30

Half way through this game, when the Steelers were up 27 to 3, you thought the story for the next week was going to be when Browns’ backup rookie quarterback, Johhny Manziel was going to take over for the starter Brian Hoyer. Even after the frantic comeback attempt came up short, you feel as though the Browns and the rest of us will be saved from that nuisance for another week or two at least.

Line: Cleveland is cursed.

Washington Redskins 6, at Houston Texans 17

Last year was the season from hell for the Houston Texans and the Washington Redskins. Today made it seem like Houston is on its way up while Washington is still descending. Dante would be pleased.

Line: Washington quarterback RGIII may never again be as good as he was his rookie year.

Jacksonville Jaguars 17, at Philadelphia Eagles 34

The heavily favored Eagles didn’t start scoring until the second half. Luckily once they started, they didn’t stop until they had 34 points.

Line: Shaky start for the Eagles, let’s watch them next week to see if this was an anomaly or a warning sign.

Tennessee Titans 26, at Kansas City Chiefs 10

There’s a math thing called regression which is all the rage in football. It just means that things that have been improbably good or bad are likely to return to being average. The Chiefs were improbably good last year so everyone expected them to be predictably average this year. They were.

Line: The Chiefs season is all about regression to the mean, baby.

New England Patriots 20, at Miami Dolphins 33

Huh? What? The Patriots have won their first game every season since 2003 and dominated their division during that same period. When they were up 20-10, everything made sense. Losing 33 to 20? It’s like the earth tilting in a different direction.

Line: If the Dolphins can stay healthy, they might be able to challenge the Patriots for the division title this year.

Minnesota Vikings 34, at St. Louis Rams 6

Coming into the game, both starting quarterbacks felt equally shaky. After a bad first half from Rams starter, Shaun Hill, he was either injured badly enough or benched in lieu of the unknown Austin Davis. The Vikings and quarterback Matt Cassel looked great but against the shaky Rams, who knows how good they really are.

Line: The Rams might not win a game this year.

New Orleans Saints 34, at Atlanta Falcons 37

The second overtime game of the day, this was a back-and-forth, all offense, all excitement all the time, nail-biter of a game. The Falcons offense looked unstoppable and the Saints offense looked, well, unstoppable. Honestly, neither team really stopped the other. That’s why the score was so high!

Line: Oh shucks, you know me, some people like all that scoring but I prefer a lower-scoring, old-school football game.

Oakland Raiders 14, at New York Jets 19

The Jets won this matchup between two teams not expected to win many games this year. Then again, the Jets are designed to win low-scoring, ugly games like this one, so maybe they’re better than we think.

Line: The decisive story of this game was the teams’ abilities to rush the football. The Jets rushed for 212 yards. The Raiders, only 13.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, AT 4:25 P.M. ET

Carolina Panthers 20, at Tampa Bay Buccaneers 14

Even with star quarterback Cam Newton sitting on the sidelines because of a rib injury, the Carolina Panthers had enough to beat the Buccaneers behind veteran backup Derek Anderson.

Line: Derek Anderson! That guy is terrible!

San Francisco 49ers 28, at Dallas Cowboys 17

The Forty Niners went up 28 to 3 in the first half and never looked back. Actually, they did look back and laughed sardonically at the Cowboys’ frantic attempt to catch up.

Line: Tony Romo [the Cowboys quarterback] was terrible!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Indianapolis Colts 24, at Denver Broncos 31

It’s probably no coincidence that, in a game whose plot was defined as being “Peyton Manning’s old team against Peyton Manning’s new team,” the team with Peyton Manning actually playing for them, won. He is still one of the best quarterbacks in the world although his opponent and successor in Indianapolis, Andrew Luck is not so shabby himself. Luck led his team on a second half comeback that just fell short of success.

Line: Peyton Manning is so good, it’s almost not fun to watch. He makes football seem like a surgical procedure.