2014 Thanksgiving NFL preview: Chicago Bears at Detroit Lions

Thanksgiving is the ultimate American holiday. Its focusses are family, food, and football. To celebrate the first two, it helps to know about the third. To that end, we’re offering a free copy of our Guide to Football for the Curious in addition to publishing previews about each of the three Thanksgiving NFL football games.

The first of the three Thanksgiving NFL football games this year is between the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions at 12:30 p.m. on CBS. Despite it being at the start of the day, this game’s Thanksgiving food analog is the classic Thanksgiving pies: pecan and pumpkin. It’s definitely traditional, like pies, the Detroit Lions, are an ever-present part of the day. And, like the pies, if it weren’t Thanksgiving, you might not find this game as tasty. While the other two games on Thanksgiving feature teams battling it out for first place in their divisions and a playoff spot, this game has one team still alive for the playoffs but the other lost its relevance several weeks ago. 

Plot

For years and years, the Detroit Lions Thanksgiving game was a bit of a joke. Every year, the Lions would host a game and every year it seemed they would lose. Truthfully, they’ve been a bad team for a long time:

  • They’ve won one Thanksgiving game since 2003.
  • They’ve made the playoffs only once since 2000 and haven’t won a playoff game since 1991.
  • They’ve only had two winning seasons since 2000 and during that time became the only team in history to go winless for an entire 16 game season.

This year, everything is upside-down. The Detroit Lions are having their best season in a long time this year. They are 7-4 (seven wins, four losses) on the season but for the first time all year, find themselves in second place in their division, behind the Green Bay Packers. The Lions have lost two games in a row, so they are reeling a little bit, but they also must be liking their chops in anticipation of facing the Chicago Bears in this game. For years, the Bears have been the big brother that beat up on the Lions but this year the only big they are is a big mess. The Bears may have hit their low-point three weeks ago when they lost 55-14 to the Green Bay Packers on national television and dropped to 3-6. I was, frankly, surprised that their head coach was not fired following that game. Since then, they’ve won two games against sub-par opponents but these wins have not inspired much confidence at all.

Characters

Jay Cutler, Quarterback on the Chicago Bears

The quarterback of an NFL team is supposed to be its leader and moral center. Jay Cutler subverts that expectation publicly by appearing noticeably disinterested and disengaged from the game. He is so expressive in this way that he’s inspired a popular Tumblr blog called “Smokin’ Jay Cutler” that features photos of him with photoshopped cigarettes dangling from his mouth in honor of “the most apathetic looking athlete in the history of sports”. Cutler is a strong-armed quarterback (he once controversially claimed to have a stronger arm than legendary Denver quarterback John Elway) who is prone to making bad decisions with where he chooses to throw the ball.

Brandon Marshall, Wide Receiver on the Chicago Bears

Brandon Marshall is one of my favorite NFL players. He’s an outspoken advocate for mental health and lives his beliefs on the subject by speaking openly about his own struggles with borderline personality disorder. He’s every bit as passionate on the outside as Cutler is apathetic. Marshall plays his heart out on the field and sometimes blows his vocal chords out screaming on the sidelines.

Matt Forte and Alshon Jeffrey, Running Back and Wide Receiver on the Chicago Bears

Matt Forte and Alshon Jeffrey are important figures on the field and quiet ones off the field. Forte, from Louisiana, and Jeffrey, from South Carolina, are both understated stars. They let their play on the field speak for them. Forte is an excellent running back who does a lot of his damage on screen or swing passes. Jeffrey is a tall, powerful receiver, who often overpowers the defenders assigned to guard him. They both represent a type of quiet athletic elegance.

Martellus Bennett, Tight End on the Chicago Bears

Martellus Bennett is a receiving tight end with almost limitless talent. As a member of the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants, he showed tantalizing moments of superb play mixed in with a bunch of mediocrity. This year on the Bears, he seemed like he had finally put it together to play consistently at a high level, but has slid backwards over the past month. His persona slants more towards brash than anything else. His nickname, which he gave himself, is “The Black Unicorn” based on an answer he gave to a reporter who asked him about his conditioning in 2012: “I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, I’m faster than I’ve ever been. I could run all day. I’m kind of like a black unicorn out there”

Calvin Johnson, Wide Receiver on the Detroit Lions

Calvin Johnson’s nickname is Megatron and, over his years playing football, he’s either evolved to fit the name or the name was a perfect fit for him to begin with. He is how you imagine a football playing robot would be designed. He’s tall — 6’5″. He can leap — 43 inch standing vertical jump. He is fast, very fast — 4.35 second 40 yard dash. Yet none of these raw measurements can express his excellence at making amazing catches when his team needs him to do so. He is a fantastic player.

Matthew Stafford, Quarterback on the Detroit Lions

Matthew Stafford is one of those classic enigmas of football. Because football is such an intertwined sport, it’s often hard to isolate the performance of one player from another. This is Stafford’s sixth year in the NFL but each one of them has been with star receiver, Calvin Johsnon. Even after six years, it’s hard to tell if Stafford’s good performances are due to Johnson’s brilliance or whether he would be successful on his own. Stafford plays football like a swashbuckler. He takes risks, throws from all sorts of strange angles, and plays through a lot of big hits.

DeAndre Levy, Linebacker on the Detroit Lions

Finally, we give the defenders some attention. DeAndre Levy is the leader of Detroit’s defense and potentially a prototype for a new breed of NFL linebackers. As the game has slanted more towards passing, a linebacker’s ability to cover tight ends and even wide receivers has become more important. Levy is one of the smallest linebackers in the league, which helps him in pass coverage, and one of the most explosive, which helps him defend the run. According to Robert Klemko in a fun profile of Levy in The MMQB, “Levy is an oddball with a prospector’s beard, a quiet nature and an uncommon zeal for travel.” Sounds like a fun guy to me.

Ndamukong Suh, Defensive Tackle on the Detroit Lions

Ndamukong Suh made his name as one of the NFL’s biggest bad actors, back when being violent ON the field was enough to qualify you for NFL bad boy. Now that we live in the era or Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, Suh’s offenses seem quaint in comparison. Elizabeth Merrill wrote of Suh in her profile of him for ESPN, “He likes to surprise people, finding immense enjoyment in debunking the notion that he’s a thickheaded hit man… he didn’t get his degree in basket weaving or, say, communications. He matriculated through a rigorous engineering program.” Suh is an enigma, a truly destructive force on the football field who seems to be a righteous dude off the field.

Brothers Fuller? Kyle Fuller, defensive back on the Chicago Bears and Corey Fuller, wide receiver on the Detroit Lions

This game could feature the rare sight of a pair of brothers literally playing against each other on Thanksgiving. If they were both healthy and playing, Kyle might easily be covering Corey, trying to keep him from catching a pass. Alas, Kyle hurt his knee this past weekend and may miss the game and Corey is relatively far back on the Lions’ depth chart.

Marc Trestman, Head Coach of the Chicago Bears

Trestman took an interesting path to become a head coach in the NFL. He made a name for himself as head coach of the Canadian Football League Montreal Alouettes, where he won two championships and became known as an offensive mastermind. That reputation has been sorely tested this year in Chicago where his highly talented offense has sputtered and stalled more than it has excelled. He’s definitely on the hot-seat and could be fired at the end of the year.

Jim Caldwell, Head Coach of the Detroit Lions

Way back in 2010, columnist Bill Simmons and his readers had tagged Caldwell as an almost absurdly unemotional coach. As coach of the Indiannapolis Colts, Caldwell was seen as almost a care-taker thanks to quarterback Peyton Manning’s hands-on domineering nature. As much maligned as he is, Caldwell has the Lions playing as well as they have for more than a decade, so he must be doing something right.

Sports Forecast for Monday, November 24, 2014

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:

  • BPL Soccer – Southampton at Aston Villa, 3 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • NFL Football – New York Jets vs. Buffalo Bills in Detroit, 7 p.m. ET on CBS regional.
  • NFL Football – Baltimore Ravens at New Orleans Saints 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NCAA Basketball – Villanova vs. VCU in Brooklyn, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN 2.
  • NHL Hockey – Pittsburgh Penguins at Boston Bruins, 7 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • And more!

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.

What happened on Sunday, November 23?

  1. The NFL in all its glory: Yep, another full, full day of NFL football. If you were out enjoying the weather, check out our Week 12 NFL One Liners to catch up on all the games.
  2. Major League Soccer semifinals: Major League Soccer’s semifinals are arranged as two game playoff series. Yesterday was the first half or leg of them in both the Western and Eastern conferences. In the East, the New York Red Bull lost 2-1 to the New England Revolution. After the Revolution jumped out to an early 1-0 lead, the Red Bull were able to tie the game up on a crazy scramble in front of the goal which involved a shot from a player lying on the ground hitting the cross bar and bouncing right to an open Bradley Wright-Phillips who headed the ball in. Jermaine Jones, one of the heroes of the World Cup for the U.S. this past year, put the Revolution ahead for good in the second half. In the West, the Los Angeles Galaxy beat the Seattle Sounders 1-0 thanks to a goal from Marcelo Sarvas and some clutch goalkeeping by Jaime Penedo.
    Line: Did you know the MLS semifinals started yesterday? Probably not because there was so much American Football on.
    What’s Next? The second legs of the semifinals are on November 29 and 30.
  3. Memphis stomps on another team: The Memphis Grizzlies are 12-2 and have looked like a dominant NBA basketball team so far this season. Last night they stomped on another very good team, the Los Angeles Clippers, in a 107-91 rout. They’re led by Spanish big man, Marc Gasol, who scored 30 points and had 12 rebounds in the game.
    Line: Have you caught a Memphis game yet this year? They look seriously good.

Week 12 NFL One Liners

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by Google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

Week 12

Sunday, November 23, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Cleveland Browns 26, at Atlanta Falcons 24

The Browns keep Cleveland’s magical sports year going with a victory. Sure, it was a two point victory on a last second field goal over a 4-7 team, but still.
Line: The Browns continue to look good but they still seem like they play the worst teams every week.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers 13, at Chicago Bears 21

All of Chicago must have been mournfully eating deep-dish pizza at halftime with their Bears down 10-0. Luckily for them, the Bears offense woke up in the second half and rattled off 21 straight points.
Line: Up and down, down and down, down and up, that’s the Chicago Bears this year.

Cincinnati Bengals 21, at Houston Texans 13

People in the NFL media talk about “coaching trees” and judge coaches, in part by their ability to foster assistants who later become successful head coaches. The Tom Brady “quarterback tree”, which numbers at least two current quarterbacks, including Texans Ryan Mallett, is not a healthy one. Mallett struggled in second start and the Texans could not overcome his play.
Line: Ryan Mallett played like a new starter on Sunday.

Detroit Lions 9, at New England Patriots 34

Meanwhile, the real Tom Brady continues to stand up. Last week the Patriots won by running the ball through the center of the defense. This week, the Patriots took a look at their opponent, saw that their run defense was very good, and decided to throw the ball a lot. Brady completed 38 of 53 (that’s a lot) pass attempts and led the team to victory.
Line: The Patriots vary their game plan more from week to week than any other team.

Green Bay Packers 24, at Minnesota Vikings 21

This was a close game but as an observer, you probably felt that the Packers were never seriously at risk for losing it. You would have been right.
Line: This game was not as close as the score makes it seem.

Jacksonville Jaguars 3, at Indianapolis Colts 23

Oh boy. After seeming marginally competent for a few weeks, the Jaguars are back to their old tricks.
Line: This game was exactly as close as the score makes it seem.

Tennesse Titans 24, at Philadelphia Eagles 43

It’s an interesting truth about the NFL that the measure of a good team is more that they beat bad teams by a lot than that they win close games against good teams. The Eagles did their best to prove that they were good by beating up on the not-so-good Titans.
Line: The Eagles outclassed the Titans.

SUNDAY, November 23, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

St. Louis Rams 24, at San Diego Chargers 27

The Rams continue to prove to everyone that they can play with the best teams in the league. What differentiates them is their inability to consistently beat the bad teams (like the Eagles did the Titans.)
Line: If the Rams could play as well against the bad teams as they do against the good ones, losing a game like this wouldn’t hurt so badly.

Arizona Cardinals 3, at Seattle Seahawks 19

The Seahawks pretty much knew that they had to win this game to have a shot at winning their division. The Cardinals didn’t know anything that drastic, so it’s no surprise the game turned out this way.

Miami Dolphins 36, at Denver Broncos 39

The Dolphins continue to develop into one of the best teams in the NFL. Peyton Manning continues to cement his legacy as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history.
Line: Hey, I’d like to see this game again, please. Please?

Washington Redskins 13, at San Francisco 49ers 17

The 49ers have now won their last three games and six of their last eight without inspiring virtually any confidence in their worth as a team. The Redskins have inspired thousands of statements about their worth as a team over that time but none that are safe for publication on this website.
Line: Another week, another uninspiring 49ers win.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Dallas Cowboys 31, at New York Giants 28

Just this:

Nothing else that happened is worth talking about more than that.
Line: HOLY SHIT, DID YOU SEE THAT CATCH???

Why do soccer teams pass the ball backwards so much?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do soccer teams pass the ball backwards so much? Sometimes they go all the way back to their goalie. I know it makes me seem like a dumb American but I get so annoyed when soccer teams do this. Aren’t they trying to score? What’s up with that?

Thanks,
Shane

Dear Shane,

Yours is a common question. It does seem counter-productive to move the ball backwards so much in soccer. I admit, even having played soccer my whole live and having spent many more happy hours watching soccer, that at times, I share your annoyed feelings. There are good reasons why soccer teams pass the ball backwards so much and it’s worthwhile to explore them because they touch on some of the core principles of soccer.

The first reason why teams pass the ball backwards so much is because it helps them keep the ball longer and having the ball is much less tiring than chasing the ball. Fatigue is an important element of soccer. The game is one and a half times longer than football and hockey and almost twice as long as basketball. Soccer is also much more restrictive when it comes to substitutions than those other sports. In most competitive soccer, only three subs are allowed for the whole game. Being more fit than the other team is a big advantage and possessing the ball for a majority of the time is a big tactical advantage when it comes to fatigue. The team with the ball moves as it wishes, offering a chance for some to catch their breath while others make short, sprinting runs up field. The team without the ball is forced to chase, not just the ball, but person with the ball, and anyone else who is running around the field. As the team with the ball moves forward towards the goal they are trying to score on, they meet increasingly more resistance from a higher concentration of defenders. This increases the chances that they will lose the ball and have to transition to more tiring defensive behavior. If, on the other hand, they pass the ball backwards, they’re less likely to lose the ball and they can continue tiring the other team out. Advantage team with the ball, advantage passing backwards.

Of all the major sports, soccer is the hardest sport to score in. As I wrote in my post answering “Why do people like soccer?” there are four key factors in this:

  • First they take away the most dextrous limbs at your disposal, your arms. No using your hands or arms.
  • Then they put a ball on the field that, if you kick it hard enough, bends and dips in all sorts of fairly unpredictable ways.
  • Controlling this ball without using your hands means that your top speed with the ball is way slower than a defender can run without the ball.
  • Finally, they allow one player, the guy who is there with the sole purpose of preventing you from scoring, to use his hands.

All of these offensive disadvantages are magnified when operating in a space with a higher density of defenders. The precision a player needs to hold on to the ball, pass it to a teammate, or get a reasonable shot on goal increases seemingly exponentially when surrounded by two, three, or four defenders. Soccer players know this. They know that they have a much better chance of scoring if they can do it against a sparse collection of defenders. One way to do this is to allow the other team to have the ball and attack your side of the field. Then, try to steal it from them and quickly transition to offense before all their players can run back to defend. That’s a risky proposition! Passing the ball backwards is a safer, if slightly less effective way of achieving the same effect. By moving the ball back towards your own net, you tempt the opposition to follow you, stretching their position and decreasing their ability to completely surround and stymie your attackers.

You’ll often hear soccer announcers or fans talking about a team’s “shape.” In a sport that has a lot of unique words, at least for Americans, like “nil” for “zero”, “pitch” for “field”, or “golazo” for “holy shit, did you just see that unbelievable goal”, it would be easy to dismiss this linguistic peculiarity. It would be a mistake. The metaphor of shape is incredibly useful when watching soccer. It’s so difficult to translate the positions and actions of 22 players in constant motion into meaningful tactics. If you think about each team as having its own shape, with edges defined by the outermost players to the front, back, and sides of the field, then understanding what a team is trying to do becomes easier. I think of soccer as a game between two globs of semi-liquid, semi-solid gloop. When a team’s shape is compact, it’s very tough to cut through it and score. When a team’s shape gets stretched out, it’s much easier. When the team with the ball passes it backwards, they’re trying to stretch their opponents shape until it becomes thin enough to poke through with a few passes ending in a goal.

Hope this makes sense,
Ezra Fischer

Rethinking injuries in sports

Injuries are a sad reality of sports. As athletes, even amateur ones, we know they’re coming and we just hope they’re not too painful or debilitating. As fans, we are transfixed at the edge of our seats whenever someone on the teams we root for goes down in a clump, grabbing their ankle or knee. As fantasy sports owners, we’re a step removed from the injuries and they transform into simple tactical obstacles that need to be overcome. 

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 injuries:

This article subverts everything we think about athletic injuries by focusing on the organ donor whose tendon was put into NFL quarterback Carson Palmer’s knee in 2005 and the emotional impact of this on her family and Palmer himself. It’s a brilliant article not least because of its restatement of the age old grandfather’s ax paradox. Can a donor live on through her donee’s achievements? What happens when her tissue is replaced?

Carson Palmer’s lasting connection

by David Fleming for ESPN

De Rossi’s final gesture of organ and tissue donation would eventually save or improve the lives of more than 50 people. One of them just happened to be a Pro Bowl quarterback in need of a new knee. “A cadaver didn’t save Carson’s career, that was Julie, a person called Julie,” says Dorothy Hyde. “There was absolutely no one else on this planet like her.”

Twenty-two months after she was killed, 
De Rossi’s Achilles tendon became part of Palmer’s knee. Within five months, Palmer was already jogging. He was back under center for the Bengals 2006 season opener without missing a single game. “It’s a little eerie, but it’s also pretty amazing,” Palmer said in an interview just two days before he re-tore his ACL. “Dorothy’s daughter lives on; a part of her is still moving and running and cutting. All the things my knee is doing, she’s doing too.”

His latest injury has severed his physical link to De Rossi… Yet the deeper connection between Palmer and De Rossi remains intact. Shortly after learning about Julie while recuperating from his 2006 surgery in California, Palmer asked his wife, Shaelyn, to drive him to the DMV. Eight years later, when he reported to a hospital for his latest surgery, he would have been asked to provide identification and any pertinent medical information. Palmer would have reflexively reached into his wallet, pulled out his driver’s license and handed it to a hospital administrator.

On the lower-left-hand corner of the ID, just next to Palmer’s smiling, tan face, is a tiny dark-pink circle with a single word written in small, thick black letters.

Donor.

Questionable to Start is a great blog I discovered this week on my voyages around the internet. Its creator started with a simple observation that mainstream media’s reporting on injuries in the NFL was not based on historic data. So, he decided to collect the data, build a database, and now he writes about NFL injuries from an informed perspective unavailable to most. This article is a response to some criticism for a debunking statement Questionable to Start made about quarterback Nick Foles’ broken collar-bone — a debunking statement that turned out to have been correct. 

Are all injuries really different?

by Craig Zumsteg for his blog Questionable to Start

Yes, all injuries are absolutely different. While two players might both have collarbone fractures, those fractures are often in different locations. Different levels of stress and mechanics caused those two injuries, so the extent of the injury is usually different as well. Different players heal and respond to treatment in different ways.

I have examples of two recent quarterbacks who suffered fractures to their left, non-throwing, collarbone. One returned after missing seven weeks. The other was close to returning around eight weeks, then suffered a setback and ended up missing the ten games before the season was over. Yes, I admit this is a dangerously small sample size.

With those two examples in mind, something rings false about any estimate that includes four weeks as a possibility. Yes, I guess that’s physically and medically possible, but it is not something we’ve seen from a quarterback… In order for me to believe that a four-week return is possible for Foles, I would like to understand the specifics of his injury. Why is Foles injury half as crippling as the ones Aaron Rodgers or Tony Romo suffered? It is entirely possible that Foles has a smaller fracture. Or that his fracture is at a location more likely to heal quickly. Or some combo of the two. But, without those specific details, I think that a historical comparison approach is the best tool we have available.

What is we could prevent injuries before they happened? We would have fewer beautiful stories like our first story today and less need for intelligent statistical coverage of injuries like in our second. Still, I think we can all agree that fewer injuries is a good thing. This article is about a revolutionary attempt to prevent injuries in downhill skiing — one of the most dangerous sports out there.

Airbag System Approved for World Cup Ski Races

by the Associated Press in The New York Times

Perhaps if Lindsey Vonn had a big cushy air bag to fall on when she tore two ligaments in her right knee she wouldn’t have missed the Sochi Olympics… Looking back, it’s nearly impossible to calculate what effect — if any — an air bag would have had in those crashes. But with a radical air bag system being approved for use in World Cup and lower level races beginning in January, Alpine skiing could get a lot safer.

The system — which entails putting an air bag in the neck area of athletes’ back protectors — was developed by Italian manufacturer Dainese in coordination with the FIS. It inflates when skiers lose control and are about to crash.

NFL Week 12 Good Cop, Bad Cop Precaps

The NFL season has started but how do you know which games to watch and which to skip? Ask our favorite police duo with their good cop, bad cop precaps of all the matchups in the National Football League this weekend. To see which games will be televised in your area, check out 506sports.com’s essential NFL maps.

Week 12

Sunday, November 23, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Cleveland Browns at Atlanta Falcons

Good cop: The Browns are only one half game out of first place in their division and the Falcons are tied for first place in theirs! As we get closer to the end of the season, the margin for error gets smaller and smaller!

Bad cop: All that is true but what you’re glossing over is that the 6-4 Browns are tied for last place in their division while the 4-6 Falcons are tied for first in theirs. Divisions are stupid.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Chicago Bears

Good cop: These teams both had big wins last week to keep their seasons alive!

Bad cop: Alive but in a persistent vegetative state.

Cincinnati Bengals at Houston Texans

Good cop: These teams have shown themselves to be adaptable survivors this year! The Texans are on their second quarterback of the year and may be missing their best running back too! The Bengals were without their best offensive player for more than a month! These teams show how football is a true team game!

Bad cop: It’s a team game but that doesn’t mean you can win the Super Bowl without stars. These teams don’t have stars.

Detroit Lions at New England Patriots

Good cop: I can’t wait to see this game! The Lions have a top three defense this year but no one is smarter at figuring out how to attack defenses than Patriots coach Bill Bellichick and quarterback Tom Brady!

Bad cop: I got nothing.

Green Bay Packers at Minnesota Vikings

Good cop: The Vikings are building a new stadium, so this year they are playing outdoors on the University of Minnesota’s field! That means these two NFC North division rivals will get to play a cold-weather home game in Minnesota! Old-school!

Bad cop: If the Vikings defense manages to even dirty Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ jersey a little bit, I’ll be surprised.

Jacksonville Jaguars at Indianapolis Colts

Good cop: Young quarterbacks Andrew Luck and Blake Bortles might be rivals for the next decade or more!

Bad cop: True. And maybe one day it will be a good rivalry, but for now I’m guessing we’ll see another game like the one between them earlier in the year when the Colts beat the Jaguars 44 to 17.

Tennesse Titans at Philadelphia Eagles

Good cop: The Eagles try to get back on track after their blow-out loss to the Packers last weekend!

Bad cop: And if they can’t beat the Titans, watch out for the Philly fans to pelt the field with boos, bottles, and batteries. That’s how bad the Titans are. That’s how they do in Philly.

SUNDAY, November 23, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

St. Louis Rams at San Diego Chargers

Good cop: The Rams are giant killers! They specialize in bringing strong teams to their knees! Their last three wins have been against the excellent Broncos, 49ers, and Seahawks! Let’s see if they can keep it going against the Chargers! 

Bad cop: I’m not sure that I’d label the Chargers as an excellent team. In fact, I’m sure I wouldn’t. The Chargers’ last four games have been a close win over the Raiders, close losses to the Chiefs and Broncos, and a terrible loss to the Dolphins. The Chargers are just bad enough to easily beat the Rams.

Arizona Cardinals at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: If the Seahawks lose this game, they’re morally eliminated (as opposed to mathematically) from catching the Cardinals for the division title! They’re gonna play hard!

Bad cop: Of course they will. Professional football players are paid to play hard. That said, you’re right, I think this will be a good game too. Which, means it will probably be terrible. Might as well just skip it.

Miami Dolphins at Denver Broncos

Good cop: The Dolphins are one of the hottest teams in the league over the last two months! Their only two losses in that time were three or four point losses to quality teams! Meanwhile, the Broncos just lost a stunner to the Rams! I think the Dolphins have a shot here!

Bad cop: Facing a pissed off Peyton Manning at home in Denver? I don’t think so.

Washington Redskins at San Francisco 49ers

Good cop: The two biggest soap-operas of the 2014 season face each other in a football game! How could you miss this?!

Bad cop: Daytime television at its worst.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Dallas Cowboys at New York Giants

Good cop: The Giants are the most dangerous kind of rival — the rival with nothing to play for except your demise! Watch out Cowboys!

Bad cop: The Cowboys are the most dangerous kind of rival — the rival that’s better than you. Watch something else.

MONDAY, November 24, AT 7:00 and 8:30 P.M. ET

New York Jets vs. Buffalo Bills in Detroit

Good cop: Fresh off their good deeds, the Buffalo Bills travel to Detroit to cheer up their fans with a victory!

Bad cop: I have to say, after 9+ feet of snow in a week, I do hope the people of Buffalo get their power back in time to see their team beat the Jets.

Baltimore Ravens at New Orleans Saints

Good cop: Despite their up and down seasons, these two teams are still in the drivers seat to make the playoffs… if they can win this game!

Bad cop: I like the driving metaphor. The Ravens are stuck in a traffic jam in the AFC North division. The Saints are close to the head of the pack in the tricycle race that is the NFC South.

Strange sports: jousting and zoning out

Here at Dear Sports Fan we tend to have inclusive opinions about sports. Oh, sure, I like getting into bar arguments about whether baseball or soccer or darts or pool or car racing or boxing or log rolling is really a sport as much as the next guy, but at the end of the discussion, if any of those things are being shown on TV, I’ll happily watch it. As long as something is competitive and requires some combination of physical and mental expertise, I think it’s a sport. Recently two strange sporting events came to my attention. The first requires total precision and complete focus in the midst of a high speed world. The second requires total relaxation and complete inattention in the midst of a high speed world. It’s hard to say which is a more more impressive feat. The first is a modern form of the Middle Ages sport of jousting. The second? An innovative “spacing out” tournament held in Seoul, South Korea.

Most of us have a general understanding of jousting from movies or books. Two heavily armored knights charge at each other on horses with long wooden spears called lances and the winner knocks the loser off his horse. Jousting emerged as a sport in the 1300s out of fairly disreputable duels fought between people on horseback. These pre-sport jousts often began with two or more combatants on horses with lances but would continue with hand-held weapons once the fighters were close enough to make lances unwieldy. As the principles of chivalry swept through the upper classes of Northern Europe, jousting transformed into a generally non-lethal competition. Throughout the Renaissance, the joust became increasingly specialized and distant from actual fighting. A barrier was put in to separate the two competitors and specialized jousting armor was created which could weigh up to a hundred pounds. Jousting as a popular form of sport came to its end at the very tail end of the 1500s when King Henry II of France was killed in a jousting accident.

Luckily for us, that’s not the end of jousting’s story. Jousting is still done today, it just looks a little different. Since 1821, the Natural Chimneys Joust has been held in Mount Solon, Virginia. This makes it one of our country’s oldest continuously running sporting events. Older even, members of the jousting community contend, than that other horse related competition, the Kentucky Derby. Modern (if you can call it that) jousting, is competitive but not confrontational. Competitors take turns running their horses down an 80-yard path and, at full speed, catch small rings on the end of their lances. This sounds reasonably tame until you see how small the rings are: one inch in diameter for the best jousters. Each jouster gets three runs down the course and the one who catches the most rings after three attempts win. If there is a tie after the three runs, the remaining jousters move to single elimination runs, like a soccer shootout after the first five shots. During these ride-offs, the rings get progressively smaller. To break particularly insistent ties, rings the size of life-saver candies can be used.

The jousting community is tight-knight and multi-generational. Andrew Jenner‘s descriptions of “Zula Casady, the 91-year-old matriarch of the Natural Chimneys Joust” and her family were my favorite parts of his article The Fading Glory of America’s (Allegedly) Oldest Sporting Event in Modern Farmer. This article is what led me down the path of jousting discovery and I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading it too.

From rural to urban and from Virginia to South Korea we go for our next strange sport: spacing out. That’s right, there was a tournament held in Seoul, South Korea recently that crowned a nine-year old as its champion. The various athletes who decided to enter the competition had to sit or lie or sprawl for three hours with no access to smart phones or other technology. According to Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku, organizers would “go around and check people’s heart rate or try to make them laugh to see who, in fact, was truly spaced out.” Jeanne Kim, writing for Quartz, relayed a statement from one of the organizers of the tournament: “Because of smart devices, we are unable to escape from external stimulation even for a moment. In such a society, I wanted to contemplate the idea of not doing anything.”

I don’t know about you, but I think this sport is a great idea. I’d love to participate! Watching it… now that’s another story. I doubt it would make for a very good spectator sport, although this one minute youtube clip is delightful. Enjoy!

Sports Forecast for Friday, November 21, 2014

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:

  • NHL Hockey – New York Islanders at Pittsburgh Penguins, 7 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NBA Basketball – Cleveland Cavaliers at Washington Wizards, 8 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NCAA Basketball – Texas vs. California at Madison Square Garden, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN 2.
  • NCAA Football – Air Force at San Diego State, 9:30 p.m. ET on CBS Sports Network.
  • And more!

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.

What happened on Thursday, November 20, 2014?

  1. On any given Thursday: Well, it happened again. The most seemingly lopsided game of the week, the game I featured on my Do Not Watch This Game column because it was going to be so unfortunately one sided, turned out to be a close, exciting game where the underdog won. I gotta stop writing that column or at least I need to base it on something other than my prediction of which game is most predictable. The until last night winless Oakland Raiders beat the Kansas City Chiefs 24-20 on a rainy night in Oakland.
    Line: Bad though they may be, the Raiders are professionals and their pride shone through last night.
  2. Better in Toronto: Crisis averted in Toronto, where two straight horrible losses for the city’s hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, may have created a true city crisis. Instead, they’re celebrating a 5-2 victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning. And just like that, they’re fine. Their record is ten wins, eight losses, and two overtime losses. That’s fine, everybody chill out!
    Line: Hey, the Maple Leafs are fine. Everything is fine in Toronto. Really. 
  3. A new day in California Basketball: Everything is topsy-turvy in the NBA in California this year. The Clippers are way better than the Lakers, as they showed last night by beating the Miami Heat comfortably 110-93, and the Sacramento Kings are consistently good. The Kings beat the visiting Chicago Bulls 103 to 88 last night.
    Line: Up is down, down is up, and the Kings and Clippers are good!?
  4. Another early season upset in college basketball: The Syracuse Orange dropped their first game of the year 73-59 against the California Golden Bears. This game was part of an early season tournament called the 2K classic being played at Madison Square Garden. Cal now moves on to the finals to play Texas.
    Line: We’re used to seeing Syracuse play heroically in the Garden but I guess things have changed.
    What’s Next: California plays Texas tonight in the finals of the 2k classic, at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN2.