An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Every avocation has its own language and sports is no different. There’s a particular language that sports fans become conversant with and fluent in over the course of years. Like all languages, it’s difficult for an outsider to understand. This is a shame because there’s no reason for sports to be an exclusive society. Twitter, with its 140-character limit only magnifies the difficulty for casual fans or non-fans to understand what someone is saying about sports. There’s no room, even for the most open and thoughtful sports fan, to explain all the terms they’re using or the implications of what they’re saying. Today, I’m going to take one tweet from Wall Street Journal writer Kevin Clark and unpack it.
If football gets an honest-to-goodness hot stove, which it will, and there's legit player movement like this, other sports should shut down.
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) March 10, 2015
Let’s start with the what is probably the most immediately confusing phrase in this tweet: “hot stove.” What does a kitchen appliance have to do with sports? Hot stove is a phrased used to refer to the movement of players from team to team during a time when a sports league is not actively playing games and the rampant and excited speculation among fans that potential or real player movement creates. According to Wikipedia, this term “dates from nineteenth-century small town America when, during the winter, people ‘gathered at the general store/post office, sat around an iron pot-bellied stove, and discussed the passing parade. Baseball, along with weather, politics, the police blotter and the churches, belonged in that company’.” Players can move from one team to another by signing a contract with a new team when they are at the end of a contract and are therefore free agents or by being traded to another team while under contract.
Now that you know what a hot stove is, the next step is to understand why football hasn’t traditionally had one. There are a couple reasons for this. One is specialization. Football is the most highly specialized sport. Players can not only just play one of the dozen or so positions on the field but they usually are best in a particular offensive or defensive scheme. As opposed to basketball, hockey, or certainly baseball, transitioning from one team’s system to another is way more painful in football. There are lots of examples of good players moving from one team to another and never regaining the success in a new system that they had in their first. Another reason is power. The NFL is the most lopsided of the major American sports leagues when it comes to the power dynamic between players and teams. NFL teams can arbitrarily cut all but the best players and are usually able to get their way in contract negotiations. As a result, NFL players have traditionally had less power than in other leagues to ask for or force their team to trade them. The last reason is the salary cap. Unlike in the National Basketball League, where player contracts are all guaranteed and trades are often made for financial reasons, in the NFL, teams have the opportunity to cut their players if they don’t want to deal with counting their salaries towards the team’s cap.[1]
The NFL’s free agency period began yesterday and with it came an unprecedented slew of player signings and meaningful trades. The Philadelphia Eagles have led the way by trading a star running back to Buffalo for a young linebacker and a draft pick and then following that up by swapping quarterbacks and draft picks with the St. Louis Rams. Right behind them in terms of timing and significance were the Seattle Seahawks who acquired the outstanding tight end, Jimmy Graham from the New Orleans Saints. The Miami Dolphins signed controversial but effective defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh to a massive free agent contract and the New York Jets traded for wide receiver Brandon Marshall and signed free agent cornerback, Darrelle Revis. These moves came in quick succession and their perceived importance brought football writers and fans everywhere to their computers in droves where they registered their thoughts, complaints, and excitement.
The last thing to unpack in this tweet is Clark’s suggestion that other sports leagues “should shut down” if the NFL’s player movement becomes exciting and plentiful. This is likely a somewhat hyperbolic statement but there’s some truth to it. The NFL is already by far the most popular sport in the country and when it is in season, it’s hard for other sports to get attention from sports fans. Luckily for them, the NFL only plays from September to February. Beyond those times, only the NFL draft in late-April/early-May generates enough excitement among football fans to draw attention away from other sports. If there were more player movement between teams, like there was yesterday, it would extend the period of NFL obsession even further and that would damage the ability of other sports to have their time in the spotlight.
Twitter is a powerful platform for facilitating communication but it does sometimes make hard-to-understand comments impossible. If you see a sports tweet you don’t understand, send it to dearsportsfan@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to explain it.
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
Dear Sports Fan,
I don’t get it. College basketball has the perfect tournament called March Madness. Why does it need to have these extra conference championships? What’s the point? Why would anyone bother watching when the real competition is yet to come?
Thanks,
Lori
Dear Lori,
It’s true, the NCAA Basketball tournament, popularly called March Madness, is a wonderfully fun event. The tournament is 64 (technically 68 teams for the men’s tournament now, but most people still think of it as 64 for men and women) of the best college basketball teams in the country, playing in a single-elimination tournament until only one team is left. Before that happens though, almost every conference (all but one, the Ivy League) will have a conference championship tournament. These tournaments are happening now, in the two weeks before the NCAA tournament begins. Compared to March Madness, these tournaments may seem underwhelming, but they’re important for a variety of reasons. Their most important meaning does relate to the NCAA championship tournament. Every winner of a conference championship will get an automatic bid or place in March Madness. This shapes the conference tournaments and their meaning for the teams that play in them. It all depends on what type of team you are in what kind of conference.
Conferences come in all shapes and sizes but we can break them up into three categories: power conferences, tiny conferences, and in-between conferences. Tiny conferences usually only get one place in March Madness. Power conferences may get five, six, seven, or even eight teams into the tournament. The in-between conferences vary from year to year, depending on the quality of the teams in their league that year, but they might get two or three teams in.
For a team in a tiny conference, winning the conference championship is the only way to qualify for March Madness. For these teams, their conference championship is the pinnacle of competition. They know that they probably don’t have much of a chance to win a game in the NCAA tournament, much less win the overall championship. This transforms March Madness from being the tournament to being almost thought of as a prize for winning the conference tournament. Win the conference tournament and they’ll get to say, for the rest of their lives, that they played in March Madness. Being a dominant team in a one-bid league also means that the conference championship is a perilous time. There’s no rule that says a league only gets one bid. Non-automatic bid teams are selected for March Madness by a committee and there’s no guarantee that the committee will select a team with a very good record from a weak conference if it doesn’t win its conference tournament.
The situation in power conferences are different. The top teams in these conferences are basically guaranteed a tournament spot, even if they don’t win their conference tournaments. For these teams, the conference tournament is a chance to show off for the committee and hopefully get a higher seed in (and therefore an easier path through) the NCAA tournament. The teams in the middle of the power conference standings are the ones playing for bigger stakes. Win the conference tournament or at least get close, and they could rescue a mediocre season by qualifying for the tournament.
The experience in the in-between conferences, as you might guess, falls in-between the tiny and the power conference championship experience with one twist. These conferences often have one or two teams that are virtually guaranteed a tournament spot based on their regular season success. If they win their conference tournament, they get an automatic bid as well. If a surprise team from the in-between conference wins the conference tournament instead, that team will get the automatic bid. The favored team or teams in these conferences will probably still get their spots, meaning that instead of two spots in March Madness, the conference might get three; instead of three, they might get four. Every spot comes at the cost of another team elsewhere in the country, so you’ll see teams in one conference root for the favorite in another conference just so that a surprise team doesn’t eat up an automatic spot in the tournament.
Conference tournaments are exciting in their own right, but they do lead to some potential for counter-intuitive incentives. Like in European club soccer, as I recently explored in a post on whether or not teams always actually “play to win the game,” some teams may go into their conference championships with other things on their mind. Avoiding injury or testing a new strategy could be more important to a team that already feels it has a spot in March Madness wrapped up than winning the conference championship. For years, the Big East was widely thought of as the best and most physical basketball conference in the country. Teams that won or even just went very far in the Big East conference championships often were so physically and mentally drained by the effort that they couldn’t play their best in the NCAA Tournament. This sparked two competing lines of thought. One was that Big East teams shouldn’t try to hard to win their conference championship. The other was that winning the Big East title was in some ways more prestigious than winning March Madness itself.
This year, the power conferences (for the men’s tournament) are the Big 12, Big Ten, Big East, ACC, and SEC. The in-betweens are the American, Mountain West, Pac-12, Atlantic 10, West Coast, and Missouri Valley conferences. The other leagues are mostly tiny conferences with one bid, but of course, we won’t know until the selection committee releases their choices. Stay tuned.
Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer
This morning I woke up to find that Dear Sports Fan turned 100,000 overnight. That’s right, since May 22, 2011, the first day of this blog’s existence, it has been viewed 100,000 times! The past almost five years have been an amazing time for me. This blog has gone from being a casual side-project to a passion to an almost full-time avocation. I’ve poured a lot of myself into the around 500,000 words I’ve written for this site and if there hasn’t been blood or tears so far, there has definitely been a lot of sweat. I want to thank the close to 3,000 people who have come along for the ride in a really meaningful way by following me on Twitter or Fancred or liking my page on Facebook. You all are the worm that keeps me excited about getting up early and writing. [BAD METAPHOR ALERT]
To celebrate, I’d like to share a little bit about the blog, give some stats and anecdotes from the first 100,000 views and talk a little bit about the next 100,000.
How did Dear Sports Fan get to 100,000? Let’s let the numbers tell the story.
As you can see from this first chart, the site’s growth was reasonably consistent for its first three years, from May of 2011 to the spring of 2014. Then it starts picking up a little speed and grows a little more rapidly. Starting in August of 2014, the site’s growth accelerates like a mile runner kicking towards the finish line. This growth rate continues to get steeper until the last little bit of the graph. Translating those numbers to events, I can tell you that I became much more dedicated to the site in late 2013/early 2014. My dedication was rewarded with more views. More views fed my dedication, and during the Spring and Summer of 2014, as I struggled with the decision to leave my job of seven and a half years, I decided that part of what I wanted to do when I left was write Dear Sports Fan. After I left in August of 2014, I was able to start writing every day. This, combined with a particularly newsworthy NFL football season, sparked the growth you see in the curve above. This peaked with the Super Bowl on Feb 1, Dear Sports Fan’s best day ever with 966 views. Since then, there’s been a natural lull, both in terms of my writing and the public’s viewing. I’m actually thrilled that Dear Sports Fan has maintained its relevance as much as it has during the slow sports time after the Super Bowl.
An even better way of looking at these statistics is through a chart showing average views per day.
One fun thing to notice in the chart above is that every September before this past one has a little peak. This is the peak in interest as the college and NFL football seasons start and lots of people start wondering how football works and why our culture seems so obsessed with it. This past year I was able to take that peak and build on it. Two other spikes that are fun to notice and remember are February 2014, when I wrote a lot about and even traveled to the Winter Olympics in Russia and June 2014 when the World Cup made soccer a brief national obsession.
Dear Sports Fan has 766 published posts. I’ve tried to find a good balance between stock (posts whose subject will last, if not forever, than a long time) and flow (articles whose interest will probably last only a few days.) In the flow category, I do two daily features — a 2-4 minute Sports Forecast podcast where I run through the most interesting sporting events of the coming day and a series of Cue Cards with very pithy synopses of high profile sporting events from yesterday and lines to use in conversations about them. During the football season, I was also writing weekly features previewing (as an imaginary good cop, bad cop duo) and reviewing each NFL football game.
As for stock, I’ve tried to concentrate on explaining the basics of major sports for people who are curious or confused about why so many people spend so much time being so involved with them. For a sample of the types of posts I’ve been writing, here are my top twenty posts from the first 100,000 hits.
No surprise that the series of “Why do people like _____?” posts are consistently quite popular. That’s the most basic question non-sports fans ask about sports fans. Although it doesn’t show up in my greatest hits numerically, I’m particularly proud of my series on brain injuries in football and how to save the future of football and football players by solving the brain injury problem. I also enjoyed putting together my two email courses (so far), Football 101 and Football 201. If you haven’t earned your certificates yet, you should do that before next fall.
I have two projects that I’m excited about starting. The first is a text message service for hockey or basketball fans and the people who live in, around, or with them. The NHL and NBA playoffs begin April 15 and April 18 respectively. The playoffs are a hectic time. Teams play almost every other night but are not always scheduled in a predictable way. The importance of each game is magnified to somewhere on a scale from vital to earth-shatteringly important depending on the context of the seven-game playoff series. Injuries are tracked with as much interest and as little forthrightness as Cold War era troop movements. It’s a lot to keep track of and I’d like to help out with a text message each morning. The second project will be a series of articles and podcasts describing major sports franchises and what’s unique about being a fan of that team. There’s a surfeit of information out there about sports teams but very little that helps the layperson understand what to expect from a typical Mets fan and how that’s different from a Yankees fan.
Both of these new initiatives are more focused on getting directly involved with people who read, listen to, or otherwise make use of the site. Engagement has been the biggest struggle so far and I’m really hoping this will help. If you’re interested in being a part of one or both of the new features, comment on this post or send an email to dearsportsfan@gmail.com. Let me know if you’re a fan or someone who lives among the fans and which team or teams you follow.
Thanks for all the support,
Ezra Fischer
Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: In today’s segment, I covered:
For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.
You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link. Music by Jesse Fischer.
No theme this week, just a selection of wonderful articles about sports that I flagged throughout the week. One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:
Football is everywhere, right? And the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event of the year. It’s virtually a holiday! Here’s the story of a small but growing group of people who engage in their own Super Bowl competition: who can make it longest without finding out who won. They’re called “runners” and losing, or finding out who won, is jokingly referred to as “dying” or a “death.” This is a great article.
Most of the runners, however, found themselves waking up each day in a cold sweat. “I feel like I’m being sequestered for the stupidest jury trial in modern history,” one competitor said. “It’s gotten to the point where three things may end me: recklessness, homesickness, or sheer boredom.”
“I’m starting to think that #DeathByGirlfriend is becoming a reality as she gets more fed up with me being anti-social,” one runner wrote on Twitter. A doctor feared going to the hospital, where he would have to make small talk with patients. A stripper in Los Angeles slept through the Super Bowl—most of the clientele was watching the game—but found the rest of her work week difficult: “Starting every conversation with ‘Don’t tell me who won the SB!’ is hilarious but not the best way to make money in a strip club.”
Now that the Super Bowl is won and gone, the biggest story in the sports world is… still NFL football. It’s now time for free agents to be wooed and signed by new teams. The biggest and best free agent this year is a ferocious defensive tackle named Ndamukong Suh. Suh is known equally for being an impactful player and a dirty one. In this article, Brian Phillips pierces through the first level of analysis and tries to get at what makes Suh the type of player he is.
We want football players to be blood-scenting berserkers half the time and upstanding sportsmen the other half; even if you don’t agree that the line is in kind of an arbitrary place, can you imagine how hard that would be to navigate, from Pop Warner on? You’re a big, fast kid who can hit people hard. You’re taken into a room and told, first of all, that this makes you special, and second of all, that your special self is subordinate to a team. You’re told that all your future specialness will depend on how completely you subordinate yourself. You’re told to give everything. Give your all. Leave it on the field. Never stop trying to win. Never stop trying to get better. You’re told that there’s no room for weakness. You’re told that there are no excuses. You’re told to make yourself a weapon. You’re told that the only thing that matters is beating your rivals. You’re told to call me sir. You’re told that what you’re doing when you’re playing defense is hunting. You’re told to seek out any edge, any advantage, any crack you can use for a toehold. If you win, the crowd roars your name. But the crowd will like you only if you’re humble. The crowd is screaming for you to kill your opponent. But do it at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and they’ll turn on you. Be a warrior. Be a killer. But be respectful. Give 110 percent, but hold yourself in check.
As a set of inputs, this is madness. What person’s brain could line that up into anything like coherence?
Soon, college basketball will take over the sporting landscape as early March transitions into March madness, the NCAA men’s college basketball championships. As such, it’s time for the personal interest stories to start flowing. This story is a particularly excellent example of the genre. It follows Isaiah Williams, a junior guard for Iona, a small school New Rochelle that hopes to qualify for the tournament this year. Williams grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and has struggled during his college career with finding a balance between trying to help his family out of their socio-economic and violent plight, and personally protecting his little brother, Kevin.
Teammates wondered how Isaiah held it together.
“It’s not just like, ‘My best friend got killed,’ which is hard enough to take,” says Iona senior forward David Laury, Isaiah’s closest friend on the team. “It’s like, ‘One of my best friends got killed.’ Two months later, ‘Another one of my best friends got killed.’ Another month later, ‘Another one of my best friends got killed.’ These are kids that he grew up with from around, like, sandbox time. It was just ridiculous.”
The off-campus house Isaiah shares this year with seven students is quintessential college — dirty floors, a Fry Baby in the kitchen and a sign hanging in the foyer that reads “5 O’Clock Somewhere Ave.” He says he’s doing well balancing books and basketball as he works toward a degree in criminal justice and currently sports a 3.0 grade-point average thanks, in part, to Wednesday evening date nights with Menendez at the library.
The biggest difference between New Rochelle and Newark is obvious, Isaiah says.
“Here, you can walk outside around 11 o’clock and you don’t have to worry,” he says. “Back home, once the sun goes down, you need to be in the house. Not even — when the sun’s up, you still not safe.”
Even with Isaiah at school, his presence is felt in the family’s Newark home. His associate’s degree hangs next to the front door. The living room alcove is filled with 26 trophies and dozens of medals. Framed pictures of Isaiah dot the walls.
Dear Sports Fan,
I’ve been watching a bunch of hockey lately and really liking it, but there’s one thing I don’t get. When a defender’s stick breaks, the announcers usually make a big deal out of the fact that a forward will give his stick to the defender. What is this all about? Why do hockey forwards give their sticks to a defenseman? Wouldn’t it be better for the forward to just hold on to his own and let the defender get a new one?
Thanks,
Blanca
Dear Blanca,
There’s a rule in ice hockey that forces any player except the goalie who breaks his or her stick to drop it immediately. I’m pretty sure that this is a safety rule. A broken stick becomes an unpredictable and extremely sharp tool. Playing a sport with what is basically a weapon in your hands is dangerous enough, there’s no reason to allow that weapon to get more dangerous. Sticks do break pretty frequently though — at least a few times a game. When a stick breaks, its player is forced to continue playing without the benefit of a stick. There are a few options for this player. Substitutions are free-flowing in hockey, so the player can skate to her bench and have another player replace her on the ice. If the player was just starting his shift on the ice and doesn’t want to come off, he can skate past his bench and grab a stick that someone on the bench hands him and keep playing. Among the coaches on every hockey team’s bench is an equipment manager. At least at the NHL level, equipment managers stock several sticks per player and are incredibly adept at noticing when a player breaks his stick, grabbing the right one from their stock of extras, and having it ready to be handed to him within seconds. One of these two options, either substitute quickly and get off the ice, or skate by the bench and get a new stick, is the solution for maybe 75% of the situations when an ice hockey player breaks a stick. The other 25% of the time is when things get tricky.
When a player breaks her stick while she is in her own third of the rink, playing defense, there isn’t as simple of a solution. In the defensive zone, the cost of skating to the bench to get a new stick or to substitute is generally thought to be too great for the benefit of getting a new stick to outweigh. Conventional wisdom says that it’s better to play defense with all your players, even if one doesn’t have a stick, than it would be to give the other team a brief numerical advantage. Okay, so, there’s no easy way out. The difficult way involves playing defense without a stick. It’s probably worth taking a minute to think about why this is such a disadvantage. A hockey player without his stick is not completely lost, but he’s very close to it. Hockey players on defense use their sticks to try to intercept or prevent passes, to tie up opposing players’ sticks so they can’t pass or shoot, and to check an opponent with. A player without a stick has to use her hands or feet to do all of those things, which reduces the radius that they can defend from a circle as wide as their stick is long (four to six feet) to just a few feet on either side. It reduces their effectiveness defensively and it means that even if they do get the puck, they’ll have to awkwardly try to kick it to pass it to a teammate or clear the puck to mid-ice. It’s not fun for anyone to play hockey without a stick.
When one of the three forwards on the ice breaks her stick, she keeps playing if the play is in her defensive zone. When one of the two defenders breaks his stick, one of the forwards on his team will try to sneak back and hand him his stick. Even when this move is successful, it means the forward has to play without a stick and the defender has to play with one that’s unfamiliar and could be too short or too long or even curved the wrong way. As you pointed out, this seems like it could be a bad move. It’s worth it for two reasons. First, if the defensive team is able to get the puck back, it’s far easier for a forward to get to the bench for a new stick or a change. Forwards play closer to the middle of the ice where the team benches are. The second reason is about what responsibilities each position has on defense. The role of a forward playing defense is largely obstructive. They try to get in the way of the offense – to not let them get comfortable with the puck, to get into places where attackers would like to pass the puck and to throw their bodies in front of shots. Defenders are more controlled and targeted in the defensive zone. Each defender will be responsible for one side of the ice near the goal. They clear offensive players away from the net with their bodies and use their sticks as a last line of defense to prevent passes or shots from close range. If there’s a rebound in front of the net or a scramble for a loose puck, they’re going to be the ones to get the puck and smack it out of a dangerous position.
Given their jobs while playing defense, offensive players are marginally less affected by losing their sticks and their jobs are slightly more expendable. That, plus the fact that it’s going to be easier for them to get a new stick or a quick substitution, is why they give up their sticks to a defender without one. The same thing is true, but even more so, when a team is killing a power play. When a four player, or three player penalty kill unit breaks a stick, their team is in serious trouble but it’s still better for a forward to be without a stick than a defender.
Thanks,
Ezra Fischer
