Sports Forecast for Wednesday, October 29, 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:

  • Game seven of the World Series between the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants is at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
  • There are three matches in the 1/8 finals of the British Capital One Cup. The televised game is between Manchester City and Newcastle United on BeIN Sports at 3:30 p.m. ET.
  • The NBA schedule has a dozen games tonight but only two are nationally televised: the New York Knicks vs. the Chicago Bulls at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN and the Oklahoma City Thunder vs. the Portland Trailblazers at 10:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • The NHL schedule features a game between the Detroit Red Wings and Washington Capitals tonight at 7:30 p.m. on NBS Sports 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 Tuesday, October 28, 2014?

  1. Game Six of the World Series: Game six was a blow-out! The Kansas City Royals beat the San Francisco Giants 10-0 to force a deciding game seven tonight. The rout began and was basically complete in the second inning when the Royals scored seven runs!
    Line: That was a Royal beat-down!
    What’s next: Game Seven, tonight, 8 p.m. ET on Fox!!!
  2. The NBA is off to a rollicking start: There were three games yesterday for the first day of the NBA season. The New Orleans Pelicans beat the Orlando Magic 101-84 behind budding superstar Anthony Davis’ performance, the San Antonio Spurs picked up where they left off last year by beating the Dallas Mavericks 101-100, and in what is likely to be a harbinger of many losses for the Los Angeles Lakers this year, they lost 108 to 90 to the Houston Rockets.
    Line: Year after year after year after year, the Spurs are good.
  3. A full night of NHL games: The Ottawa Senators got their first victory since their city was locked down following the Parliament shooting when they beat the Columbus Blue Jackets 5-2. The Pittsburgh Penguins racked up a total of eight goals on their way to beating the New Jersey Devils. The Tampa Bay Lightening were only one goal short of that in their 7-3 victory over the Arizona Coyotes. The Carolina Hurricanes remain the last winless team in the league after losing 4-1 to the Vancouver Canucks.

What is a blitz in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a blitz in football? I get that it’s something the defense does to attack the quarterback but I’m not sure exactly what it is.

Thanks,
Lee

Dear Lee,

This is an easy question! A blintz is a thin rolled pancake filled with fruit or cream and then cooked. What? Oh, a blitz, not a blintz? Shucks, that one isn’t so easy. Blitz is a word that football took from military history, where it meant a rapid attack. The German bombing of London during World War Two is called The Blitz. Despite being an incredibly common football term, the word blitz is hard to define. It’s been used and reused in so many different ways that its actual meaning has been blurred almost completely. I think it’s safe to say that a blitz is a defensive strategy that relies on speed and surprise to attack the quarterback that aims to tackle him before he can throw the ball or, failing that, to disrupt him enough that his throw is unsuccessful. That’s a more general meaning than most of the definitions that are given but most of the specific definitions given are contradictory. Let’s run through some of them:

  • A blitz happens when someone other than a defensive lineman rushes the passer. This doesn’t make sense because in a 3-4 defense with three linemen and four linebackers, there’s almost always at least one linebacker rushing the passer.
  • A blitz is when the defense rushes the passer with more players than are protecting the passer. Possible but it makes the blitz dependent on the offense. I always thought that defenses could “call” a blitz play but if a play is only a blitz under these circumstances, the defense wouldn’t really be in control of what is or isn’t a blitz.
  • A blitz is when you send more than four defensive players to get the quarterback. Okay, this solves the problem of our first definition, but it doesn’t cover zone blitzes. Zone blitzes are when a defense tries to trick the offense by sending one or more linebackers at the quarterback while dropping one or more linemen into pass coverage. This allows for having only four people rushing the quarterback during a play described as a blitz. 
  • A blitz is just a descriptive term for the act of rushing the quarterback. Anyone who tries to sack the quarterback is blitzing. This one is nice and simple but it fails because it doesn’t provide for a distinction between blitz plays and non-blitz plays. There’s always someone rushing the quarterback but a defense is not always blitzing.

Eventually, if you probe a football fan deep enough, he or she will probably say something like, “quit bothering me, I know a blitz when I see it.” I suspect that there is a technical definition of blitz used within football teams that still has a very specific meaning although it could be used differently from team to team. I also think there probably was once, at the start of the use of the term, a specific definition. The Wikipedia article on the blitz claims that the term was originally used to refer only to a team rushing seven men at the quarterback. Rushing six was called a “red-dog” after a linebacker named Donald Nesbit “Red Dog” Ettinger who played for the University of Kansas, the New York Giants, and in the Canadian Football League. Great nickname! This has the ring of truth to me. It fits most of our descriptions. If you rush seven men, you’re absolutely using a player who is not a defensive lineman because there are at most five of those, you’re likely to be blitzing with more men than are protecting the quarterback, and you’re by definition sending more than four rushers.

So, if you want to be a stickler the next time you’re watching football with a bunch of friends, correct them when they shout about their team blitzing. Tell them that wasn’t a blitz, it was a red-dog! Then duck the plate of hot wings that’s inevitably going to come flying at your face.

Wish I could be more definitive, but this is what I’ve got,
Ezra Fischer

Why do people like basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people like basketball?

Thanks,
Henry

Dear Henry,

Basketball is a wonderful mixture of finesse and strength, style and substance, offense, offense, offense, and defense. People like basketball for so many different reasons. Here is a list of my top reasons for why people like basketball.

  • Grace and power in the air — No athletes in any sport fly with the power and grace of basketball players. Oh, sure, you could pull out ski jumping to argue with me if you wanted, but in a pure, unassisted way, basketball players fly like no one else. They jump and hang in the air in a way that seems totally inhuman and impossible to people like you and me. A powerful slam dunk jolts the viewer out of her chair with its power and audacity. Watched in slow motion, you can appreciate the incredible control basketball players have over their bodies. They’re able to twist and turn, to aim, adjust, and re-aim in mid-air. Basketball players leap with the beauty of a ballet dancer and the strength of a lion springing at its prey.
  • Personalities abound – Basketball players are the most personally accessible of all the major sports. On most teams, there are six or seven players who play most of the game. Wearing nothing more than sneakers, shorts, and a tank-top, it’s easy to see them sweat and grimace and scream and celebrate and try. Compare that with football players who are obscured by full helmets and a league that seems determined to dehumanize them or baseball with its culture that punishes emotional expression on the field or hockey where players play for 45 seconds only to be replaced by another swarming over the bench. When you watch basketball, you really get to know the players you’re watching.
  • Never more than one player away from contending – Another function of basketball’s smaller number of players on the court, is that a single player can make an enormous difference to a team’s fortunes. Even the worst teams are never more than one player away from being legitimately good. This means the fire of hope in a basketball fan’s heart may be banked for a season or two or three but it’s always ready to come back, burning stronger than ever.
  • Teamwork has its say – Basketball is dominated by super-star players with strong personalities and even stronger play. You almost never see a championship won in college or the NBA without one truly great player on the winning team. At the same time, even the greatest players can’t do it without being a part of a cohesive team. Basketball punishes teams who rely too heavily on the personal greatness of one player and rewards teams that play as a unit, moving the ball around the court until they find an open shot or a mismatch in size or skill to exploit.
  • Basketball is pop culture – More than any other sport, basketball is tied thoroughly into pop culture. From the Notorious B.I.G. rapping about having an affair with the girlfriend of a New York Knick, to Jay-Z using basketball players’ numbers as code words for the going price of wholesale drugs, to Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s wonderful cameos in Airplane, to the gobs of celebrities that sit court side at NBA games, basketball is pop culture and pop culture is basketball. There’s a particular parallel that fans love to draw between basketball and black music. It’s easy to see the improvisation of jazz and the brashness of hip-hop in basketball play.
  • Trading, drafting, and signing intrigue – If teams are only ever one player away, then player movement becomes a fascinating topic for fans to obsess over. We’ve all lived through and enjoyed (to some extent) the where-is-LeBron-going intrigue over the bast several years. LeBron is an extreme example, but every team has its dramas every year. Will this player re-sign with the team? Who will they draft? Will the draft pick be as good as hoped? One wrinkle that the NBA has as a league, which makes player movement even more fascinating to obsess over, is a salary cap structure which leads teams to make all sorts of trades for financial reasons in addition or instead of basketball reasons.
  • March Madness is awesome – March Madness, the annual college basketball championship tournament, is many people’s favorite sporting event of the year. It’s hard for anything to match its first few days when 64 teams play each other in single elimination games. If you’re a college basketball fan, you start figuring out how to wrangle watching those day-time games weeks in advance. March Madness is so great, we wrote a post just about it.
  • Players can be good in a variety of ways – Basketball is a versatile sport. There are so many different ways to be great in basketball. If you’re small (relatively) you can become a great passer like or you can throw yourself recklessly at the bigger players or you can be a great shooter. If you’re medium-sized, you can dominate with athletic dunks or shut-down defense or by facilitating other people’s play. If you’re a giant among giants, you still have options. You can develop great moves close to the basket, scoring in a variety of ways, or you might have an excellent outside shot, or you can specialize in the grittier aspects of play, setting picks and getting rebounds. There’s so many ways to be a great basketball player and they’re all represented by players in college and the NBA.
  • A supported women’s league – The NBA is one of the more enlightened leagues when it comes to many social issues, including the support of women’s sport. The WNBA is owned and operated (and subsidized) by the NBA. I know it’s not required by Title IX because professional leagues don’t take federal money but I think every men’s professional league should do what the NBA has done to support women in the same sport.

Those are my top reasons. What are yours?

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Tuesday, October 28

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:

  • The World Series between the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants continues with game six in Kansas City at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
  • The NBA season begins tonight with three games, two of which are on national television. The Orlando Magic play the New Orleans Pelicans at 8 p.m. ET. The Dallas Mavericks take on the defending champion San Antonio Spurs at 8 p.m. on TNT. The Houston Rockets play the Los Angeles Lakers at 10:30 p.m. ET, also on TNT.
  • There’s a dozen games in the NHL tonight. We’ll highlight just a couple of them. The Minnesota Wild play the Boston Bruins on NBC Sports Network at 7. The Ottawa Senators look for their first win since the shootings in their city when they play the Columbus Blue Jackets, also at 7. The Anaheim Ducks play the Chicago Blackhawks at 8:30 p.m. ET.
  • Finally, in non-game-based sports news, the first ever official College Football Playoff committee’s top 25 rankings will come out today.

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, October 27?

  1. Washington upsets Dallas: One of the charms of the National Football League is that the very best teams are only a little better than the worst teams. The gap between them is less than in other sports. The gap between good teams and bad teams is even smaller. Thus the expression “on any given Sunday” or, in this case, Monday night. The Washington Redskins beat the Dallas Cowboys 20-17 in overtime. The story of the game was the great play of Washington’s understudy quarterback, Colt McCoy, and the potential re-injury of Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo’s surgically repaired back.
    Line: The Cowboys lost, but if Tony Romo turns out to be okay, they should feel like they won.
  2. The topsy turvy continued in the NHL: Seems like it was just one of those nights when the unexpected thing kept happening. The Edmonton Oilers upset the Montreal Canadiens 3-0 and the New York Rangers scored five goals (five!!) in the third period to beat the Minnesota Wild in a game that was marred by violence.
    Line: What the huh?
  3. The quiet before the storm: Yesterday was a pretty quiet day in sports. Today is the complete opposite: the NBA season begins, the World Series might end if the Giants win, and the NHL has a full slate of games. Tune in to our sports forecast for the day for more coverage.

Let's get ready for basketball season

Let’s get ready for basketball season together. The National Basketball Association (NBA) season starts tomorrow. To help get excited AND prepared for the new season, here is a collection of our best writing about basketball:

The basics

Even the least familiar person with basketball knows a few things about the game: it’s played by teams of five who try to shoot a round ball into a metal hoop which hangs ten feet up in the air off of a plexiglass backboard. Beyond that though, things can get pretty fuzzy, pretty fast. That’s why we’ve covered a few of the next level questions in these basic posts about basketball.

What are the positions in basketball?

In this post, I run through how all the basketball positions work in this post as well as how they’ve evolved over the last twenty years. Basketball has generally transformed in that time to have more interchangeable parts. There’s less differentiation between positions than ever. This change has been reflected by a shift from referring to positions by name (power forward, shooting guard, etc.) to number.

How long is an NBA basketball game?

Talk about the basics, this post covers how long an NBA game is. Spoiler alert, it’s 48 minutes, divided into four quarters of 12 minutes each. There’s a multiples of four motif throughout basketball —  the shot clock is 24 seconds and teams have eight seconds to get the ball across half court. In the past month, the NBA experimented with reducing the

Are basketball fouls really arbitrary?

They certainly seem arbitrary, don’t they? Of all the sports, basketball fouls are probably the hardest to identify and the most open to interpretation. Well, all the major televised sports anyhow, water-polo, for instance seems to have almost constantly confusing foul calls. The truth is that the more you know about a sport and its rules, the less the rules and the foul calls that follow from them seem arbitrary. This post helps explain some of the most common foul calls.

Vocabulary

All sports, basketball included, have their own technical terms. Understanding the technical and expressive elements of basketball language is essential to enjoying the game.

What does it mean to have a foul to give?

Having a “foul to give” is something you’ll hear basketball announcers say about a team at least a few times a game but none of them ever stop to explain what that means to casual or beginner fans. Luckily, this post has you covered.

What does “and one” mean in basketball?

At any given moment, the cry of “and one” is indignantly echoing around a gym somewhere in the country, shouted by someone who feels righteous and over-confident at that moment. My colleague, Dean Russell Bell took this question and turned his answer into an opus well worth reading.

What does “ball don’t lie” mean in basketball?

Seldom has a piece of sports slang been so tied in association to a single player as “ball don’t lie” is to Rasheed Wallace. Find out why and what it means in this post.

The NBA season begins on Tuesday with three games, two of which are televised on TNT. The games are the Orlando Magic at the New Orleans Pelicans at 8 p.m. ET, the Dallas Mavericks at the defending champion San Antonio Spurs at 8 p.m ET on TNT, and the Houston Rockets at the Los Angeles Lakers at 10:30 p.m. ET on TNT. That’s just the first three of 1,230 games this season. I hope these posts help you enjoy at least one of them a little bit more than you otherwise would.

Sports Forecast for Monday, October 27

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:

  • The Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins at 8:30 on ESPN.
  • Two games in the NHL, the Minnesota Wild (4-2-0) and New York Rangers (4-4-0) at 7 p.m. and the Montreal Canadiens (7-1) vs Edmonton Oilers (3-4-1) at 9:30.
  • In the Barclay’s British Premiere League, Queens Park Rangers vs. Aston Villa at 4 p.m. on NBC Sports Network.

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

Music by Jesse Fischer.

What happened on Sunday, October 26?

  1. The Giants Ace Game Five: The San Francisco Giants won game five of the World Series thanks largely to their ace pitcher, Madison Bumgarner, who threw a complete game shutout. That means he pitched for all nine innings and didn’t let in a single run. The Kansas City Royals tried their best but just couldn’t figure out how to manufacture a run against him. The Giants are now one win away from winning their third World Series in five years.
    Line: The Royals were being held up as potentially having invented a new strategy in baseball. Last night taught us that nothing beats a great starting pitcher.
    What’s Next: Game Six is Tuesday night at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. 
  2. An overstuffed day of NFL football: On most Sundays during the fall, there’s NFL football on television from 1 p.m. ET to around 11:30 p.m. ET. Yesterday, the league one-upped itself by starting its first game at 9:30 a.m. ET. That’s fourteen hours of straight football! Just in case you didn’t watch it all, we’ve got one liners about all the games, so you can talk about them at work today.
    Line: Woke up, watched football, went to sleep.
  3. CONCACAF Champions: The United States Women’s national soccer team finished off its World Cup qualifying run in the CONCACAF (The Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) region with a 6-0 win over Costa Rica. American Hero, Abby Wambach, scored four goals to bring her total up to 177, the most of any woman or man in international competition. The American team was dominant during this World Cup qualifying tournament. Not only didn’t they lose a game but they weren’t even scored on once.
    Line: [silently bows down to show respect for Wambach and co.]

Week 8 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 8

Sunday, October 26, at 9:30 a.m. ET

Detroit Lions 22, at Atlanta Falcons 21 (In London)

A game of two halves. The Falcons won the first half, 21-0. The Lions won the second half 22-0. The Lions won the game, 22-21.
Lion: This wasn’t so much one close game as two blow-outs.

Sunday, October 26, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Buffalo Bills 43, at New York Jets 23

You gotta think this is the final nail in the coffin for head coach Rex Ryan and quarterback Geno Smith’s careers with the Jets. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the Jets fired Ryan this week.
Line: The Jets are a mess!

Baltimore Ravens 24, at Cincinnati Bengals 27

We thought these two teams were closely matched and they were. I’m not sure we learned much about these teams this weekend.
Line: The Bengals won but the Ravens still look good.

Seattle Seahawks 13, at Carolina Panthers 9

A rare low-scoring football game. This game was the flip-side of the Ravens v. Bengals game. It was close but both teams looked pretty bad.
Line: Sometimes a low score means the teams were well matched and played well. This game was just sloppy.

Chicago Bears 23, at New England Patriots 51

The Bears showed themselves to be just about as dysfunctional as the Jets but unlike the Jets, there aren’t any easy scapegoats or changes to make. They’ll just have to go back to work and try harder. The Patriots, meanwhile, have won four in a row and are probably looking forward to testing themselves against the Broncos in their next game.
Line: The Bears need to fire someone but there isn’t really anyone easy for them to fire.

Houston Texans 30, at Tennessee Titans 16

The Titans aren’t good. The Texans are just good enough to beat up on bad teams but maybe not quite good enough to compete with the best.
Line: The Texans look great… when they’re playing the Titans.

Miami Dolphins 27, at Jacksonville Jaguars 13

The Jaguars are a young team that’s growing together. This game was a big episode of growing pains. Miami needs to beat someone better before we take them seriously.
Line: The next two games for the Dolphins, versus the San Diego Chargers and Detroit Lions will tell us more about them than this one did.

Minnesota Vikings 19, at Tampa Bay Buccaneers 13

Believe it or not, even though the Buccaneers had only won one game coming into this week, people were still saying they had an outside chance to make the playoffs. This result will end that talk in a hurry. At 3-5, the Vikings have a glimmer of hope but it’s flickering.
Line: These two teams aren’t doing anything special this year.

St. Louis Rams 7, at Kansas City Chiefs 34

The Chiefs are probably the team that’s taken the biggest shots this year in terms of losing players to injury and have been able to recover. They look like a legit contender for a playoff spot. The Rams try hard but they don’t have the players to compete.
Line: Rooting for the Rams has been a little like ramming your head into a wall for the last few years.

SUNDAY, October 26, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Philadelphia Eagles 20, at Arizona Cardinals 24

The Cardinals are a remarkable team. No matter how many of their players get injured, they just keep on winning. I don’t think they’re a legitimate Super Bowl contender but they could certainly beat a legit contender in the playoffs.
Line: The Cardinals are like the watch in that commercial, they take a licking and keep on ticking.

Oakland Raiders 13, at Cleveland Browns 23

The Raiders remain winless. The Browns remain a winning team but one that’s decidedly nerve-wracking to root for.
Line: I’d rather be a Browns fan than a Raiders fan but either way, Sunday can’t be a very fun day.

Indianapolis Colts 34, at Pittsburgh Steelers 51

Colts quarterback Andrew Luck finally played a B- game and the Colts lost their first game in six weeks. Luck is great at football but it’s hard to count on him to be great every week in order to win. On the Pittsburgh side of the ball, Ben Roethlisberger set all kinds of team passing records in this game.
Line: If defense wins championships like people say, I guess these two teams are not going to win a championship any time soon.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Green Bay Packers 23, at New Orleans Saints 44

The Saints finally got a replica of their normal offense back and unleashed it on the visiting Green Bay Packers.
Line: The Saints looked like the old Saints, finally!