What is a Defensive Lineman in Football?

A defensive lineman is about as close to the common stereotype of a football player as a slavering bloodthirsty ogre as you will find anywhere on a football field. Defensive linemen are strong and relentlessly aggressive. Although defensive linemen in the NFL average between 260 and 310 pounds, they start each play in a sprinter’s stance. As soon as the play starts, they burst off the line and… most of the time, smash directly into the offensive lineman opposite them. Their goal? Get around the offensive lineman and hit the quarterback. If they can’t get around (or just for the joy of it) they will try to knock the person blocking them down to the ground and run over him to hit the quarterback. If they don’t run the guy over, driving the him backwards into the quarterback works just as well.

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, and What is a Wide Receiver in Football. Today we give the big guys some with What is a Defensive Lineman in Football?

What is a Defensive Lineman in Football?

It’s not all seek and destroy for a defensive lineman though. When the opposing offense calls a run play, the tables can turn on a defensive lineman pretty quickly. During a run play, offensive lineman smash into the defensive linemen^[1] to make space for their running back. On these plays, the defensive lineman has to do his best to hold his ground and deny the running back any room to run.

There are two positions in the defensive lineman category: end and tackle. The responsibilities of these two positions vary significantly based on which of the two basic defensive formations a team plays, which are known as the 4-3 and the 3-4. We will probably do separate posts on common formations sometime, but here’s a four sentence explanation to help with understanding defensive linemen.

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.

4-3 Defensive Ends

These are the stars of the defensive lineman firmament. The defensive end always lines up on the outside of the defensive line. In a 4-3 defense the two defensive linemen are usually the two defensive players closest to the edge of the offensive line. On most plays this means they have the best shot of anyone to get around the offensive line and sack the quarterback. A common strategy for 4-3 defensive ends is to use speed or trickery to get around their opponent to the outside so 4-3 defensive ends tend to be the fastest and lightest of all defensive linemen.

4-3 Defensive Tackles

Defensive tackles are the linemen on the interior of the defensive line.^[2] In a 4-3 formation there are two of them between the two defensive ends. Bigger and slower than 4-3 defensive ends, these guys still have a reasonable chance to get to a quarterback because of the focus the offensive line has to pay to the threatening defensive ends. That said, the main job of the 4-3 defensive tackle is to be good at burrowing through their counterparts on the offensive line to disrupt the flow of running plays that rely on open lanes for the running back.

3-4 Defensive ends

3-4 defensive ends are usually somewhere between 4-3 ends and 4-3 tackles in responsibility, physicality, and talent. In the 3-4 formation, the two outside linebackers are the closest of the seven defenders to the edge of the offensive line and therefore they are the ones who have the best shot at hitting the quarterback. One responsibility that 3-4 defensive ends have that is almost completely unique to them among defensive linemen is to cover an offensive player who is trying to catch a pass. Plays that call for this are called “zone blitzes” and their purpose is to confuse the offensive line by reversing the usual roles of defensive linemen and linebackers. Linebackers rush at the quarterback like banshees while 3-4 defensive ends take a short hiatus from smashing into the offensive line and nimbly step back to prevent a pass getting to its intended target.

Last year, one 3-4 defensive end, J. J. Watt of the Houston Texans, was so incredibly good at hitting the quarterback that he made the impact of a 4-3 defensive end while allowing his team to only play three defensive linemen. When he was on it was almost like his team had an extra defensive player on the field. He is pretty unique.

3-4 Defensive Tackles or Nose Tackles

3-4 defensive tackles are mountains disguised as men. These guys average 300 pounds. Called “nose tackles” because they are the odd center of a three man defensive line, their main responsibility is to stay in place while two or three offensive linemen try to push them backwards. This is called “occupying blockers” and it allows the defenders around them better odds at creating a positive play for the defense. Aside from being physically crazy, nose tackles have got to be really interesting people psychologically — willing to fight against two or three people over and over again with a draw being the most fantastically positive outcome they can expect.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

For the offensive linemen, this is a case of doing unto others as they would do unto them. This either proves that football is either extremely Christian or extremely not Christian. I’m not sure which.↵
In the diagram, one of the two 4-3 defensive tackles is identified as a NT or Nose Tackle. We cover nose tackles in the 3-4 defensive tackle section. I’ve literally never heard anyone call one of the two 4-3 defensive tackles a nose tackle but I’m writing this blog, not whoever created that stupid graphic!↵

What is a Wide Receiver in Football?

Wide receivers are among the most talented athletes in the world. They generally have world-class speed and quickness, strong hands, freakish reflexes and hand-eye coordination and NBA-quality leaping ability. Wide receivers line up on either side of the Offensive Line. There can be as many as five of them on a field for a given play – or there can be none. Their job is to run at a flat out sprint to catch a ball that can be thrown as hard as forty miles per hour and is frequently too high or too low, too far in front or too far behind. Even more than most other positions, wide receivers have to accomplish all this while eleven other physical freaks try to knock their head off.

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, and What is a Defensive Back in Football?. Today we move back to the offense to cover the Wide Receiver position.

What is a Wide Receiver in Football?

When their team calls a passing play, the wide receivers run predetermined routes to get open so the quarterback can pass to them. There are several types of routes. Among the most common are the slant (basically run one yard up the field, then cut violently towards the middle at a 45 degree angle), the post (similar to a slant, except you run further up the field before cutting into the middle) and the fly (JUST RUN!!). If their team calls a running play, the wide receiver’s job is to block the player across from them. For most receivers, it’s not their favorite part of the game so you’ll see a lot of half-hearted attempts to pretend to be blocking…

While an offense may run anywhere between sixty and seventy plays in an average football game, most receivers will not touch the ball more than a few times. They are entirely dependent on the quarterback getting them the ball. A running play will always result in the running back getting the ball; a pass play, even if it is designed to get the ball to a single receiver, gives a quarterback multiple options.

Football-Formation-WR — This is a classic two wide-receiver formation. It once was the most common formation but now has been supplanted by formations with three or four wide receivers. It’s great for diagramming purposes though. Note how there is no slot receiver in this formation.

Wide receivers have a reputation for being divas in and out of the locker room. They tend to be the ones with out-sized personalities, the ones with well-publicized emotional outbursts, and the ones with reality shows. We think this might have something to do with how dependent they are. The receiver only ever gets to do his thing if a lot of other things have happened first: the coach has to call a play with them as an option, the offensive line has to protect the quarterback, the quarterback has to decide to throw to them and then has to execute the throw well enough to give the receiver a shot at the ball.

Some receivers are very outspoken about needing the ball — this attitude might be epitomized by the receiver Keyshawn Johnson who wrote a book called “Just Give Me the Damn Ball” in 1997. As is frequently the case among highly skilled performers, some of them can be a bit…quirky. Receiver Chad Johnson changed his name in 2006 to “Chad Ocho Cinco” which was a poor transliteration of his jersey number 85. His “projects outside of football” section on wikipedia includes “Smartphone apps, Dancing with the Stars, Versus, The Ultimate Catch, WWE, Major League Soccer, Professional Bull Riders event, Acting, and Other pursuits.”

Still, the reputation of wide receivers as high-maintenance divas seems to have been tempered in recent years by the emergence of lower-key superstars like two unrelated Johnsons (Andre from the Houston Texans and Calvin from the Detroit Lions).

While there’s some overlap, receivers generally play two slightly different positions: slot and not slot (this is the default for wide receivers and therefore both has too many names and no name) with two general styles: possession receivers and deep threats. The great receivers are usually a combination of all of them or are so incredibly skilled that they transcend a single category.

Slot Receivers

When there are more than two wide receivers on the field, they can’t all be the farthest away from the center of the field. Any receiver that lines up between the widest wide receiver and the offensive line is said to be in the “slot.” Players who more often than not line up there are slot receivers. The slot receiver deals with a more chaotic universe of overlapping routes, charging linebackers, and more complicated blocking assignments. Because it is harder for a receiver who lines up in the middle of the field to get wide open deep down the field, slot receivers often play with a possession style than a deep threat style.

Possession Receivers

Possession receivers are generally smaller, quicker and have more reliable hands. They’re the type of player likely to be described as “shifty,” as opposed to the type who relies on flat out speed. They run shorter routes that result in easier and safer throws and catches. Their goal is not to gain huge chunks of yards at once or score in a single play – instead, they run routes that get them the ball between 5-15 yards of the line of scrimmage. These plays are successful more consistently than those that involve throwing the ball farther down the field so receivers that specialize in them help their team move the chains (get first downs) and keep the ball for longer offensive possessions.

Great possession receivers, however, can turn small gains into large gains by avoiding tackles after they’ve caught the ball. A receiver’s Yards After Catch is a statistical measurement of this ability.

Example: Wes Welker (Denver Broncos, formerly of the New England Patriots) is the most talked about modern example.

Deep Threats

These receivers are fast. As in, “they probably ran track in college and are just a hair slower than Olympic sprinters” fast. Sometimes the defensive backs covering them will have a ten yard head start, will know the guy is going to try and run past him…and will still not be able to keep up. There’s not much else to say about them: they line up, they run as fast as they can and they try to get behind the defense. Sometimes these receivers leave a bit to be desired in the hands (catching ability) department because teams place such a premium on speed.

Deep threats catch fewer passes because throwing the ball 30-40 yards is a lower-percentage proposition than throwing it 5-10 yards. But each catch is usually spectacular and can have a huge impact on the game.

Examples: Mike Wallace, Desean Jackson

What is a Defensive Back in Football?

Defensive backs are the smaller, quicker, and faster defensive players who frequently serve as a defense’s backstop – the last, best hope at stopping an offensive player who’s gotten loose. They’re the players you’ll see lined up across from wide receivers or otherwise spread out, usually 10 or so yards behind the line of scrimmage – though some of them may play closer to the line of scrimmage and even blitz (a berserker-like attempt to hit the quarterback before he can throw the ball) occasionally.

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 and What is a Quarterback in Football. We move to the defensive side today to cover the Defensive Backs.

What is a Defensive Back in Football?

Defensive backs have a wide array of assignments and physical skills. They have to be strong enough to tackle a running back who is running at full speed and skilled and crafty enough to closely follow the path of a wide receiver doing his best to get open for a pass from his quarterback. The defensive back spends a lot of his time running backwards at full speed. They have to be quick enough to follow the moves of the wide receiver. It’s like following in a couples dance with an insanely athletic partner who not only won’t tell you what the moves are but is actively trying to trick you.

Defenses use their own brand of trickery to try to regain the initiative the offensive side has. Defensive players engage in a dizzying array of schemes to cover receivers. Diagrams of these schemes are as complicated as a molecular model but for our purposes there are three overarching coverage concepts: man to man coverage, where each defensive player is assigned to cover a specific offensive player, no matter what happens; zone coverage, where each defensive player has responsibility for a specific area of the field and covers any player who comes through; or, a combination, where, for example, two defensive backs may cover one talented receiver while the other defensive backs play zone on the rest of the field.

Defensive Back Diagram — The players represented by the red shaded blocks are all defensive backs. CB = cornerback, FS = free safety, and SS = strong safety. The opposing offense lines up below this diagram and they are trying to move the ball up.

There are a lot of other terms associated with coverage schemes – “jamming” a receiver, for example, basically means grabbing him and keeping him from leaving the line of scrimmage. The “bump and run” is a type of coverage where defensive backs jam the receiver for a second just to throw the play’s timing off, then turn and run with him. There are many more, but the general concepts outlined above should give you a good foundation.

You’ll occasionally hear commentators say that an offensive player made it to the second or third “level” of the defense, which refers to how far down the field he was tackled. The first level means the player was stopped by the defensive linemen, usually for a short gain; second means he was stopped by a linebacker for a medium gain (3-6 yards) and the third meaning he made it into the defensive backfield and was tackled, after a longer gain, by a….well…defensive back.

What Kinds of Defensive Backs are There?

Cornerbacks

Cornerbacks have a single job: they cover the opposing teams’ wide receivers, running as close as possible to them to prevent the quarterback from completing a pass. Oh sure, they’ll tackle a running back if he happens to come their way and no one stops him first – but they’re not known for their tackling prowess and it’s sometimes amusing to watch them avoid tackling someone.

Not surprisingly, cornerbacks are the players you see lined up directly across from the receivers. They’re selected based on their speed and “ball skills” – a fancy term for the ability to intercept or knock down a pass. One of the cynical running jokes in football is that if cornerbacks could actually catch, they’d be wide receivers – but since they can’t, they do the job where it’s simply knocking the ball down is considered a success.

In reality, nowadays NFL teams put a premium on pass defense for the simple reason that the league features more prolific passing offenses. As a result, cornerbacks are frequently just as athletic as the receivers they cover. They’re just as likely, if not more likely, to return punts and kickoffs in addition to their primary responsibilities, specifically because they’re so fast and athletic (and, the cynic would say, because returning kicks is dangerous enough that the league has talked about removing them from the game, teams use defensive backs for this job because they’re less valuable than wide receivers.)

A lockdown corner – a cornerback who effectively renders one of the elite receivers in the league ineffective all game without help from his teammates – is one of the most valuable commodities in the league.

Example: Darrell Revis

Safeties

Safeties are cornerbacks who hit. They’re bigger, meaner, tougher and have to be strong tacklers because, in addition to covering receivers, they are tasked with stopping the bigger, stronger tight ends and running backs. All the best safeties are known for being able to “read” what an offense is about to do and get to where the ball is going to be almost as if they had been told before-hand what the play was. A safety who uses his instinct and intellect to “read” an offense like this better be right, because they – as their name implies – are the last line of defense. If an offensive player gets by the safety, there’s a pretty good chance he’s going to score.

There are two types of safeties: the strong safety and the free safety. The distinction is fairly technical and has to do with where they line up on the field and what their responsibilities are once the play starts.

Examples: Troy Polumalu (Strong Safety), Ed Reed (Free Safety)

What are the Fantasy Football Implications of Defensive Backs?

In 95% of all fantasy football leagues, a fantasy team consists of individual offensive players while defensive players get lumped in together as a unit. In this majority of leagues, the impact of defensive players in general is limited. A few leagues play with both individual offensive and defensive players and there are even a small number of leagues that only care about defensive players. In leagues that play with individual defensive players (called IDP leagues) the big plays that defensive backs make, like interceptions (catching a pass by the opposing team’s quarterback,) forcing a fumble, or getting a sack (tackling the opposing team’s quarterback when he has the ball behind the line of scrimmage) give a fantasy team lots of points. These plays are very hard to predict though, so most teams will opt to use players who may get a big play once in a while but will definitely provide a steady stream of points by tackling offensive players. When it comes to defensive backs, these players are usually safeties and sometimes really back cornerbacks that struggle to prevent opposing wide receivers from catching the ball.

What is a Quarterback in Football?

The quarterback is the most visible person on a football team. In high-school he is the one with the bleached blond hair and all the most desirable girlfriends (or boyfriends in a particularly open high-school community.) When the team wins the quarterback gets the most credit and when the team loses the quarterback takes even more of the criticism. Six of the highest ten paid players in the NFL are quarterbacks. Whether the quarterback really deserves all this attention is arguable, but it matches how most people watch a football game. As soon as a football play starts, the quarterback has the ball and almost every eye in the stadium and on TV follows him until he throws the ball or is tackled.

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?

A great quarterback has to have a rare mix of physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities. He has to have a strong throwing arm, great footwork, and enough physical toughness to pick himself up and keep playing after a couple 300 pound defensive players crush him into the turf. A less obvious but essential physical quality is a strong, untiring voice. Quarterbacks have to communicate with their teammates over the noise of the crowd. Although teams do develop systems of hand-signals and other physical cues to use when it gets too noisy, these are measures of last resort. Quarterbacks vary in terms of emotional bearing — some go for cool and confident while others are fiery and combative — but they all have to be able to inspire their teammates. With all the attention focused on them, they also have to foster a type of willing amnesia in themselves. No matter how big of a mistake they or one of their teammates make, they need to get up and treat the next play as if the last one never happened. Quarterback is not necessarily the most intellectual position on the field (that prize probably goes to the offensive line that protects the quarterback) but it requires a wide understanding of where every player on the field is, an encyclopedic memory of plays, and unbelievably quick decision-making.

A given play for a quarterback goes something like this:

Listen to the play the coach has chosen for you to run. (Quarterbacks are the only offensive player on the field with an earpiece in their helmets so they can hear the coach talk to them between plays.)
Relay the play to the rest of the offensive players on the field
Look at how the defensive players on the field have lined up and are moving around. Assess how the play you’re about to run is going to fare and, if it’s bad, audible (i.e. switch) to a better play.
Get the ball and do a little fancy footwork moving backwards while simultaneously scanning the field to find someone on your team to throw the ball to.
While looking down-field at your receivers, use your instincts, your ears, and your peripheral vision to keep track of whether or not someone is about to drive you painfully into the turf.
Throw the ball or, if no one is open, find a spot on the field where there aren’t any (or many) defense-men and run like the blazes in that direction.

The first three things happen before the time the ball is snapped, but everything else has to happen in an average of 2.5 to 3 seconds.

What Kinds of Quarterbacks are There?

Quarterbacks are categorized into two styles: pocket passers and running quarterbacks.

A pocket passer is a quarterback whose first through ninth option on a passing play is to throw the ball. If he cannot find anyone good to throw the ball to, he’ll usually find a way of “throwing the ball away.”^[1] The word “pocket” in the phrase “pocket passer” refers to the protected area that a team’s blockers try to create for their quarterback. A pocket passer is not unathletic — he’s usually very adept at sliding around in the pocket to avoid defenders that make it through his blockers — he just very rarely chooses to run with the ball past the line of scrimmage.

A running quarterback is sort of what it sounds like but not quite. As opposed to the pocket passer, a running quarterback is one whose first through approximately third option on a passing play is to throw the ball. Once in a while a team will call a play that intends for the quarterback to run the ball into the opposing team’s territory. Most of the time the plays a team calls with a running quarterback are the same as with a pocket passer, it’s just that there is a much higher chance that a running quarterback will run with the ball. The running quarterback style combines all of the qualities of a pocket passer with the physicality of a running back.

Historically, there has been an insidious racist belief that black athletes couldn’t succeed in positions that required a lot of intellect or leadership, but that they were somehow more “naturally athletic” than white athletes. Black athletes were therefore relegated to playing running back, wide receiver, and defensive positions. Despite the long history of black quarterbacks in the NFL, people continue to associate whiteness with unathletic pocket passing quarterbacks and blackness with athletic running quarterbacks. These beliefs inform both how people think about and view quarterback performance AND the choices made by developing young athletes and their coaches.

What is clear is that there have been lots of great quarterbacks in every combination of white, black, running, and pocket. There have been great black running quarterbacks: Randall Cunningham, Steve McNair, Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick. And great white running quarterbacks: John Elway, Steve Young. Excellent black pocket passers like Warren Moon and Doug Williams. And wonderful white pocket passers: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Dan Marino.

What is the Fantasy Football Importance of the Quarterback?

Quarterbacks score the most points in most fantasy leagues but are traditionally not the most important position. This is because there’s less difference between the best quarterback and an average quarterback than there is between the best running back or wide receiver or tight-end and an average player in that position. Also, most fantasy leagues use the stats from two or three running backs and wide receivers on each team but only one quarterback. In only a few of the last seven years has an unexpectedly excellent performance by the best statistical quarterback in the league made having the best quarterback more important than having the best running back or wide receiver. Logic aside, because watching football involves a lot of watching quarterbacks, having a bad quarterback on your fantasy team, like on your real-life team, is a sure-fire way to make yourself miserable. Don’t make yourself miserable, get a good quarterback but you don’t need to shoot for a great one to win your fantasy league.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

There is a rule against intentionally grounding the ball but there are enough loopholes in it that a clever quarterback can usually find a safe way of throwing the ball at no one and moving on to the next play that isn’t ruled a foul.↵

Cue Cards 7-22-13: Golf and Soccer

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.

Sport: Golf
When: Thursday through Sunday, July 17-21
Context: The British Open
Result: Phil Mickelson won
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

Tiger Woods — in golf, at least in the United States for the past decade or so, the story is almost always Tiger Woods. He was tied for second place after three of the four days in the tournament but had a bad last day. Once thought to have a good shot of becoming the golfer with the most major tournament wins, Tiger remains stuck at fourteen since his personal scandal in 2008.
Phil Mickelson — the winner will get some press too. He was tied for ninth coming into Sunday and played an incredibly good last round of golf on Sunday. This is particularly remarkable considering he was winning the last big tournament before he messed it up in its last day.

What’s Next: The next major tournament is the PGA Championships on August 8-11.

Sport: Soccer
Teams: The United States and El Salvador
When: Sunday, July 21
Context: The quarterfinals of the Gold Cup, a regional tournament held every year to determine the champion of the North American, Central American, and Caribbean region
Result: The United States wins 5-1
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

Streaking — The United States Men’s national team has now won nine games in a row, its longest streak ever.
Landon Donovan — For years Donovan has been the consensus best American player and the leader of its national team through three World Cups. In the last few months the new coach Jurgen Klinsmann has decided not to use Donovan for important national team games. This tournament has been seen as a chance for Donovan to prove that he is still a valuable enough player to be included in the US lineup for next year’s World Cup in Brazil. Donovan played very well yesterday and headlines today suggest that Donovan “has his swagger back” and “proved he belongs.”

What’s Next: The United States will face Honduras in the semifinals on Wednesday, July 24 at 7 pm. The other semifinal game is Panama vs. Mexico at 10 pm that night.

What is a Running Back in Football?

If football were a farm, the running back would be the pig. Like a good pig, a good running back is compact, strong, and very hard to catch. The job of a running back is multifaceted. Running backs are expected to be able to catch the football reliably and to prevent defenders, who are often much bigger than them, from getting to the quarterback, but that’s only part of it: the primary job of the running back is to take a few steps, grab the football as it’s handed to them, and then charge off down the field while avoiding as many defenders as possible before being tackled or pushed out-of-bounds.

Running back is one of the toughest jobs in football. A running back either gets hit or hits a defender on almost every single play. Sometimes both happen in a single play. Running backs have the shortest professional careers of all the positions (4.35 years according to a 2002 Dartmouth study), but they make up in immediate impact what they lose in longevity. Running backs don’t waste time growing into their professional careers; unlike other positions, they can be effective right out of the gate. The diverse skill set of a great running back includes some very unexpected qualities, like great peripheral vision and low center of gravity.

There is an overall trend in professional football to run the ball less and throw it more. This has made running backs a less important part of football strategy. The running back remains essential to most teams’ fortunes but there is a romantic air of inevitable obsolescence that lingers around the position.

What Kinds of Running Backs are There?

Feature back

A feature back is the running back on a team that gives the majority of its carries (plays when a running back takes a hand-off and runs the ball up the field) to a single person. A great running back can make an enormous difference to a team’s fortunes so it’s no surprise that teams who have star running backs feature them a lot. Twenty carries per game has traditionally been the average that defines a feature back but, like the fullback, this number has declined in the past ten years. Last year only three running backs averaged more than 20 carries per game over the whole 16 game season.

You won’t hear a lot of people refer to a running back as a feature back — it’s a term that will be used to differentiate one person who plays the running back position from another who does it but does it in a different way. As you might expect from a position that requires so many different skills, there are players who specialize in one aspect of the position. Increasingly over the past ten years, teams have used several specialized running backs instead of one great generalist. This approach is called “running back by committee.”

Fullback

The fullback is a blocking specialist. He often lines up right in front of a running back and uses himself as a bowling ball, scattering would-be tacklers away from the path of the running back who has the ball. Fullbacks are big, hulking guys with necks the size of medium-sized tree trunks. Alas, the fullback is a dying breed in the NFL. Over the past fifteen years, teams have gradually moved away from using fullbacks. This season it will be pretty rare to see a fullback on the field. Although the fullback is officially one type of running back, it is specialized enough that it’s basically considered another position, as opposed to the types of running backs we’re about to describe.

Third-Down Back

The third-down back is usually a smaller, quicker running back who is better than most at catching the ball. This is dictated by the situation teams find themselves in on third downs. If a team is not within a yard or two of getting a first down, they will almost definitely be passing the ball. The third down back is the best running back on the offense for when the team is planning on passing. Sometimes, instead of playing their best receiving running back on third down, teams will choose to put a veteran who can reliably “read the blitz” (figure out who it’s their job to block). When it comes down to it, regardless of strategy, the third down back is a back who plays mostly on third down.

Goal-Line Back

Some teams have a running back who specializes in getting into the end-zone when their offense is within five yards of scoring a touchdown. Like a third-down back, this specialty is defined by situation. Unlike the third-down back, the goal line back tends to be bigger and stronger instead of quicker and more wriggly. Plays close to the end-zone are much more compact than those that start somewhere in the middle of the field, because all twenty-two players on the field are smushed into only a few yards instead of the twenty to thirty yards that could be expected otherwise. Goal line backs use patience and vision to find small weak spots in the defense and then use their formidable strength to push through them to make it to the end-zone.

What is the Fantasy Football Importance of the Running Back?

Traditionally the running back was the most important position in fantasy football. This is because most fantasy football leagues require each fantasy team (twelve is the most common number) to use the stats from two running backs each week but only one quarterback. The statistical difference between the best quarterback and the twelfth best was not as great as that between the best running back and the twenty-fourth best. This is still true today but much less so because of the overall decline in use of the running game and the splintering of the position into specialist running backs that split the work. As in real life, fantasy fortunes are often cyclical, so the glory days of a running back’s importance may come again.

Stanley Cup Popcorn, an Explosive Hockey Gift

Hockey’s championship trophy, the Stanley Cup, is the best trophy in sports. It’s giant, it’s shiny, and it reeks of tradition. In our post about why people like hockey we wrote that the summer after players win the cup:

“each player gets a day with the cup. They can take it to their home town, take it to their favorite vacation spot, to visit a hospital, or a bar… they drink champagne from it or eat cereal. Some have slept with it in their beds.”

According to Wikipedia, one of hockey’s oldest traditions “dictates that the winning team drink champagne from the top bowl after their victory.” They claim that players have been doing this since 1896 when the Winnipeg Victorias gulped down some celebratory bubbly.

Now you can get give the hockey fan in your life the thrill of their life every night with the NHL League Logo Stanley Cup Popcorn Maker. For full disclosure, this Stanley Cup is not actually authentic, but a precedent for popcorn was set in 2000 when New Jersey Devils goaltender Martin Brodeur took the Cup to the movies with his family, filled the cup with popcorn, and went to town!

I see no reason why you and a loved one shouldn’t sip champagne from the top while you share some popcorn from the bottom!

Thanks to our friends at Yahoo’s Puck Daddy for this amazing gift idea.

What is a Good Football Book? The Blind Side

Dear Sports Fan,

I have a question for you from my coworker. He is making a last ditch attempt to get his wife interested in sports, especially pro football. She loves murder mysteries, so he asked for book recommendations that would merge the two. Do you have any recommendations? Preferably murder mysteries, but any engaging book will do!

Thanks,
Helen

— — —

Dear Helen,

Last ditch attempt, huh? I too am a lover of detective novels but when it comes to introducing someone to American Football through a mind-blowingly good read, there’s only one book I would recommend: Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side. I know you might be thinking “wasn’t that that chick flick from a couple years back starring the woman from Speed?” And you’d be right — yes, the material from the book was made into a movie starring Sandra Bullock in 2009. I’ve seen parts of it and I think it’s probably a good movie but it probably wouldn’t get your friend’s wife into football. The book? The book might just do it.

Michael Lewis is an economist and a writer and a sports fan and he uses all three to great success in The Blind Side. The book has two key chronological stories. One, the one that the movie focuses on, is the story of a young, poor black boy growing up near Memphis. Michael Oher, the kid, is taken in by a rich white family and grows physically and academically until he is a 6’4″, 300 pound potential star college and eventual high NFL draft pick playing the position of left tackle. This is a great story in and of itself, and Lewis does a great job telling it without flinching or sensationalizing any of its many dicey elements — from Oher’s extreme poverty, to his academic and social struggles, to the suspicion that the Tuohy family (who basically adopt Oher) have designs on his playing for their alma mater, Ole Miss.

The other side of the story is a remarkably accessible history of football’s tactical evolution from being dominated by teams that could run the ball the best to teams that pass the ball the best and the effect that this evolution had on the position of left tackle. The left tackle is one of the offensive line-men, and thirty years ago the left tackle was just one of the offensive linemen, the big guys whose job it is to either clear the defense away from where the running back wants to run or to protect the quarterback from defensive players). As football began to tilt towards emphasizing the pass and the left tackle starting increasing in importance until around the time Michael Oher was in high school, when the left tackle was usually one of the top three players in terms of salary and importance. Why the left instead of the right tackle? Well, because most quarterbacks are right handed, when they prepare to throw the ball, their body is perpendicular to where they want to throw it, with their right arm cocked back. In this position, they cannot see defenders attacking them from the left side of the field. The left tackle protects a quarterback’s blind side when he is passing the ball.

The brilliance of the book and the cleverness of its title comes also from a mostly hidden third narrative. This narrative asks a tough question about our society. If so many semi-miraculous things had to go right for Michael Oher’s talent to make him successful, how many other talented poor children are we missing out on? If rags to riches is so insanely difficult on the football field, where talent is so objectively measurable (again — 6’4″, 300 pounds, and unbelievably athletic) how difficult is it for our society to identify talent in more subjective fields? The quarterback’s blind side makes him vulnerable to defensive rushes. He needs a strong left tackle to protect him. Social stratification makes our culture vulnerable to missing out on some of its brightest talents. Where’s our country’s left tackle? On top of being a touching story and a great tactical history of football, The Blind Side, is an insightful, challenging book about America.

Let me know if this works,
Ezra Fischer

Is Tennis Sexist? Andy Murray at Wimbledon

Dear Sports Fan,

Is tennis sexist? After Andy Murray won at Wimbledon last week I heard a bunch of stuff about gender politics. What gives?

Thanks,
Amy

The Championships - Wimbledon 2013: Day Thirteen — No one claims Andy Murray is sexist, but what about the sport he plays?

—- —- —

Dear Amy,

I don’t know if tennis is inherently sexist. There are a couple things about the sport and its culture and history that are controversially gendered if not out and out sexist. Two things happened last week that brought these feelings to the surface.

Last Sunday Andy Murray won the Men’s Finals at Wimbledon. Wimbledon is one of the four big tennis tournaments of the year and the only one that takes place in England. It drips with history and nationalism. The last time a British man had won Wimbledon was 1936 and before last week the British people were desperate for a local champion. Way back in 2006 ESPN ran an article about this entitled “Decline of the British Empire” in which it detailed the continued failure of the best British men’s tennis player at the time, Tim Henman:

“WIMBLEDON, England — The autopsy was predictably grim. For the 13th consecutive year, Tim Henman — led by the dour and disheartened British scribes — discussed his failure at the All England Club.”

The same year, the ESPN scribe Greg Garber identified a 19 year old Andy Murray as being the future hope of the British people. Seven years later, he finally won. As you might expect, the reaction of the British fans was enormous. Deadspin.com re-posted the almost messianic image on the front cover of the English newspaper The Times. After 77 years a Brit had won Wimbledon!! But wait, hold on a second, said a few small voices, hadn’t some British women won Wimbledon in the intervening years between 1936 and 2013? One of those voices, that of the feminist blogger and media personality Chloe Angyal, was in tweet form, retweeted almost 20,000 times:

Murray is indeed the first Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years unless you think women are people.

The reverberations of this statement made it into the mainstream press even in England where The Guardian ran an article about the controversy and pointed out that not one but four British women have won Wimbledon since the last British man before Murray won the tournament.

Meanwhile, also on Twitter, another gendered conflict was brewing. A fan (or theoretically a troll) tweeted Andy Murray to say that he thought Serena Williams, the great women’s tennis champion, could beat Murray on grass. Murray went with it and tweeted back that he thought so to and that maybe someday they would play. For those readers who are tennis fans or over the age of 50 this probably brings back memories of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’ Battle of the Sexes in 1973. Riggs was a former top men’s professional tennis player. At the age of 55 he became one of the sport’s great villains by claiming that women’s tennis was inferior to men’s and that he could, even at his age, beat top female players. His challenge was taken up first by Margaret Court, a great women’s player, and then after he beat her, by Billie Jean King. King was another great women’s player but not as great as Margaret Court, who won 24 major tournaments in her career, which remains a record. King was and is much more high profile off the court as an advocate for the game of tennis and for sexual equality. King beat Riggs soundly in front of a television audience of over 50 million.

The proposed match between Murray and Williams has none of the chauvinistic feel of the Riggs v. King spectacle. Both players are close to the top of their abilities and, though this would likely make it less of a close contest (Serena herself said she doubted she’d “win a point,”) it also significantly lowers the stakes when it comes to humiliation. Both players have responded to the idea as a fun exhibition for the sport of tennis and my guess is that if the match happens it will be all about making creative points on the court, not political points.

1973 was a breakthrough year for women’s tennis in another way — it was the year that the U.S. Open, the first major tennis tournament to do so, equalized the prize money between men and women. It took a long time for the other three major tournaments to follow suit. The Australian Open equalized in 2000 and the final two, the French Open and Wimbledon, didn’t until 2007. These moves have not been without criticism from players who point out that men and women tennis players are getting paid for different amounts of work. What’s that you say? That’s right, men continue to play best three out of five sets in major tournaments while the women play best two out of three. This may not sound like a big deal but it means that women’s finals at Wimbledon have averaged around 90 minutes in the past 30 or so years, while the men’s finals have averaged 150 minutes.^[1] Many protest that the message this sends is that women are less able to hold up against the rigors of a long match, and tennis will remain at least somewhat sexist as long as this is true.^[2] As the UK Telegraph concludes in their article about this conundrum, “equal pay can ultimately be justified only be equal play.”

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Possibly ironically, I got this stat from a blog post that used it to argue in favor of giving male tennis players more money for winning than female tennis players.↵
Any readers who think that women actually couldn’t stand the rigors of a long match, please read Brian Phillips’ excellent Grantland piece about the Iditarod which features Aliy Zirkle, a woman who places a close second in the 1,000 mile week-long pain-fest of a dogsled race.↵

Did a Woman Strike Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig?

Jackie-Mitchell-1 — Ruth and Gehrig look on as Jackie Mitchell warms up.

From Tony Horwitz in the Smithsonian Magazine comes the true story of a woman who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back to back in a baseball game in 1931. Back in those days it was more common for today to have professional teams that existed outside of the structure of the major leagues. The Harlem Globetrotters are the only example of this today that I can think of and though they have a rich competitive history, today they rarely play games against major league teams. The Chattanooga Lookouts (who still exist today as a minor league affiliate of the LA Dodgers) were an independent team with an entertaining history. Reports Horwitz, “The Lookouts’ new president, Joe Engel, was a showman and promoter whose many stunts included trading a player for a turkey, which was cooked and served to sportswriters.”

In 1931 Engel signed 17 year-old pitcher Jackie Mitchell to a contract days before playing the New York Yankees in two exhibition games. On April 2, Mitchell got her chance to pitch after the Lookout’s starting pitcher gave up hits to the first two batters he faced:

First up was Ruth, who tipped his hat at the girl on the mound “and assumed an easy batting stance,” a reporter wrote. Mitchell went into her motion, winding her left arm “as if she were turning a coffee grinder.” Then, with a side-armed delivery, she threw her trademark sinker (a pitch known then as “the drop”). Ruth let it pass for a ball. At Mitchell’s second offering, Ruth “swung and missed the ball by a foot.” He missed the next one, too, and asked the umpire to inspect the ball. Then, with the count 1-2, Ruth watched as Mitchell’s pitch caught the outside corner for a called strike three. Flinging his bat down in disgust, he retreated to the dugout.

Next to the plate was Gehrig, who would bat .341 in 1931 and tie Ruth for the league lead in homers. He swung at and missed three straight pitches. But Mitchell walked the next batter, Tony Lazzeri, and the Lookouts’ manager pulled her from the game, which the Yankees went on to win, 14-4.

Was it real? Horwitz tries hard not to take too strong of a position on either side but it seems to me that he favors it not being completely honest. He notes the game was originally scheduled for April 1 (for those wondering, April Fool’s day is apparently really old; like 1392 old!) and that Ruth’s reported rage seems, in the few remaining photos of the game, to be a little tongue-in-cheek. For her part, Mitchell always insisted that it was real. Of striking out the two hall-of-famers, she said:

“Why, hell, they were trying, damn right,” she said of Ruth and Gehrig not long before her death in 1987. “Hell, better hitters than them couldn’t hit me. Why should they’ve been any different?

Hope you enjoy the article here and you can follow the Smithsonian magazine on twitter @SmithsonianMag. Thanks to Deadspin.com for leading me to the article on their post here.