Diana Nyad Swims from Cuba to Florida — But at What Cost?

Nyad's shows off her guns and the marks that jellyfish left on her body. Photo by Catherine Opie
Nyad’s shows off her guns and the marks that jellyfish left on her body.
Photo by Catherine Opie

Yesterday when I read that Diana Nyad had finally succeeded in her quest to swim from Cuba to Florida, my first reaction was “but at what cost?”

Nyad completed the 100 to 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida in almost fifty three hours of continuous swimming. She is the first woman[1] to complete this feat without a shark cage. This may seem like only a safety concern, but when swimming in a shark cage, the swimmer benefits enormously from the drag or current in the water created by the boat towing the cage. Nyad had a large support team including a team of shark divers who swam ahead of her with shark repellants and a support boat which she did not hold on to at any time. It was her fifth attempt at the swim. The first attempt was in 1978. Diana Nyad is 64 years old.

It’s an inspirational story of age and determination overcoming youth and vigor. Nyad herself said when she reached the shore:

“I have three messages. One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team.”

President Obama congratulate her on twitter, “Congratulations to @DianaNyad. Never give up on your dreams.” Terry Savage of the Huffington Post proclaimed Nyad a hero who reminds us to “never give up” and that “persistence pays.” So why was my reaction “but at what cost?”

My reaction was informed by memories of a New York Times magazine article I read about Nyad in 2011, shortly before her fourth attempt. The author, Elizabeth Weil, did a wonderful job of characterizing Nyad and her quest. What stuck with me was the relationship between Nyad and one of her friends and lead handler, Bonnie Stoll:

Whatever the case, in early November Stoll decided she could no longer abide Nyad’s “Groundhog Day”-like optimism. If she was going to discuss another swim with Nyad — let alone, train her for one — Stoll needed Nyad to watch a video of her jellyfish stings. So one Wednesday morning, Stoll drove over to Nyad’s house, where Nyad’s nephew, who’s making a documentary about his aunt’s swimming, cued up a six-minute clip. The two women sat close on the couch, hunched toward the laptop on the coffee table. The footage was gruesome. Gone was the swimmer’s strong, confident, singing, counting athletic self. Nyad’s eyes looked desperate, terrified. “Wow wow wow,” she said on the video, treading water, trying to manage her pain. “Are we all the way across?” she asked, attempting to orient herself. “This can’t be all the way across.” Back on the couch, Stoll flinched. Nyad’s eyes teared up. The body in the water — Nyad’s body — was going into shock. “It’s under my arm, the armpit. . . . It’s paralyzing my back.” Stoll’s voice on the laptop strained for control. “Diana in, out. Diana in, out! Breathe!”

For a few moments after the video ended, Nyad seemed cowed. “That’s the first time I’ve seen what you were living through,” she said to Stoll, wiping away a tear. “I look like a child who is scared.”

But five minutes later that fear was gone. Nyad has a rare gift: muscles and a psyche that can swim for days straight.

We sports fans celebrate the outliers. Diana Nyad has rare gifts that allow her to swim and swim and swim, forgetting past failure and current pain. We marvel at how Michael Jordan could overcome the flu (or food poisoning… or a horrible hangover depending on who you ask) to score 38 points in 44 minutes during the 1997 NBA finals. We lionize “genius” coaches like Mike Leach whose eccentricities are matched only by their winning.

Nyad’s, Jordan’s, and Leach’s performances are all admirable and inspiring, but is there a necessary downside to athletic achievement? Jordan competitive drive led him to gamble compulsively and psychologically terrorize his lesser teammates.[2] Leach’s try anything attitude ended his employment at Texas Tech when he ordered a concussed player to stand in a dark closet. When Nyad walked up the beach in Key West, Bonnie Stoll was there to hug her but I have to ask: Was it worth it? What was the cost of success for her life? For her friend’s life?

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. It’s a little hard to tell if a man has done this. A long-distance swimmer named Walter Poenisch claimed to have, also in his sixties, but there are doubts about the veracity of his claim.↵
  2. And they were all lesser.↵

How Should I Feel About the NFL Concussion Settlement?

Dear Sports Fan,

I read over the weekend that the NFL settled a lawsuit out of court with retired players on the subject of concussions. I know concussions are an increasing concern in sports. How should I feel about the NFL concussion settlement?

Thanks,
Tricia

— — —

Dear Tricia,

Every good settlement is going to leave people on both sides with mixed feelings. The agreement that the NFL made to give $765 million to retired players is no exception to that rule, but I think it is more good than it is bad. Here are a few reasons why:

People Need Help Now

Retired football players who are suffering from the result of head trauma need help now. This is clear from the high-profile suicides of former players like Junior Seau, Ray Easterling, and Dave Duerson as well as the heart-wrenching stories of Steve Gleason and Kevin Turner and many others who are alive but severely affected by early dementia and Alzheimer’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease, which has been linked in theory, even on nfl.com, to brain trauma), and other issues. You might expect NFL players to have enough money to take care of their own health care but salaries have only skyrocketed to the current  in the past thirty one years since the 1982 strike and there is still an enormous amount of inequality within NFL player salaries. There are a lot of older players and less successful players out there who never made a lot of money. It’s conceivable for recent retirees to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, but if you look at the bigger picture you will find many stories like Terry Tautolo‘s, who ended up homeless.

Retired NFL Players are Not the Public

One of the best arguments you will hear for why this settlement is a bad thing is that it allows the NFL to avoid being forced to reveal in court how much it knew about the effect of concussions and when it knew what it knew. Daniel Engber of Slate.com makes this case forcefully but I don’t totally buy it. It’s easy to see parallels between this situation and Watergate or cigarette companies. The questions “what did they know” and “when did they know it” are instinctive because of those cases. A key difference is that this is a dispute between employees and an employer, not between a government and its citizens or a group of consumer companies and its customers. In terms of being truthful to the general football-watching public, the breach of trust is happening more now that the NFL is trying to market a softer, safer sport than it has in the past. If the NFL knew that it had an unsafe work environment (okay, obviously it’s unsafe, but I mean…really unsafe) and they actively hid information about the hazards from its employees, they should pay and pay punitively. The NFL owes its former employees but it does not owe the public nor would justice be served by its public humiliation or destruction.

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

This settlement does not preclude future lawsuits. NFL players like Scott Fujita, who wrote a great article in the New York Times about the settlement, know this. Fujita writes that he did not get involved in the lawsuit because he didn’t want to “risk watering down a potential award for so many people who are legitimately suffering. There are numerous former players experiencing a wide range of brain-related health issues. Right now, I’m not really one of them.” If he starts experiencing symptoms he is free to open his own suit against the league. The NFL knows this too, and that’s why the settlement is not just for players who actively participated in the lawsuit. Any retired player suffering from brain injury is entitled through this settlement to up to $5 million depending on their particular ailment.

A timeline of the lawsuits and settlements against cigarette companies over the past fifty years is a good reminder that the first settlement can be followed by later, larger settlements. The deadspin.com timeline of the NFL concussion issue only has one settlement on it so far but otherwise it looks chillingly similar.

It Would Have Been Tricky in Court

Although it seems obvious that a profession that involves being smashed repeatedly in the head had something to do with the damage done to its employees, it might have been very difficult for the players to win this case in court. Brain injury is more clearly understood all the time, but it remains frustratingly elusive both from a medical standpoint and a legal one. Matthew Futterman and Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal made this point convincingly in their article about the settlement:

Legal experts familiar with the case say the plaintiffs’ attorneys didn’t believe they had enough firepower to win in court. NFL lawyers were prepared to probe each plaintiff about his athletic history to try to convince the court the NFL couldn’t be held liable for injuries that could have come from youth, high-school or college football—or substance abuse.

The NFL has virtually unlimited resources to throw against their former employees in court. It might not have been a pretty sight. It still might not be.

Which Lesson Has Been Learned?

It’s easy to point at the overall value of the settlement relative to the wealth of the NFL and argue that the only lesson this will teach the NFL is that they can continue to get away with downplaying the danger of brain injury among their players. This doesn’t seem likely. For one thing, it’s clear from the history of the 2012 NFL referee labor dispute that the NFL often operates on principle instead of or in addition to finance. That the NFL reached a settlement suggests to me that it is ready to understand (or has already understood) that brain injury represents one of the biggest potential threats to its existence as an institution and profit-making machine. If this is true, the league will accelerate its initiatives to create a safer environment for current players.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

 

Three Good Sports Links for the Long Weekend

Hi All and Happy Labor Day Weekend!

I know all of you are lying around wondering what you can possibly do with yourselves now that your primary hobby (I’m talking about wearing white pants, of course) is coming to an end. Here are three good sports related stories to fill the void with.

Amazing Sports Photography

This photo was taken by Lorenz Holder and was entered in the New Creativity section.

In their ongoing attempt to link ingesting caffeine, taurine, glucuronolactone, B-group vitamins, sucrose, and glucose with exciting adventure sports, Red Bull sponsors a tri-annual sports photography contest. Many of the photos are amazing and I enjoyed paging through them all. Voting is still open for the people’s choice award.

Name Dropping – Hip Hop and Basketball

Hip hop and basketball have always shared a special connection. They’re both forums that reward creativity and style within well defined boundaries. Rap is full of cultural references and basketball players often find themselves planted in a lyric. Usually this is just because the rapper admires the basketball player’s style or performance, but sometimes it’s as a form of coded speech. Bdon.org created a handy infographic that charts the number of mentions a basketball player gets in raps against the number of points he scored in that year. A couple of surprises to me were how few Allen Iverson references there were given that he is generally thought of as the player who brought hip-hop to the NBA and also how references to Scottie Pippen have accelerated in the bast few years despite his having retired years ago.

Thanks to Deadspin.com for finding this infographic.

A Sad Story of Loss and Love and Basketball

A year or so ago there was a story that popped up in the news that bewildered me. A former NBA player, Dan Roundfield, had drowned in the Caribbean where he had been on vacation with his wife and family. The news stories were all a little unclear about what exactly had happened but they all said that Roundfield had died saving his wife from drowning and they all portrayed the deceased as a remarkable man. My eyes perked up the other day when the New York Times returned to the story a year later. The story is sad, obviously, but like the best eulogies or obituaries it conveys the great joy of Dan Roundfield’s life as well.

 

How Does Scoring Work in Football?

Very little about football is intuitive and that includes how its scoring works. Luckily, unintuitive is not the same as difficult to understand. There are really only three ways to score points in a football game.

A Touchdown

A touchdown happens when a player in the end-zone catches a pass or when a player who is running with the ball pushes the tip of the ball across the goal-line. On its own, a touchdown is worth six points, but it also gives the team that scored it a bonus chance with the ball from the two yard line. A team with this extra point attempt has two ways to attempt to score — they can kick the ball through the goal posts for one point or they can score two points by running a single play which results in what looks like a second touch-down but which is only worth two additional points. In either case, if the team fails to convert their attempt, they get zero points. In this way a touchdown can result in six points (a missed extra point kick or failed two point conversion attempt,) seven points (a made extra point kick,) or eight points (a successful two point conversion.)

By far the most common choice following a touchdown is an extra point attempt. And almost all of them are successful. According to the Washington Post in an article recommending the eradication of the extra point, in the past 12 seasons, NFL teams have succeeded on 99.3% of the extra point kicks they’ve attempted. The high success rate of the extra point is the source of much of the confusion about football scoring. People will commonly refer to a touchdown as being worth seven points, not six because they assume the extra point will be successful. This makes the “two point conversion” much harder to understand because it nets the team eight, not nine points. According to wikipedia, two point conversion attempts are successful around 40% of the time. Most teams have “cheat sheets” with mathematic models that take into account how far the team is winning or more likely losing by and how much time is left to guide the coach to a decision about whether to go for one or two points following a touchdown.

A Field Goal

The team with the ball can choose to attempt to kick the ball to score from any position on the field on any down. If they are successful at kicking the ball between the two uprights and above the cross-bar, their team gets three points. Teams usually attempt this when they are at most forty to forty five yards away from the end zone they are trying to score on. You’ll hear distances quoted that are longer than this because the ball is snapped back about seven yards from the line of scrimmage and the goal-posts are at the back of a ten yard end-zone. Field goal kickers have steadily gotten increasingly strong and reliable from less than 20% successful before 1970 to over 50% since 2000. That said, football fans seem to expect field goals to be successful 100% of the time and are liable to scream at the television when one is missed.

A Safety

A safety is not the only way a defensive player can score (because he can score a touchdown after intercepting a pass or recovering a fumble) but it’s the only way points can be scored by a player who never even touches the ball! A safety happens when an offensive player is tackled with the ball in his own end-zone or when he steps out of bounds from the end-zone. Once in a while a team will intentionally give up a safety[1] but most of the time it’s the result of an exciting, fast moving play where the best plans of the offense are not just thwarted by the defense but laughably imploded like the shark at the end of Jaws.

So, a team can score two points (a safety,) three points (a field goal,) six points (a touchdown,) seven, (a touchdown in conjunction with an extra point,) or eight points (a touchdown in conjunction with a two-point conversion.)

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. There are lots of complicated reasons for why a team would do this but they all boil down to feeling like the certainty of giving up two points is better than the risk of giving up seven if there is an interception, a fumble, or a punt that leaves the other team with the ball really close to scoring a touchdown.↵

How Does Fantasy Football Work?

Fantasy football combines elements of stock market speculation, role playing games, and casino gambling and throws them into the context of the NFL, far and away America’s most popular professional sport. Here, as simply as possible, is how it works.

The start of every September is the beginning of the NFL season. Each team plays sixteen regular season games over the next seventeen weeks. For a traditional football fan, the only thing that matters is what their team’s record is — how many wins and how many losses. A fantasy football fan cares about something different — how individual players perform. During each game, a company called the Elias Sports Bureau keeps official statistics for the NFL. These statistics transform each play into objective,[1] measurable data. For example, the famous helmet catch play from Super Bowl XLI would have been transformed into: Eli Manning +1 completion, +32 passing yards; David Tyree +1 reception, +32 receiving yards; Rodney Harrison +1 tackle.

These statistics have been used for all sorts of purposes in professional sports. Teams might use them to judge player performance, player contracts often have bonuses built in based on statistics. Leagues give out awards to players with the most goals or highest batting average. Player statistics have even been used in contract arbitration settings. Fantasy football looks at each game as a data set made up of the statistical translation of football plays and builds a different type of contest on top of them.

Real Football Game –> Statistics –> Fantasy Football Game

The fantasy football game that is built on top of the statistics generated by football is based on asking normal people to predict before the season begins and then again each week during the season which football players are going to generate better statistics.

Before the season begins the people in a fantasy football league (called owners) get together physically or virtually and pick NFL players to be on their fantasy teams. Fantasy leagues are usually made up of ten or twelve owners; because no NFL player can be picked by more than one team, the more people in a league the harder-core it is. In an eight player league, owners can probably thrive knowing only the star players. By the time you get to a sixteen or twenty person league, owners likely know the NFL rosters better than they know their own friends’ birthdays.

There are a variety of different ways to divvy up players before the season but the most common one is the snake draft. A draft order is set, usually randomly, and then owners take turns picking NFL players until their teams are full. It’s called a snake draft because the person who picks first the first time through picks last in the second round. The order is first-to-last, last-to-first, and repeat.

The fantasy football draft is the most important and exciting day of the fantasy season. If you are joining a fantasy league for the first time, we wrote some tips on how to enjoy and succeed on draft day here.

The predictions don’t stop after draft day. This is because the statistics generated by an owner’s set of NFL players don’t all count for their team each weekend. Instead, fantasy football asks owners to predict which of the real players on their imaginary team will perform the best in their real games each (real) weekend. Before the games begin, owners have to choose a “starting lineup” of players whose stats will count towards the fantasy team’s performance. Leagues vary quite a bit on how a starting lineup is structured, but this is a common form:

One Quarterback
Two Running Backs
Two Wide Receivers
One Tight End
One Kicker
One Team Defense[2]

In most fantasy football leagues there’s one more layer of abstraction on top of all of this. Each weekend two fantasy teams in the league will “play” each other. At the end of the weekend, whoever’s starting lineup has performed better wins. Like lineups, the way fantasy leagues translate football statistics into fantasy points varies from league to league. It’s also too complex to cover completely in this post but the standard basics go something like this:

One rushing or receiving touchdown = 6 points
One passing touchdown = 4 points
Ten rushing or receiving yards = 1 point
Twenty five passing yards = 1 point

Fantasy scoring systems are designed to create a compelling game so they don’t always match the realities of football. Amazing athletic plays don’t count for more than pedestrian plays. Quarterbacks are almost always the most important players on their real teams but not often on their fantasy teams.

Believe it or not, this all adds up to create an experience that millions of people find incredibly compelling. This is due in part to how having a fantasy team changes the way you watch football.[3] The main reason is that fantasy football is a big but knowable closed system. Results are based in part on luck but also on knowledge and skill. Owners feel like the effort they put into their teams has a real effect on their performance; and they get frequent and objective feedback about this each week. It simulates the joys and agonies of running your own business without most of the risk.

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. More or less.↵
  2. Fantasy lumps defensive players together because defensive stats are a little more subjective. Or if you’re cynical you’d say it’s just because people like offense better.↵
  3. Which we’ll cover in more detail in another post.↵

What are Some Tips for Your First Fantasy Football Draft?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’m going to be taking part in my first fantasy football draft ever in a few weeks. Do you have any tips?

Thanks,
Sonja

— — —

Dear Sonja,

First off, welcome to the fantasy football club! As of 2010 there were over 30 million people in the U.S. and Canada who play fantasy sports. That fact comes from a Forbes magazine article which sited a study by the FSTA or Fantasy Sports Trade Association. You know, because there’s one of those. Which is all to say that you are in good company and you won’t be the only person new to fantasy football this year. Here are some tips on how to enjoy your first draft and maybe they will help you win as well.[1]

Tips for Your First Fantasy Football Draft

Have a Strategy

Whether you are a die-hard football fan or new to the sport, whether you are Nate-Silveresque in your statistical predictive abilities or flunked out of high-school algebra, you can come up with a strategy for your fantasy football draft. Having a strategy is key to enjoying draft day. Without a strategy, drafting is likely to feel like arbitrarily selecting items off a menu in another language. It doesn’t have to be a good strategy, a friend of mine once decided that he thought players who played in cold-weather would be better than players who played in the heat. Another of my friends has tried for years to get all of the Johnsons who play in the NFL on his team. It doesn’t have to be a good strategy as long as it’s not self-destructive. Here are some simple strategies you can use:

  • Use rankings from some other website than the one you are drafting on. Almost every league will draft using the web interface from ESPN, Yahoo!, CBS, or NFL.com. During the draft, you will be selecting players from an ranked list ordered by “fantasy experts” at that site. Lots of the owners in your league will be more or less making their choices based on these rankings but you don’t have to! Get a ranked list from one of the other sites listed above or from one of the many independent fantasy football websites out there like Fantasy Football Nerd, Fantasy Pros, Fantasy Football Toolbox and use their rankings instead. There’s no knowing whose list is more accurate but using one list while the majority of your league uses the same one as each other gives you an inherent advantage.
  • Figure out players that are going to be more than normally unpopular in your league and take them. This means doing a little research about the people you’re going to be playing with. Are most of them Giants fans? If so, they’re likely to over-value the Giants players and be reluctant to pick players from the Giants’ natural enemies: the Redskins, Cowboys, and Eagles.
  • Take the boring players. People who play fantasy sports like to feel like if they win, they did it because they knew something that no one else did. They like to “discover” players who are about to experience the best year of their careers. So they tend to over-value rookies and players who have just moved teams or gotten new coaches. What they don’t like doing is drafting someone who has played well but not spectacularly for years and is likely to do basically the same thing this year that they did last year. This is where you sneak in and take the boring, reliable performers.

Enjoy Yourself

Fantasy football should be fun! It’s a hobby, after all. To the newbie though it might seem a little strange. Here are a few things that won’t help you win your league but might help you enjoy the experience.

  • Serious doesn’t mean not fun. You’ll probably be surprised at how seriously people take this hobby. Even some of the vocabulary around fantasy football shows this. People who play fantasy football are called “owners.” The guy or gal who runs the league is a “commissioner.” Everyone is seriously trying to win. None of this screams fun but it can be in the same way that a water gun fight or a game of tag is more fun if you suspend disbelief and buy into the idea that you really don’t want to be it or get hit by a tiny stream of water.
  • Go in person. Most leagues get together to do their drafts. Now that it’s so easy to run the process online it’s easy for people to draft from their homes but it’s not nearly as much fun as sitting together in a room with snacks and beer. If your friends and you can’t get together, do a conference call or a google hangout or some other technological solution that allows for banter. If you are in a room with beer and snacks, don’t get too drunk and end up with a team full of players with awesome sounding names who all suck at football.
  • Draft one player from a local team. Even if it is a mid-level tight end, the back-up running back, or a second or third wide receiver, having a player from the local team on your fantasy team will provide you a full fall’s worth of compelling entertainment because it gives you something to root for every Sunday.

At it’s worst, fantasy football can seem like a strange form of voluntary self-flagellation (how could I have thought that Alex Smith would have had a better game than Aaron Rodgers…if only that second tier running back hadn’t fumbled in the fourth quarter of a blowout victory…etc.) but at its best it forms close, consistent communities that continue for years.

Good luck!
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. For full disclosure, I am dating this particular fantasy football newbie. So while I want her to enjoy her first fantasy football experience, I might not actually want her to win the league. A close second is about as high as I can, in good faith, wish for Sonja.↵

What is a Fumble in Football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a fumble? When my friends watch football and there is a fumble, they turn to each other and solemnly say “the football.” What are they talking about and why do they enjoy this so much?

Thanks,
Frank

— — —

Dear Frank,

In football a fumble is what happens when an offensive player accidentally drops the ball or loses control of it because of what a defensive player has just done to him. As with so many elements of football there are a few technicalities to learn about the rules that govern fumbles. If a quarterback is in the act of throwing the ball and his arm is moving forward when he loses the ball or he is recovering from a fake pass, it is not a fumble. If a wide receiver has caught the ball but has not made a “football move” (note that this phrase can mean almost anything. It’s up to the refs to decide what it means, but it usually refers to some clear, willful act, like turning or dodging or diving,) losing the ball will not be a fumble. If there is a fumble, the ball is up for grabs by any player on the field as long as it stays in bounds.

The word fumble is so closely associated with football today as to almost be a technical term. I would have guessed that its use in common language was a result of the central importance of sport in our culture. I would have been wrong. The word fumble is old. It has its roots in the Norwegian and Sweedish word “fumla” or the Middle Low German “fummeln” from at least as far back as the 1500s when it’s meaning was close to the modern usage of the verb “to grope.” Its meaning has not changed too much in the last 500 years.

Although it’s hard to see it if you are not used to watching football, football is a game of precision, exact timing, and physical feats that have been practiced so many times that they become routine. A quarterback will take a three, five, or seven step drop backwards at the start of the play and then throw the ball to a receiver who’s route has been dictated by exactly how long it takes the quarterback to take to step backwards and throw. If the quarterback takes five instead of seven steps, the play will fail. On a running play, the movements of the five offensive linemen are tightly programmed so that one member of the line can push a defensive player back and to the left while his partner hits another to the right in order to open a tiny crack in time and space for the running back to sprint through.

A fumble is one of the rare moments in football when all that precision goes out the window and is replaced by complete mayhem and outcomes governed more by chance than skill. The shape of a football evolved to be more pointed at its ends so that it would fly faster and more accurately. It flies wonderfully but when it hits the ground, it behaves with the predictability of a drunk North Korean dictator with vertigo. When dropped or knocked out of a player’s hands, the football does not bounce, it squirts. This is probably why your friends attribute the craziness of a fumble to the ball. When a fumble happens, the ball is free; whoever picks it up captures possession for their team. Everyone wants it but it often seems as though the football is willfully evasive, unwilling to be recaptured now that it has experienced freedom. Players are told from a young age not to try to pick up a fumbled ball but over and over again they try, only to have it escape out of trembling hands.

A lot of the time it isn’t clear that anyone has recaptured the ball before there is a pile of five to ten players on top of one another with the ball underneath. These pile-ups are pretty crazy. As described in this NFL.com article:

When a football hits the ground, players are known to do whatever it takes to get it. Nothing is off limits. Eye-gouging. Crotch-grabbing. Biting. Kicking. Punching. Choking. All that’s missing are brass knuckles, steel chairs and other objects made famous by the grapplers in World Wrestling Entertainment.

According to stat gurus Football Outsiders, all the determination in the world doesn’t amount to much when it comes to recovering fumbles. What happens once the ball has been fumbled is completely random as shown by there being “no correlation whatsoever between the percentage of fumbles recovered by a team in one year and the percentage they recover in the next year.” On the other hand, causing a fumble is a highly prized skill among defensive players. So much so that you will often see defensive players give up an easy chance to tackle the player with the ball, instead attempting to punch the ball away. This is spectacular when it works but looks foolish when it doesn’t. Offensive players, particularly ones who handle the ball a lot, like quarterbacks and running backs are judged harshly for fumbling. A fumbling habit is the fastest way to be benched.

Football fans love the game for its precision but we can’t help loving the chaotic moment when the ball is fumbled and all the best plans of Giants and Jets…

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is a Tight End in Football?

Watching a good tight end is one of the joys of football. To channel Groucho Marx as well as some of my straight female and gay male friends who watch football, watching good tight ends — also one of the joys of watching football. Phew. Now that we got that joke done with right at the top of the post we can proceed in answering the question about what the football position tight end is all about.

In preparation for the rapidly approaching football season, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a series about the basics of football. Some previous posts answer the questions: Why Do People Like Football, How do I Begin to Enjoy Football, Why Are People Obsessing About Fantasy Football Now, and What’s a Down in Football. This post is one in a series that explores each position on a football team. So far we’ve covered What is a Running Back in Football, What is a Quarterback in Football, What is a Defensive Back in Football, What is a Wide Receiver in Football, What is a Defensive Lineman in Football, What is a Linebacker in Football, and What is an Offensive Lineman in Football. Today we cover the last remaining position in What is a Tight End in Football?

What is a Tight End in Football?

Watching a good tight end is one of the joys of football. To channel Groucho Marx as well as some of my straight female and gay male friends who watch football, watching good tight ends — also one of the joys of watching football. Phew. Now that we got that joke done with right at the top of the post we can proceed in answering the question about what the football position tight end is all about.

The tight end is a hybrid position somewhere between a wide receiver and an offensive lineman. The wide receiver’s main job is to run down the field and catch passes from the quarterback. The offensive lineman’s job is to protect the quarterback when he is passing and to block defensive players out of the way of the running back when the team decides to run.

Football-Formation-TETight ends get their name from where they line up at the start of a play. They are the closest offensive player horizontally on the field to the offensive line. They are close (tight) to the end of that line, but how tightly they line up varies depending on the play. Much of the time tight ends are almost indistinguishable from the offensive line because they line up right at the end of the line and start with their hands on the ground, just like the linemen. In other plays the tight end will line up separated from the end of the offensive line and will be upright like a wide receiver would be. Teams usually play with one tight end on the field at a time although a few teams like the Patriots have been using more formations with two tight ends simultaneously in recent years. When two are on the field at once, one usually lines up on the line and another like a wide receiver.

As we’ve mentioned before during this series on positions, football has gradually become more focused on passing in the last thirty years. The tight end position has been affected by this evolution so much so that you could almost call it a revolution, as writer Bill Barnwell did in this Grantland.com piece. Although there are no commonly recognized positional distinctions among tight ends, there are more players in the position who specialize in catching passes in the NFL than ever before.

Receiving Tight Ends

Tight ends who are primarily on the field to catch passes can be referred to as receiving tight ends. They are likely to have slighter builds than their blocking brethren. Ever since two college basketball players, Tony Gonzalez and Antonio Gates[1] revolutionized the position, a surprising number of receiving tight ends have been former basketball players. There are some common sense reasons for this. Tight ends, even the receiving ones, need to be big enough to stand up to strong defensive players when blocking. Tall basketball players, like power forwards, tend to have frames that can add muscle and weight. Tight ends also use their height to advantage when catching passes. Tight ends tend to run pass routes in the middle of the field where they are less likely to get open. More often they turn to face the quarterback and use their bodies keep the defensive player from getting to the ball before it’s safe in their hands. This mimics the body positioning a basketball player uses when he “boxes out” another player to try to get a rebound.

Blocking Tight Ends

Blocking tight ends are more like offensive linemen than wide receivers. They are big men, able to push a defensive end or linebacker off the line to make room for a running back or to protect a quarterback. Unlike offensive linemen who are by rule ineligible to run past the line of scrimmage and catch a pass, the blocking tight end can, when the defense least expects it, run out and get open to receive a pass. In this way, blocking tight ends are among the sneakiest football players. Tight ends will often block for a second or pretend to block before sprinting out into space. Defenses who get fooled by the tight end may not react quickly enough to stop the quarterback from throwing an easy pass to the wide-open tight end. It’s not unheard of for a team to use a predominantly blocking tight end by having him pretend to trip, lie on the ground for a second, and then run into the end zone to catch a touchdown.

Fantasy Football Implications

Tight ends are among the most stratified positions in fantasy football. There are so few great receiving tight ends (fantasy leagues have yet to figure out how to reward for blocking skill) and the few greats have such better statistics than the average, so having one of the best tight ends in the league on your fantasy team can be a big advantage. Right behind the top two or three tight end talents though, there’s not a ton of difference between number five or six and number eighteen, so fantasy owners who don’t get a top guy will often wait until the very end of their drafts to pick one.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Gates shockingly did not even play football in college.↵

What is an Offensive Lineman in Football?

If football were a medieval battleground, the offensive linemen would be the castle walls and the battering rams. Offensive linemen are gigantic human beings. They are usually well over six feet tall and three hundred pounds heavy. Don’t let their size fool you, they are still faster and quicker than you are. They are also generally thought to be the smartest players on the football field.

In preparation for the rapidly approaching football season, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a series about the basics of football. Some previous posts answer the questions: Why Do People Like Football, How do I Begin to Enjoy Football, Why Are People Obsessing About Fantasy Football Now, and What’s a Down in Football. This post is one in a series that explores each position on a football team. So far we’ve covered What is a Running Back in Football, What is a Quarterback in Football, What is a Defensive Back in Football, What is a Wide Receiver in Football, What is a Defensive Lineman in Football, and What is a Linebacker in Football. Today we take on What is an Offensive Lineman in Football?

What is an Offensive Lineman in Football?

If football were a medieval battleground, the offensive linemen would be the castle walls and the battering rams. Offensive linemen are gigantic human beings. They are usually well over six feet tall and three hundred pounds heavy. Don’t let their size fool you, they are still faster and quicker than you are. They are also generally thought to be the smartest players on the football field. Their job is one of the most complicated and important. When their team calls a pass play, offensive linemen are tasked with preventing the defensive player across from them from getting past them and hitting the quarterback. This usually involves moving generally backwards with a bend but don’t break philosophy. When their team calls a run play the offensive linemen’s job is to create an open lane for the running back to run through by forcing defensive players to move in one direction or another. Success involves seamless coordination between five linemen and at least a few other players. Failure means that at best the offensive play falls apart. At worst failure can mean the quarterback gets seriously injured and your team’s chances for the year take a serious hit.

Offensive Linemen are my favorite players in football. If I could have had the size, strength, attitude, and talent to play in the NFL, I would have wanted to be on the Offensive Line. Part of that is that I’m just attracted generally to any position that requires size that I can’t even imagine having. Another part of it is the psychology of the position. Lineman is interesting because it encourages many common football traits like aggression, competitiveness, and willingness to subject oneself to the team but the position’s primary psychological feature is protectiveness. Although we recently wrote a post all about Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side, I can’t resist sprinkling this post with stories from the book. Two come to mind that pertain to the psychology of Offensive Linemen. The first is about the subject of the book, Michael Oher. Still a high-school kid discovering his abilities as a football player, he was also learning how to drive. One day he and his adoptive little brother were in the car together when they got into a an accident. When the paramedics got to the scene they were shocked at how little damage the airbag had done to the little brother, much less than they would have expected given his age and size. It turns out that Oher had instinctively thrown his arm between the airbag and his brother, and though the airbag burned his arm, he managed to save his brother from harm while also exhibiting an extremely protective nature and preternatural physical abilities. Every Sunday in the NFL provides offensive linemen with a supreme challenge of protectiveness and the pressure to succeed is enormous. Lewis tells us that many linemen don’t sleep the night before games, so haunted are they by the fear of failing to protect their quarterback.

There are five players in the offensive line and they are divided into three positions, Center, Guard, and Tackle. Thirty plus years ago, these positions were more or less interchangeable but since then they have become specialized. It’s rare today to find players that can play all three positions.

Centers

As you would expect from the name of the position, the center is the player in the middle of the offensive line with two linemen on either side of him. He begins each play with the football and his action of snapping the football backwards is the official start of the play. This means he needs to be in completed sync with the quarterback (yes, when “under center” a quarterback’s hand rests right under the center’s general crotch/ass region, and often signals that he wants the ball by gently pushing his hand up…) and very closely coordinated with the rest of the team who cannot move until he snaps the ball. Teams have two main ways of achieving this. The first is an audible snap count. Used when a team can hear itself think (usually at home) the quarterback will signal the center and the team to start the play with some code, like the fourth time he says blue or the seventh time he says banana. A silent count is some physical signal — the quarterback will stomp his foot three times or slap his hip or something.

Once the play begins the center’s job is not so different from the rest of the linemen but he is at a physical disadvantage. Because he’s had to use his hands to snap the ball, he needs an extra second to get them into a good position to block his opposing defensive linemen. You don’t often see dominating blocking from a center because of this.

Centers are also often kind of coaches on the field for the rest of the offensive line. They are most likely to be the ones that look at the way the defense is lining up and make sure that each offensive lineman knows which person or area he’s responsible for blocking.

Guard

The guards are the two offensive linemen directly to the left and right of the center. They are the least glamorous of the linemen. They don’t have the responsibility of guarding the edges of the line versus pass rushers nor do they collaborate so closely with the quarterback. What they focus on is run blocking. Guards love when their team calls a run and they get to drive the lineman opposite them into the ground. A phrase you might hear is that someone is a “good pulling guard.” What this means is that player is good at quickly getting behind the center and “pulling” over to the other side of the line where, because he’s an extra big, strong body on that side of the line, he can usually create a nice road for his running back to run through, paving the way with the bodies of defensive players who make the mistake of getting in the way.

Tackle

The tackles are the two offensive linemen on the edges of the five man line. Their primary responsibility is pass blocking and they face the biggest challenge because they only have a fellow lineman helping them on their inside side. Often they will get a little help on their outside, either from a tight-end or a running back, but these are generally smaller players who can’t block as well as linemen. A tackle who can successfully and reliably protect the quarterback without needing help from a running back or tight-end is extremely valuable because it gives the team the flexibility to use those players in other ways. It’s almost like having an extra player on the field.

On teams with right-handed quarterbacks, the left tackle is more important than the right because when the quarterback drops back to throw, he stands with his back to the left side of the field. The left tackle is said to be protecting the quarterback’s blind side. With a left-handed quarterback, this is reversed.

Fantasy Football Implications

Alas no one has figured out how to generate enough measurable statistics from offensive linemen so that they can be used in fantasy football. That doesn’t mean you should ignore them though. Research into which teams have strong or weak offensive lines (and things that might make them stronger or weaker like new players, injuries, new coaches, etc.) can tell you a lot about how successful the teams’ quarterbacks, running backs, and receivers are likely to be.

 

 

What is a Linebacker in Football?

Linebackers are the meanest, toughest football players on the field. At least, they look it. Unlike linemen, who have a little extra meat on their bones to help them move the player across from them, linebackers are usually sculpted like extras in 300. They’re stronger than defensive backs and faster and more agile than defensive linemen. They line up a few yards behind the line of scrimmage and are responsible both for crashing the line of scrimmage to stop a running back or sack the quarterback and for covering tight ends or wide receivers, generally when those offensive players are sent running to catch a pass on shorter (“underneath”) routes.

In preparation for the rapidly approaching football season, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a series about the basics of football. Some previous posts answer the questions: Why Do People Like Football, How do I Begin to Enjoy Football, Why Are People Obsessing About Fantasy Football Now, and What’s a Down in Football. This post is one in a series that explores each position on a football team. So far we’ve covered What is a Running Back in Football, What is a Quarterback in Football, What is a Defensive Back in Football, What is a Wide Receiver in Football, and What is a Defensive Lineman in Football. Today we finish up the defensive side of the ball with What is a Linebacker in Football?

What is a Linebacker in Football?

Linebackers are the meanest, toughest football players on the field. At least, they look it. Unlike linemen, who have a little extra meat on their bones to help them move the player across from them, linebackers are usually sculpted like extras in 300. They’re stronger than defensive backs and faster and more agile than defensive linemen. They line up a few yards behind the line of scrimmage and are responsible both for crashing the line of scrimmage to stop a running back or sack the quarterback and for covering tight ends or wide receivers, generally when those offensive players are sent running to catch a pass on shorter (“underneath”) routes.

The greatest linebackers are those that can play “sideline to sideline” – they can cover huge amounts of ground and are fast enough, for example, to keep up with a running back who is trying to get around the defense. They are also equally skilled at stopping the run and covering receivers, which means they don’t have to come off the field in situations when the defense thinks the opposing offense is more likely to pass or run.

When the ball is snapped linebackers may have any number of responsibilities: if it’s a running play they may attack the line of scrimmage aggressively, trying to get through to get the ball carrier in the backfield; or, they may slide side to side, mirroring the running back’s movements and containing him by plugging the holes the offensive linemen are trying to create.

If it’s a pass play, the linebacker may cover a tight end in man to man coverage, or be responsible for covering whoever crosses into a specific zone of the field; or, they may be assigned to blitz, ignoring everything else for a chance to hit the quarterback in the backfield before he can release the ball.

There can be anywhere from one to four linebackers on the field in any given situation. Although we covered the two most common defensive formations in the defensive lineman post, it’s worth repeating:

A total of seven defensive players play near the offensive line in both of these formations. Players who usually start a play in a sprinter’s stance right on the line of scrimmage are defensive linemen, and players who start standing up (usually a few feet to a few yards back from the line of scrimmage) are called linebackers. A 4-3 defense plays with four linemen and three linebackers. A 3-4 defense plays with three linemen and four linebackers.

3-4 Linebacker

Unlike defensive linemen, linebacker positions and responsibilities between 3-4 and 4-3 formations are not so incredibly different. The key difference is between middle and outside linebackers.

Middle or inside Linebackers

The middle or inside linebackers are the quarterbacks of the defense. Particularly in a 4-3 defense when there is only one of them (as opposed to 3-4 when there are two,) they are expected to be the leader of the defense. In our quarterback post we mentioned that the quarterback is the one player on the offense who has a ear-piece in his helmet that allows him to hear his coach between plays. On defense the ear-piece can be in any player’s helmet but it is most frequently in a middle linebacker’s helmet. You can tell who has the ear-piece because they have a little green dot on the outside of their helmet.

A middle linebacker who leads the defense this way gives the rest of the defensive players their assignments, checks out the offensive formation and makes any last-second adjustments before the ball is snapped.

Since they’re positioned in the middle of the field they usually are responsible for covering more ground so they have to be fast. Since they’re positioned in the middle of the field they are also usually involved in more plays… which means more collisions so they have to be strong. Since on top of all of this they also have to be leaders, they tend to be loud, brash, spilling over with charisma.  

Outside LINEBACKERS

Outside linebackers, by contrast, may be limited to covering their half of the field. For example, if a running back takes a hand-off and runs to the defense’s left, the middle and left outside linebackers’ jobs will likely be to fly to the ball and try to bring the ball carrier down. The right outside linebacker’s job, on the other hand, may be to stay on his side of the field, lagging a little behind the play, to make sure the running back can’t reverse direction and get around the defense.

Outside linebackers are also well-positioned to blitz the quarterback, since it’s frequently easier to penetrate the outside of the offensive line than it is to get through the middle. Outside linebackers tend to be slightly smaller and quicker than inside linebackers just like defensive ends are smaller and quicker than defensive tackles and for pretty much the same reason. In both common formations but particularly in a 4-3 defense, the outside linebackers are among the players with the best chance to tackle the quarterback before he can throw the ball to a receiver.

Although they are all linebackers, outside linebackers vary from their inside cousins when it comes to personality. Outside linebackers, because they usually don’t bear the burden of leading the defensive team, and because they have rare talent and can specialize in making explosive plays, tend to be a little more eccentric, sometimes to the point of erraticism. Lawrence Taylor is an extreme example of this. In the 1980s Taylor revolutionized the way outside linebackers played by being faster, stronger, more aggressive, and less predictable than anyone had ever been. He kept quarterbacks and offensive linemen from sleeping the night before they had to face him. He was also a bit crazy. On his Wikipedia page there is a section titled “Drugs and Extreme Measures” and it includes the words crazy, wild, reckless, abandon, aberrant, and controversy.