Dear Sports Fan - Page 93 of 133 - An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports

Deciphering TV Graphics: NBC and ESPN NFL Football

Sports is no fun when you don’t know what’s going on. That’s never more true than when a beginner sports fan sits down to watch football with a bunch of die-hards. One of the constant challenges in that scenario are the television graphics that overlay the football game. Every network has a different way of displaying information to the viewer. These graphics are packed with information and mostly well designed but they are never explained. Networks simply assume that viewers will be able to decipher the TV graphics for themselves. Most long-time football fans can but for casual fans, it’s just one more artifact that makes getting into the sport difficult. That’s not how it should be! I took screenshots of the ESPN and NBC NFL Football TV graphics so that I could explain them in detail. Both graphics show exactly the same set of information but they arrange it in different ways. I covered Fox and CBS’s graphics last week. Send me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com or leave a comment if you have a particularly problematic graphic for me to unravel.

What information is encoded in these TV graphics?

Score

The score should be one of the easiest things to see from the graphic and indeed, it is.

Timeouts remaining

Each team gets three timeouts per half. Of the four channels that televise NFL football, NBC is the only one that shows timeouts with white colored bars instead of yellow. In our screen captures, both teams have three time outs remaining in the ESPN game but in the NBC game, San Francisco has one timeout remaining and Denver has three.

Quarter

Pretty intuitive, this is just which quarter the game is currently in. Since quarters range from 1st to 4th and so do downs, it’s better to have the quarter close to the time remaining and far from the down and distance.

Time left in quarter

NFL games are organized into four quarters of 15 minutes each. Like basketball and hockey, the clock counts down from 15 as opposed to soccer which counts up to 90.

Down and distance

Down and distance are football shorthand to express the situation of the game. Which of the four chances a team has to move the ball ten yards are they on and how far do they have left to travel? I wrote a whole post on this which I recommend if you, like the person who asked me this question, have always wanted to know what down and distance were but were afraid to ask.

Play time left on clock

Teams with the ball have forty seconds from the end of one play to start running another. This is an important tactical factor because teams can stretch out the time between plays if they are ahead or rush them if they are behind. A penalty is assessed for letting the play clock run out without running a play. For viewers it can also tell them when to look up from whatever else they’re doing so they don’t miss a play. NBC shows this nicely but ESPN doesn’t. It’s possible that a graphic showing the play clock on ESPN comes onto the screen only when it’s close to running out.

What’s missing?

Possession

CBS and Fox both show which team has the ball in their TV graphics. NBC and ESPN don’t. I’m not surprised that, if there were going to be differences, that the two channels that show primetime games would move together. That said, showing which team has the ball is really useful. I’m not sure why NBC and ESPN omit it from their graphics.

Got it, let’s see the graphics

Great baseball shirts from Baseballism

If you’re a casual baseball fan like me, you’re probably more interested in the game right now than you’ve ever been before. That makes this the perfect time to invest in some stylish, clever baseball apparel for yourself or for the baseball fan in your life. Baseballism is a great place to find baseball apparel that looks and feels good. The “premium off the field brand focusing on the class, tradition and history of baseball” was founded by four former college baseball players who had, earlier in their lives, run a baseball camp together. Their style plays on the traditional aspects of baseball without taking on the conventional and a slightly ugly characteristics of old-school baseball uniforms. You can purchase some of their shirts on Amazon here. I’ve highlighted a few of my favorites below.

6+4+3 = 2 — A simple gray shirt with this non-mathematical equation that makes sense only if you know that 6 refers to the shortstop, 4 refers to the second baseman, and 3 refers to the first baseman. When the three are involved in a play, in that order, it’s a double play (2 outs) with the shortstop fielding the ball, throwing it to the second baseman who touches the base to force the first base runner out and then throws it to the first baseman to get the hitter out. It’s a clever but knowable baseball reference.

This shirt is available as a T-shirt for men and women.

Baseball Blue Print — The field is one of the most unique things about the sports. While most sports are played in mundane, boring rectangles, baseball is played on a diamond within a misshapen fan-like field. Every baseball stadium is slightly different in its shape and dimensions. This Baseballism shirt shows the necessary geometry and dimensions for creating your own baseball diamond.

Baseballism Men’s Blue Print Shirt

Kit Keller — This women’s tank pays homage to Kit Keller, the younger sister of the main character in the classic 1992 baseball movie, A League Of Their Own. Kit pushes her older sister to go to Chicago with her to try out for the All-American Girl’s Professional Baseball League which really did exist and played for 12 years, beginning in 1943 when many male major leaguers were in the military services.

Kit Keller Women’s Tank

Take Me Out to the Ballgame — If you ignore the slight gender inequality of this shirt (why can’t a woman take a man out to the ballgame?) and just focus on it’s excellent (Mets) colors and design, you can relish in the fact that a song first popularized in 1908 by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer remains instantly recognizable today.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame Tank

Wednesday, October 22

A Royal Surprise: After eight straight wins in the playoffs, the Kansas City Royals finally lost in the first game of the World Series. The San Francisco Giants jumped on them early, with three runs in the first inning, as if to say, “things are going to be different now that you’re playing us.” The Royals could never quite get their feet on the ground and ended up losing 7-1. If you missed our preview of the World Series (really just a reblog of the two best other previews out there,) read it here.
Line: Now we’ll see what the Royals are made of.
What’s Next: Game two is tonight, at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
Giant scores in the Champions League: As we explained in our article about the UEFA Champions League, the tournament is set up with the twin goals of inclusion and competitive balance. Yesterday’s slate of games had a few examples of what happens when inclusion overwhelms balance. Bayern Munich beat AS Roma 7-1, Chelsea beat NK Maribor, 6-0, and Shakhtar Donetsk beat BATE Borisov 7-0. They weren’t all blow-outs though, the most exciting a surprising result was a comeback 2-2 draw between Manchester City and CSKA Moscow.
Line: If you let all the champions of all the leagues, even the small ones, into the tournament, sometimes you’re gonna get some blow-outs.
What’s Next: Another set of games today at 2:45 p.m. ET on ESPN3 and ESPN Deportes.
Cowboys waive Sam: That’s right, remember Michael Sam? The first openly gay person to be drafted by a major professional sports team? After being cut by that team before the season started, Sam was signed by the Dallas Cowboys to play on their practice squad. Yesterday he was cut by the Cowboys. This doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t good enough, practice squads are pretty small and teams often need to cut players for positional reasons (they need an extra wide receiver there more than they need a defensive end, for example.) Still, it means that Sam is another step farther from landing a contract as a roster player for a team. Hopefully this is a case of one-step-back-two-steps-forward. The New England Patriots just lost their best defensive end (the position Sam plays) for a month yesterday… maybe they’ll sign Sam?
Line: People get cut from practice squads all the time for all sorts of reasons. Let’s hope this isn’t the last we hear of Sam.

2014 World Series Preview

The World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants begins tonight, Tuesday October 21, at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. World Series preview articles cover the internet like so many fallen red and yellow leaves. Two stood out to me as being of particular quality and interest.

Joe Posnanski’s Rule of Three focuses on the biggest tactical story line of the baseball playoffs so far. It’s not Kansas City’s love of the bunt, it’s another of their innovations – the use of three one inning relief pitchers to pitch the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings. All teams have a specialist pitcher, called a closer, who pitches the ninth inning when their team has the lead. Most teams have a designated “set-up man” who pitches just the eighth inning. The Royals have taken in one step farther, designating a pitcher to pitch the seventh inning too. So far, it’s been extraordinarily successful: the Royals have won 94% of their games this season (regular season an playoffs) when they had the lead after six innings compared to just 88% for all other teams. Will their success continue and if so, how will it reshape the game in the coming years?

Rule of Three

By Joe Posnanski for NBC SportsWorld

For more than one hundred years, baseball postseasons had been dominated by the starters, by Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, by Christy Mathewson and Curt Schilling, by Whitey Ford and Chris Carpenter. Everyone believed in it, from old-school thinkers like Detroit’s GM Dave Dombrowski to Moneyball mogul Billy Beane. You win in October with great starters, and so Detroit and Oakland went to get themselves great starters.

The Royals’ three-man closing law firm of Herrera, Davis and Holland has been the single dominant weapon of the postseason. In the wild-card game, while Lester and the A’s bullpen disintegrated, the Royals’ threesome kept the Athletics scoreless in the seventh, eighth and ninth. That allowed the Royals to come back. In the Angels series, the threesome kept the Angels scoreless in those pivotal three late innings, and the Royals took control with back-to-back extra-inning victories.

You know the old joke about the guy who prays daily to win the lottery and then finally hears a heavenly voice say: “Look, I’d like to help you, but you have to buy a lottery ticket first.” The Royals might have been lucky getting those three pitchers. But turning that trio into perhaps the greatest closing machine in baseball history is the Royals’ doing.

For a less tactical but much more emotional approach to the World Series, we go over to Grantland and life-long Royals fan Rany Jazayerli. He digs into how it feels to love a team that loses for twenty five years straight and then suddenly, almost without warning, is in the World Series.

One Away: The Total Improbability of the Royals’ World Series Run and the Agony of Potential Defeat

By Rany Jazayerli for Grantland

The team that couldn’t win anything for nearly three decades suddenly couldn’t lose. The Royals didn’t lose to the A’s, when by all rights they should have. They didn’t lose the ALDS to the Los Angeles Angels, who led the majors with 98 wins this season. They didn’t lose the ALCS to the Baltimore Orioles, who posted the second-best record in the American League. They haven’t lost once in eight playoff games, the first team in baseball history that could make that claim. They haven’t lost even though they’ve gone to extra innings four times, were tied in the ninth in a fifth game, and won two other contests by one run. They’ve literally won one game in the playoffs whose outcome wasn’t in doubt until the final pitch.

There’s also an element of survivor’s guilt, as with an infantryman who watched his friends get slaughtered at Ypres. Having dealt with failure for so long, it’s difficult to adjust to success, especially when it comes at the expense of A’s fans, who have watched their team lose seven elimination games in a row now, or Orioles fans, who had gone longer without seeing a World Series than Royals fans had. There’s a sense that if the Royals don’t finish off their dream season, the suffering of A’s and O’s fans will have been in vain — that it will be easier for fans in Oakland and Baltimore to accept defeat if they know that one of their comrades in lucklessness went on to defeat the entrenched powers that be, the San Francisco Giants, who have won two of the last four World Series.

Crazy as it sounds after the Royals have gone further than I ever dreamed they would, I’ll be more disappointed if they lose now than if they had lost three weeks ago against Oakland. Winning hasn’t diminished the fear of losing; it has only heightened it, and a championship is the only release.

What are refs for?

Something interesting happened at the end of the National Football League (NFL) game last Thursday between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. A small interaction between a ref and a player played a potentially big role in the outcome of the game. Of interest to us is not the outcome of the game but what it says about the function of officials in football and how well that maps to our perception of authorities in the rest of society. Let’s start unpacking this thing from the trunk.

At the end of the game, the Patriots were up by two points. The Jets last chance to win the game was to kick a very long field goal to get three points. They lined up for a 58 yard field goal. This is not an impossible task but it’s very difficult. As the teams set up for the attempt, a Patriot defender was lined up directly opposite from the Jets center. On field goal attempts, the center is a specialist called a long snapper who’s entire job is to snap the ball back to kickers on field goal and punting plays. The New York Times ran an incredible video feature on how field goal attempts work back in 2013. Check it out here if you want to know how they work. Anyhow, the thing that’s important to us is that when the long snapper is doing his thing, he’s basically an open target to defenders who could really smush him into the ground. So, the NFL created a rule to protect the long snapper by mandating that defensive players may not line up directly opposite from him. The exact text of the rule from the NFL playbook is this: “When Team A presents a punt, field-goal, or Try Kick formation, a Team B player, who is within one yard of the line of scrimmage, must have his entire body outside the snapper’s shoulder pads at the snap.”

The Patriots player was set up in an illegal position and, if the ball had been snapped while he was in that position, his team would have been assessed a five yard penalty. The Jets could then have tried a 53 yard field goal to win the game instead of a 58 yard one. How big of a difference is this? Pretty big. Jets kicker Nick Folk has made a little more than half his field goal attempts over 50 yards but never one over 56 yards. So, that penalty could really have helped the Jets. Unfortunately for them, a ref did something which is apparently very common and noncontroversial: he stepped forward, and nudged the player in the illegal position to warn him to move over so that he didn’t get a penalty. The defender moved, the long snapper snapped the ball, the kicker aimed low so that his kick had a chance to fly 58 yards, and a defender reached up with his hand and blocked the kick. No penalty was called. Game over, the Patriots win.

What’s so interesting about this is that we normally think of refs as being there to penalize wrongdoing not to prevent rule breaking or to protect the safety of the players. In the aftermath of the game, after initial claims of controversy and cheating, we learned that refs do this type of preventative action all the time. The most interesting part of the story became how non-controversial it was. Even the Jets coach admitted the ref was “not wrong doing what he did.” League spokesman Greg Aiello was interviewed by Dom Cosentino in his article about the incident for NJ.com. Read closely because Aiello offers two explanations:

It is a standard officiating procedure that occurs regularly… That rule was adopted for player safety purposes, another good reason to help avoid violations in advance.”

“Helping players get lined up properly takes place in other pre-snap situations to avoid administrative penalties… It’s a longstanding standard officiating mechanic.”

Preventing penalties serves the twin purposes of player safety and maximum entertainment even if it comes at the cost of some marginal amount of competitive balance. Teams that are slightly sloppier in their mechanics probably receive more help from refs than more precise teams. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the Jets got a raw deal. Losing a game in part because a ref helped an opponent avoid a penalty doesn’t feel fair, even if the overall approach seems reasonable.

Does this same principle hold for authorities outside of sports? Take the approach of police to the dangerous practice of speeding. Police give out penalties for drivers they catch speeding, just like refs do for players caught breaking the rules. Police also do things to prevent speeding without giving tickets. If you’ve ever seen an empty police car at the side of the road or one of those digital readouts that show your current speed next to the speed limit, they are tactics the police use to slow people down without giving tickets. In this context, authority measures used to prevent violations before they occur don’t seem so bad, do they?

Tuesday, October 21

Pittsburgh win, Houston loses: The Monday Night Football game was a game of streaks. The Texans had the first streak during which they opened a 13-0 lead against the Steelers. Then, the Steelers had the next one when they scored 21 points in the final two minutes of the first half! That was the decisive streak. After that, the teams traded points in the fourth quarter but the game was really decided in those last two minutes of the first half.
Line: Sometimes, you can play well enough to win for 58 minutes and bad enough to lose in the other two.
U.S. Women perfect through three: The U.S. Women’s National Soccer team is perfect through three games of World Cup qualifying. They beat Haiti 6-0 last night to advance to the semifinals on Friday against the winner of the Mexico v. Jamaica game tonight with a 3-0 record in the group stage. This isn’t surprising, the level of competition in North America and the Caribbean, with the exception of Canada, is not at the U.S.’s level.
Line: No surprises here.
What’s Next: A semifinal game on Friday against Mexico or Jamaica. The winner will qualify for the World Cup.
Baseball’s long wait is over: Nothing happened yesterday in the baseball playoffs, just like nothing happened on Sunday, Saturday, or Friday. That’s right, just before the World Series, baseball took a four day break from having games. I don’t know about you but any momentum I had as a casual baseball fan to watch the games feels like it has dissipated. It also feels a little cheezy because it seems like baseball was trying to avoid having the first game of the World Series go up against college or professional football because their ratings would look bad in comparison.
Line: Thursday to Tuesday is too long a wait between games.
What’s Next: Game One of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.

What is identifying the Mike linebacker in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

Something funny happened yesterday in the Giants vs. Cowboys game. Or at least, the football fans I was hanging out with thought it was hysterical. The Cowboys quarterback shouted that one of the Giants players was the “Mike” and the Giants player yelled back that he wasn’t the Mike. I get that it’s funny for opposing players to be having a dialog on the field but I don’t know what they were talking about. What is identifying the Mike linebacker in football?

Thanks,
Jordan

Dear Jordan,

I saw that video too! It was pretty funny. Here’s the video for everyone to watch. After you give it another watch, I’ll explain what the quarterback was doing and why. After that, I’ll attempt the always dangerous explanation of why something was funny.

The name “Mike” is common football short-hand for the person playing the middle linebacker position. We’ve got a detailed post on linebackers and their specific positions within the most common defensive formations, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say that in a standard, vanilla defensive formation, there are often three linebackers on the field lined up behind four defensive linemen. The linemen are the big dudes who line up with their hands on the ground opposite their behemoth counterparts on the offensive line. The linebackers line up behind the defensive line, standing up, where they are in great position to tackle a running back, cover a wide-receiver, or sprint up to try to hit the quarterback. The three linebackers positions in this standard 4-3 formation are not called left, middle, and right, they’re called weak, middle, and strong. (Quick detour — the strong side is the side with more offensive players lined up on the line of scrimmage — linemen and tight ends, the weak side is the one with fewer players, usually just two.) These positions have nicknames: Will, Mike, and Sam which correspond with Weak, Middle, and Strong. (It hasn’t always been Will, Mike, and Sam. Back in 1959, the Giants coaches used the names Wanda, Meg, and Sara.) When a quarterback screams a defender’s number before the start of a play or points at him, he’s identifying the Mike or middle linebacker.

You might be thinking to yourself, “That’s silly, I can look on any team’s website and find out before the game who is playing middle linebacker. Why would the quarterback need to scream about it before each play?” It’s a good point. The thing is, what’s on the website is the player who plays the middle linebacker position in an absolute sense. What the quarterback cares about is who is playing the middle linebacker on each play in a relative sense. Or, to be more realistic about it, he is identifying the player he wants his teammates to consider the middle linebacker of the defense on that play no matter what position he’s actually playing.

On passing plays, somewhere between five and eight of a quarterback’s teammates are responsible for keeping the quarterback safe by blocking defenders who are trying to tackle him from getting near enough to him to do that. The plan for how to do this is called a blocking scheme. Blocking schemes are about as complicated as the choreography of a ballet and at least as opaque to outsiders. Let’s pretend for our purposes though, that they’re pretty simple. Let’s say that the five offensive linemen are going to block, one-on-one, one member of the opposing defense. They’ll move as one unit of five players to block five defenders. They just need to be aimed. When the quarterback calls out the Mike, he’s centering the blocking scheme. He’s ordering the offensive line to center themselves on that player and then block accordingly. If the quarterback calls out someone lined up far to the right as the Mike, the offensive line will aim themselves to the right, the center blocking the Mike, the guards blocking the defenders lined up to either side of him, and the tackles blocking the defenders two people on either side of the Mike. If the Mike is to the left, the line will aim itself to the left. If the Mike is actually in the center of the field, like in the video above, the line will be centered.

So, what’s so funny about the video of Jameel McClain loudly denying Tony Romo’s declaration of his being the Mike? Well, for one thing, it’s funny because the Cowboys have no reason to believe anything McClain is saying. McClain’s profession is to help win football games. Why would he help the opposition? It’s like a poker player interrupting the deliberations of an opponent at the table by saying, “don’t worry about calling my bet, I only have a pair of twos.” McClain’s position is so unbelievable that saying he’s not the Mike is not even a good form of misinformation, it’s just silly. If you really want to get comedy and football nerdy at the same time, you might argue that the funniest thing about McClain screaming that he wasn’t the Mike is that it could be interpreted as a deliberate misunderstanding of the two meanings of Mike: relative and absolute. You could argue that McClain was interpreting Romo’s declaration that for the purposes of the Cowboys’ blocking scheme, Romo wanted his team to interpret McClain as the relative Mike (center of the blocking scheme) and answering honestly that he wasn’t the center of the defensive scheme or the absolute Mike. When everyone can tell the truth and successfully communicate nothing to anyone… that’s funny.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Monday, October 20

Football, football, football: It was another full day of football. Sunday culminated with a record-breaking moment from Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning but there was lots of action before that. Get all the information you need to engage in football small-talk from our NFL One Liners column.
NASCAR single elimination: Three NASCAR drivers needed to win Sunday’s race to stay alive in the playoffs, called the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Only one driver could win. That was Brad Keselowski who needed and got a little help on the last lap from Matt Kenseth. Coincidentally, the two of them had gotten into a physical altercation after the previous week’s race. NASCAR, it’s like professional wrestling except with cars.
Line: Car racing, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows.
Liverpool gets a gift: Own goals (scoring on yourself) happen in all sports but they’re most tragic in soccer where goals happen so rarely. Queens Park Rangers had climbed their way back to a 2-2 tie against Liverpool yesterday when, right before the game ended, Steven Caulker scored against his own team! Gah!
Line: Losing on an own goal in extra time has got to be the worst (sports) thing ever!

Week 7 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 7

Sunday, October 19, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Minnesota Vikings 16, at Buffalo Bills 17

You don’t necessarily need to have two great teams to get an entertaining football game. This game proved that point with a last second touchdown which pushed the home team to a victory.
Line: Not great teams but a great game.

Atlanta Falcons 7, at Baltimore Ravens 29

Football can be a very complex game but it has some important factors which are very simple. Teams need to be able to protect their quarterback to have a chance to win. Atlanta has had so many injuries on their offensive line that they can’t protect their quarterback.
Line: Atlanta’s loss was all about their offensive line or lack thereof.

Cleveland Browns 6, at Jacksonville Jaguars 24

Oh Cleveland. After so many years of being bad, you were so impressive through your first five games of the season. You played hard and were competitive in every single game. You seemed so far from the lousy Jaguars who had lost every game they’d played. Oh Cleveland.
Line: Welp, there go the Browns again.

Carolina Panthers 17, at Green Bay Packers 38

After struggling at the start of the season, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers went on local sports talk radio and told the Packer fans to relax. Four straight victories later, if Wisconsin gets any more relaxed, we could have a serious cheddar shortage on our hands.
Line: Guess Rodgers knew what he was talking about when he told the fans to relax, huh?

Miami Dolphins 27, at Chicago Bears 14

The Bears have now lost three of their last four games and they’re officially entering soap-opera territory. There was, apparently, a big kerfluffle in the locker room after the game with Bears blaming each other at high decibels.
Line: The Bears are falling apart.

Cincinnati Bengals 0, at Indianapolis Colts 21

You could say the Bengals are falling apart but I think it’s more likely that they are being revealed. Their three early wins came against the Ravens, Falcons, and Titans. Since there were so few 3-0 teams this year, that made people think the Bengals were really good. Now that we know a little more about the Falcons and Titans (that they’re not so good), those wins don’t look so impressive.
Line: The Bengals aren’t falling apart, they’re just not good.

New Orleans Saints 23, at Detroit Lions 24

I was totally convinced that the Saints would win this game. In past years, when the Saints have been a reliably very good team and the Lions have reliably fallen apart at the least provocation, they would have. This year, the Lions are made of firmer stuff.
Line: The Lions are for real this year.

Seattle Seahawks 26, at St. Louis Rams 28

Stop the presses! The defending champion Seahawks have lost two games in a row! Actually, it’s okay, start them again. The Rams are sneaky good even though they don’t win that much.
Line: The Seahawks will be fine.

Tennessee Titans 17, at Washington Redskins 19

Washington went to their third quarterback on the year and still beat the Titans who were, admittedly, on their second string quarterback themselves. All in all, not a game to be remembered by anyone involved.
Line: Meeeehhhh.

SUNDAY, October 19, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Kansas City Chiefs 23, at San Diego Chargers 20

We’re entering the part of the season where some games just mean a lot more to one team than their opponent. At 2-3, the Chiefs needed to win this game a lot more than the 5-1 Chargers. Sometimes that is the difference between two teams close in talent.
Line: The Chiefs just needed this one more than the Chargers.

New York Giants 21, at Dallas Cowboys 31

The Giants hung around and made it competitive but the Cowboys proved that you should never challenge a Texan when football is on the line.
Line: It’s a change to be able to use the cliche “How about them Cowboys” and not just get resigned shaking heads.

Arizona Cardinals 24, at Oakland Raiders 13

With the Jaguars beating the Browns, I think that makes the Raiders the only team left that hasn’t won a game. Losing to the Cardinals is nothing to be ashamed of though, Arizona is 5-1 and it looks like they deserve that record.
Line: The Raiders will eventually win a game but probably not against Arizona.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

San Francisco 49ers 17, at Denver Broncos 42

Peyton Manning, quarterback of the Broncos, set the NFL record for all-time touchdown passes thrown during this game. His team knew he was only three touchdown passes away from the record when they started the game and they seemed hell-bent to make sure he broke the record at home, on national TV. The 49ers never looked like they had a chance.
Line: The Broncos really wanted Manning to break the record last night and they made sure he did. Winning the game went along with that.

News Clippings: October 18

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.

Brian Phillips is one of my favorite writers out there these days. He is overwhelmingly enthusiastic and incisive about the subjects he chooses. In this article, he says farewell to the U.S. Soccer player, Landon Donovan, who retired from international play this week.

Inside Out

By Brian Phillips for Grantland

Donovan carried a zone of retirement around with him, the way fighters sometimes seem to move in a zone of potential violence. There was always this slight hint of removal, as if he were surrounded by a Photoshop blur set to 1 or 2 percent — hardly detectable, but enough to let you know that you were seeing him, and being seen by him, through a force field of self-created privacy.

He refused to be anything but himself… But what he was — complex, reflective, observant, careful with himself — was so out of step with our expectations for a major sports star that he left us with a sense of something unresolved.

Eric Kester is a former football player and NFL ball boy. This gives him a rare perspective with which to reflect on the violence and virtue of football.

What I Saw as an N.F.L. Ball Boy

By Eric Kester for The New York Times

Spend an extended period of time behind the N.F.L. curtain, as I did, see eerily subdued postgame locker rooms filled with vacant stares and hear anguished screams echoing from the training room, and you’ll understand how the physical and emotional toll these players endure is devastating enough to erode the morality of a good man or exacerbate the evils of a bad one.

This is not to say players who commit crimes deserve even a little exoneration. But what they and all N.F.L. players do deserve — and need — are improved resources to help them cope with the debilitating consequences of on-field ferocity.

The Allrounder is a great new site that “looks at how sport impacts communities, shapes culture, and taps bodies and emotions.” Created by a history professor, a senior research fellow, and an analyst at a think-tank, the Allrounder has a valuable scholarly presence without being pedantic in the least. I look forward to more great pieces from their writers in the coming months. This article about the singing culture of Welsh Rugby comes from their Guide For the Global Fan series.

Welsh Rugby Songs

by Daryl Leeworthy for The Allrounder

The oldest Welsh rugby song of all is “Men of Harlech,” a stirring tune penned in the eighteenth century that tells of Welsh defiance in the face of the English invader during a medieval siege that lasted seven years. It was originally sung to accompany the Welsh team as they entered the pitch, the “battlefield” if you like, and is still a key part of the pre-match build up. Then there’s the comic classic “Sospan Fach” which is literally about cat scratches, an unwell and then dead servant called Dafydd, a soldier called Dai who can’t seem to tuck his shirt in properly, and a couple of saucepans. There’s no real logic to the song but it established itself as a firm favourite of rugby crowds in Llanelli and is now one of those songs that every Welsh person knows, regardless of whether they like rugby or not.

But on the whole rugby songs are much less problematic than soccer songs, there’s almost none of the hostility that’s present in the songs sung at an Old Firm derby in Glasgow for instance. That’s not to say that some of them aren’t obviously couched in a degree of playful dislike… But generally they’re harmless and build on a Romanticised stereotype we have of ourselves as a nation. At their heart they seem to say it doesn’t matter if we lose (as we often do) to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, France, or Ireland; as long we beat England by a single point, it’s worth it in the end.

The European Champions League is an exciting tournament for fans but it might be even more exciting for team owners. Just qualifying for the tournament is a financial windfall. This article looks at one unintended consequence of this money — the destabilization of small soccer leagues. In this case, the author focuses on the Swedish league.

A Glamorous Event Injects Cash and Concerns

by Sam Borden for The New York Times

Money is always front and center in professional sports, and it is no different in European soccer. Malmo won the Swedish league last season and made its way through two qualifying [Champions’ League] rounds before arriving in the 32-team group stage. For its accomplishments, Malmo will receive more than 78 million Swedish kronor (more than $10 million), regardless of what happens during its six group stage games.

Tony Ernst, the chairman of the Swedish supporters group that encompasses fans of teams in the country’s top two divisions, said the sudden influx of money for Malmo — which is already poised to win the Swedish league again this season — had left many fans worried about competitive balance.

“Traditionally, the Swedish league has been very hard to win two times in a row — it is very open,” Ernst said in an interview. “I think there is a fear that this will make the other teams’ chances that much harder.”

This week marked the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco area. So many people around the country remember that earthquake, not just because it was strong and damaging, but because it happened during the pre-game telecast of the World Series. Sports fans experienced it live through the lens of baseball. Well-known baseball writer, Richard Justice, was there and shares some of his personal memories of the quake in this article, including waking up in a hotel room to find that the furniture was all out of place.

Remembering the Quake

by Richard Justice for Sports on Earth

And yet, in the worst of times, these two great American cities did themselves proud, too. This is the part of the story that sometimes gets lost in the retelling. We focus on the shaking and the death and the damage.

We laugh at how we huddled in dark hotels and jumped as the aftershocks came in waves over the next few days. We remember the one baseball writer who got stuck in traffic because he was, as usual, running late and never got to Candlestick Park. We occasionally pass over the best part of the story. That’s how people pulled together and helped one another and resolved to rebuild and carry on.

I would just about guarantee that those of us who experienced the earthquake and then stayed around the city until the World Series resumed 10 days later would tell you the same thing.

If they didn’t love the Bay Area before, they fell in love with it in those two weeks. And if they already loved it, they had those feelings reinforced. There was such a spirit and a resolve it was impossible not to be inspired.