Why does an offensive lineman slap the center's butt in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why does an offensive lineman slap the center’s butt in football? I see this all the time now when watching football and I never used to. What changed?

Thanks,
Melvin

Dear Melvin,

The offensive lineman next to the center, called a guard, slaps the center’s butt as part of the elaborate set of signals a team uses to coordinate the snap that starts a football play. The snap has been an evolving practice with league-wide trends and team specific wrinkles. The guard’s slapping of the center’s butt is the latest in a long line of innovations aimed at giving the offense a slight advantage against the defense. Here’s how it works and some of the history behind it.

In the old days, offenses in competitive football used basically the same system we all used when playing football in our backyards as kids. When the quarterback says “hike” the center snaps the ball to him and the rest of the offensive team begins to block or run routes as programmed by the play. As you might expect though, defenses caught on to the meaning of the word “hike” and charged at the quarterback as soon as he said it. So, teams went to great lengths to disguise their signal to snap the ball. They might use different words or alter the number of times the quarterback could say a word before it told the offense the play was starting. Soon though, the popularity of college and professional football, new stadium designs that seemed amplify noise, and the increasingly intentional involvement of screaming fans meant that offenses on the road simply couldn’t hear the quarterback. Offenses had to adjust to the noise and do so while maintaining the advantage of being in sole possession of knowing exactly when the ball is going to get snapped.

There is a simply wonderful article about how offenses adjusted and evolved to this challenge called, The Silent Treatment, by Mark Bowden in Sports Illustrated. I had absolutely no idea, but there was a time when the NFL actually had a rule which said that if the crowd was too noisy, the quarterback did not have to snap the ball. The ref would ask the crowd to quiet down and if they did not, the home team would be penalized. This seems totally crazy nowadays when we expect the home crowd’s noise to be an advantage for the home team by making it impossible for the visiting offense to hear each other. The rule was struck from the books in the early 1980s and from that moment, the defense had a big advantage at home. Offensive coaches had to adjust and finally, one of them did. Bowden tells the story of that adjustment through its integral figure, the former NFL guard and long-time offensive line coach, Howard Mudd.  Mudd was thinking about the problem of coordinating offenses without being able to hear when he talked to a fellow coach who had spent some time coaching football at a school for the deaf. If they could do it, he figured NFL athletes could do it to. He implemented a system called the “silent count.” In this system, the quarterback would give some visual signal to the center (who is looking backwards through his legs.) That would cue the center to raise his head or wiggle it side to side. This visual cue would tell the rest of the offensive line to begin counting: one one thousand, two one thousand, three… and at a pre-set number of thousands or Mississippis, the center would snap the ball to the quarterback while the rest of the team simultaneously began their movements. Mudd’s team, the Indianapolis Colts who had a young Peyton Manning and a great left tackle, Tarik Glenn, adopted Mudd’s silent count so effectively that it became a weapon for them:

The Colts got good at it. Glenn got very good at it. He learned to coordinate the count with the swivel of his head. It was like a dance move. “It made a huge difference,” he says. “It gave me time to face the task at hand. It’s all about timing, and pretty quick I could just feel it.” In fact Glenn started getting off the snap so fast that refs flagged him, claiming he had jumped too early. Mudd defended him. “He would send a man to the league office and have them review it,” says Glenn. “After a while they started to see that I wasn’t offside. Coach Howard didn’t just come up with the silent count, he sold it, to the team and then to the league.”

Like any good innovation, the silent count was soon adopted and altered by teams around the league. According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Giants tackle Luke Pettigout, “used to like to hold onto Mr. Seubert’s [the guard between him and the center] pinky. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the man he had to defend. When Mr. Seubert saw the ball snapped, he’d free his hand and Mr. Pettigout could go.” The New York Jets, according to NJ.com, are one of the teams who use the innovation you mentioned in your question — the guard hitting the center’s butt: “The center has such an important pre-snap job – identifying the linemen’s attack point for blocking on running plays – that some offensive coordinators don’t want the center to take his eyes off the defensive front. So those coordinators will have one guard look back through his legs for the quarterback’s leg lift. When the guard sees it, he will tap the center, who then begins his head nodding.” So that’s the answer to your question. When the guard hits the center’s butt, he’s relaying a signal from the quarterback to the center to ask him to begin a silent count that will lead to the ball being snapped.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

Sports Forecast for Tuesday, November 11, 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 – Colorado Avalanche at New York Islanders, 7 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NBA Basketball – Orlando Magic at Toronto Raptors, 7:30 p.m. on NBA TV.
  • NCAA Football – Toledo Rockets at the Northern Illinois Huskies, 8:00 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
  • 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 Monday, November 10?

  1. Eagles outclass Panthers: I suppose it’s fitting for the NFL game the night before Veterans’ Day to be won by a team that uses our national bird as their name. The Eagles scored on defense, special teams, and offense last night in beating the Panthers 45-21. The Panthers, who made the playoffs last year, have now lost four games in a row.
    Line: Looks like the Eagles really didn’t miss a beat with new starting quarterback Mark Sanchez.
  2. Seattle and Dallas tie, Seattle wins: The Seattle Sounders went into their Major League Soccer playoff game last night knowing that they would advance to the next round with a win or a 0-0 or 1-1 tie. They went for the 0-0 tie and their home crowd, wise to the ways of the soccer playoffs, didn’t mind one bit.
    Line: Sometimes in soccer, a 0-0 tie is really a win for one team.
    What’s next: Game one of the Western Semifinals between the Seattle Sounders and the L.A. Galaxy is 5:30 pm E.T. on Sunday November 23, on ESPN.
  3. Spurs get late run to beat Clippers: The defending champion San Antonio Spurs leaned heavily on last year’s finals MVP, Kawhi Leonard to beat the Clippers 89-85. Leonard scored 26 points despite not being able to see very well out of one eye because he’s still recovering from a nasty case of pink eye. I repeat he scored 26 points against professional competition despite not being able to see very well out of one eye. And I have trouble making an uncontested layup.
    Line: Kawhi Leonard, even with one eye, is better at basketball than most humans.
  4. LeBron’s triple double leads the Cavs to a win: In basketball, a double double is when a player records double digits in two main statistical categories, most frequently points and assists. A triple double is an ever rarer feat which calls for a player to score double digits in three categories. It’s a sign of a well-rounded player absolutely dominating a game. LeBron James recorded a triple double last night with 32 points, 12 rebounds, and 10 assists and his team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, beat the New Orleans Pelicans 118 to 111.
    Line: Now that’s the LeBron the Cleveland fans have been waiting for!

How do the NASCAR championships work?

Dear Sports Fan,

I read your Cue Cards series every morning faithfully. This morning you admitted that you didn’t really understand how the NASCAR championships work. Isn’t that your job? Figure it out!

Get on it,
Arturo

Dear Arturo,

You’re right, it’s unforgivable. I should know how the NASCAR championships work! So, I did some research and figured it out. It’s an interesting model. Here’s how it works:

There are 36 races in a NASCAR season. Of these, the final ten are part of the NASCAR championship series, called the Chase for the Sprint Cup. In some ways, these final ten races are just like the first 26 races in the season. Each is its own event with its own results and prize money. For example, the Goody’s Headache Relief Shot 500, run on Sunday, October 26, 2014 had a total purse of $5,036,108 that went out to the forty-three drivers who competed in the race. During the final ten races though, there is another set of standings and results super-imposed on top of the normal race results. This extra structure is the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

The Chase for the Sprint Cup begins with 16 competitors and slowly reduces the field to four before crowning a champion in one final race. The first round consists of three races and is called the Challenger Round. After those three races, four drivers are eliminated and the next round begins. The next round is called the Contender Round, also consists of three races, and has twelve competitors. Once the three races are done, another four drivers fall out and only eight remain. The eight compete in the Eliminator Round, also over the course of three races. The final cut happens and the field is reduced to four drivers for the Championship round which is a single race.

The sixteen driver field is initially chosen based on the results of the first 26 races in the season. Drivers in these “regular season” races are assigned points at the end of the race based on what place they finished the race and whether or not they led during the race. The racers with the most wins in the first 26 races will be given spots in the sixteen driver Chase field. If there are more than 16 winners (which almost never happens,) the winners with the most points will qualify. If there are fewer than 16 winners (because some drivers won a lot of the first 26 races) then the field will be filled in order of the points standings among non-winners. It’s a little convoluted, but basically the best 16 drivers from the first 26 races qualify for the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Before the Chase starts, the 16 qualifiers are assigned points based again on regular season wins. Every driver is given 2,000 points plus three points for every regular season win. This year, the standings at the beginning of the Chase looked like this with Brad Keselowski in first place with 2012 points and a three-way tie between drivers 14-16 who all qualified without having won a single race that season.

At the end of each round until the Championship round, the winners of the three races in the round (note that because each race has the normal complement of 43 drivers, there may not be three eligible winners) automatically advance to the next round and the rest of the available slots are filled in order of how many points they accumulated during the round. At the beginning of each round, the points are reset, so each driver that survives the cut has an equal shot to win the next round. There are no cumulative standings. The final Championship round takes place during a single race at the Homestead-Miami Speedway on November 16, 2014. Of the four remaining drivers, whoever places higher in that race wins the overall Chase for the Sprint Cup.

There are so many things about this format that are interesting. First of all, the idea of having a race within a race — a set of drivers within a field of 43 who care more about beating each other than winning the race is curious. How does that impact the tactics of the race itself? It’s tempting to want to see just the sixteen, twelve, eight, or four drivers still alive for the championships race alone on a track but racing with so few cars on the track probably alters the sport enough to make it unfitting for a playoffs. Still, it’s strange to think of a driver other than one in the final four winning at Homestead-Miami. Then you’ll have two separate victory celebrations happening simultaneously at the end of the race. The Chase for the Sprint Cup is an evolutionary approach by NASCAR to trying to maintain the one-day excitement of their sport while creating the week-to-week suspended drama of a playoffs.

I learned a lot — I hope you did too,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Monday, November 10, 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:

  • Tennis – Barclay’s ATP World Tour Finals: Roger Federer vs. Kei Nishikori 9 a.m. ET and Novak Djokovic vs. Marin Cilic at 3 p.m, ET on The Tennis Channel.
  • MLS Soccer Playoffs – FC Dallas at Seattle Sounders FC, 10:30 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • NBA Basketball – San Antonio Spurs at Los Angeles Clippers, 10:30 p.m. on NBA TV.
  • NFL Football – Carolina Panthers at the Philadelphia Eagles, 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • 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.

Week 10 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 10

Sunday, November 9, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Kansas City Chiefs 17, at Buffalo Bills 13

After starting the season with two losses, the Chiefs have won six of their last seven games and are hurtling towards a playoff spot. The Bills are the exact opposite. They started the year with two wins and are now sinking towards missing the playoffs for the 15th straight season.
Line: Two teams headed in opposite directions pass each other in week 10. If they are both traveling at the speed of light, how far will they…

Tennessee Titans 7, at Baltimore Ravens 21

The Titans scored seven points in the first quarter and then not again for the rest of the game. That had to be frustrating for Titans fans. Frustrating for Ravens fans? They’re stuck in a division with three other really good teams.
Line: Are they the Tennessee Titans or the Titanics? ’cause their season is sinking fast.

Dallas Cowboys 31, vs. Jacksonville Jaguars 17 (In London)

Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo came back from missing one game with two broken bones in his back and led the team to a relatively easy win over the Jaguars. These London games might be fun to go to, but for some reason they’re almost always bad examples of what an NFL game should be like.
Line: Why do we keep sending the worst matchups over to London?

Miami Dolphins 16, at Detroit Lions 20

This game was one of the weekend’s best matchups. The Lions and Dolphins both seem to be on the upswing this season and they played a great game. Vegas’ common logic says that home-field advantage is worth three points, so this game suggests that the Lions are better than the Dolphins by a hair.
Line: I really enjoy both these teams.

San Francisco 49ers 27, at New Orleans Saints 24

The 49ers needed to win this game more than the Saints because, although they were both 4-4 coming into the game, the Saints division is much weaker than the 49ers. First it looked like the 49ers were going to win comfortably, then it looked like the Saints were going to beat them, then there was OVERTIME, and finally the 49ers won.
Line: Just like the Dolphins, Lions game, this one lived up to expectations.

Pittsburgh Steelers 13, at New York Jets 20

A classic “any given Sunday” game to use as evidence that even seemingly lopsided matchups in the NFL can have unexpected outcomes. After throwing 12 touchdowns in two weeks, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger couldn’t seem to get anything going against the canny Jets defense.
Line: Was this enough to save (Jets coach) Rex Ryan’s job?

Atlanta Falcons 27, at Tampa Bay Buccaneers 17

This game could be used as exhibit A for another NFL lesson. Even a game between two bad teams with almost no chance of making the playoffs is played in a spirited fashion. Why? Because every player on both teams is playing for their job each week.
Line: This game was more exciting to watch than you would think from the score and the, uh, teams involved.

SUNDAY, November 9, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Denver Broncos 41, at Oakland Raiders 17

This was a good game for almost a quarter and a half of football. Then the Broncos woke up and remembered they were the Broncos and the Raiders remembered they were the Raiders and fell asleep.
Line: Sheeesh, the Broncos are good.

New York Giants 17, at Seattle Seahawks 38

The Giants were actually winning this game at halftime but the Seahawks scored 24 straight points in the second half and the Giants scored none. Seahawks running back, Marshawn Lynch, scored four touchdowns.
Line: BEAST MODE [Lynch’s nickname/catch phrase]

St. Louis Rams 14, at Arizona Cardinals 31

The Cardinals won this game to move to eight wins and one loss on the season, but the question of the day will be, “at what cost?” Their starting quarterback, Carson Palmer, went down with what looked like a bad knee injury in the fourth quarter.
Line: Arghh. The Cardinals were such a fun story. I hope Palmer is not too badly hurt.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears 14, at Green Bay Packers 55

This game was as lopsided as any game I’ve ever seen. The Packers came out and were simply better than the Bears in every facet of the game. It’s one of the few games where I wouldn’t have been surprised if the owner had fired the coach at halftime.
Line: If you were watching that game after the first half, you must have either had money riding on the outcome, or you just love rubbernecking.

What happened on Sunday, November 9, 2014?

  1. Football, football, football: Good football games. Bad football games. Close football games. Lopsided football games. We’ve got them all covered in our NFL One Liners column.
    Line: No time to watch football? Just read Dear Sports Fan’s One Liners instead.
  2. Major League Soccer playoffs: The New England Revolution beat the Columbus Crew 3-1 to advance to the Eastern Finals where they will play the New York Red Bulls. The Los Angeles Galaxy got a hat-trick (three goals) from their retiring captain, Landon Donovan, on their way to advancing to the next round. They beat Real Salt Lake 5-0.
    Line: Landon Donovan’s still has some energy in his legs and tricks up his sleeve.
    What’s Next: The last conference final spot is up for grabs tonight at 10:30 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network when the Seattle Sounders play F.C. Dallas in the second leg of their two game playoff series. The two teams ties the first leg in Dallas 1-1, so to advance, Dallas will need to win the game or tie it at a score higher than 1-1.
  3. California Basketball teams play Trading Places: Last night the until then undefeated Golden State Warriors lost their first game of the season, 107-95 to the Phoenix Suns while the unvictorious Lakers won their first game of the season 107-92 over the Charlotte Hornets.
    Line: You can’t keep a good team down forever. Or a mediocre one, it seems. Nor can you keep a good team up forever.
  4. Second place not enough in NASCAR’s Elimination round: NASCAR has a playoffs of its own which I don’t completely understand but should probably figure out. Yesterday’s race was the semifinals of the championship where the eligible field (more drivers race in each individual race than are eligible for the championship) was narrowed from eight to four. The top four spots didn’t change and Jeff Gordon was eliminated despite placing second in the race.
    Line: I get the feeling that NASCAR’s playoffs are pretty awesome, I’ve just never spent the time to understand how they work.

You can't always get what you need in sports

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 some of the articles this week that inspired me. We think of sports as a meritocracy where the best athletes rise to the top, where the best franchises flourish, and where the rewards are mostly commensurate to the risks. That’s not always the case. This week, I chose four stories about elements of the sports world that didn’t quite work out the way they were intended.

Marcus Lattimore was a star among stars in the world of college football. As a running back at South Carolina, he ran around and over the competition like few can. That all stopped after his second catastrophic knee injury. Despite his medical history, he was drafted into the NFL by the San Francisco 49ers who felt his talent was worth the risk that he might never recover. This past week, Lattimore decided to retire at the age of 23 because of chronic knee pain he could not rehabilitate his way through.

The Martyrdom of Marcus Lattimore

by Michael Baumann for Grantland

Lattimore directly contributed 3,444 yards from scrimmage and 41 touchdowns to the cause, at the cost of countless hours of work and the unimaginable physical agony that comes with being the title character in a game of Kill the Man With the Ball. His efforts led to the Gamecocks’ first SEC East title, first two 11-win seasons, and first two top-10 finishes in the AP poll. They also led to a boost in recruiting3 that helped make that success sustainable.

So what did Lattimore get for his contributions? A scholarship that paid for most of three years of college and prevented him from seeing a dime from the sale of merchandise that bore his number and the sale of tickets and television carriage fees bought by people who wanted to see him play. The promise that his time would come when he cashed in with the NFL. And the knee injuries that left him physically unable to cash in once that time finally came.

When a person like Lattimore suffers a career-ending injury while serving his school for no pay, making him whole shouldn’t be an act of kindness or compassion, as it is here. It should be the norm. It should be required.

Chivas USA was one of the more interesting experiments in the U.S. professional soccer league, Major League Soccer (MLS). Chivas is the nickname of a Mexican league soccer team — officially called Club Deportivo Guadalajara. The owner of the Mexican team bought the MLS team to use as an American outpost and minor league version of his main team. The experiment didn’t go well and the team has now been bought and sold and part of that sale is an agreement to shut the team down for a year or two and then reopen it with a new name, brand, and location in downtown L.A. 

The Once And Future End Of Chivas USA

by Connor Huchton for The Classical

Many bad decisions must be made for failure to arrive this spectacularly. These are some of the required ingredients, in short — a shared stadium and the second-fiddle perspective produced; an unclear identity; discrimination lawsuits and HBO investigative reports, league misstep after misstep; a few unremarkable teams. Eventually what’s left is desperate marketing ploys and cries of “Free tickets!” A good amount must go badly for a growing league to produce a team so haunted and solitary, and here, it did.

Some of the best Chivas games were two-goal losses, games when Wilmer Cabrera and his players hardly feared embarrassing final scores or the BigSoccer forum jokes that would follow. These were free-floating performances, runaway trains built from spare piston parts, heading for the cliff at high speed — because if you can’t beat them, then fuck it, still don’t join them – just play soccer of a more unhinged metaphorical sort. This identity wasn’t the troubled one Jorge Vergara and Don Garber had in mind, but somehow, it makes a lot more sense than any rebrand ever could.

One of the appealing things about sports is how clear its goals are. Winning is an objective thing. Statistics can be kept. This means it acts more like a true meritocracy than almost any other activity. Which is not to say that discrimination hasn’t and isn’t a part of sports. Black athletes in the United States were restricted from competing in the white professional leagues for decades and remnants of that discrimination continue today. What is usually the case with sports though, is that if a minority can get into a game, the game itself should be able to help prove their point about equality. One enormous exception to this rule has been transgender athletes, who continue to be barred from competition in many places. This article places a current legal battle in Minnesota in its historical context.

Heroes, Martyrs, and Myths: The battle for the rights of transgender athletes

by Parker Marie Molloy for Vice Sports

The reality is that even today, nearly four decades after Reneé Richards won the right to compete, trans people remain largely unwelcome in the athletic world—a world that is already well behind when it comes to LGBT inclusion. The NFL still hasn’t had an openly gay athlete on a regular season active roster. The NBA just recently had their first. Baseball and hockey remain a refuge for straight individuals.

Trans athletes strong enough to brave this harsh world are pioneers. Richards to Allums, Fox to Jönsson; unfortunately, they are sometimes also martyrs. As Leva and her ilk look to hamper competition, we should aspire to a world in which all athletes can perform free of hormone testing, “gender testing,” or the pseudo-scientific ramblings of the world’s Joe Rogans; a world in which all are welcome to compete.

Every profession has its unsung heroes. Carli Lloyd, a player on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team is one of those heroes. This profile of her brushes the surface of why that might be but instead of getting caught up in that, it instead celebrates Lloyd for who she is, what she has done, and what she will do.

A Star (Still) in the Making

by Jeff Kassouf for NBC SportsWorld

Lloyd is a two-time Olympic hero, scoring the gold-medal winning goal for the U.S. women at both the 2008 and 2012 Games. She is the only player in history – male or female – to score in back-to-back Olympic finals. She wears the 10 shirt for the national team (customarily given to the top field player on the team). And yet, despite her heroics, she is hardly the face of U.S. Soccer.

Lloyd isn’t shy about telling you that she trains harder than anyone, and she’s frank about her quest to be the best player in the world. She forever carries a chip on her shoulder, fueled by a crowd of naysayers whom Lloyd doesn’t specify, yet acknowledges their existence. Lloyd said she doesn’t play for accolades, but she’s only human. She sees marketing and advertisements that don’t involve her. In 2013 she was left off the NWSL all-league first and second teams, and didn’t make the first team in 2014 after carrying her struggling Western New York Flash club through the season. But Lloyd was traded to the Houston Dash in October. Two weeks later she won the Golden Ball as the best player of the qualifying tournament.

Her attitude is classic if not cliché New Jersey: Work harder, always. And Lloyd is proud of that, calling herself a “Jersey girl for life.” She lives a few towns over from where she grew up.

NFL Week 10 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 Week 10 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. If you’re worried about watching too much football or if you’re negotiating for a little break during the weekend, read our weekly feature, Do Not Watch This Game.

Week 10

Sunday, November 9, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Kansas City Chiefs at Buffalo Bills

Good cop: This game is for the real football fans out there! The teams may not be glamorous but they’re both 5-3 and playing great football! I can’t wait to see it!

Bad cop: Not glamorous is an understatement for teams featuring Alex Smith and Kyle Orton as starting quarterbacks. Even the biggest football fans in the world wouldn’t know those guys if they bumped into them in the super market. Unless Orton had his famous neck beard. Neck beard.

Tennessee Titans at Baltimore Ravens

Good cop: The Baltimore Ravens are the best last place team in football! A win this weekend is going to start their run to the playoffs!

Bad cop: The Tennessee Titans are the WORST third place team in the NFL by far. Can you say blowout? 

Dallas Cowboys vs. Jacksonville Jaguars (In London)

Good cop: Will Cowboys Quarterback Tony Romo play with two broken bones in his back?!? What a tough guy! That’s a game I want to watch!

Bad cop: The Jaguars always play with at least two broken elements of their team. The Cowboys could beat them without ever even attempting a pass.

Miami Dolphins at Detroit Lions

Good cop: Without ever making headlines, these two teams are quietly among the best in the league! They have great defenses! Neither team gave up a point last weekend!

Bad cop: Sure… the Dolphins shut out the Chargers and the Lions… had a bye week. Cheap stat.

San Francisco 49ers at New Orleans Saints

Good cop: Whoooo! This is an exciting game! Both teams have underachieved this year and both teams need to win this game! At 4-4, a loss here could end the playoff chances of either team!

Bad cop: You’re overselling that a little. A loss would be disastrous for the 49ers but the Saints are actually in first place of their division at 4-4, that’s how bad their division is. The Saints can afford a loss here.

Pittsburgh Steelers at New York Jets

Good cop: Ben Roethlisberger has thrown twelve touchdowns in the last two weeks!

Bad cop: The New York Jets have eight passing touchdowns this whole year. I keep mistakenly typing their name as the Jest and I think I should stick with it.

Atlanta Falcons at Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Good cop: If 8-8 might win this division, the 1-7 Buccaneers still have life!

Bad cop: Amazingly, that’s what they’re thinking too. As evidenced by them switching back to unsuccessful veteran quarterback Josh McCown.

SUNDAY, November 9, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Denver Broncos at Oakland Raiders

Good cop: These teams hate each other! The Raiders would love to continue the Broncos losing streak!

Bad cop: One loss creates a losing streak? The Broncos lost last weekend and now they’re mad. You think the Raiders are going to even score in this game? Bah.

New York Giants at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: This is an unexpectedly important game for the standings! With the Cardinals running out to a two game lead over the Seahawks and the Eagles and Cowboys ahead of the Giants and looking strong, these two teams need to win to stay in the divisional race!

Bad cop: I have no idea what will happen in this game. But I can’t see it being exciting. These teams induce my afternoon football nap more than any other teams in the league.

St. Louis Rams at Arizona Cardinals

Good cop: The Rams may be a losing football team but they love playing within their division! They are 2-1 against divisional opponents and they just beat the 49ers in a close game! Will they make it two in a row?!!?

Bad cop: Rams are sheep. Sheep need water. Arizona is a desert. No, the Rams won’t win.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears at Green Bay Packers

Good cop: Old time football! Outside! Freezing cold! The forecast says it will be 34 degrees at kickoff!

Bad cop: So it will probably be 65° and sunny. Did you see Patriots quarterback and star curmudgeon, Bill Belichick go off on the weather forecasters this week?

MONDAY, November 10, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Carolina Panthers at Philadelphia Eagles

Good cop: It’s a classic matchup of star quarterback versus offensive system! The Panthers have the quarterback, Cam Newton, but the Eagles have the system! Even with a new quarterback, Mark Sanchez, coming in, my bet is on the system!

Bad cop: You do know that the offenses don’t actually play against each other, right? There are so many other factors that go into winning a football game, something that, dare I mention it, the Panthers haven’t done since October 5.

Fund this project: Cycling Party

Whether you’re an avid sports cyclist, a fan of professional cyclists, or just someone who rides her bike to work everyday and loves board games, you might be interested in this clever board game that represents cycling in an innovative way. Cycling Party is the product of two cycling and board game enthusiasts, Leandro Pérez and Diego Hernando. You can find information about the game on their website, www.cyclingparty.com, follow them on Twitter, and help fund their game on Kickstarter.

The game’s simplest version, the junior game, does a great job of teaching the basics of bicycle racing. For example, riders can be in three situations — in the big group of riders, the peleton, a smaller group, the paceline, or alone in a breakaway. In each setting, how far and fast the racers go is determined by rolling two dice but the results are interpreted in different ways — ways that make sense given how things actually work in a race. Riders in the peleton generally move together at the pace of the fastest rider (the highest roll) in the group. Only an extraordinarily good or bad roll will see a rider fall off the back of the peleton or escape away from it. In a small group, a paceline, the riders will still generally stick together  but it takes less to break the group apart. A difference in roll of only four will see one rider move ahead or behind the group. When a rider is all alone, his pace is up to him and him alone. In the real world, this means that a group will almost always catch a lone cyclist because the group can trade off the hard work of leading the pack. In the game, the group moves at a pace set by the highest of several rolls while a lone cyclist only gets one roll. The junior version of the game recognizes the difficulty of climbing mountains by forcing every rider in a peleton or paceline to act like a rider in a breakaway — moving only at their own pace — on mountain roads. It’s a clever way of teaching beginning cycling mechanics while also creating a compelling game.

The senior game adds specialized roles for riders into the mix. Players designate riders as sprinters, climbers, roulers (cyclists who are good at everything,) flat domestiques, mountain section domestiques, and lanterne rouges (basic riders.) Each type of rider has slightly different variables which modify the effect of the die rolled for them each term. The senior game also adds some tactics other than go-very-fast to the game: attacks, retreats, and risky descents abound.

To the excellent gameplay of the junior and senior games, the last version of the game, the master game, adds the element of a multi-stage tour to the mix. Cycling’s greatest and most popular race is the Tour de France. Run annually since 1903, the Tour de France is run (rode) in 21 stages over 23 days. It covers more than 2,000 miles each year. The brilliance of the race, from a fan’s perspective, is that it combines amazing physical feats with interesting one-day tactics and team strategies that bridge the race from stage to stage. The master version of Cycling Party tries to emulate that. I’ve always found the season or campaign version of sports games to be the most compelling. The length of these modes give your imagination a chance to run its course and get attached to the imaginary athletes you control.

I love the way Cycling Party demystifies the physical realities that drive professional cycling and puts players in the place of team managers and riders, forced to make tactical choices to win the race. Help make the game a reality!