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Sports Forecast for Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

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You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.

Is there really not enough parity in women's soccer?

One of the common criticisms of women’s soccer, once you get by all of the more virulently idiotic bigoted nonsense, is that women’s soccer tournaments, like the World Cup, aren’t as exciting as men’s tournaments because there isn’t enough parity. This criticism contends that the strong teams are too strong and too few and the rest of the teams are too weak. As a result, the World Cup or Olympics are long periods of boring cake-walks of the great teams over the poor with only a few games of evenly matched soccer in the semifinals and finals. It’s unclear whether people who subscribe to this line of thought believe that an ideal tournament would be made up of completely even teams or if they believe in some ideal distribution of skill.

No matter, what I was curious about and what I wanted to see was how the frequently criticized women’s World Cup would compare to the men’s edition of the tournament. To do that, I took data from the Group Stage of this year’s women’s World Cup and the 1982 men’s World Cup held in Spain. Why 1982? Aside from it being my birth year, like this year’s women’s tournament, 1982 was the first time the men’s field expanded from 16 teams to 24. Like in Canada this year, the expansion in 1982 opened the World Cup to a number of countries who had never made the field before.

New countries:

1982 men’s World Cup – Algeria, Cameroon, Honduras, Kuwait and New Zealand
2015 women’s World Cup – Cameroon, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ivory Coast, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand

This difference can be attributed to the much longer history of men’s World Cups before expanding to 24. The men’s World Cup began in 1930 and was held 11 times while it grew from 13 to 24. The women’s World Cup was first held in 1991 with a field of 12 and took only six tournaments to expand to 24 teams.

In order to determine parity, I took the scores of the Group stage games and analyzed them. If women’s soccer is truly evolving in a less competitive (and therefore exciting) way, we’d expect there to be more blow-outs and fewer closely fought matches. We’d expect to see more games like Germany’s 10-0 beat-down of Thailand in 2015 than we would Hungary’s 10-1 beat-down of El Salvador in 1982. The first way I broke out the games was by goal differential — 0 if the two teams tied, 1 if the winning team scored one goal more than the losing team, regardless if that was a 1-0 win, a 2-1 win, or a 11-10 win (there are none of those in soccer.)

1982 men’s World Cup goal differential

0 – 12 games – 33%
1 – 11 games – 31%
2 – 4 games – 11%
3 – 6 games – 17%
>3 – 3 games – 8%

2015 women’s World Cup goal differential

0 – 10 games – 28%
1 – 15 games – 42%
2 – 3 games – 8%
3 – 0 games – 0%
>3 – 8 games – 22%

How you read these numbers depends entirely on how you perceive two goal and three goal games. If you think a 2-0 game or a 3-0 game is a blow-out and not exciting, then you’d conclude that the women’s game is more exciting in 2015 than the men’s game was in 1982. A full 70% of all the group games in 2015 were decided by less than two goals, while only 64% were that close in 1982. If, however, you think that anything less than a four goal difference is representative of a pretty even matchup, you’d conclude that there are almost three times more blow-outs in the women’s 2015 World Cup than in the men’s 1982 World Cup. As with almost anything, you can interpret the data how you want. I would argue that a three goal differential is enormous in soccer and unlikely to occur between teams of close to even strength. As such, my conclusion is that, while there are a few more severely lopsided games in 2015 women’s competition than there were in men’s competition in 1982, there are also more very close games in 2015 than in 1982.

Another way to look at the same data is to focus not on goal differential but on the most common soccer scores: 0-0, 1-0, 1-1, 2-1, and 2-0. When I looked at the data that way, I discovered that exactly the same percent of the games in both tournaments fell within that range – 66%. There was some variety within those scores but not enough to seem meaningful in any way.

Overall, the 2015 Group Stage games were a little bit more high scoring (107 goals compared to 100) and although there were a few more closely competitive games, there were also a few more wild blow-outs which led to a higher average goal differential (1.75 in 2015 compared to 1.5 in 1982.) Frankly, it’s quite surprising how similar the numbers are across gender and generations. The women’s game in 2015 is not as evenly matched as the men’s game in 2015 is but it’s basically exactly where the men’s game was in 1982 when its World Cup expanded to 24 teams and the women’s game has arrived at this point much faster.

All the data I got for this post was taken from the Wikipedia entries for the 1982 men’s World Cup and 2015 women’s World Cup. You can view or copy the data here. Please give attribution if you use it.

How to Watch the World Cup Round of 16: USA vs. Colombia

Tonight, Monday, June 22, 2015, the United States women’s national soccer team will play in their World Cup Round of 16 game against Colombia. The game starts at 8 p.m. ET (regardless of what television stations that want you to watch their pre-game shows tell you) and it will be televised on Fox Sports 1. Whether you’re jumping on the band wagon now or have been there for the ride from the start, here’s some useful background information about the game.

What’s the plot?

The Round of 16 is where things start to get real in the World Cup. No more ties, no more advancing on points, this is single elimination. Win and move on. Lose and go home. The United States was expected to win their group, and they did, with wins over Australia and Nigeria, and a scoreless tie against Sweden. Although fans have to be happy with the result so far, by and large, they have not been impressed with how the U.S. team has played. Colombian fans, on the other hand, are delighted despite the team’s third place finish in Group F. Colombia scored the tournament’s biggest upset so far when they beat France, 2-0, in Moncton.

Colombia might have preferred to see a less highly regarded team than the United States in this round of the tournament, but if so, they are hiding it well behind a campaign of bluster and accusation. In the days leading up to the game, Colombian players have said they were happy to be playing the United States, accused the U.S. team of taking them lightly, made veiled accusations about the U.S. team being a dirty, trash-talking team, and guaranteed a victory. On the U.S. side, the players have remained calm and utterly bland in their press appearances. The two teams do have a heated history though. In the group stage of the 2012 Olympics, the United States beat the Colombian team 3-0 but not without controversy. During the game, a Colombian player, Lady Andrade, punched Abby Wambach in the face. Although the ref didn’t penalize her during the game, she was later given a two game suspension by FIFA. Wambach, black eye and all, scored later that game. Then she scored the next game… and the game after that… and the game after that. The U.S. won the gold medal. 3-0 was also the score of the last World Cup match these teams played, in 2011, also in favor of the United States.

As a small historic bonus, this is also the 21st anniversary of the United States men’s national team upsetting Colombia 2-1 in the 1994 World Cup. Famous at the time as a feel-good story about an under-powered host team playing over their talent level, it became infamous only a few weeks later when Colombian player, Andres Escobar, was murdered in a killing that was at least partially motivated by his own-goal blunder against the United States.

Who are the characters?

Lady Andrade – Set up to be a villain by her punch to Abby Wambach’s eye, Lady Andrade seems determined to be not just a henchwoman but the main boss-level bad gal. She’s Colombia’s striker and best player. She scored the goal that propelled Colombia to their victory over France and was their best field player throughout the game. At 5’8″, Andrade is a thoroughbred striker, high-strung, athletic, and extremely skilled on the ball.

Sandra Sepulveda – Colombia’s goalie started the World Cup on the bench but after teammate Stefany Castano struggled in the first game, Sepulveda was called on and didn’t disappoint. During the team’s upset against France, Sepulveda had six saves, and was extremely strong in net. Colombia will need her to have a repeat performance if they hope to beat the United States.

Carli Lloyd – The hardest working woman on the U.S. team, Lloyd has been conspicuously inconspicuous through the team’s first three games. It may be that like her male counterpart, Michael Bradley, in last year’s men’s World Cup, Lloyd is being asked to take on so many defensive responsibilities that she’s unable to show up offensively. It’s time for her to show up and I think she’ll come through. Watch for a few long-distance blasts from Lloyd this game.

The defense – while team’s attack has left something to be desired, it’s hard to complain about the back line. Made up of wing backs, Meghan Klingenberg and Ali Krieger and center backs, Becky Sauerbrunn and Julie Johnston, the defense has been rock solid. They have a big job in stymying the Colombian attack but I think they’re up to the task.

Alex Morgan – Injured coming into the tournament, Morgan has slowly reclaimed her position as the core non-Wambachian U.S. striker. What she hasn’t done yet is score. I expect she’ll start up front with Wambach and show us something. If she can’t, she might not be able to hold off Sydney Leroux, who has been playing inspired soccer, for the rest of the tournament.

If you’re interesting in meeting the rest of the United States team, here are our profiles of all 23 of them.

Who’s going to win?

The United States should win this game. It’s easy to be swayed by Colombia’s masterful play against France and the United States’ modest play in the Group stage and think this should be a very close call. It shouldn’t be. The folks at Five Thirty Eight have the U.S. a 95% favorite to advance. In the FIFA rankings, the U.S. is second, Colombia 28th. Colombia is clearly capable of having a big game against a good team but if even a hint of the team that tied Mexico and lost to England shows up, they won’t have a chance. It would be very easy to argue that having survived the “Group of Death,” this should be the easiest game yet for the United States.

How does the men's college baseball World Series work?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why doesn’t anyone watch men’s college baseball? I think it’s because the format of their tournament is impossible to understand. I might watch it if I understood how it works. Could you tell me? How does the men’s college baseball World Series work?

Thanks,
Stacy

Dear Stacy,

Men’s college baseball often gets a bad rap. This is partially because professional baseball has an extensive minor league system that snaps up many of the future professional baseball players before they hit college. Losing these players robs college baseball of the air of elite competition that college football and basketball still have. Another factor certainly is persistent slight confusion around how a championship team is determined. The men’s college World Series follows a more complex format than most competitions we’re used to watching, but it’s not beyond our understanding by any means. Here’s how it works.

The tournament begins, like March Madness, the college basketball tournament does, with 64 teams. In the baseball championship, these teams are split into 16 groups of four teams each. These groups of four teams will play each other until one can be identified as the winner of the group. That team moves on to the next round of the tournament. This round, with 64 teams is called the Regional. The next round, with only 16 teams is called the Super Regional. Although groups of four are reminiscent of the men’s World Cup and the women’s World Cup in soccer, there are two major differences. Instead of two or three teams advancing from the group of four, as in the World Cup, only one team advances. Also, the format of competition is different. Instead of a round robing, where each team plays the others once, this part of the college baseball championships are played as a double elimination tournament.

The principle of double-elimination is simple. The teams play each other until every team but one has lost twice. As teams accrue their second defeats, they are eliminated from the tournament. Pretty easy, right? The only tricky part is how to decide who plays who. Within each group, the four teams are ranked or seeded from one to four. This allows the succeeding games to be played out formulaically.

Game 1: Team 1 plays Team 4
Game 2: Team 2 plays Team 3
Game 3: The winner of Game 1 plays the winner of Game 2
Game 4: The loser of Game 1 plays the loser of Game 2
Game 5: The loser of Game 3 plays the winner of Game 4
Game 6: The winner of Game 3 plays the winner of Game 5. Note that at this point, the winner of Game 3 is, by definition, undefeated. They won the first game they played — either Game 1 or Game 2 — and then won the matchup between themselves and the winner of the other of the first two games. Their opponent in this game has to have lost a single game before. In order to play in and win Game 5 to qualify for this game, they would have had to either lose Game 1 or 2 (and win Game 4) or lose Game 3. That’s all just a complicated way to say that this game, Game 6 is between a team with one loss and a team with zero losses. If the team that comes into this game with one loss, loses, then the regional is over. Every team will have lost two games. If they win, then both teams involved will only have one loss and another game, Game 7, must be played to decide who advances.
Game 7: The same two teams as Game 6, if needed to decide a regional champion.

For bonus confusion, seeing “Game 7, if needed” triggers thoughts in a sports fan’s mind of a best-four-out-of-seven series. This is the most common playoff format, used in professional baseball, hockey, and basketball. In that format, Game 7s may not be needed if one team beats the other four times in the first four, five, or six games. That’s why you’ll also see “Game 5, if needed” or “Game 6, if needed) in those sports. Never in college baseball’s regionals — in the double elimination format within groups of four teams, only the seventh game is dependent on earlier results to be necessary. The first six will always be played.

After the Regional round, the teams advance to the Super Regionals. In the Super Regionals, the 16 remaining teams are grouped into pairings of two teams each. These pairings are pre-set before the tournament, the winner of Group A will play the winner of Group B, no matter who those winners are. Within each pairing, the teams play a best-two-out-of-three series. In a sense, this is still a double elimination format, but it’s not unusual in the way the Regional round format was. Best-two-out-of-three is easily understood. It’s how many people settled sibling or friendly disputes as kids, with rock-paper-scissors or odds and evens.

The Super Regional best-two-out-of-three series get the field from 16 to eight teams. From there, the tournament enters the College World Series. This eight team tournament within a tournament follows the same pattern as the last two rounds, just with fewer teams. First, the eight teams are split into two groups of four. Within those groups, the teams play a double-elimination tournament like they did in the Regional round above. Once this is done, six more teams (three in each group of four) will have been eliminated. The remaining two teams face each other in a best-two-out-of-three game series to crown an overall men’s college World Series champion.

This year, 2015, those two teams are Virginia and Vanderbilt — the same two teams as last year. The series starts tonight, Monday, June 22 at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN. Game 2 will be Tuesday at the same time and channel and Game Three (if needed) will be on Wednesday at the same time and channel. Last year, Vanderbilt won the first game 9-8, lost the second 2-7, but won the third and deciding game, 3-2 to become the 2014 champion. Only time will tell if they can repeat or if Virginia will take their revenge.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How to plan for the week of June 22-28, 2015

If you are a sports fan or if you live with a sports fan then your weekly schedule becomes inextricably linked with what sporting events are on at what times during each week. The conflict between missing a sporting event for a poorly committed to social event and missing an appealing social event to watch a game is an important balancing act in any kind of romantic, familial, or business relationship between a sports fan and a non-sports fan. To help facilitate this complicated advanced mathematics, Dear Sports Fan has put together a table showing the most important sporting events of the upcoming week. Print it out, put it on your fridge, and go through it with your scheduling partner.

Download a full-size copy here.

Monday: The United States women’s national soccer team plays its first elimination game of the World Cup against Colombia. That’s a big deal. Only an hour later, the men’s college World Series begins and it’s a rematch of last year’s series between Virginia and Vanderbilt. That’s a big deal too. Women’s soccer and college baseball may be slightly more fringe than last week’s NBA and NHL finals but if you’re a fan of either or if you live with a fan of either, tonight is going to be a sports-heavy night.

Tuesday: Why is the soccer game so late? I’ve noticed that the World Cup times have been conveniently convenient for television viewing in home countries. 10 p.m. ET is 7 p.m in Vancouver and 11 a.m. the next day in Japan. Oh, sure, it’s 4 a.m. in the Netherlands, and that’s not so good, but Japan is the defending champions and if we were going to modify things for either country’s home audience, it would be there’s. For sports fans, it’s somewhat convenient because the late start takes the soccer game pretty much out of conflict with Game Two of the men’s college World Series.

Wednesday: On a relatively sports-light week, Wednesday could be the lightest day. If either Virginia or Vanderbilt wins both of the first two games of the men’s college World Series, then there won’t be a need for Game Three tonight and we’ll have a pretty much sports-free day. If you’re in the Boston area, join the Dear Sports Fan Viewing Parties meetup group. We’ll be in Central Square, watching the Boston Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles. Baseball!

Thursday: The NBA draft is not actually a game but it is a sporting event in the truest sense. Basketball fans of all 30 NBA teams will want to pay attention. These days though, that can just mean a quick look at a cell-phone under the table or in the bathroom. It’s safe to go out for dinner.

Friday: Date night! There’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news for the prospects of a date is that there’s Women’s World Cup quarterfinal action from 4 p.m. ET to around 9:30 p.m. ET. The good news is that this should be the best day of the World Cup. France vs. Germany could/should be a finals matchup and although it’s something of a shame that they are meeting so early in the tournament, that doesn’t change how intense and skilled their game will be. The intensity of the later game will depend on who faces China. If it’s the United States, it may become the most watched U.S. women’s national team game to date. It would be a rematch of the 1999 World Cup championship game which famously ended in a shootout with the United States winning. If it’s Colombia, a big swatch of the viewership will be disappointed, including me.

Saturday: Two quarterfinals matches in the women’s World Cup, just like yesterday, but this side of the bracket is decidedly the undercard. It’s easy to think that whichever of the four teams that eventually comes out of Friday’s two games should have an easy time in the championship game with whichever team comes out of these two games. Still, as they say, “there’s a reason they play the games.” Anything can happen and it usually does.

Sunday: This is honestly not a bad Sunday to go for a day-trip. We do have the usual Sunday suspects: golf, NASCAR, and soccer, but none of it is can’t miss TV.

Caveat — This forecast is optimized for the general sports fan, not a particular sports fan. As such, your mileage may vary. For instance, you or the sports fan in your life is a fan of a particular team, then a regular season MLB baseball game or MLS soccer game may be more important on a particular day than anything on the forecast above. Use the calendar as a way to facilitate conversation about scheduling, not as the last word on when there are sports to watch.

What do we know about the coaches of World Cup 2015?

During the Group Stage of the 2015 women’s World Cup, I researched and wrote a series of posts about each of the coaches of the women’s national soccer teams taking part in the competition. The stories I found were fantastically interesting. The range in experience, age, and attitude among the coaches was far wider than I had expected. Those posts can be found organized by group:

Group A – Canada, China, the Netherlands, New Zealand
Group B – Germany, Ivory Coast, Norway, Thailand
Group C – Cameroon, Ecuador, Japan, Switzerland
Group D – Australia, Nigeria, Sweden, the United States
Group E – Brazil, Costa Rica, Korea, Spain
Group F – Colombia, England, France, Mexico

With stories comes information and as I gathered information about the coaches, I threw it in a table to create data. I was curious not just about qualitative information about the coaches, who were they, what were their backgrounds, proclivities, etc., but also about who they were, quantitatively, as a group? Were they old? Young? Male? Female? From the country they were coaching? Or hired guns? Had they played soccer when they were younger? Professionally or internationally? How good were they? I found a lot that was interesting. Here are some of the highlights.

Two thirds of the coaches are men. This raw fact can be interpreted in many ways. This could be seen as a good thing. As global sports cultures begin to take women’s sports more seriously, coaching a women’s national team has become a much more desirable job. And, although it’s unfortunate that men are still more able to get desirable jobs in coaching than women, the current imbalance is an overall positive signal about women’s sports. On the other hand, it could be seen as a bad thing. You could interpret the ratio of men to woman coaches as being an expression of paternalism — “it’s very nice (of us men) to let women play and even give them a knowledgeable coach (man) to lead them.”
In reality, both interpretations are true. The Spanish and Nigerian coaches strike me as being symbolic of everything that’s wrong with men coaching women’s sports. The Spanish coach has been in charge forever, seems to have no pressure to win, and his players don’t like him. The Nigerian coach seems to have been a political choice with no real coaching talent. On the flip side, the Mexican and English coaches are also male but seem to have been put in charge for the right reasons and be doing a good job. The Mexican coach, like the Spanish coach has been around forever, but under his watch the team uses the same facilities as the men’s national team and has improved wildly. The English coach is a standard, fast-rising, up and coming coach who could easily be coaching a top-flight professional men’s team. He’s qualified and driven.
Of the 16 countries who advanced to the knockout round, 75% of them are male. That’s up slightly from the 66% of overall competitors who were coached by men. It means that male coaches did slightly better than female coaches. We’re working with such small numbers, that the difference between 75% and 66% is only around 1.5 teams/coaches. I’m willing to throw that deviation out and guess that there was no real difference in how well teams coached by men and women did.
Age helps but only a little. The average age of coaches was 47. The male coaches were slightly older, with an average age of 49 as opposed to 43 from the women. There were a few coaches on the edges of the age range worth noting. Of the four coaches in their 60s, all four were male: Leonardo Cuéllar, Philippe Bergeroo, Ignacio Quereda, and Even Pellerud. There were only two coaches in their 20s, both women from Spanish speaking countries: Amelia Valverde from Costa Rica and Vanessa Arauz from Ecuador. The average age of coaches who advanced to the knockout round was 48 and the average age of those who failed to advance was 44.
Most coaches have played professional or international soccer, but the female coaches are much more likely to have been good to great. Of all the coaches we have information about, almost 60% of them played some professional soccer and 36% of them played internationally. A smaller percentage were either solid players or great players in their day: 45% professionally and 27% internationally. What jumps out about these numbers though is the split between men and women. One half of all the women coaching played professionally and internationally and of those, 75% can be said to have been truly brilliant players. Two of them were actually teammates, Silvia Neid and the Swiss coach, Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, who both played for Germany. Of the men, only 40% were solid professional players and 13% solid international players. None were brilliant international level players.
Some coaches are hard to research. A handful of the coaches were very difficult to find information about. Some don’t have Wikipedia pages, some have pages with very little information on them. I had to go digging to figure out even basic things about many of the coaches, like previous jobs, whether they had playing careers, and what their stories were. For two coaches, Nuengruethai Sathongwien of Thailand and Edwin Okon of Nigeria, I eventually gave up. I’m not sharing this to complain, but because it’s pretty stunning that information about the coach of a team going to the World Cup finals would be difficult to find. This would be inconceivable in the men’s game, which is obsessed over and covered at a minute level.

View the data in Google docs, here.

How to plan for the week of June 15-21, 2015

Download a full-size copy here.

Monday: Teams in the women’s World Cup begin playing their third and last games of the group stage. Group games are played simultaneously so no one gains an advantage by knowing the result of the other game before their own. The only team of the eight playing today that has basically no chance of advancing is the Ivory Coast. The most highly anticipated game of the day will be Canada vs. the Netherlands. Both teams are likely to advance, but a win would likely put either team in first place, giving them an easier road through the knockout round. Meanwhile, the National Hockey League’s knockout rounds (the Stanley Cup playoffs) are coming to a close. It’s game Six of the seven game series between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Blackhawks are up three games to two. If the Blackhawks win tonight, the season is over and they are champions.

Tuesday: This is the hardest decision of the week. What to watch at night? The US Women’s National Soccer Team playing their last group stage game against Nigeria or Game Six of the NBA Finals, which have been absolutely wonderful so far? Well, take it one thing at a time. The soccer game starts at eight. Watch the first half. If all goes well and the U.S. is up 4-1, switch to the basketball. If not, finish the soccer game and then pick up the basketball game mid-stream.

Wednesday: The last day of the Group stage in the World Cup features the most exciting group so far, Group F. France, the overwhelming favorite coming into the group, is in third place, trailing Colombia and England. If you can get yourself to a place with multiple televisions, enjoy the drama unfold starting at 4 p.m. ET with Mexico vs. France and England vs. Colombia! If the Chicago Blackhawks don’t win on Monday, tonight will feature a deciding Game Seven. There’s nothing better than a Game Seven.

Thursday: The World Cup takes the day off, hockey will definitely be over, and if the NBA needs a Game Seven, it won’t be until tomorrow. So, what do you do? Well, I’ll take the day off from watching sports. But if you don’t want to, the men’s U.S. Open golf tournament begins with coverage virtually all day, and you could tune into the college World Series.

Friday: Date night! You should be clear unless the NBA Finals need a seventh game. In that case, all bets are off. If you’re with a basketball fan, they’re going to be glued to the television set.

Saturday: The World Cup is back and this time, in a single elimination format. After the two games at 4 and 7 p.m. ET, two countries will be going home and two will be moving on to the quarterfinals.

Sunday: Three more elimination games in the World Cup plus the final day of the men’s U.S. Open golf tournament should make for an exciting day. And if you need any more excitement, there’s also a good Major League Soccer game in the late afternoon.

Why don't hockey teams announce injuries like football?

Dear Sports Fan,

Have you been watching the Stanley Cup Finals this year? I’m curious about the Tampa Bay Lightning goalie. He’s obviously injured but no one will say how. All they say is that he has a “lower body injury.” Why don’t hockey teams announce injuries like football?

Thanks,
Meredith

Dear Meredith,

I have seen some of the Stanley Cup Finals this year. They’ve been exciting! Among the most suspenseful parts of the series has been watching Ben Bishop try to play through whatever injury he has. During Game Two, he was forced out of the game twice. He made it through Game Three despite seemingly struggling to move side to side or get back up to his feet from the ground. He sat out Game Four completely and watched his backup, Andrei Vasilevskiy, play only moderately well in a loss. At the time of writing this post, his status for Game Five, tonight, is still unknown. Equally unknown is what, exactly, is wrong with him.

Information about injuries to hockey players is usually hard to come by. That’s never more true than during the playoffs. Since 2008, teams have not been required to give the media or the league any information about player injures although they are required not to release misleading information. Most of the time, teams do give out some information. The “lower body injury” language that you referred to in your question is a hockey classic. “Lower body” or “upper body” is all we normally get. Sometimes, as is the case with Bishop, teams don’t even specify the hemisphere of the injury. The only thing the Tampa Bay Lightning have officially said about Bishop is that he has an “unspecified injury.”

Theoretically, the reason for this stonewalling is to protect the injured player. It’s commonly thought that if an opposing team knows that Player A’s left knee is hurt or her right arm, they will target that specific spot for extra abuse in the form of legal checks or illegally thrown elbows or slashing sticks. There could also be tactical considerations. Some injuries limit what a player can do on the ice — maybe a player with in injured wrist will have trouble lifting the puck on shots. If that news gets out there, the opposing goalie will know to concentrate on covering the bottom of the net.

Of course, with the availability and malleability of video these days, every play of every game can be dissected from any number of angles. If a player gets hurt in a game, it’s usually going to be obvious what limb or joint is the injured body part. Even when that is the case, most teams continue the upper body/lower body charade. I’ve seen obvious injures, like when a player blocks a shot with his left foot and then limps off the ice. What then, could be the point of classifying that injury as a “lower body injury” instead of a “left foot injury.”

In cases where the injury is obvious, the obfuscation can only be for one of three reasons:

As security theater. I don’t think players are dumb enough to believe that if their coach doesn’t tell the media the nature of an obvious injury, no one will know what it is, but it probably still makes them happier than hearing their coach talk about it.
It’s a way to create and maintain a team identity. Taking a stand against the media is a classic page in every coach’s book for creating a sense of team.
It’s easier. Instead of talking about the obvious injuries and going mute when a non-obvious injury happens, it’s just easier to say nothing about everything all the time.

The only reason we expect teams to go public with the nature of injuries is that the National Football League requires their teams to do so. Why? Is it for the enjoyment of fans? Not really. It’s all about gambling. Sports books cannot and will not set lines if they don’t know whether an important player will play in an upcoming game. Forcing teams to release injury information facilitates sports betting which always has been and continues to be one of the big drivers of attention to sports. Even though the NFL refuses to endorse gambling on their sport, their policy on injury information suggests otherwise. Betting on hockey is big business but it’s not nearly as big as football betting is, and perhaps the NHL doesn’t feel quite the same pressure to pander to the gambling industry.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Who are the 2015 Women's World Cup coaches in Group F?

The other day on Facebook my friend and Dear Dear Sports Fan Fan, Natty, asked me about the backgrounds of coaches in this year’s Women’s World Cup. I had no idea! So, I decided to do some research. Over the next few days, as the teams all play their second games in the Group Stage, we’ll be profiling their coaches. We’ve covered Group A, Group B, Group C,, Group D, and Group E so far, here’s Group F.

Colombia – Fabián Taborda

The 36 year-old Fabián Taborda is billed as a “former PE teacher” but that probably does him a bit of a disservice. There aren’t many gym teachers who have coached their country’s Under-17 women’s national team to a U-17 World Cup or, when promoted to coach the senior level team, could implement a defensive strategy to stop the Brazilian attack and qualify for the World Cup with an unbeaten record.

England – Mark Sampson

The 32 year-old Mark Sampson has had a meteoric and non-traditional rise through the ranks of coaching to become head coach of the English national soccer team. The Wales native jokes that although he figured out he wouldn’t have a future in soccer as a player, his father says he could have told him at age six. Instead, he focused on becoming a coach, even as he was still playing as a semi-pro himself. He found a back-office job with the English Premier League team, Swansea City. Instead of continuing to work his way up within that organization, he took a job as head coach of Bristol Academy, a rare women’s professional soccer team that’s unaffiliated to any of the Premier League teams. Despite the financial disadvantage of this setup, Sampson and his team were so successful, that when the senior national team job came open, Sampson was given a shot.

France – Philippe Bergeroo

Philippe Bergeroo has been to World Cups before: as a backup goalie on France’s 1986 World Cup team and as a goalie coach for the 1998 France men’s team that won the World Cup. As a head coach, he’s been successful on the international level but a disaster as a professional coach. In two stints with top-level French men’s club teams, he’s flamed out and been fired twice. Not that being fired is a disgrace, it’s by far the most common outcome for all coaches, but these were both in-season firings after extended slumps. On the international level, he once led the Under-17 French men’s national team to a European championship. He had never coached women before 2013 when he was approached by the French soccer federation to take the job. He inherited a good team and has made them better. Bergeroo isn’t just focused on raising the fitness level of his team, he’s also thinking about the 2019 World Cup which will be in France and the impact that will have on all levels of women’s soccer in the country. Meanwhile, this French team went undefeated in World Cup qualification and are expected to compete for the championship.

Mexico – Leonardo Cuéllar

Like his French counter-part, Leonardo Cuéllar has World Cup experience as a player. Unlike Bergeroo, Cuéllar actually saw the field, starting all three games in the 1978 World Cup for Mexico. Cuéllar played much of his club soccer in the United States, playing in the NASL in both its outdoor and indoor phases. He was still living and coaching in the United States in 1998 when the Mexican soccer federation sold him on the idea of becoming head coach of the women’s program. During his long tenure as coach, Mexican women’s soccer has grown and improved massively. Long a punching bag for the United States team, Mexico finally broke through and won a game in 2010. Cuéllar has helped women’s soccer grow as a serious sport in Mexico and his team trains in the same facilities as the men’s national team. Although he’s coached in the 1999 and 2011 World Cups, the 61 year-old Cuéllar and Mexico are still looking for their first ever World Cup win.

Who are the 2015 Women's World Cup coaches in Group E?

Brazil – Vadão

Vadão, full name, Oswaldo Fumeiro Alvarez, is a journeyman soccer coach who spent 22 years coaching men’s teams before taking over the women’s national team last year. In those 22 years, he’s has 28 different coaching stops! His longest tenure with a single team is the three years he spent at his very first job from 1992-1994 at Mogi Mirim. That’s an astounding number of rapid-fire coaching assignments. It’s hard to believe he’s still with the team, given that it’s been more than a year since he took the job! Maybe the 58 year old has finally settled down a bit or maybe it’s the allure of coaching the Brazilian women through the World Cup and to the 2016 Olympics hosted in Brazil. Since Vadão took over, he’s established a semi-permanent training camp for the team because he felt the domestic league was not competitive enough for them to improve in.

Costa Rica -Amelia Valverde

Not much is known about Amelia Valverde. This makes a certain amount of sense considering the 28 year-old took over as head coach less than six months ago when then head coach, Garabet Avedissian, stepped down to become the director of football for the Puerto Rican men’s and women’s program. Six months is a minuscule amount of time to have in the role of head coach before taking a team to its first ever World Cup. Luckily, the 28 year-old Valverde has been a part of the Costa Rican national program since 2011 in various assistant coaching roles.

Korea – Yoon Deok-Yeo

Although we’ve had several female head coaches with World Cup experience as players so far, Yoon Deok-Yeo is the first male coach we’ve profiled with playing experience in the World Cup. Yoon was a defender on the South Korean national team that went to the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Korea lost every game that year and Yoon got himself thrown out of their last game with a red card in the 70th minute. As a coach, the 54 year-old is said to be a “hugely popular father figure” for his inexperienced team.

Spain – Ignacio Quereda

At first glance, the story of Ignacio Quereda seems like a heart-warming one. The 64 year-old Guereda has been the head coach of the Spanish women’s national team, without pause, since 1988. Finally, in 2015, 27 years after he began, he finally gets a chance to lead the team he’s devoted much of his life to coaching to the World Cup. Then it occurs to you that a men’s coach who had failed at qualifying for the World Cup in each of its first six editions might not have the same job-security that Quereda enjoys. Then you look a little deeper and you find out that 2011, Spain’s leading scorer and several of her teammates left the team and refused to play as long as Quereda was the coach. Maybe this isn’t a story about loyalty and persistence at all. Maybe its a story about how some national federations neglect and disrespect their women’s programs.