How do I Begin to Enjoy Football?

Dear Sports Fan,

My partner is a big football fan and I’m wondering if there are any tricks to start enjoying watching football more. I want to be able to enjoy a game with him but the game seems so complicated that it’s hard to know where to start in trying to understand it.

Thanks,
Ken

Dear Ken,

I imagine this is a problem that many football watching newbies face. One of the sports blogs I read, Deadspin, jokingly addressed this issue the other day in a post titled, “Football is the Hardest Sport to Explain to Children and Dumb People.” In it, the author Drew Magary describes the problem and through his tongue-in-cheek impatient vulgarity, describes the reward for those who develop football understanding:

Football… almost goes out of its way to keep you at arm’s length. You can’t watch football for the first time and know, intuitively, what the hell is going on. The announcers don’t pause to explain every little thing to you, which is good because that would be really fucking annoying. But even the referees don’t know the rules to the game anymore. It can all be rather intimidating…

It takes a while to figure out what’s going on in a football game but, once you’ve got the basics down, watching becomes intensely rewarding.

Fear not though Ken, I think that I may have one little thing that you can do each play that will get you in engaged in the game and will teach you a lot about football along the way.

Once you understand the basics of down and distance (and if you don’t, I wrote a post about it a while back) the next thing to do is play the run or pass game. The rules are simple — as soon as the ball is snapped to start a play, shout out RUN or PASS. If you are watching with a friend or your partner and you are sporting people, put a small wager on each play. According to wikianswers.com there are around 125 plays in a football game. So put 10 cents on each play and you’ll end up being able to buy your friend a beer or a popcorn.

Here are three tips you can use to win the game:

  1. Think about the down and distance. If it’s second or third down and the team with the ball needs less than three yards to get a first down, they are more likely to run the ball. If it’s third and ten to fifteen yards, the team is likely to throw.
  2. Watch the offensive line. The Center (who snaps the ball to the Quarterback,) the Guards (the two men on either side of him,) and the Tackles (the two men on the outside of the Guards) will usually try to knock the defensive players opposite them backwards if it is a run play. If it is a pass play, the offensive line will usually fall back, allowing the defensive line to move forwards, but trying to maintain a protective “pocket” around the quarterback so he can throw the ball before he is tackled.
  3. When in doubt, guess Pass. The NFL has slowly been evolving into a league where most teams pass most of the time. Last year teams passed 57% of the time, tied for the highest in NFL history.
Hope this makes watching games more interesting. Let me know how it goes!
Happy Watching,
Ezra Fischer 

What's the Difference Between the Two Leagues in Baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Explain baseball to me. I might start paying attention. What do I need to know to do that? I hear there are differences between the leagues. If it matters, I care about the Tigers and the ways in which they play.

Thanks,
Lisa

 

Dear Lisa,

I’ve got to start out by declaring that I’m not a baseball fan. In fact, I think baseball is pretty damn boring. And, although I live less than ten minutes away from the Mets’ home stadium, I don’t have a favorite team. So, I’m going to leave the explaining of baseball and why you should pay attention to my colleagues Dean Russell Bell and John DeFilippis who are Phillies and Yankees fans accordingly and much more passionate about baseball. They probably both hate the Tigers though, so good luck with that.

What I can help you with is the difference between the National League and the American League. Baseball is the only sport that I know of where a single league is split into two divisions that actually play with slightly different rules. Yes, this is really weird. Imagine what it would be like if big institutional investors got to play by different rules when buying stock than us normal people do. Oh wait.

The difference in rules between the National and American leagues is small but it has some interesting consequences. In the National League, the pitcher takes a turn hitting once every nine batters, just like everyone else on the team. In the American League, the pitcher is excused from hitting and his turn hitting is taken by a player who does nothing but hit. This player, called the designated hitter, just sits on the bench while his team is pitching and fielding.

Let us pause for a second to remark upon how completely absurd this is before we continue. Pitchers in the American League are paid millions of dollars a year and are considered top-flight professional athletes and yet they are not expected to take part in an elemental part of the game of baseball? Are they too fragile? Not skilled enough? I really don’t understand this at all? I know I only have one season of little league in my history, but it seemed to me like when we were young, the best athletes played pitcher. When did they forget how to hit? Babe Ruth, the famous slugger whose last World Series hit ever was a home run that he may or may not have called by pointing to the fence before he hit the ball way over it… started his career as a pitcher!

In any event, this little rule difference has some interesting downstream effects on strategy and tactics. Baseball is not an incredibly high scoring game. Combined scores average fewer than ten runs. Adding a very good hitter and subtracting a usually bad one, as the American League Designated Hitter rule does, creates a small but real increase in the average score of American League teams. Mostly what it does is make it less likely for American League teams to win 2-0. So, they tend to build their entire line-ups based on this fact. They concentrate on finding bigger, stronger, slower guys who can hit home-runs. The fact that they can play these guys in a game without needing them to run around and try to catch the ball helps too! The National League teams, on the other hand, feel like they might be able to win with fewer runs, so they tend towards smaller, faster players who can steal bases, bunt, and play excellent defense.

The tactical effect of the DH rule comes into play when switching pitchers in the National League. Most pitchers these days don’t play the whole game. At some point the starting pitcher will come out of the game and a relief pitcher will come in. Often several relief pitchers will finish the game out. The last of these pitchers, a guy who specializes in pitching the last inning of games is called the closer. Sometimes the team will just sub one pitcher in for the next, but more often, the team will take the opportunity of removing their pitcher to sneak a good hitter into the lineup for a single at bat.

It works like this. A pitcher pitches an inning and in the next half of an inning, his turn to hit comes up in the batting order. The manager replaces him with a good hitter. The hitter hits or… more likely fails. When it’s this team’s turn to pitch again, the pitcher is officially this good hitter. Which would not be good… but, they have the opportunity to substitute again and they take out the hitter and replace him with a relief pitcher. Voila! They’ve switched pitchers AND bought themselves an extra good batter in the nine man rotation.

It gets much more complicated but in my opinion not that much less boring 😉 Hopefully one of my colleagues will take on the challenge of explaining to you and me why baseball is really, really, not boring after all.

Until then,
Ezra Fischer 

Can You Help Me Understand the Playoff Beard?

Dear Sports Fan,

The guy I’m dating has started to grow a “playoff beard” to support his favorite hockey team. Can you tell me what he could possibly be thinking? And is there anything I can do to stop him?

Thanks,
Sonja

Dear Sonja,

The growing of a playoff beard in the context of a relationship can be a very delicate issue, particularly if you are not into your beau’s tonsorial experiment for stylistic reasons. We must deal with whether it’s okay to try to influence the beard, and if so, what the best methods are.

In most cases, I would argue that a partner’s appearance is out of bounds. Everyone influences their partner’s style by complimenting them on certain choices and staying silent on others. It’s even okay to say things like, “Honey, those neon teal capris are very flattering on you, but I think I prefer the way a simple pair of jeans allows your natural elegance to shine through.” It’s fine to express an opinion, but when it comes to actually asking, negotiating, or demanding a stylistic change… that crosses a line and becomes an infringement on your partner’s individuality and personal control.

Is a playoff beard really a choice of style though? I don’t think so. I think it’s an element of fandom divorced from[1] style. It’s more akin to painting your face on game day or wearing giant foam fingers[2] than cutting bangs into your hair. It’s very likely that he is doing this because somewhere deep down, he feels like his actions will affect the success of his team. This is as obviously insane as it is common.

One argument you could make is that the playoff beard isn’t really as much of a rule as people think it is. The playoff beard is a relatively recent tradition, having been started by the New York Islanders in the 1980s. It was immediately correlated with victory when the Islanders won four Stanley Cup championships in a row.[3] The NHL has been around since 1917, so the majority of its history has been spent sans beard. Even since 1980 there have been lulls and resurgences in the popularity of the playoff beard. For instance, in 2009 the Detroit Red Wings used the slogan “The Beard is Back” on their way to the finals. Unless your date is a Red Wings fan, he probably hates that team. Ask him if he really wants to be a part of something the Red Wings “brought back.”

If you prefer the indirect approach, here are a couple things you might want to try.

  • Wait until day four. This is probably the itchiest day in the history of the universe. Watch for a particularly agonized moment and mention how much more you enjoy kissing his neck when it’s smooth.
  • According to the rules of playoff beards, not being able to grow a beard does not excuse you. For example, Patrick Kane grew a playoff mullet a couple years back. Tell your boyfriend that you’re going to join him this playoff season as best you can. According to the rules, “Women are not exempt from playoff beards.  Some refuse to shave their legs…others get more…um…creative.  I’ll just leave it at that.”

Your third option is to embrace the playoff beard! You might be surprised at how much you grow to like the “fuzzy and furry facial accoutrement” growing on his face. The female bloggers over at Puck Daddy certainly do — they just wrote a “Guide to 2012 Stanley Cup scruff.” Encourage him to take part in the beard-based charity drive at Beard-A-Thon where hockey fans have raised over $100,000 so far!

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer
Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. perhaps even intentionally oppositional to↵
  2. of course if he is growing a beard, he probably does those things too…↵
  3. Also point out that they have not won since… so it may be more of a curse than a boon↵

Are Predictable Sports More Popular?

Dear Sports Fan,

Are more predictable sports more popular than unpredictable sports?

Thanks,
Tyrone

Dear Tyrone,

Great question! I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there even is a clear correlation between popularity and predictability, but it’s something I’ve often thought about it. Let’s explore this together!

The four major sports in the United States are Football, Basketball, Hockey, and Baseball. In two of those sports, Football and Basketball, college competition is close in popularity to the professional leagues, so we will include those in our discussion. The first thing to do is establish the order in which these sports are popular. I have my own favorites, but television ratings should provide a pretty good guide to the true popularity of the sports. There’s a good post on this at www.spottedratings.com which looks at the relative ratings of the championships of the six sports leagues.  In order, they are:

Popularity (Television Ratings)
1. NFL Football
2. NBA Basketball
3. College Basketball
4. College Football
5. Major League Baseball
6. National Hockey League[1]

Now we come to the more interesting piece of this which is to attempt to rank these in order of predictability. There are two main factors that play into this — the format of the playoffs and the elements of the sport itself. The key difference in format is between single elimination[2] and a playoff series.[3] As you might imagine, the playoff series creates much more predictable results because it allows a better team to have an off night and still end up the champion.

Single Elimination
NFL Football
College Basketball
College Football

Playoff Series
NBA Basketball
Major League Baseball
National Hockey League

It’s a bit harder to figure out how the elements of each sport affect their predictability. I’m sure there are thousands of factors that effect this, but let’s just chose one to think about — the average score. High scoring games would seem to be more predictable by the same logic that playoff series are — they make it less likely that a single bad moment, a single mistake, or a single moment of unusual brilliance will change the eventual result.

Scoring (from high to low)
NBA Basketball
College Basketball[4]
College Football
NFL Football
Major League Baseball
NHL Hockey

If we combine these two factors[5] we end up with the sports in this order.

Predictability (format, scoring)
NBA Basketball (+3,+3) 6
Major League Baseball (+3,-2) 1
National Hockey League (+3, -3) 0
College Basketball (-3,+2) -1
College Football (-3, +1) -2
NFL Football (-3, -1) -4

This model, because of its simplicity, doesn’t quite match up with my instincts about the sports. For instance, my gut tells me that College Football is actually significantly more predictable than College Basketball, there’s a reason the College Basketball tournament is called “March Madness,” but I think it’s mostly correct. For evidence of the overall directional correctness, consider that there have been twelve different NFL champions in the last twenty years but only eight in the last twenty years of the NBA. The NFL engenders clichés like “any given Sunday” to express its unpredictable nature, whereas the NBA is known for its dynastic teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers[6] and Michael Jordan who won six championships with the Chicago Bulls during eight years in the 1990s.

I’m still not sure if there is any clear connection between predictability and popularity, but it at least seems obvious that unpredictability is not harmful to a sport’s popularity. So when you hear silly stories about how horrible it is that College Football doesn’t have a playoff like College Basketball does, and people like Barack Obama get involved, just make sure they don’t use “getting the best team to be the champion” as a rationale. Not only is a single elimination playoff notoriously unpredictable, but many of the most popular sports have the least predictable results!

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. It’s figuratively physically painful for me to see hockey at the bottom of this list since it has clearly the best playoffs of any sport. It is worth mentioning that some of its finals games are televised on a mildly obscure cable channel with a relatively smaller distribution.↵
  2. if your team loses a single game, it’s out↵
  3. like you played rock-paper-scissors as a kid, this is best x out of y where x = y/2 + 1↵
  4. The college game is eight minutes shorter and has a longer shot clock which allows a team to hold the ball longer before being forced to take a shot.↵
  5. Let’s do give a sport +3/-3 for format and +3 to -3 for scoring to get a ranking from 1-6 overall↵
  6. These two teams alone have won 33 of 65 NBA championships.↵

What Happened on the Last Giants Touchdown?

Dear Sports Fan,

What the hell happened on the play where Ahmad Bradshaw scored?

Thanks,
Mary

Dear Mary,

Welcome to a situation where real life and video games collide. Anyone who’s played Madden football has done what the Patriots did in that situation and knew immediately it was the right call. To recap:

Giants are down 17-15 with only a few minutes on the clock. Either a touchdown OR a field goal wins the game for them. This is important to note.

After Eli Manning completed his absurd pass to Mario Manningham, and executed a few more mundane plays, it became clear that the Giants were going to score. They were in field goal range, and rapidly approaching the range where basically you or I could successfully kick a field goal.

At a certain point the Patriots had to make a decision: when do we accept the reality that they’re going to score, and how do we get the ball back as quickly as possible and with as many timeouts as possible (this is important to note), so that we can try to counter? Keep in mind the Patriots only had two timeouts left because they had used one to challenge whether or not Mario Manningham caught Eli Manning’s absurd pass which, absurdly enough, he did. The clock also stops at the two minute warning,[1] giving the Patriots three opportunities to stop the clock.

If you’re the Giants, the plan is simple: run as many safe plays as you can for as long as you can to draw the clock down and force the Patriots to use all of their timeouts. Then, when you’ve eaten up as much time as you can – they could have taken the clock down to around 20 seconds in this case – you line up and kick the field goal, taking the lead and giving the Patriots very little time to get the ball back and score.

Here’s where Madden football comes in: in video game world, the ONLY sensible thing to do in this situation is to let the other team score a touchdown immediately. If the choice is trailing by five or six with around a minute to go and a time out, or trailing by three with 20 seconds to go and no timeouts, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. So in Madden world, you call the most permissive (promiscuous?) defense you have and, as soon as the play starts, take control of as many players as possible and dive to the ground to avoid making a tackle.

In the NFL, this rarely happens – primarily because coaches and players always like to think there’s a chance of stopping someone or forcing a turnover, and letting the opponent score reeks of surrender, which is something football players are conditioned to never do; and second, because the other team is presumably smarter than the artificial intelligence in the Madden game and will refuse to cooperate.

How? It’s pretty simple: you fall down before you get in the end zone. Falling down – we do it all the time. It’s the easiest thing to do in the world, unless you’re Ahmad Bradshaw and the only thought in your mind is scoring the winning touchdown in a Super Bowl, and the defense miraculously melts away in front of you and you have a clear path to the end zone and it’s not until you’re at the one-foot line that you realize – either because you hear someone yelling or you hear your coach’s voice in your head – that you’re dancing on the very thin line between being a Super Bowl Hero or being The Greatest Super Bowl Goat of All Time,[2] but it’s too late and your momentum slowly topples you into the unknown. (footnote 3: In this case, the obscene run on sentence is an attempt to capture the running back’s stream of consciousness. It’s neither laziness nor an indictment of the writer’s high school English teachers)

So as it does in Madden football, the strategy worked for the Pats – or worked as well as it could have under the circumstances. That they weren’t able to complete an absurd Hail Mary pass in the end zone to win the game in the end isn’t an indictment of their strategy – the mere fact that they were a foot away from a Super Bowl winning catch validates what every video football game player has known for years.

Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. The 2 minute warning is an institution that no one really challenges. It’s unquestioningly accepted as part of the game, like tight pants – except the tight pants actually serve a purpose. There are 53 players and dozens of coaches on the sideline and there are scoreboards all over the stadium – do they really need to be warned that there are only 2 minutes left?↵
  2. The GOAT goat?↵

What Channel is the Super Bowl on? Who are the Patriots?

Dear Sports Fan,

Who are the Patriots? Is the Super Bowl today? Tell me what channel to watch — I guess I really should join the rest of the human race if only for a little bit.

Thanks,
Jim

 

Dear Jim,

Ha! Yes, today is the super bowl!

It’s on NBC (probably channel 4) at 6:30. The New England Patriots play the New York Giants.
This is a rematch of a Super Bowl a few years ago. Back then the Patriots were going into the game undefeated and were seen as massive favorites to win and become the second team ever to go undefeated the entire season. The Giants upset the Patriots, thanks in part to this incredible play to keep them alive with about a minute left in the fourth quarter.
The Giants this year were only so-so for most of the year, but towards the end of the year they got on a roll and have been playing very, very good football since then. Their strengths are defensive line-men (Justin Tuck, Usi Umenyiora, and Jason Pierre-Paul are probably three of the top ten defensive linemen in the league and they’re all on the Giants) and the chemistry between their quarterback, Eli Manning (a really great, really long article about him) and his three wide receivers Hakeem Nicks, Victor Cruz, and Mario Manningham. Those last three might be particularly problematic for the Patriots since their weakness is definitely their defensive secondary (the guys who try to cover the wide receivers.) As commentators will probably remind us at least twenty times today, they are so weak at that position that Julian Edelman, who started the year as a wide receiver on offense, will be starting on defense. I think this is a little overstated. He’s actually pretty good on defense.
Starting an offensive player on defense is an incredibly unconventional idea… which is pretty much on par with the Patriot’s coach Bill Belichick. As Charles Pierce pointed out in this Grantland piece Belichick has been very successfully the NFL’s most anarchist coach for a long time. He’s one of the Patriots’ main (apparent at least) advantages. The other is definitely Tom Brady, their quarterback, who is playing in his fifth Super Bowl and has won three of four. The Patriots offense this year has been very heavy on short passes up the middle of the field to three targets — Wes Welker, a freakishly precise and quick 5’9″ slot receiver and two young tight ends Aaron Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski. Everything you need to know about Gronkowski you can learn from watching this play. He suffered a pretty brutal ankle sprain two weeks ago though and it’s unclear how much or how well he’ll be able to play today. My bet is that he’ll be fine.
Of course, the real star of the day is money. From betting on everything from the length of the national anthem to the color of the Gatorade dumped on the winning coach to covering the commercials as if they are their own sport money is front and center the whole time.
As for joining the rest of the human race, good luck! The NFL put together a fun infographic about what people will be doing today… let’s just say that 53.5 million pounds of avocado and 8 million pounds of popcorn are involved. 8 million pounds of popcorn!! What a great day.
Enjoy,
Ezra Fischer

Is it Fair to Mock Tim Tebow for his Religion?

Dear Sports Fan,

I saw that a couple of football players were making fun of Tim Tebow for praying. What’s up with that? Do you think it’s fair to mock Tim Tebow for his religion?

Thanks,
Cody

— — —

Hey Cody,

It’s a close call, but I do think it’s okay to mock Tim Tebow’s religiosity. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, here’s a little background. Tim Tebow is a Quarterback, currently playing for the Denver Broncos in the NFL, who won two National Championships in college with the University of Florida football team. In college he became incredibly famous, mostly for his football playing prowess, but also for his religious beliefs which he was unabashedly public about. In 2009 a reporter asked him if he was a virgin and he said he was. He also showed some humor, saying, “I think you’re stunned right now,” Tebow joked with reporters after revealing his virginity. “You can’t even ask a question. … I was ready for that question, but I don’t think ya’ll were.” In 2010, Tebow publicized his beliefs further by participating in a Super Bowl commercial for Focus On the Family which (between the lines, as it were) promoted an anti-abortion message by celebrating Tebow’s mom’s decision to continue her pregnancy despite being advised by a doctor not to. As Brian Phillips writes in his well-worth reading article on Tebow on Grantland, “A trillion words have been written about this already, but suffice it to say that if you see him as the avatar of muscular Christianity in football, you know that in his bland, smiling, placidly self-confident way, he sees himself that way, too.”

These days, Tebow has somehow become even more polarizing as he has emerged in mid-season as the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Two weekends ago he started his first game this season against the Miami Dolphins. The Broncos were down 15-0 at half-time but ended up coming back to win the game in overtime. When they won, cameras caught Tebow kneeling in prayer as his teammates celebrated around him. This act has become a meme over the last week, leading to a website selling shirts… and to any number of photos and videos of people performing their own acts of “Tebowing.”

This past Sunday’s game did not go quite so well for the Broncos or for Tebow. The Broncos lost 45 to 10 to the Detroit Lions and Tebow played badly, throwing one interception and fumbling three times. The Lions were not satisfied just by winning, they also picked a couple choice moments to mock Tebow by adopting his now famous praying pose after sacking him or scoring a touchdown.

To your question — which was also asked in this way in the New York Times’ football blog today:

Is it all in good fun?  Tebow invites scrutiny with the very public nature of his religious beliefs, his evangelistic side. But let’s imagine that a player displayed a Muslim religious ritual or one based on Hinduism? Would it be fair to mock those displays as well? If not, why is it fair game for Tebow?

I say yes, it is fair to mock Tebow for his religious displays because Tebow, through his actions has made them part of the public domain. It’s one thing to claim that dropping to his knees in passionate prayer is not a public act even if it is on a playing field with 20+ cameras, but it’s another to claim that someone who used to list bible verses on his eye-black and who has publicly endorsed religious/cultural lobbies it treating his own religious as a private matter. Frankly, I don’t think the players on the Lions were mocking Tim Tebow for his religion, I think they were mocking a sophomore player, who they think is not very good at his craft, for what they consider a self-aggrandizing and maybe just a little prematurely self-congratulatory celebration.

What do you think?
Ezra Fischer

 

When Will People Stop Playing Violent Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

Someone died in an Indy Car race today? Why do people do this to themselves? When will they stop?

Seriously, this is crazy,
Fernando

 

Dear Fernando,

It does seem a little crazy, doesn’t it?

Dan Wheldon who was a former Indy 500 champion died today during a race in Las Vegas  in a crash that involved 15 cars traveling at over 200 miles an hour. I don’t know what makes people do risky things. In sports there are obvious dangers — car crashes, broken bones, and torn ligaments. Taking a stick, puck, elbow, or fist to the face leaves a visible and sometimes permanent mark of the perilous life of an athlete. We now know there are less visible but still insidious dangers that lurk in the repeated collisions that take place on every play of every football game and practice. I’m not sure what attracts us to sports. Are we attracted in spite of or because of the danger?

When it comes to injuries short of death (and to an increasing extent, brain injuries, but that’s another story…) sports cultures tend to build off the courage and intolerance to pain that are a necessary part of doing anything as physically challenging as playing a sport to create an intolerance to the admission of pain. There is a cliche that there is a line between being hurt and being injured. You can play hurt. You can’t play injured. The line moves a little from sport to sport, but reasonably bizarre things are often on the line of hurt. How far you are willing to push that line for your own body generally has a lot to do with how your teammates and coaches think of you. I played soccer for about 10 years growing up and I am still proud to say that I never missed a game with a “hurt.” Sure, I dislocated each of my kneecaps twice… but those were “injuries.” At the level (low) that I was playing at, this is usually a fairly innocuous attitude to have, but at higher levels, it leads to people pushing their bodies into all sorts of situations that are likely to have long-term effects on their health. This Malcolm Gladwell article made a big splash for its revelations about concussion, but when read carefully, it suggests something else — that willingness to put ones own health at risk for the good of the team is basically selected for throughout youth sports, so that by the time you get to the highest levels of competition, basically everyone is like this.

One would think that death cannot be an extension of this attitude towards your own body. And in fact, I imagine it’s not. But risk of death might apply. There is some risk of death inherent in every sport. It’s certainly higher in sports like football, hockey, cheerleading, boxing, and racing than in sports like baseball, soccer, and basketball. I can’t speak for drivers, but I imagine that like with injury in other sports, people who do not have the quality of being willing to risk their lives in their sport are weeded out long before we ever see them on television.

I don’t know why there are people willing to risk their bodies and their lives for a particular activity, but I do know that for the most part, these are the people who are successful enough to make it to the professional ranks of each sport. It’s almost a catch-22, but the reason drivers are crazy enough to get in cars and risk their lives is because only people that crazy can drive professionally.

Let’s hope risk doesn’t turn to loss again for a long time,
Ezra Fischer

What's Up with Realignment in College Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s up with realignment in college sports? That seems to be all anyone is talking about these days.

Thanks,
Ken

 

Dear Ken,

If you’ve ever wondered why national borders are so messed up — why they break cultural groups in half, ignore obvious geographic boundaries like rivers and mountains, and  geometric conventions like straight lines — then this is the perfect non-violent real life lesson. Over the past couple weeks (and years,) several schools have committed to moving from one conference to another. The borders are shifting.

There’s no need to get into the specifics[1] but suffice it to say that many of them involve relatively impractical moves like Pittsburgh (366 miles from the ocean) into the Atlantic Coast Conference and Texas A&M (Southern, but not particularly Eastern) into the South-Eastern Conference. It’s not all geography — the Big Ten conference now has 12 teams.[2]

The sport that’s driving all of this is football. There’s an enormous amount of money made on college football. According to this CNN article, in 2010 the average school with a football team in one of the major conferences made over a million dollars a game. The important phrase in that sentence is not “over a million,” it’s “major conferences.” Right now the major conferences are the SEC, the Big 10, the Big 12, the Pac 12, the ACC, and the Big East. As these conferences threaten to break up, the member schools are wriggling around in their chairs, trying not to be the last one standing when the music stops. This creates MORE instability, which creates more nervousness, which creates more movement, which creates more instability… I could keep this up all night if it didn’t wear out my suspenders.

There’s nothing I hate more than people who simply argue that everything that once was was better than anything that will be. This is mindless nostalgia, the subject of a recent brilliant essay by Chuck Klosterman,[3] and I will try to avoid it. However, it seems to me that letting the profit from a single sport drive who everyone other athlete in those schools play (and how far they have to travel to do it) is too bad. It’s another sign that the big money college sports, football and basketball, need to be more fully divorced from track and field, swimming, soccer, field hockey, etc. We can have semi-pro football and basketball teams affiliated with universities that do not drag everyone else through this mud and that are not as inherently hypocritical as the “amateur” leagues are now but that still are profitable enough to fund the non-money sports.

Not sure if I answered your question or just added to your list of people who are talking about realignment but thank you for your question.

Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Because it’s pretty boring, even to crazy college football fans. This website does a ridiculously compendious job of covering it.↵
  2. They compounded this mistake by dividing the league into two six team divisions, one named “Legends” and one named “Leaders.” Both divisions are made up of teams of college kids.↵
  3. Although I must say… his writing used to be way better in the early aughts…”↵

The Return Heard Round the World — Djokovic Beats Federer

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s up with yous? No posts for more than two weeks?? What are we, chopped liver?

Dear Sports Fan Fan

 

Dear Dear Sports Fan Fan,

Apologies for the long interregnum between posts. We will be trying to ramp back up to close to a post a day in the coming week or two!

Today I’m going to repost an article that Brian Phillips wrote for Grantland.

In it he recaps the amazing tennis match from Saturday in the U.S. Open semifinals between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. In it he describes how Djokovic survived two Federer match points and came back to win the match. He wonders about the meaning of this:

We want athletes to be able to explain sports. Sport, at its most basic, is about physically realizing intentions — calculating the angle, plotting the spin, executing the shot. So surely the people who have the intentions, the people whose inner lives sport is expressing in some complicated way, are in the best position to tell us what really happens on the court. And to a certain extent that’s true. But one of the reasons it’s so scary to imagine going into the postmatch press conference as a loser is that it’s not entirely true. What happens during a match may concern you to an emotionally devastating degree, but what happens can also turn on tiny fluctuations of chance so complicated that they are astoundingly difficult to articulate — minute physical differences that fall within any conceivable margin of error, emotional swings that could have gone either way and went against you, who knows why. These sorts of breaks are often monstrously unfair. And as with The Shot and The Confrontation, they tend to take on outsize importance in matches that are otherwise very close. Meaning that the greatest contests, the ones whose outcomes are most exalting for the winners and most devastating for the losers, are the ones most likely to be decided by infinitesimal turns of luck.

I have to say that I think he’s taking a little away from the greatness of the match and the greatness of that moment. Let’s watch it:

What I see in Djokovic’s face before the shot is someone who is resigned to his situation as he sees it. He knows that he has only a small chance of winning and he knows exactly what that chance is. He knows that his only hope is to take a low-percentage chance. He’s going to guess — to over-commit to where Federer might serve. If he’s right he’ll be able to win the point decisively. If not, Federer gets an ace and the match is over. Here’s where the greatness comes in — by this point they have been playing for over four hours. Djokovic has seen 162 Federer first serves. They’ve played 22 other times before Saturday. Without a coach talking in his ear, or a catcher flashing signs at him, Djokovic has to decide what gamble to make. Does he commit outside or inside? How many steps behind the base-line should he be? Should he return cross-court? Facing defeat in front of thousands of people, exhausted by four hours of tennis in the hot sun, annoyed at a crowd which has supported his opponent all day, Djokovic makes up his mind… and he’s right.

Sure it was lucky — but it was lucky like Larry Bird was lucky when he stole Isiah Thomas’ inbound pass, like Muhammed Ali was lucky not to get knocked out while he was rope-a-doping George Foreman.

Ezra Fischer