Do Not Watch This Game 11.8.14 Weekend Edition

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Thursday, 8:25 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Cleveland Browns at Cincinnati Bengals. It’s on the NFL Network but do not watch this game!

I know what you’re thinking… it’s a little early in the week for this post. You’re right. Whatever level of hunger you have for football, you’re still digesting last week’s games. So, why am I already thinking about Week 10 in the NFL and which game to suggest skipping, if you’re going to skip any of them. Easy – because this week, the clear candidate for skipping is the Thursday night football game between the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals.

Here’s the case against the game. The Cleveland Browns right now are like a stale donut rotating in a display. It looks delicious on the outside, but once you get past that layer of glimmering glaze, it’s stale and crummy on the inside. Mmmm… donuts. The Browns have a good record this year with five wins in their first eight games, but when you look at their schedule, especially recently, they’ve really only played bad teams and even then, they haven’t been impressive. During the last three weeks, they’ve played the three worst teams in the NFL: the Jacksonville Jaguars, Oakland Raiders, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Any decent team should have been able to rattle off three easy wins. The Browns lost to the Jaguars and beat the other two with a distinct lack of aplomb. The two most compelling characters on the Browns are interesting partially because of their absence. Wide receiver Josh Gordon is serving a ten week suspension for his third violation of the NFL’s ban against weed. Rookie quarterback Johhny Manziel is sitting on the bench because literally nothing he’s done so far in the NFL has suggested he should be playing over the hum-drum current starter, Brian Hoyer.

The Browns’ opponent, the Cincinnati Bengals are 5-2-1 (five wins, two losses, and one tie) on the year so far. They’ve made the playoffs four out of the last five years and lost in the first round every single time. That’s impressive – it’s like flipping a coin sixteen times and calling at least ten right four out of five times but then getting the next one wrong ALL FOUR TIMES. Football isn’t exactly like flipping coins, but it would be interesting to know what the likelihood of a coin-flipping team having the record the Bengals have had over the last five seasons [activate math friends!] Honestly, the best reasons to watch this game are that both teams wear orange and black/brown and they’re from Ohio. If you’re not an Ohio native or resident or you don’t have a thing for orange, it’s probably safe to spend your Thursday night doing something else.

If you are an Ohio/Orange lover, here’s an alternative – skip the 4:05 game between the Denver Broncos and the Oakland Raiders. The Broncos are one of the best three teams in the league and they’re pissed after losing to the Patriots last week. They’re not about to allow the winless and hopeless Raiders even an eight of an inch of wiggle room in this game.

Hockey goalie masks: individuality in sports

Jerry Seinfeld famously joked that “loyalty to any one sports team” is a curious thing because, if you accept that the players move from one team to another and eventually retire, rooting for one team must be nothing more than “rooting for laundry.” It’s a clever joke, mostly because it creates such an amusing scenario. What if we did root for literal laundry? “GO TUMBLE-DRY ONLY SHIRTS!!” As with all good observational humor, there’s a deeper truth lurking beneath. Team sports, particularly professional team sports, demand a subordination of the individual to the team that goes far beyond what most of us experience in our professions. The darkest aspect of this subordination is played out in the eagerness of athletes to play through injuries that would sideline most people and should sideline them for the sake of their future health. Professional athletes have few opportunities to express their individuality, which is why the ones they do have — touchdown dances in football and walk-up music in baseball being two clear examples — are so important to them and noticeable to fans. In all of sports there may be no cooler way (except maybe these skeleton helmets) for athletes to express their individuality than hockey goalie masks.

It seems completely crazy now but hockey goalies didn’t wear masks or helmets until 1959. It took only another decade or so for the first goalie to decorate with his mask. According to a fairly comprehensive history of hockey goalie mask designs on NHL.com, Gerry Cheevers drew a simple stitch onto his otherwise undecorated mask in protest against his coach who ordered him back on the ice after taking a shot to the face. That the beginning of what has become an amazingly diverse artistic endeavor was the action of an athlete asserting his individuality is fitting. Since then the battle between subordination to the team and assertion of the individual has played itself out in the aesthetic of goalie masks.

Goalies like Ed Belfour and Felix Potvin successfully branded themselves with their masks. Belfour always had an eagle design and Potvin always had a cat. These identities and nicknames followed them from team to team and allowed their fans to root for them regardless of what laundry they were wearing. A contemporary of theirs, Ron Hextall believes that a goalie should choose to align his identity with his team’s:

“If you want to tie yourself in there somehow, fine, but I always preferred the team logo rather than something about you,” said Hextall, citing the masks worn by Dryden and Martin Brodeur as easy-to-recognize and iconic. “I still believe a goalie mask should be tied to the organization, the city or the logo rather than to the goalie himself.”

I wonder what he would think of the New York Rangers backup goalie, Cam Talbot, who recently debuted his latest ode to his favorite movie, Ghostbusters? Talbot calls it the “GoalBuster.” Ha!

If you want to get in on the goalie mask game yourself, you can do it with this NHL Mini Goalie Mask Standings Board. You can use these tiny helmets to involve yourself in the NHL by keeping daily standings of divisional or conference standings. Note though, that the masks here are not the masks of individual goalies, they are simply painted in team colors. Sure, you might say, this is easier and safer to do because you never know when a goalie will get traded or injured and his mask design could become obsolete. The cynics among us would note though, that inevitable obsolescence is often a good plan for products like this because it encourages you to buy it again next season. Is it possible that the makers of these helmets are taking a stance against the individuality of athletes so that we sports fans continue to root for laundry?

Sports Forecast for Tuesday, November 4, 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:

  • UEFA Champions League — Liverpool at Real Madrid, 2:45 p.m. ET on ESPN3.
  • NHL – St. Louis Blues at New Jersey Devils, 7:30 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • NHL – Pittsburgh Penguins at Minnesota Wild, 8 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NBA – Houston Rockets at Miami Heat, 7:30 p.m. ET on NBA Network.

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 3, 2014?

 

  1. The Colts of the Luck: The only luck the Indianapolis Colts needed to beat the New York Giants was their quarterback Andrew Luck. And other “luck” puns. Lots of them. About as many puns as touchdowns in the 40-24 thrashing the Colts gave the Giants last night.
    Line: [I recommend coming up with your own “luck” pun!]
  2. Blues over Blueshirts: In the only NHL game on the calendar last night, the St. Louis Blues beat the New York Rangers. The Rangers are one of the Original Six teams and have worn blue shirts for so long that they’re known as the Blueshirts. So, you know… more happy wordplay. This game went into a shoot-out so the Rangers get one point in the standings even though they lost.
    Line: The Blues are on a five game winning streak now. No shame in losing to them.
  3. Home sweet home in the NBA: The Brooklyn Nets won their first home game of the season in convincing fashion, 116-85 over the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder are missing their best two players for at least a month, so beating up on the generally weaker Eastern Conference is a must if they’re going to stay within shooting distance of the playoffs in the insanely tough Western Conference this year. The Memphis Grizzlies beat the New Orleans Pelicans 93-81 to continue two streaks. First, they’re 4-0 for the season. That’s impressive. Second, they’re now 16-0 in their last 16 games at home.
    Line: Must be that Memphis/Brooklyn barbecue!

Why do sports suspend women while honoring men?

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. This weekend, I read a wonderful profile of the aging boxer, Bernard Hopkins, by Carlo Retella in the New York Times. It’s an excellent example of a classic sports profile. Rotella choses an intriguing athlete and spends time and effort to understand him. The result is a fascinating story about a complicated man who defies expectations to exceed in his sport. I loved it and had it lined up to feature in this section of the website. Then I read Amy Bass’ thought-provoking piece, ‘Calling Nature a Cheat’ in the Allrounder. Bass tells the story of Dutee Chand, an eighteen year-old Indian professional sprinter who was recently suspended from competition because of high androgen levels. She is not being accused of cheating but she’s not allowed to compete either. Bass persuasively poses the question – why do we laud male athletes who exceed our expectations while suspending female athletes who do the same? What makes Chand’s chemical advantages different from the mental and physical advantages that allow Hopkins to consistently beat men his exact size who are fifteen or twenty years younger than him?

This question struck home for me, because it’s absolutely true — we sports fans love talking with fascination, admiration, and wonder about the physical characteristics of male athletes that help them do things we could never do. Whether it’s a basketball player’s wingspan that far exceeds his height, or a cyclists heart that beats one-third as frequently as mine, we know that male athletes are not like us. Why should the female athletes be physiologically “normal?” These articles made me think twice and more about the way we think about male and female athletes. I hope they do for you as well.

Bernard Hopkins, Boxing’s Oldest – and Most Cunning – Champion

by Carlo Rotella for The New York Times

One key to his longevity at the top of the fight world is that he has come to consider it “barbaric” to exchange blows with an opponent.

There are masters of defense who rely on will-o-the-wisp elusiveness, making a spectacle of ducking punches. Others build a fortress with their gloves, arms and lead shoulder, deflecting incoming blows. Hopkins can slip and block punches with the best of them, but his defensive technique is founded on undoing the other man’s leverage by making constant small adjustments in spacing and timing that anticipate and neutralize attacks before they begin. It’s somehow never quite the right moment to hit Hopkins with a meaningful shot. Boxers, especially big hitters, feel a kind of click when the necessary elements — range, balance, timing, angle — line up to create an opening to throw a hard punch with proper form. Hopkins doesn’t run away, but an opponent can go for long stretches­ of a round without ever feeling that click.

Calling Nature a Cheat

By Amy Bass for the Allrounder

Women on the field continued to be understood within the confines of a biological determinism that solidified the notion of their physical incapacity when compared with men. In short, there was only so much that the male-dominated, male-defined, sports world expected of women, and if they performed beyond those expectations, they were suspected of being men.

Chand’s appeal to CAS, then, goes far beyond the question of defining women competitors: she is questioning the very nature of how we conceive of competition. What does it mean to compete with the body that one is born with? Can we applaud strong women athletes if one is categorized as a man when she gets too strong? And, perhaps most importantly for sport writ large, what actually constitutes an unfair competitive advantage? If an advantage comes naturally, can it be deemed unfair?

Sports enthusiasts marvel over Michael Phelps’s disproportionate torso or the height of Yao Ming – there is no problem accepting the seemingly genetic freakiness of these male champions. Athletes with unusual training regimens, too, whether runners working at high altitude or someone like Shaun White pretty much buying his own mountain, are commended for their dedication, their effort. But, the natural make-up of Chand’s body is considered to be, for all intents and purposes, cheating because, according to the rules of the IAAF, it makes her less of a woman and, hence, too much of a potential athlete.

What is a bye in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a bye in sports? I’ve heard that word in a bunch of different contexts but I’m not totally sure what it means.

Thanks,
Samuel

 

Dear Samuel,

In sports, a bye refers to a period when a team or player would normally compete but for one reason or another does not have to in this case. In mainstream sports like football, soccer, baseball, or basketball, it has two common uses. The first is a scheduled week off in sports where teams play weekly. The second is in the context of a playoffs or a tournament, when a team or player is rewarded for earlier success by getting a free pass into a later round. We’ll take a quick look at each meaning in this post and then spend a moment on the word’s history and derivation.

In leagues where teams play weekly, like professional and college football in the United States and soccer in most European leagues, teams sometimes have a week off. In the NFL, each team has one week off during a seventeen week schedule during which they play sixteen games. This is a great thing for players and coaches to rest up in the midst of a very physically and mentally challenging season. An unintended but intriguing consequence of this is that it wreaks havoc of fantasy football owners whose start/sit decisions are made a thousand times harder on weeks when important members of their team aren’t playing. When organized this way, a bye week is an equitable way of rewarding all teams with the same amount of rest.

In tournaments and playoffs, a bye week rewards a team or player by guaranteeing entry to a future round of play. Let’s take a single elimination tournament, like the NFL playoffs or a tennis tournament. If you wanted to design a tournament or playoff without byes, you would start at the finals (two teams) and go back: semifinals (four teams,) quarterfinals (eight teams,) the round before that (sixteen teams), and again (thirty-two,) once more (sixty-four.) Choose a number from those and you can have everyone play the same number of rounds. If, instead of four teams, you want to start with six, one easy way of handling it is to have two games (four teams) while two teams wait to play the winners of those games in the next round. This gives you two rounds of four teams each, followed by a final with two teams. It’s not “fair” because it gives a significant advantage to the teams who don’t have to play in the first round, so instead of selecting these teams or players at random, the reward of the bye goes to teams or players who have performed better in previous tournaments or in a regular season. Using byes in this way is one strategy the organizers of a sport have for balancing the excitement of an inclusive tournament with the goal of getting the two best teams or players into the finals so they can play each other.

The word “by” has lots of meanings in English but the one that I think most clearly represents its current use in a sports context is as an adverb, meaning “so as to go past” as in, “the reindeer ran by the puzzled pig.” This fits the use of the word in sports fairly well, even if the word has shifted from being used as an adverb to a noun: “The Dolphins have their bye week this week” or “Serena Williams has a first round bye in an upcoming tournament.” Another possibility, called out in this Yahoo answers post, is that the word is used because it means “something secondary.” This is supported by a great discussion of byes on Stackexchange’s English language site, where a person named Hugo points out that the first use of byes (and how they still work in some throw-back competitions like dog racing) were an attempt to make competition more fair, not less. When a dog (or human athlete) could not compete in a tournament, their opponent would have to complete a bye or a secondary form of the game. Advancement to the next round of the playoffs was guaranteed but, in order to keep things fair, the athlete would have to tire themselves out as much as they would have if they had had to play. In the case of dog racing, the dog would have to run the course anyway. In human sports, I’m guessing a substitute was brought in to compete just as a workout partner.

Hope this shed some light on what byes are,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Monday, November 3, 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:

  • EPL – Crystal Palace vs. Sunderland, 3 p.m. ET, not on TV.
  • NHL – St. Louis Blues at New York Rangers, 7 p.m. ET on local cable.
  • NBA – Brooklyn Nets vs Oklahoma City Thunder, 7:30 p.m. ET on local cable.
  • NBA – New Orleans Pelicans vs Memphis Grizzlies 8 p.m. on local cable.
  • NFL – New York Giants vs. Indianapolis Colts 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.

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 2, 2014?

  1. Football happened: As is true on all fall Sundays, the biggest sports story was the National Football League. Six teams had the weekend off, so there were fewer games than on most weekends. That’ll make catching up on them easier, especially if you read our NFL One Liners.
  2. Major League Soccer playoffs: America’s men’s professional soccer league began its semifinals this weekend. They are organized as a home-and-home or two-leg series. That means each semi-final consists of two games (called legs) one at each team’s home field. Yesterday, the D.C. United lost to the NY Red Bulls 2-0 and FC Dallas tied Seattle’s Sounders FC 1-1. It’s weird to have ties in the playoffs, but that just means the second leg of the series will decide the outcome.
    Line: Ties in the playoffs? What’s up with that?
  3. Are the Miami Heat Mark Twain? After losing LeBron James during the off-season, a lot of people (myself included) thought the Miami Heat were going to be a bad basketball season this year. They’ve come out at the start of the season and answered their critics by rattling off three straight wins. Last night they beat the Toronto Rapters 107-102.
    Line: I guess the Heat are still going to be okay, even without LeBron James.
  4. Flames off to a hot (get it? get it?) start: Talk about surprising teams at the start of the season! In the NHL, the biggest surprise might be the Calgary Flames who, after many bad seasons in a row, are off to a great start. After yesterday’s 6-2 victory over the Montreal Canadiens, the Flames are 7-4-2.
    Line: The Flames are off to a very… good start. No pun intended, no pun executed.
  5. New York Marathon: Wilson Kipsang and Mary Keitany, both from Kenya, won the New York City marathon yesterday on a clear but windy day. The most exciting moment was in the last few hundred yards of the men’s race. Two runners were alone at the front, Kipsang and the enjoyably named Lelisa Desisa. Desisa hung sneakily behind Kipsang until a moment of his choosing when he decided to make a move and sprinted around and past Kipsang. He bumped Kipsang a little on his way around, which must have bugged the tall Kenyan. Kipsang did a double take, followed by a look of haughty disdain, as if to say, “what? you little bug! why would you even bother trying to beat me in this race?” Then he absolutely left Desisa in the dust.
    Line: Did you see the look Kipsang gave Desisa? LOL!

Week 9 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 9

Sunday, November 2, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Tampa Bay Buccaneers 17, at Cleveland Browns 22

The Cleveland Browns’ romp through the three weakest teams in the NFL continued today with a win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They’re now 5-3 but one senses that reality might treat the Browns harshly once they start playing better teams.
Line: The Browns cut through opponents like a knife through butter but… so far all their opponents have basically been butter.

Jacksonville Jaguars 23, at Cincinnati Bengals 33

Talking about weak opponents, that’s written on the back of every Jaguars business card. The Jaguars may be the best of the worst teams but they still fell to the Bengals.
Line: Another week, another Jaguars loss. Maybe they would do better if they had a different governor?

Arizona Cardinals 28, at Dallas Cowboys 17

This matchup of highly ranked teams was marred by the absence of Cowboys starting quarterback Tony Romo who missed the game because of two broken bones in his back.
Line: Without Romo, the Cowboys never seemed to have a chance against the Cardinals.

Philadelphia Eagles 31, at Houston Texans 21

The Eagles lost their starting quarterback, Nick Foles in this game. The Texans lost their starting running back, Arian Foster. Despite quarterbacks being generally though of as less replaceable than running backs, the Eagles didn’t miss a beat while the Texans faltered.
Line: The Eagles barely seemed to miss Foles when he got injured.

New York Jets 10, at Kansas City Chiefs 24

Kansas City needed some good news after suffering a game seven World Series loss and an early elimination from the Major League Soccer playoffs during the past week. They got it with the arrival of the woeful New York Jets.
Line: I expect Rex Ryan to get fired this week. 

San Diego Chargers 0, at Miami Dolphins 27

I have no idea what happened in this game. I’m not sure anyone has any idea what happened in this game.
Line: I have no idea what happened in this game.

Washington Redskins 26, at Minnesota Vikings 29

This game was overshadowed by two artifacts of protest against the use of a racial slur as the name of an NFL team. 1. When the team bus was involved in a traffic accident, the NFL’s official twitter account posted a photo but referred to the team only as “Washington,” noticeably not using the team’s name.  2. Thousands of Minnesotans gathered before the game to protest the name.
Line: Washington lost, but the bigger story might be them losing their name soon enough.

SUNDAY, November 2, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

St. Louis Rams 13, at San Francisco 49ers 10

All year, the 49ers have seemed like a powder-keg of resentment towards their coach and worse than expected performance. The Rams might have just lit a match and thrown it.
Line: Watch out for the “49ers are exploding” stories this week.

Oakland Raiders 24, at Seattle Seahawks 30

Not a bad showing from the Raiders on the road in Seattle. The Raiders specialize in moral victories.
Line: Remember when the Raiders we’re good? Oh, you weren’t born then? Neither was I.

Denver Broncos 21, at New England Patriots 43

Like an anticipated heavyweight boxing match that ends with a first round knockout, leaving viewers feel like they were robbed of some enjoyment, this game was over before it really got started.
Line: The Patriots hit the Broncos before they could get started.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Baltimore Ravens 23, at Pittsburgh Steelers 43

The new-age Ravens and Steelers may not be the defensive behemoths of old, but, even as they are scoring lots of points, they seem to hit each other harder than any team hits another team.
Line: The Ravens vs. Steelers rivalry still brings out the most violent aspects of football, it’s just that they score now too.

Beneath the surface of 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. 

This week, I chose four articles that delve beyond the surface of sports to examine the strange, quirky, sometimes charming, sometimes complicated underpinnings of sports. What are athletes and coaches really like? How do cultural changes effect the game? What can we learn from how we organize our sporting events? What is life like for athletes a tier or two down from the stars?

We start with an article about the complicated relationship between an eccentric, demanding coach, and his strong-willed quarterback. There’s a melancholy addendum to this story, which is that Connor Halliday, the quarterback in this story, broke his leg during a game the week after this was published. His college career is over. 

The Pirate and His Pupil

by Michael Weinreb for Grantland

He tends to treat his quarterbacks a little bit like fiction writers treat their protagonists: He projects himself onto them,5 sets them in motion, and puts them through an emotional and physical wringer, and they emerge on the other end having fundamentally changed, most of the time for the better.

Part of the burden of being a Leach quarterback is in the inherent freedom of the offense: Every play call that Leach makes is meant to be viewed as a suggestion. If the quarterback sees something different… he is free to change the play call at any time.

Because Halliday had to adapt to Leach on the fly — because he was thrown into a leadership role starting in place of the oft-injured Tuel before he was fully prepared — he struggled to decipher this balance. He often felt that he was being blamed for things that weren’t his fault; his offensive line wasn’t accustomed to all that pass blocking, and Halliday took a beating, spraining ankles and injuring and then reinjuring his hip and taking shots that constantly threatened to knock him out of games. He is naturally a headstrong and outspoken kid — “A cowboy,” Loscalzo says — but those first couple of years, he was weighed down by the burden of the manners he’d been taught, by the idea of respecting one’s elders, and especially by the idea of respecting one’s head football coach. If Mike Leach called the play, he thought, what makes me think I could possibly call a better one?

At the very least, Leach and Halliday appear to have reached a mutual understanding, so that when Leach fell into that long digression about Guadalupe and the Bermuda Triangle and Jacques Cousteau and volcanoes during the quarterbacks meeting, it was Halliday who egged him on with questions, who encouraged him to go deeper, who seemed to be enjoying this latest wholly unpredictable left turn more than anyone else in the room.

We all know how much the iPad changed our lives. For some, it freed us from our desks and let us work in a radically more mobile way. For others, it was just a new and innovative way of reading in the bathroom. This article examines how technology has changed the balance of football.

How Technology Is Killing NFL Defenses

by Kevin Clark for the Wall Street Journal

Until now, the chess match before the snap had always been a fair fight. Offenses get to come out in a set formation and can make minor tweaks—a different route here, an adjusted blocking assignment there. But defenses can change their whole scheme based on what they see from the offense.

But then technology intervened. For about the last four seasons, players have had tablets to watch film on. This year, the effects are being felt for perhaps the first time. “Things that used to be subtle, like a safety lining two yards outside of a hash mark, is now a dead giveaway,” said former NFL lineman Shaun O’Hara, now an analyst at the NFL Network.

Cameron Heyward, a Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman, said that research of pass-rushing moves has gotten so advanced that he rarely wants to make the first move, since the offense will know what’s coming.

“It’s totally changed the way we’ve played,” said Steelers lineman Ramon Foster. Fellow lineman Kelvin Beachum said that the team excels at “anticipatory management” with the new technology at their disposal.

“We’ve trained ourselves to, when I talk to Kelvin Beachum, I make sure to say, ‘Yo, let’s not do this with our hands. Just know it, no pointing,’ ” Foster said. “The technology part is crucial.”

“Playing for love of the game” is a quaint, almost anachronistic phrase and idea, but as this article teaches us, there are many soccer players playing at the highest professional level in this country who are doing just that. While salaries for star players have increased to attract better players to Major League Soccer, pay for the rank-and-file players has lagged behind in a major way.

Many in M.L.S. Playing Largely for Love of the Game

by Andrew Keh for The New York Times

In many ways, this year has been a high-water mark for soccer in the United States. After years of fighting to gain recognition alongside the more established major sports in the country, soccer reached an unprecedented level of public consciousness during last summer’s World Cup, where an intrepid run by the American team charmed a fresh crop of casual fans.

Yet in some ways, salaries in the league show how far the sport has to go… The league’s median salary is about $92,000, with an average of about $226,000 in guaranteed money, and there is a belief in the union that the number must be considerably higher to attract and retain better talent, which in turn would ensure the future of the league.

As Nasco said, “When you compare this to anything else in professional sports, you really are playing for the love of the sport, and you’re hoping, if you can stay in it and stay healthy, you can eventually get the money you deserve.”

This year marks the first year of a new era in college football. For years people have been loudly calling for a college football playoff and they’ve finally got it. This article outlines why you might not always want what you want, not really. Learn all about the unexpected downsides to a playoff system.

Tossing the Crystal Ball: What’s Lost When the Path to College Football’s Championship Is Made Clear

by Michael Terry for Grantland

October 28, 2014, is meant to be the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare. On that fine autumn day, the inaugural College Football Playoff rankings will be sent down from on high, and finally, following a debate that extended from stadium bathroom lines to the Oval Office itself, we will have our College Football Playoff. And with it, supposedly, the era of injustice will be over.

In our increasingly uniform way of choosing champs, we want to believe there is clear reasoning: that if we give more teams a pathway to the playoff, we are creating a journey the champion must complete in order for us to feel that the team in question is a justly deserving winner. More often than not, though, the narratives that have been most compelling are actually those in which the outcome seems unjust. Whether it’s a judge robbing a boxer of a deserved victory, or a fresh horse being sent out at Belmont to prevent a Triple Crown, or a system that chooses the wrong two teams to play in a purported title game, these stories drive home the reality that sports aren’t actually fair, nor were they meant to be.

What was interesting about college football was that it stood out from the increasing uniformity of sports through the intriguing inadequacy of its system. Its frequent inability to make sure the best team was awarded the championship was fun to watch because of that inability, not in spite of it.