Tag: college football

2015: Rose Bowl plot and characters

In 2015 Dear Sports Fan will be previewing the biggest sporting event of the year in each of the 50 states in the United States plus the district of Columbia. Follow along with us on our interactive 2015 map.

California — The Rose Bowl

College Football — January 1, 2015 — Oregon Ducks vs. Florida State Seminoles, 5 p.m. ET on ESPN.

The Rose Bowl is a college football game with a long history and an exciting present. It has traditionally been played on New Year’s Day and this year is no different. What is different this year is that it will be one of two games playing the role of semifinal games in the new college football playoff system. The winner of the Rose Bowl will go on to play in a National Championship game later in January. This is the first time in recent history that a team could play more than once during “bowl season” and it’s widely seen as either a great innovation, an obvious solution that college football should have adopted years ago, or just another symptom of college football’s never ending slide into hypocrisy and greed. However you see it in the big picture, in the small picture, it’s a prospectively exciting football game. Let’s talk about the plot and learn the characters.

What’s the plot?

This game is likely to be cast as everything that’s bad about college football vs. everything that’s good. The Florida State Seminoles are playing the role of the bad guys here. Why? Well, let’s see. You start out with a racially questionable nickname (although the relationship with the existing Seminole tribe is one area where the college seems to have excelled) add a quarterback who has been arrested but not indicted on sexual assault charges and whose less serious behavior seems evidently dumb from other incidents (he was arrested for shoplifting crab-legs and suspended for shouting a purportedly amusing, sexually charged vulgar phrase) then mix in an New York Times expose on how the football program has warped the justice system over many years and you’ve got exactly the recipe for a team that most people would be happy rooting against. As a bonus, Florida State has won their last 27 games and last year’s national championship. Everyone likes a winner, just not this one. The Oregon Ducks are not necessarily an ideal candidate to play the good guys, but they will be viewed that way just because they are opposing Florida State. The Ducks came to prominence over the last fifteen years thanks to an extremely close relationship with Nike, whose headquarters are near the school. Before they were a good team, they were just the team that seemed to have an infinite number of infinitely bright uniforms. Then, as they got good, they became known for being coach Chip Kelly’s masterpiece of revolutionary, faced paced football. Even though Kelly has moved on to the NFL, the team’s image remains the same — an exciting offensive team that doesn’t quite have enough power to win the biggest games.

Who are the characters?

Jameis Winston — Winston is the quarterback of the Florida State Seminoles. He is the one who has been arrested for sexual assault. I know people are innocent until proven guilty in this country (although that’s a legal rule, not a blogging rule) but I’m more likely to think O.J. Simpson was truly innocent (he’s covering for his son!) than feel good about rooting for Winston. I think this is a pretty wide-spread belief (not the O.J. part) and that says moderately good things about our country. Winston has also never lost a college football game, and if he wins his last two this season before turning pro, he should probably be considered one of the best five players in college football history. Ouch. Marcus Mariota — As long as Mariota can get through the month without shredding his knees, he will be the first pick of next year’s NFL draft. He’s the prototypical modern quarterback. He’s tall (6’4″), fast (sub 4.5 seconds for the 40 yard dash, which is faster than you can imagine), and a good decision maker. If were were better than terrible at identifying good NFL quarterbacks, Mariota would be a sure thing. He’s also a senior, playing his third year for the Oregon Ducks (he sat out his freshman year.) When he won the Heisman trophy this year, he became the first Hawaiian born player to ever get that honor given to the best college football player each year. Mark Helfrich — Who? Right, that’s the point. Even sports fans don’t know who Mark Helfrich is. He’s the head coach of the Oregon Ducks. Reading this excellent article about him by Michael Weinreb in Grantland makes me feel like maybe the whole good vs. bad plot is actually legitimate. Here’s a few tidbits about Helfrich. He grew up in Oregon and loved the Ducks as a kid, even when they were terrible. He played college quarterback for Southern Oregon and later as a pro in Austria during the NFL’s flirtation with developing a minor league in Europe. Instead of screaming and yelling, like many coaches do during the game, he is “thorough and utterly prepared and calm on the sideline, an intellectual at heart who happens to be a football coach.”

Who’s going to win?

Oregon is actually favored by nine points. I take this to mean two things. First, that Vegas thinks Oregon is a little better than Florida State. And second, that Vegas thinks way more people want to bet on the good guys than the bad guys. I think Oregon will win but I fear Florida State might.

Cue Cards 10-3-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Thursday, October 2

  1. The Royals magic continues — The Kansas City Royals won game one of their playoff series with the Los Angeles Angels 3-2. Like their first game of the playoffs, this game went into extra innings. Mike Moustakas hit a home run in the eleventh inning to push the Royals ahead of the Angels.
    Line: The Royals sure are exciting!
    What’s Next: Game two is Friday night at 9:37 p.m. ET on TBS.
  2. Beat down in Baltimore — The Baltimore Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers 12 – 3 in game one of their playoff series. Baltimore isn’t quite the feel-good story that the Royals are but they have only made the playoffs one other time since 1997, so they’re a good underdog to root for also.
    Line: Detroit has such great pitchers, you don’t expect to see them lose in such a lopsided, high-scoring game.
    What’s next: Game two is Friday at noon ET on TBS.
  3. You wanna buy a duck? — The Oregon Ducks’ college football team went into last night’s game ranked number two in the country. They lost 31-24 to Arizona. This is the second straight year that Arizona has upset them. The Ducks are famous for their dynamic spread-offense and their flamboyant uniforms. The coach of Arizona’s team, Rich Rodriguez, spent many years coaching at West Virginia about ten years ago where he was one of the early adopters of the spread-offense. Perhaps he knows how to defend it better than most.
    Line: Sad to see the Ducks lose so early in the season. That said, they’re the most exciting when they are looking to upset the top teams, not the other way around.
  4. Thursday Night NFL games continue to stink — There’s so many reasons to dislike having NFL games on Thursdays. It breaks the rhythm of the weekend, it sullies fantasy games, it’s terrible for the health of the players, and it’s a unabashed money grab by the NFL, but perhaps the best argument against them is that they stink! So far this year, of the five Thursday games, the scores have been 36-16, 26-6, 56-14, 45-14, and now, 42-10 with last night’s Green Bay Packers win over the Minnesota Vikings. No fun!
    Line: It’s barely even worth watching these Thursday night games. They’re over before they even get started.

What is the red zone in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the red zone in football? The announcers during football games are always talking about one team or another being “in the red zone.” What does that mean? Do the rules change when a team is in the red zone?

Thanks,
Sammy

— — —

Dear Sammy,

The red zone is a term used to refer to the area from the twenty yard line to the goal-line of the side of the field that the football team with the ball is trying to score on. A team that is “in the red zone” is one that has the ball and is less than twenty yards from scoring. The red zone is purely a convention, it has no implication on the rules of football at all.

Wikipedia writes about the red zone, that it, “is mostly for statistical, psychological, and commercial advertising purposes.” In terms of psychology and statistics, you’ll often see statistics about how often a team scores once they are in the red zone and what percent of those scores are touchdowns versus field goals. Fans feel like once their teams are in the red zone, they should score. Missed “red zone opportunities” are seen as disappointing and as potentially pivotal to the result of a game. This psychological understanding of the red zone is true of at least some football players as well. Reporter Sam Borden asked a football player about the red zone in an article on the topic from 2012:

Tight end Martellus Bennett says the irritation a unit feels when a red zone trip goes unconsummated is unique.

Initially, Bennett hesitated when asked to describe the emotion that came with walking off the field with the ball so close to the end zone. “I’m not sure this is printable,” he said. He ultimately offered a “cleaned-up” analogy that likened it to the frustration felt by an anxious, apprehensive man who spends hours working up the courage to talk to a pretty woman and then is only steps away when another man sidles up and slips his arm around her.

Sports statisticians have looked into the red zone and, for the most part, come up empty. As you might expect, there’s nothing magical about the 20 yard line that makes scoring easier or more likely once it is crossed. The best visual proof of this comes from NFL Stats Blog and it shows likelihood to score based on first down field position. Note that even the terms of this chart belie the red zone as a simple statistical reality because, of course it’s better to have the ball at the 22 yard line on first down than the 19 yard line on third. The likelihood to score curve is relatively smooth all the way down the field. A team in the red zone has a better chance of scoring as a team out of the red zone but there’s no statistical cliff that supports making a big deal over it. (As an aside, the most interesting part of the graph to me is that a team that gets a first down on the 11-15 yard line is more likely to score than if they get it on the ten yard line. This matches my instinct about football — it’s hard to go a full ten yards to get a touchdown — it’s better to at least be able to get another first down on the 1-5 yard line than have to score in one set of downs.)

No one seems to know exactly where the term comes from. One popular theory, which has floated to the top of this question on the sports question & answer portion of Stack Exchange, is that the term has military origins and means, “generally close to the enemy (red having been a symbol for danger for a long time).” I buy that as an explanation. Football has a long history of emulating the military. The same New York Times article from above, related a story about longtime New York Giants coach, Tom Coughlin, who early in his career:

Decided a psychological change of language was in order. Instead of describing the area as the red zone, Coughlin said, he consciously switched it to the green zone when referring to his team’s offense. His reasoning was simple.

“Green is go and red is stop,” he said. “What are you trying to do in the green zone? You’re trying to score. It’s not the red zone. If you’re on offense, it’s green.”

Coughlin’s got an interesting point. If you follow the analogy closely, the team in question seems to be the defending team, not the team playing offense. I think at some point, as football itself flipped to being far more about successful offense than successful defense, we flipped how we use the term red zone. My guess is that originally, the red zone was used primarily to describe the last twenty yards a defending team had to concede before allowing a score.

The red zone is a made-up concept but it’s a compelling one. Hearing that a team is in the red zone makes most football fans look up from their nachos (if they’re lucky!) and attend to the game. Some programming genius at the NFL thought about this and realized there was an opportunity to be had. The NFL created a television network called the NFL RedZone that springs from game to game on Sundays, showing every red zone trip all day, sometimes multiple games simultaneously. It’s a smashing success and will be the subject of a Dear Sports Fan post soon.

Until then,
Ezra Fischer

How are punts in football exciting?

Dear Sports Fan,

I don’t get why some people find punts exciting. Isn’t a punt basically a negative thing? It happens when a team decides they can’t advance the ball anymore and instead of trying, they punt. How are punts in football exciting?

Confused,
Connie

— — —

Dear Connie,

You’re absolutely right that punts only happen when one team decides they cannot advance the ball anymore and instead of risking giving the ball to the other team where it currently is, they choose to trade field position for possession and give the ball up. This doesn’t mean it’s not exciting though. In fact, I think the punt is one of the most exciting plays in football and I’m happy to explain some reasons why. If you missed our post yesterday on how punts work, you might want to brush up on that before you read this one. Don’t forget to come back though!

Why the punt is exciting for the receiving team

The receiving team starts out pretty excited about the punt because it means they’ve succeeded on defense. They prevented the opposing team from scoring or even moving the ball ten yards to get a new first down. It’s also exciting because it means they’re about to get the ball back. The excitement doesn’t stop there though, because if they play the punt return right, they might even score on that play!

Although it may look a little chaotic, every player on the field while their team returns a punt has a very precise mission. First, the receiving team tries to worm through or around the guys protecting the punter to see if they can block the punt before it gets going.

If that doesn’t work, and it normally doesn’t, the players switch over to slowing down the opposing team’s players so that their punt returner has room to catch the ball and doesn’t need to call for a fair catch. Then, once the punt returner has caught the ball, the other players on his team turn into blockers — trying to prevent the kicking team’s players from hitting him and also trying to shove them around to create running lanes for the returner. This sounds like a thankless job, and a lot of times it is, but once in a while, someone blocking for a punt returner will make a block so spectacular that the crowd roars in appreciation. Of all the hits in football, hits while blocking for a returner can be among the most violent because of the speed and the potential to hit someone who is focusing on something else. Here’s an example of a player getting “decleated” on a punt return:

 

Once a returner catches the ball, he takes off like a wild deer and sprints upfield, dodging and spinning and hurtling until he’s either caught and tackled or scores a touchdown. Punt return touchdowns are among the most exciting in the game. Take a look at this one from the Dallas Cowboys and watch how all the players on their return team block for punt returner Dez Bryant:

 

Sometimes, even when the blocking fails, a supremely talented and fearless punt returner can create a touchdown on his own. These are the most exciting punt return touchdowns. This one from Dante Hall in 2003 has stuck in my memory as being one of the best I’ve ever seen:

That type of return is few and far between, but the potential is there on every punt. That’s what makes the punt so exciting for the return team.

Why the punt is exciting for the kicking team

The punt can be very exciting for the kicking team because they have clear goals that take extreme coordination, precision, and often a little bit of luck. They also have things that they don’t want to have happen. The good outcomes are often incredibly close from the bad outcomes. For instance, the punting team might be aiming to kick the ball out of bounds at the two yard line because then the opposing team has to start from their own two yard line on offense. If the ball flies an extra two yards, and goes out of bounds in the end-zone, it’s a touchback and the receiving team gets the ball on their twenty yard line. The same thing holds with a punt that bounces around within the field of play. If it goes into the end-zone, the receiving team starts on the twenty. If it stops on the one… that’s a nineteen yard advantage for the kicking team. Here, the kicking team can do something to aid their own cause. If they can run down the field in time to do it, they can grab the ball before it rolls into the end-zone or even bounce it back to one of their teammates. This can be an exciting adventure because it involves players trying to control a frustratingly oblong bouncing object after sprinting for fifty or sixty yards. Here’s a great example of a punt that the kicking team saved from bouncing into the end zone:

Another strategy is to aim for a corner of the field so that it either goes out of bounds or it’s harder for the punt returner to find space to dodge around the guys trying to tackle him. This strategy is called a “coffin corner” punt. Here’s a great example of a successful one:

Playing on the unit that covers punts for the kicking team can also be exciting because you and your buddies get to (if all goes well) tackle the punt returner. If you like playing football, it’s probably in part because you like to hit people in a completely sanctioned way. It’s pretty satisfying to watch too unless it gets too violent. Here’s a prime example of good punt coverage that ends in a decisive but not cringe worthy hit:

Why are Bowl Games Called Bowl Games?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are college football bowl games called bowl games? Is it because of the Super Bowl?

Thanks,
Bill

— — —

Dear Bill,

College bowl games actually pre-date the Super Bowl by many years so if one was named after the other, it was the Super Bowl that was named after college football bowl games. Why college bowl games are named bowl games is another question entirely. The simple answer is that they are called bowl games because they are the biggest and most festive football games of the year, and as such are played in the biggest and most festive stadiums — which have historically almost all been shaped like bowls.

According to Wikipedia, the “history of the bowl game” began in 1902 when the “Tournament of Roses Association” sponsored a football game on New Year’s Day that was supposed to match the best college football team from the Eastern half of the country against the best in the West. As would become a tradition for this type of game, it didn’t quite match expectations. The game was a joke with Michigan beating Stanford 49-0 before Stanford quit with eight minutes left! Its lack of competitiveness left an impression on the organizers though and “for the next 13 years, the Tournament of Roses officials ran chariot races, ostrich races, and other various events instead of football.” They brought back football in 1916 and by 1921 it was so popular that a new stadium was commissioned that could hold the 40,000 plus spectators. Architect Myron Hunt copied his design from that of the Yale football stadium called the Yale Bowl because of its distinctive smooth, continuous, bowl-like shape. (A quick aside — the word bowl goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European when it meant “rounded or swollen.”) The stadium was complete by 1923 and the Tournament of the Roses game that year between Penn State and USC was the first to be called the Rose Bowl.

The Rose Bowl stood alone for many years until the mid-thirties when four southern cities decided to emulate the successful tourist attraction by creating their own bowl games. The Sugar, Cotton, Orange, and Sun bowls sprouted between 1935 and 1937. This number has continued to grow throughout the years with a total of eight in 1950, 11 in 1970, 15 in 1980, 19 in 1990, 25 in 2000, and 35 today. The increasing number has created a dispersal of the interest and reverence felt for the original bowl games. It’s just not that big of a deal when 70 of the 120 college football teams play in a bowl game. Even the names of the bowl games feel less important now than they used to. It’s hard to blame the organizers of these games for selling the naming rights to them but one wishes the sponsors would be a little less parochial: San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia bowl, Franklin American Mortgage Music City bowl, BBVA Compass bowl. It’s little wonder that the clever website sellingout.com recommends selling the phrase “bowl game” short in the imaginary stock market of words.

 Using the word “bowl” to describe a sporting event has spread far and wide. As you noted in your question, the championship game of the NFL is called the Super Bowl. Other professional American Football leagues have used the moniker. The European Football League calls their championship game the Eurobowl. There is a Mermaid Bowl in Denmark and a Maple Bowl in Finland. In Canada there is the Banjo Bowl which is not a championship game but instead is used to label a rivalry game between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Other rivalry games, even American college football games, have bowl names, like the Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama or the amusingly named Egg Bowl between Mississippi State and Ole Miss. Sometimes the word bowl will be used to retroactively refer to a notable game like the Ice Bowl played in Green Bay, Wisconsin at -15 degrees Fahrenheit. 

A historical theme that I find interesting is the transition from having the word “bowl” convey a sense of exhibition (and therefore inconclusiveness if not unimportance in terms of league standings) to almost the exact opposite meaning where “bowl” conveys that a game is of the utmost importance to standings. In todayifoundout.com’s post, Why Championship Football Games are Called Bowls, Daven Hiskey writes that the NFL first stole the word “bowl” for its end-of-year all-star exhibition game, the Pro Bowl. This suggests the earlier, tourist attraction, exhibition meaning. Years later, after the NFL had merged with the AFL, and now had a championship game to name, the league chose to copy Major League Baseball and name it the “World Championship Game.” Nonetheless, the phrase Super Bowl soon overtook World Championship, and by the second or third year of the league, was the de facto name for the final game, and soon after became official.

That’s probably more than you reckoned for about bowls! Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-8-2013: College Football & Tennis

clapperboardCue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Sport: College Football
Teams: Innumerable
When: Saturday, September 7
Context: The second full Saturday of the season
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The first couple weeks of the college football season are full of uneven match-ups between big, powerful schools and the weaker teams that they actually pay to visit their home field. Yesterday had its share of that type of game (Clemson vs South Carolina State, Louisville vs Eastern Kentucky, Rutgers vs. Norfolk State, etc.) but it had some really even and exciting games too.
  • Michigan beat Notre Dame 41 to 30. This was the marquee matchup of the night because it was between to traditional football powers with big fan-bases that are both expected to do well this year. Michigan’s quarterback, Devin Gardner has an interesting story. He was recruited in 2010 to play quarterback but never got much playing time. Last year he switched to Wide Receiver and was excelling at that position until the quarterback got injured and he had to quickly switch back. Now he’s the starting quarterback and he is fun to watch.
  • Georgia upset South Carolina, also 41 to 30. The story will be about Jadeveon Clowney, the star defensive end on the South Carolina team. He became a star last year after this play and is likely to be the first pick of the NFL draft next year. He hasn’t played very well so far this year though, and his team is not doing great either.

What’s Next: No more College Football until Thursday night when Texas Tech faces Texas Christian University at 7:30.

Sport: Tennis
Players: Novak Djokovic vs. Stanislas Wawrinka and Raphael Nadal vs. Richard Gasquet
When: Saturday, September 7
Context: The Semifinals of the U.S. Open
Result: Novak Djokovic defeated Stanislas Wawrinka 2-6, 7-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 and Raphael Nadal defeated Richard Gasquet 6-4, 7-6, 6-2
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The Djokovic-Wawrinka match was an epic. The five setter took four hours and nine minutes. A single game in the third set involved 30 points over 21 minutes — a game is won by the first player to get to four but you have to win by two, so these players were stuck at deuce for a long time! Djokovic is the #1 ranked player in the world, so he was expected to win but Wawrinka made a lot of fans yesterday by playing clever, valiant tennis.
  • Raphael Nadal, on the other side of the bracket, continued his dominant run to the finals. Brian Phillips (@runofplay) is one of my absolutely favorite people to follow on twitter. Here was his comment on Nadal from the quarterfinals but it would apply equally to yesterdays match:


What’s Next: The women’s final between Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka is on Sunday “not before” 4:30.  The men’s final will be on Monday.

Are Predictable Sports More Popular?

Dear Sports Fan,

Are more predictable sports more popular than unpredictable sports?

Thanks,
Tyrone

Dear Tyrone,

Great question! I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there even is a clear correlation between popularity and predictability, but it’s something I’ve often thought about it. Let’s explore this together!

The four major sports in the United States are Football, Basketball, Hockey, and Baseball. In two of those sports, Football and Basketball, college competition is close in popularity to the professional leagues, so we will include those in our discussion. The first thing to do is establish the order in which these sports are popular. I have my own favorites, but television ratings should provide a pretty good guide to the true popularity of the sports. There’s a good post on this at www.spottedratings.com which looks at the relative ratings of the championships of the six sports leagues.  In order, they are:

Popularity (Television Ratings)
1. NFL Football
2. NBA Basketball
3. College Basketball
4. College Football
5. Major League Baseball
6. National Hockey League[1]

Now we come to the more interesting piece of this which is to attempt to rank these in order of predictability. There are two main factors that play into this — the format of the playoffs and the elements of the sport itself. The key difference in format is between single elimination[2] and a playoff series.[3] As you might imagine, the playoff series creates much more predictable results because it allows a better team to have an off night and still end up the champion.

Single Elimination
NFL Football
College Basketball
College Football

Playoff Series
NBA Basketball
Major League Baseball
National Hockey League

It’s a bit harder to figure out how the elements of each sport affect their predictability. I’m sure there are thousands of factors that effect this, but let’s just chose one to think about — the average score. High scoring games would seem to be more predictable by the same logic that playoff series are — they make it less likely that a single bad moment, a single mistake, or a single moment of unusual brilliance will change the eventual result.

Scoring (from high to low)
NBA Basketball
College Basketball[4]
College Football
NFL Football
Major League Baseball
NHL Hockey

If we combine these two factors[5] we end up with the sports in this order.

Predictability (format, scoring)
NBA Basketball (+3,+3) 6
Major League Baseball (+3,-2) 1
National Hockey League (+3, -3) 0
College Basketball (-3,+2) -1
College Football (-3, +1) -2
NFL Football (-3, -1) -4

This model, because of its simplicity, doesn’t quite match up with my instincts about the sports. For instance, my gut tells me that College Football is actually significantly more predictable than College Basketball, there’s a reason the College Basketball tournament is called “March Madness,” but I think it’s mostly correct. For evidence of the overall directional correctness, consider that there have been twelve different NFL champions in the last twenty years but only eight in the last twenty years of the NBA. The NFL engenders clichés like “any given Sunday” to express its unpredictable nature, whereas the NBA is known for its dynastic teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers[6] and Michael Jordan who won six championships with the Chicago Bulls during eight years in the 1990s.

I’m still not sure if there is any clear connection between predictability and popularity, but it at least seems obvious that unpredictability is not harmful to a sport’s popularity. So when you hear silly stories about how horrible it is that College Football doesn’t have a playoff like College Basketball does, and people like Barack Obama get involved, just make sure they don’t use “getting the best team to be the champion” as a rationale. Not only is a single elimination playoff notoriously unpredictable, but many of the most popular sports have the least predictable results!

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. It’s figuratively physically painful for me to see hockey at the bottom of this list since it has clearly the best playoffs of any sport. It is worth mentioning that some of its finals games are televised on a mildly obscure cable channel with a relatively smaller distribution.↵
  2. if your team loses a single game, it’s out↵
  3. like you played rock-paper-scissors as a kid, this is best x out of y where x = y/2 + 1↵
  4. The college game is eight minutes shorter and has a longer shot clock which allows a team to hold the ball longer before being forced to take a shot.↵
  5. Let’s do give a sport +3/-3 for format and +3 to -3 for scoring to get a ranking from 1-6 overall↵
  6. These two teams alone have won 33 of 65 NBA championships.↵