Dear Sports Fan - Page 105 of 133 - An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports

Why are fantasy football drafts so exciting?

I’m hours away from my most important fantasy football draft of the year. I’m full of anticipatory energy. I’m not alone in this feeling this way about fantasy football drafts. The other day I talked to a self-professed fantasy sports obsessive and he described his experience of draft night as “shaky – nervous and excited.” For people who don’t play fantasy sports, and here’s some common ground that many sports fans and non-sports fans can find with each other, the experience of draft night is a strange one. Let’s see if I can explain it.

For a very, very quick reminder, here’s how fantasy football works and what a draft is. Fantasy football is a game that people play with a small group of people, usually friends or colleagues. Just like most other games, the outcome of fantasy football is based partially on choices made by its players and partially on semi-random events that occur in the game’s universe. In a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, these random events may be generated by rolling dice. In video and computer games, there are semi-random events programmed into the game itself – Sim City might generate a challenging natural disaster, a shooting game may present its player with more or fewer enemies to defeat. In fantasy football, the outside force that modifies how the game goes is the real performance of players within the National Football League (NFL). In fantasy football, each player or owner of a fantasy football team has a selection of real NFL players on their team and depending on how the real players perform in real games, their imaginary team will win or lose.

Draft night is the primary time when fantasy football owners construct their teams. There are two ways that this happens. The most common is a “snake draft” where teams take turns choosing players. Not unlike a playground game, when all the teams have chosen a player, the order is reversed for choosing the second player, and so the draft goes, snaking back and forth. The other model is an auction where players go up for auction and every team has a chance to bid on them with a (fake) budget. While there is some wiggle room during the fantasy football season to trade players with other teams or to drop players from your team and pick up players who are not on any team, the draft is the most meaningful tactical moment of the whole game.

Beyond simply winning or losing in the imaginary world of fantasy football, draft night is exciting because it establishes which real players you’re going to root for in real football (albeit for your own imaginary team’s purposes) for the next sixteen weeks. Especially for people like me who don’t have a favorite NFL team, my fantasy team’s real players are the ones I end up following and rooting for. This is so widely true that choosing “boring” players has become a good strategy for winning in fantasy football. Because fantasy owners enjoy rooting for the players on their team and they enjoy rooting for volatile, explosive playmakers, there’s a market inefficiency that rewards going against the grain and selecting consistent, not flashy, boring performers.

Players I’ve had on my team for several years are sentimental favorites of mine. In the league I run, we are allowed to keep three players from year to year. I find myself rooting for the players I keep and keeping the players I root for. The best example of this is Brandon Marshall, a wide receiver on the Chicago Bears. Marshall is an outspoken advocate for the normalization of mental disorders, one of which he suffers with himself. Every time he does something for his cause, like wearing lime green cleats (which represent mental illness like pink represents breast cancer,) in a game, I feel proud because he’s on my team. If he weren’t a good player, I wouldn’t keep him on my team, but if he weren’t a good person, I might choose to keep another good player instead. This allegiance can cause problems too, because the truth is that you can’t ever really know someone you don’t know. Take Ray Rice, for example, the star running back suspended for domestic abuse. I can’t remember if I’ve ever had him on my fantasy team but he did play for my alma mater, Rutgers, so I’ve rooted for him for at least a decade in a similar (but probably less intense) way to if he had been on my fantasy team. When your success is tied to a player’s success, the tie you create in your mind with that person is strong. It makes a moral or legal transgression by that player feel more like a betrayal.^[1]

One of the good things about fantasy football is that it’s a long period of enjoyment for (usually) not that much or no money. The draft is a big piece of how much I am going to enjoy or be tormented by the it over the next four months.

Fantasy football may be a simulated experience but the excitement is real.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Did we collectively react to Tiger Woods’ moral transgressions more strongly because of the best selling video game, Tiger Woods’ golf that gave the player the chance to play as Tiger Woods? I bet we did.↵

How do serves work in tennis?

Dear Sports Fan,

How do serves work in tennis? I’ve been watching the U.S. Open and the commentators seem to make a big deal over them. Why is that?

Thanks,
Titus

Best in the world at returning serves, Rafael Nadal is not so shabby at serving either.

— — —

Dear Titus,

Great question — you’re absolutely right that tennis announcers make a big deal about serving but they don’t always explain how it works. I’ll take you quickly through how serves work in tennis, in particular, what the rules are and why they’re important to the game.

Visualize a tennis court. It’s split into two halves by the net. On each half there are three rectangles created by white lines. One big rectangle covers the half of the half farthest from the net. The area closest to the net is divided into two narrower rectangles. When a player serves the tennis ball, she has to stand outside of the boxed in area on either the right side of the court or the left. Serves from the right hand side have to cross the net in the air and bounce in the left hand small rectangle. Serves from the left hand side must do the opposite and land on the right side rectangle closest to the net on the opponents side of the court. Got it? It’s just like ping pong.

Although pros make serving look easy, it’s actually very difficult and lots of things can happen to a serve to make it illegal. This is so common that it’s not truly penalized like a foul, it’s called a fault. If a tennis player faults on his or her serve, they get a second chance. If they use their second chance to serve legally, the point goes on normally. If they fault again on the second attempt, they lose the point. The important terms here are first serve which is a player’s first attempt to start a point, second serve which is any serve preceded by a fault, and double fault which is when a serving player’s opponent gets a point because the server faulted two times in a single service attempt.

A fault can come for many reasons. The most common is that the serve fails to land in the correct opposite rectangle either because it gets stopped by the net or because it lands outside of the box. The only other reason I knew of off the top of my head was a “foot fault” which happens when a serving player steps on or over the baseline when they are serving. According to Wikipedia there are some other ways to fault on a serve but they don’t happen very often. One exception to the fault rule that does happen pretty often is when the ball hits the net but goes over and lands in the proper serving box. When this happens, it’s called a let and the serving player just gets a do-over. If they are on their first serve, they’re still on their first serve. If they are on their second, they are still on their second. If you’ve watched enough tennis, you’ve seen a player win a point because, in the normal course of play, they hit the net and the ball skips over and falls into their opponent’s side of the court. The player who won the point usually holds up their hands in a universal “I’m sorry, that was luck” gesture. It’s good sportsmanship but I think it may stem from this rule that establishes the idea that hitting the net shouldn’t be good for either player.

Serves are important because they carry a significant advantage to the player serving the ball. According to the ATP World Tennis Tour’s stats page the best player in the world at winning points when he makes his first serve legally is Ivo Karlovic and he wins 80% of those points. Why is that? Well, Karlovic has one of the fastest serves in the world. His fastest serve ever went 156 mph. Here’s a great video of him serving in slow motion:

The best men’s player in the world at winning points when he is not serving is Rafael Nadal who wins 35% of points even when his opponent’s first serve is legal. On second serves, players usually take a very safe approach to serving. They don’t serve as hard and they aim a little closer to the center of the service box than they do on their first attempt when they try to hit the lines. This reduces the impact of the serve. For example, the man who wins the highest percentage of his second serve points is Roger Federer at 58%. The player who wins the highest percentage of points returning a second serve is Rafael Nadal at 57%. Federer and Nadal are not coincidentally the best players in the world. Basically, a second serve means that the best player is likely to win the point. A first serve is a strong enough weapon that it can override a big skill difference.

This is why tennis matches are so often won when a player wins a game that they are not serving. Because the serve is such an important advantage, players expect to win games they serve. Winning a game when a player doesn’t have the serve is called a break. Without any breaks, a tennis match could theoretically go on forever. American giant (6’10”) tennis player, John Isner, is the closest person to making this a reality. He’s almost unbeatable when he serves — he wins 93% of those games — but can barely ever (9%) seem to break his opponent. It’s no coincidence that he once played in the longest match ever against Nicolas Mahut at 2010 Wimbledon. The match lasted over 11 hours although it did stretch across three days because of rain and darkness.

There you go — probably more about the serve than you bargained for. Hope you enjoyed it,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-2-14

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.

Over the Weekend — August 29 to September 1

Harbingers of NFL Football — The professional football season starts this Thursday with one game and then this Sunday with a dozen others. Since the NFL is by far the most popular professional sports league, the upcoming season will likely dominate most water cooler type situations this week. Depending on where you live, your friends, family, and colleagues will be obsessing over the details of a different team but one national story that may spark conversation was the cutting of Michael Sam. Sam, the first openly gay football player to be drafted into the NFL was cut by the team that drafted him this weekend. The questions being asked are, “How much, if any, did being gay play into his being cut? And will he get a chance to play for real this season?”
College football went mostly as planned — As we covered last week, the first weekend of college football is full of easy games for the top twenty five teams in the country. As expected, only three of the top twenty five teams lost their first game, and those were the three (well, three of the six) teams that were brave enough to play another top twenty five team.
The U.S. Open rounds into shape — The major tennis tournament enters its second full week and has narrowed its field to eight women and twelve men. As has often been the case with tennis in the last few years, the male side of the bracket has been more predictable and all three of the favorites, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, and Roger Federer, are still alive. The women’s side, as has also been the pattern, is more fractured. Of the top seeds, only Serena Williams is still playing. Williams and Federer both have 17 major tournament victories during their wonderful careers. It would be great to see them both play for number 18.
The Basketball World Cup — The FIBA basketball world cup in Spain is underway and after two or three games in each group… nothing surprising has happened. Spain and the United States are still undefeated and look destined to play in the finals against each other. The United States did struggle against Turkey — they even trailed at half-time — but outscored Turkey 63 to 37 in the second half to win by a comfortable margin.

It's the first college football Saturday. What's worth watching?

A couple days ago, to celebrate and brace myself for the first weekend of the college football season, I wrote a post and created an infographic showing which of the top 25 teams have scheduled legitimate games against teams of relatively even strength. There are sixty college football games on today’s schedule but only two of them show up as “spinach” games according to our logic. So, if you want to see some college football today, I recommend you watch Georgia vs. Clemson or LSU vs. Wisconsin.

How Does the Basketball World Cup Work?

The FIBA Basketball World Cup begins on Saturday, August 30. As many of us found out or remembered earlier this summer in the Men’s Soccer World Cup, international sports are a great mixture of top level talent, patriotic fervor, and cultural sharing. Unlike soccer, where the World Cup dwarfs the Olympics, the World Cup of Basketball is a second tier tournament. Going up against the start of college and professional football, it’s unlikely to draw the full attention of all but the most die-hard basketball fans. Despite that or perhaps because of that, I’m oddly looking forward to it. Here’s some information about how the tournament works and who might win.

Tournament Structure

The tournament is structured very similarly to the soccer World Cup. It starts with a group stage. The twenty four teams in the tournament are separated into four groups of six teams each. There is a round robin whereby each team plays the other five teams in their group. The top four teams based on record and then a (you guessed it) somewhat Byzantine set of tie-breakers. Also oddly, two points are given for a win and one for a loss. Only a team that forfeits a game can walk away with no points. Once the group stage is done, there is a single elimination knockout round starting with the 16 qualifying teams. Teams from groups A & B won’t play teams from groups C & D until the finals or the third place game. The top two ranked teams coming into the tournament, the United States and host country Spain, we’re placed in opposite sides of the tournament so that they can meet in the finals if all goes as expected.

Differences in NBA vs. FIBA Rules

If you are at all familiar with watching NBA basketball, you’re likely to notice some major differences in the rules. Games are shorter – forty minutes divided into four ten minute quarters. The three-point line is fourteen percent closer to the basket which has a major tactical impact on how the game is played. Players foul out of the game after five fouls instead of six. Once the ball bounces off the rim of the basket and doesn’t go in, anyone can tip it (in or out) freely as opposed to in the NBA where players have to wait for the ball to clear the airspace above the basket before legally touching it.

The U.S. is going to win, right?

Yeah, probably. The two favorites in the tournament are the United States and Spain. A recent Vegas sports book has the United States as 4-7 favorites (you have to bet seven dollars to make a profit of only four if the U.S. wins) and Spain as the second most likely winner at 3-2 (if you bet two dollars and Spain wins, you stand to make a profit of three dollars. There are a handful of other teams in a clump as the next most likely winners: France, Brazil, Argentina, and Lithuania. All four of these teams are 30-1 (win thirty for each dollar you bet) from which you can tell that Vegas doesn’t think it’s very likely for them to win.

So why is this worth watching?

Mostly because it’s fun. The United States’ first game is against Finland and maybe it’s just me but I think watching a bunch of hockey-player-name-having Finns like Mikko Koivisto and Hanno Möttölä try to hold down the fort against the United States will be fun, at least for the first five or ten minutes. Among the other countries, there are a few teams that I think will be really fun to watch. Brazil is full of skilled big guys, Serbia and Croatia are both staffed by clever, quick, sharp-shooting players, and Greece could sneak up on people. Australia has a player named Matthew Dellavedova. I don’t know much about him but just hoping that he meets, falls in love with, marries, and has children with WNBA star Elena Delle Donne will keep me happy.

CBS Sports has a full preview of all twenty-four of the teams here.

I’m convinced. How do I watch?

All the games will be televised or streamed live. ESPN, ESPN2, and NBA TV are the main television carriers. All the U.S. games will be on ESPN or ESPN2 during the group stage with NBA TV televising other select games. If you’re interested in a game that’s not carried on one of these channels, (I have my eye on Spain vs. France at 4 pm ET on Sept. 3,) take a look at the full schedule. You can stream every game live on ESPN3.

When American sports go abroad

Gilas Blatche — From Brooklyn to the Philippines — Andray Blatche

In the spirit of one last Summer vacation before the season is over, I’m excited to bring you two wonderful stories about American sports going abroad. One story explores the recent and rapid adoption of American Football in Poland while the other profiles the National Basketball Team of the Philippines and their newest countryman, Andray Blatche, who was born in New York and has played his whole life in the United States.

“What happened in the championship of the Polish American Football League” sounds like the first line of a pre-political correctness ethnic joke but actually it’s a legitimate question for the tens of thousands of people who follow American Football in Poland. Rick Lyman of the New York Times brings us a gripping story about how Poland has embraced American football. It’s a wonderful window into how another culture views the game of football, free from some of the cultural implications and the pressure of billions of dollars that weigh down the conversation in the United States. Some of my favorite parts were the description of how family oriented the live experience of the games are:

At the game against the Goats, besides a bouncy castle, there was an inflatable sliding board, a giant dinosaur, a Starbucks tent, a bubble tea concession, a very popular burger van, a kielbasa grill, a small beer garden beyond the end zone and a “Zibi & Steczki” (steak and potatoes) stand run by the Harley guys.

“We also encourage picnicking,” Mr. Steszewski said. “Of course, we are not up to the standards of American tailgating.”

and a brief look into the one all-women’s team in the league, the aptly named Warsaw Sirens:

“Our colors are pink and black,” said Kamila Glowacz, 29, the team’s president. “You know, because we’re girls.”

The team got started when some of the women visited America and happened to see a game. “Many men told us we should go to the kitchen, not to the field,” she said. “But women, you know, we do what we want to do.”

It’s a wonderful article and is well worth reading to the final, hysterical line. I’ve definitely taken note of Lyman as a writer to follow and I’d love to watch some Polish football if it were ever on TV.

The second story about what happens when American sports go abroad is about the successful recruitment of American Andray Blatche by the Filipino National Basketball team and the process of introducing him to the team. Written by Rafe Bartholomew for Grantland.com, this article is a fun look into a wacky basketball player in a completely curious situation.

International basketball allows for one naturalized citizen to play for each country’s national team. This often means that American college players who either couldn’t make an NBA team or who have tried and failed in the NBA get recruited to play for another country. Recruitment in sports isn’t unusual, it happens at every level, but it is notable when signing up means not just signing a contract but becoming a citizen of a foreign country. In this case, Andray Blatche had to be the subject of a law that passed through the Philippines congress and signed by their president before he could begin playing with the Filipino team.

Once Bartholomew ably tells the tale of how Blatche was courted and signed, he moves on to the important question of how a talented but unreliable 6’11” NBA American center will fit into a team of undersized relatively lesser skilled Filipinos. The answer seems to be, “Pretty well.” The Filipino coach, team, and fans are refreshingly (for our stats obsessed sports landscape) focused on playing with heart and passion. For whatever else you can say about Blatche, he’s got both of those in droves. I loved the parts of the piece when Bartholomew focused on Blatche’s growing relationship with his Filipino teammates and staff. Here’s one choice bit:

Blatche even seemed to develop a genuine closeness with Gilas ball boy Bong Tulabot — and not just because Bong spent the 15 minutes before every practice massaging weapons-grade menthol liniment into Blatche’s calf muscles. “Where’s my guy?” were often the first words out of Blatche’s mouth when he’d enter the gym, and he’d jockey with Alapag for Bong’s attention. The unlikely bond between Blatche, the 28-year-old, 6-foot-11 NBA center, and Bong, the 48-year-old, 5-foot-6 Filipino team handyman who used to sell rice porridge in the street, was consummated when a morning practice ended with a visiting SBP official placing $200 at half court and inviting everyone in the gym to shoot for it. Blatche launched his half-court attempt, and when the ball rattled through the rim Bong leaped in celebration.

“DAT’S MY MAN! DAT’S MY MAN!” Bong shouted in a peculiar falsetto as he ran in circles around the gym. Blatche melted to the floor in laughter, then got up to meet Bong for a running, jumping chest bump, although their height disparity made the maneuver look more like Bong delivering a flying head butt to Blatche’s waist. Nevertheless, the moment was enough to make “DAT’S MY MAN!” the team catchphrase for the rest of its time in Miami.

So far, so good in Blatche’s time with the Filipino national team. The true test comes over the next week when the Philippines will try to upset the world and qualify for the knock out round of the FIBA Basketball World Cup. We’ll be running an article on how that tournament works later today, so keep your eyes to the grindstone.

Cue Cards 8-29-14

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 — Thursday, August 28

College Football Begins with a Splat — The first real day of college football was supposed to have at least two good, even “spinach” games. We even put out an infographic showing why. But, as they say, anything can happen on any given Sunday or even Thursday. Both games turned into blow outs with Texas A&M beating South Carolina 52-28 and Mississippi beating Boise State 35-13.
See Ya Ci Ci — The cinderella run of 15 year-old Ci Ci Bellis in the U.S. Open came to an end when she lost to Zarina Diyas. Her age finally came through in her play which was up and down and even more in the interview following her loss. When little leaguer Mo’Ne Davis was in the news recently, at least one of the narratives was “Should we be covering kids as closely as this? Is it good for them?” In tennis, where 15 year-olds can be professionals, that narrative is missing.
The NFL Adjusts — The NFL announced a new policy on domestic violence. A first offense will be answered with a six game suspension, a second offense with a “lifetime ban” although violators can apply for reinstatement. This policy will be applied to everyone who works under the league umbrella, not just players. It’s a clear response to the bad press that the NFL has received over the suspension of Baltimore Running Back, Ray Rice, who was given two games for domestic abuse.

When is a football game a cupcake?

The 2014 college football season starts this weekend. College football is a peculiar sport in a few ways. It’s a very short season — most teams play 11 or 12 games. There’s no real pre-season, so teams don’t get that much of a chance to warm up. Any loss during the regular season almost eliminates most teams from championship contention. Add to these three factors, the fact that colleges are able to schedule their own opponents for the first three or four weeks of the year, before conference play begins, and you get a recipe for… a pretty boring first weekend of football.

Why is that? Well, there’s a real incentive for the top teams to win their first several games. There’s a ton of money involved. Top teams are expected to go almost undefeated every year and the financial difference to their university between going into the fifth or sixth game of the season undefeated or with one early loss is immense. So, many top teams schedule what they think are going to be very easy games for the first few weeks of the season. They actually pay smaller or weaker teams to go on the road and play them in their home stadiums. Last year the biggest single game payment was made by Alabama to Colorado State. Alabama paid $1,500,000 for Colorado State to travel to Tuscaloosa where they lost, as expected but not arranged, 31-6. Losing is not part of the deal, but it’s part of the deal.

This isn’t all bad, it gives small teams a chance to make lots of money and also to play spoiler. Some of them can make a name for themselves by playing better than expected or even upsetting the host team. But it does mean that big established teams play a lot more at home than smaller teams which doesn’t seem fair if you think about the players as people who have families and friends who want to see them in person. It also means that a LOT of the games in the first few weeks are really not worth watching.

Using the preseason Associated Press Preseason Top 25 and Jeff Sagarin’s ranking of all teams, I put together an analysis of the opening weekend games to see which of the top 25 teams had scheduled easy games, moderate games, and which had scheduled games against opponents of relatively even strength to them. The term cupcake is a commonly used term to refer to a game a good team schedules against a weaker team and should win. I rolled with it and invented the terms “dinner roll” to refer to the not-so-unfair games that some teams scheduled and “spinach” to refer to an evenly matched game. From my perspective, it’s these spinach games that we should watch this weekend.

Without further ado, here is the first ever Dear Sports Fan infographic:

Cue Cards 8-28-14

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 — Wednesday, August 27

A Slew of Suspensions • #1 — NFL player Josh Gordon was finally suspended after a long appeals process for a full year because of testing positive for weed. The knee-jerk reaction is going to be to compare the length of his suspension for a non-violent offense to Ray Rice’s two games after assaulting his fiancée. It’s a little bit of a false comparison because the penalties for substance abuse were collectively bargained for and agreed to by the owners and the players union. Also, the chemicals in an athletes body seem more reasonably the jurisdiction of a sports league interested in protecting the fairness of their competition than any crime off the field, no matter how horrible. Then again, weed seems to be on its way to being legalized most everywhere and sexual assault is really, really, really awful. Maybe the knee-jerk reaction is the right one.
A Slew of Suspensions • #2 — University of Southern California football player John Shaw has been suspended indefinitely after admitting his story about spraining his ankles while saving his nephew from drowning was a lie. The indefinite duration probably has something to do with the fact that the true story of the ankle sprains is still either not known or not known publicly. This type of blundering is a good way to remind ourselves, right before the college football season starts, that as much as they look like grown, professional, super-hero athletes, college athletes are still basically kids.
A Slew of Suspensions • # 3 — The University of North Carolina has suspended four of their college football players after an “alleged hazing incident that left walk-on freshman wideout Jackson Boyer with a concussion.” Not much to really say about this one. Even if it wasn’t hazing, it sounds like assault. I suppose it’s helpful to also remember that there are around 125 college students on each of the 125 (symmetry not intended) division one college football teams in the country. That’s 15,625 men from age 18 to 22 who, when they get into trouble, are going to be in the news.
Actual Sports • U.S. Open Upsets — Heat and humidity fray the nerves of even the most casual commuter in New York. So it’s no surprise that it works its evil on tennis players sprinting around mid-day for two to five hours. Two big names on the women’s side of the U.S. Open lost yesterday to relative unknowns. Number four ranked Aga Radwanska lost to Peng Shuai and Sloan Stephens lost to Johanna Larsson.

Why Major League Soccer is like a New York co-op

Jermaine Jones was assigned to sign with the New England Revolution

Recently Major League Soccer, the top professional soccer league in the United States did something which raised eye-brows and exposed one of its oddest elements, its organizational structure. If you remember anyone from the United States Men’s World Cup team from earlier in the summer, it’s probably goalie Tim Howard. But if you remember anyone else it might be Jermaine Jones the dreadlocked maelstrom of a midfielder who was probably the best non-goalie on the team for the duration of the tournament. Jones is one of our many German-American players. He grew up in the United States but moved to Germany as an adolescent and began his professional career there as a fourteen year old (which is not rare for German players). He’s spent his entire career in Germany and Turkey but became interested in playing and perhaps finishing his career in the United States. And that’s where the weirdness began.

Major League Soccer has a “single entity-structure” in which, according to Wikipedia, “teams and player contracts are centrally owned by the league.” Most other leagues in the United States are connected, but much more loosely, like a neighborhood association connects property owners throughout the country. Instead of operating independently on the important things and in unison when necessary, Major League Soccer operates independently until the decisions become important. This type of structure is familiar to me only from living in a co-op apartment building where I am a “tenant-owner” the same way that Robert Kraft (who owns-owns the New England Patriots football team) is an investor-operator. Through this peculiar organization, the signing of Jones became an assigning.

The MLS team most interested in Jones was the Chicago Fire and had been pursuing him for months. According to MLS rules, most players are able to negotiate and sign with teams of their choosing if they are free agents. Players who fit this description, as a “U.S. National Team player who signs with MLS after playing abroad” however, have to go through an “allocation order” where teams that did worse in the previous year have first dibs until they sign a player that fits that description. Then they drop to the bottom of the list. Okay, that’s a little arbitrary, but I can see what they’re going for there. But what is this? There’s an asterisk?

*Designated Players of a certain threshold – as determined by the League – are not subject to allocation ranking.

That, my friends, is an elastic clause if I’ve ever seen one. So, in some cases, the league can just bypass the rules and do whatever it likes. In this case, MLS decided to have Jones skip the allocation process and they decided to choose between the two teams interested in him with a coin-flip! The two teams were the Chicago Fire and the New England Revolution (it boggles the mind to believe that these were the only two teams who wanted him, but…) and the Revolution won the coin flip.

Not only does this feel anti-competitive and arbitrary, but as Barry Petchesky argues in his Deadspin.com article about the assignment, it’s “shockingly anti-labor. If MLS wants to be the league of choice for the world’s best players, it’d better start allowing those players to choose their situations.” I couldn’t agree more. The worst thing a sports league can do is create the appearance of favoring one team over another or one player over another from an organizational standpoint. The NBA lives and flourishes with a little bit of this sentiment thanks to conspiracy theorists who think the draft lotteries are fixed or the refs are instructed to favor big-market teams. Too much of it can only lead to bad things, like the UFC’s recent issue with President Dana White’s removal of a judge mid-fight. The perception of true competition is essential for the enjoyment of sports.