Tag: culture

Why do sports leagues have All-Star games?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do sports leagues have All-Star games?

Thanks,
Greg

Dear Greg,

With the NBA All-Star game coming up soon, it’s a good time to tackle your question. All-Star games are an exhibition that many sports leagues put on in the middle of their seasons. Based on voting by fans, coaches, or some combination of the two, the best and most popular players are selected to play a game in mixed teams against each other. These games take many shapes and have different histories, but the common theme is that they generally lack the competitive nature typical of professional sports. They are essentially an entertainment, not a competition, and they are often accompanies by a host of other sports related competitions. All-Star games are loved by some fans, hated by others, and both loved and hated by a third group. They are more successful in some sports than others. So, why do sports leagues have All-Star games? Like any good child of children of the 1960s, my short answer is: follow the money.

From the start, All-Star games have been about money. The roots of today’s All-Star games can be found in games that were quite literally about money — benefit games. The NHL seems to have been on the forefront in this department. Wikipedia lists several early benefit games including a 1908 game to raise money for the family of a player who had drowned, a 1934 game to benefit a player who had his career (and almost life) ended in a violent hit, a 1937 game in honor of a player who had his leg shattered and died soon afterwards, and a 1939 game to benefit another drowned player. From raising money for a particular cause, All-Star games soon became about raising money directly or indirectly for the league itself.

Wikipedia tells us that the first professional league to have an All-Star game was Major League Baseball which held what they thought was going to be a one-time event in 1933 as part of Chicago’s World Fair. (quick side-note, if you haven’t read Erik Larson’s book about the fair, The Devil in the White City, you should!) History.com has a good article about the game, in which they claim that, “the event was designed to bolster the sport and improve its reputation during the darkest years of the Great Depression.” In the three years before the All-Star game, baseball’s attendance had dropped by “40 percent, while the average player’s salary fell by 25 percent.” Teams were experimenting with all sorts of promotions to try to bring fans and money back into the game and while Major League Baseball donated the proceeds of the All-Star game to charity, they surely profited indirectly from the attention it garnered. The All-Star game was a success, with hundreds of thousands of fans casting votes for which players they wanted to see and the top vote-getter, Babe Ruth, hitting a home run during the game. After the success of the 1933 game, baseball decided to make the All-Star game an annual tradition.

Other professional leagues in the United States soon followed along: the NFL in 1938, the NHL in 1947, and the NBA in 1951. For newer leagues, like Major League Soccer, the WNBA, and Major League Lacrosse, the inclusion of an All-Star game must have seemed like an obvious move. It seems like the All-Star game is primarily an American thing with some international sports leagues following along, but not all of them. The world’s most popular leagues — all soccer leagues, of course: the British Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, and the Italian Serie A don’t have All-Star games. The Canadian Football League had one on and off from the 1950s but has not had one since 1988.

The format of All-Star games and accompanying competitive side-dishes have been tweaked over and over over the years to try to make the games slightly more competitive and therefore more entertaining to watch. These innovations seem to have generally moved in waves. Early on, some All-Star games were between last year’s championship team and a mixed team of players from other teams. After that, the now standard game between two mixed teams based on conference or league came into fashion. Two other formats that have been experimented with in the hopes of ginning up some competitive juices have been teams based on geographic origin (often the United States or North America vs. the rest of the world) or having teams chosen by two players or former players alternatively picking from the pool of All-Stars. I’m not sure that either of these have been very successful. The more successful though rare and extreme version of this is to actually invite a foreign team to play against a team made up of All-Stars. This happened very successfully in 1979 and 1987 in the NHL when teams of NHL All-Stars played against a Soviet national team. It’s hard to replicate that success because it was so reliant on the Cold War. Major League Soccer’s All-Star team plays against a European club team which kind of works but also is an admission of how weak the MLS is in comparison to other leagues. All of these innovations are intended to make the game more competitive. Perhaps the most extreme attempt came in 2003, when Major League Baseball took the extraordinary step of awarding home field advantage in the World Series to the league whose team won the All-Star game.

All-Star games are not only an opportunity for professional sports leagues to attract attention and earn money, they are also great opportunities for players. Players on the NBA All-Star teams this year will make $25,000 for playing in the game and another $25,000 if their team wins the game. The side-show events like the dunk contest and three point contest have their own purses that go to the individual winners of those competitions. Like for winning the Super Bowl, players may also have negotiated bonuses in their contracts for making the All-Star game.

The NBA All-Star game, which takes place this weekend in New York City, is definitely the biggest and most visible of the professional All-Star games in the United States. Check back in later today for a beginner’s guide to all of its elements.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is a buzzer beater?

Dear Sports Fan,

What exactly is a buzzer beater? I know it’s a last second shot, but how last second does it have to be? And is it only in basketball? Why?

Thanks,
Wesley

Dear Wesley,

Nothing reminds people that sports are a constructed universe more than the clock that counts inexorably towards the end of a game. In most timed sports, like basketball, football, and hockey, this clock is present in the arena and on television screens throughout the entire game. In soccer, the official time is kept only by the referee, and in untimed sports like tennis and basketball, time takes a back seat to sets, games, or innings. Each sport that has a clock deals with what happens when the clock runs out a little differently. Hockey rules simply that when the clock hits zero at the end of a period or game, the action ends. If the puck is an inch from crossing the goal-line when the clock hits zero, there is no goal. As befits football’s nature as a set of successive plays, football rules dictate that time only matters at the start and end of plays. If there is a second on the clock, that is enough time for another play. If there is no time at the end of a play, (with an exception for penalties) there will be no next play. The clock hitting zero during a play makes no difference to the result of that play whatsoever. Basketball has a different way of deciding what happens when a clock hits zero.

There are two clocks in basketball: the game clock and the shot clock. The game clock starts at 12 minutes for each National Basketball Association (NBA) quarter or at 20 minutes for each college basketball half. The shot clock starts at 24 seconds in the NBA and 35 in college and resets each time possession of the ball switches from one team to another or if a shot hits the rim. The shot clock was introduced in the NBA in 1954 in order to force teams to shoot the ball more frequently. Basketball wants shots! As part of the shot clock rule, the NBA decided that instead of requiring a shot to go in or hit the rim before the 24 second clock hit zero, they would enforce it from the moment the ball left a player’s hand. Once the ball is in the air, flying towards the hoop, time is effectively no longer an issue. Basketball teams have 24 seconds (or 35 in college) to shoot the ball, not to make a basket or hit the rim.

This is a natural rule for the shot clock. After all, the shot clock was not put in place to stop play every 24 or 35 seconds, it was intended to create a fast-moving, offensive, and continuous game. When the same logic is applied to the game clock, it’s a little bit more jarring. When applied to the game clock, it means that a ball, flying through the air, after the clock hits zero, is still in play as long as the player who shot it let go before time expired. This is the essence of a buzzer beater! It’s a shot that continues after the game clock has hit zero.

There are, as you might expect, a few wrinkles to how this term is used. First, although a buzzer sounds whenever a shot clock or game clock hits zero (thus the “buzzer” moniker), people almost always use the term to refer to the game clock hitting zero at the end of the fourth quarter. Second, although buzzer beater literally should be a shot that leaves a player’s hands when there is time left on the clock and goes through the basket (or doesn’t) after time has expired, people have gotten a little sloppy. Shots that are made with less than a few seconds left are often referred to as buzzer beaters, even if you and I know that they technically should not be. In this Youtube video of great NBA buzzer beaters, about half of them should technically not qualify because there is still a fraction of a second left on the clock after they go in:

As you can see from the video, buzzer beaters are exciting! This is the third and last exception to their pure definition. A buzzer beater that happens when a team is down by forty points is not really considered a buzzer beater. To really be though of as a buzzer beater, a shot should not only fall after the clock hits zero, but it should also win the game for the team that shot it.

The only other sports parallel I can think of to the buzzer beater is from boxing where a fighter who has been knocked to the ground can be “saved by the bell.” In boxing, a downed fighter has ten seconds to rise back to his feet and prepare to continue boxing. If he or she can’t do that, they lose the fight. The only exception to this is a boxer who gets knocked down with less than ten seconds left in a round. In this case, depending on the rules of the fight, he or she might be given a free pass from that time requirement. It’s mostly an anachronism today — boxing rules have evolved enough to recognize that a fighter who cannot recover in ten seconds should not keep fighting, even if it is at the end of the round. Still, it’s interesting that both phrases for how sports action continues after the clock hits zero have become recognizable phrases in our language. People are fascinated by what will happen after their own time has run out. In the constructed world of sports, we get to decide how that works. In boxing and basketball, there is momentarily, life after death.

Thanks for asking,
Ezra Fischer

What does "five hole" mean in hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “five hole” mean in hockey? I’ve heard announcers talk about “going five hole” and “protecting the five hole” and even “giving him the five hole and then taking it away.” What on earth is going on?

Thanks,
Alejandro

Dear Alejandro,

The “five hole” is one of those terms that has a very technical source but is used quite commonly. When used in the context of hockey, the five hole is the area between the goalies legs. If a player “goes five hole” that means they are an attacker who tries to shoot the puck into the net between the goalie’s legs. “Protecting the five hole” is something every goalie must be good at. When a goalie moves from side to side, she invariably creates some separation between her legs because she needs to push off her back leg to generate power. A goalie has to be able to push off powerfully and then get into a closed position quickly again. Sometimes goalies will intentionally lure shooters into thinking there is room to score between their legs (in the five hole) and then as soon as they begin to shoot, close that area down and prevent the puck from scoring. That’s “giving him the five hole and then taking it away.”

The source of the phrase is a numbering system that coaches and players use to talk about the location of shots. Area one is above the goalie’s glove hand. That’s usually the left hand, since most goalies (as opposed to other hockey players, oddly enough) are right-handed. Area two is the same side but below the glove. Area three is high on the other side, where the goalie holds her stick and rectangular blocker. Area four is low on the stick side. Area five is between the goalies legs. Areas six and seven are medium in terms of hight on the stick side and glove side respectively and may have been added after the system was initially developed. Each area can also be called a hole because it represents a potential spot where a puck can wriggle through the goalie’s attempt to create a solid defense of the net.

The reason for the terms popularity probably comes from two sources: first, it’s the easiest to remember. If you’re a hockey announcer and you see someone score a goal through another hole, you have to quickly figure out which side of the net it went into and then whether the goalie is a righty or a lefty before you can say with confidence which hole was exploited. The five hole is easy! It’s always in the middle. The second reason may already have occurred to you. It’s mildly funny in a sexual way. This humor has been enjoyed by members of the Five Hole Band whose music was featured in the Toronto Film Festival 2009 Top Ten Canadian Short Film, “5 Hole Tales of Hockey Erotica.” There’s also an unrelated book called The Five Hole Stories by Dave Bidini, another (shocking!) Canadian artist. There are also crass T-shirts that encourage you to “score through the five hole” or “show me your five hole.”

From the arcane to the commonplace to the obscene, the more you know, the more you know!

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Was Deflategate NFL misdirection?

Remember Deflategate? The scandal that rocked the National Football League (NFL) world for the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl? Just hours after the ACF Conference Championship game (one of the NFL’s two semifinals) word started to spread on Twitter that league authorities were going to be investigating the Patriots for illicitly manipulating their set of footballs to gain a competitive advantage. For the next two weeks, we learned more about the NFL’s process for providing, handling, and manipulating the footballs that each team uses when they play offense than we ever thought necessary. We heard from physicists and statisticians. Billions of words were spoken and written about this story — how serious of an offense was it? how should it be penalized? how does it change the legacy of the Patriots as a team and franchise? of coach Bill Belichick? of quarterback Tom Brady? Then, finally, on the day of the Super Bowl, news came out from NFL sources, that of the 12 balls the Patriots provided and used, 10 were inflated only slightly under the permitted lower limit and only one was significantly under-inflated. This was an almost complete reversal from what we thought we had known for the previous thirteen days, which was that 11 of the 12 balls were significantly under-inflated. Of course, now that the Super Bowl is over, most people have moved on from this controversy. It’s left me wondering though: how much was Deflategate NFL misdirection? Is it possible that the NFL used this half-scandal the way a magician would use a harmless explosion — to distract from more important and revealing subjects?

It’s not an argument that Cyd Ziegler of Outsports makes about the apparent black-balling of gay football player Michael Sam, but he easily could. Instead, Ziegler makes a determined, unrelenting, well-researched, and ultimately convincing case that Michael Sam has been denied an equitable chance to play in the NFL because of his sexual orientation. Read the article, read the article, but even if you don’t, read Ziegler’s conclusion:

The answer to the question I’ve posed to so many – Why is Michael Sam not with an NFL team? – is also likely the most obvious one: because he’s openly gay. Defensive ends with the same size and the same speed – yet with less production in college and the NFL preseason – are in the NFL and Sam is not because he’s gay and he just won’t stop being gay.

The question I would like to pose to NFL executives is this. Knowing that you were distinctly vulnerable to criticism on big social issues like providing employment opportunity free of discrimination to people of all sexual orientations and your season-long struggle to come up with and stick to a coherent policy on domestic abuse, did you gleefully glom onto a much less meaningful controversy about deflated footballs and keep fueling it through the two-week period before the Super Bowl that is often used as a referendum on the stories of the season and the state of the NFL? If you knew that only one of the 11 under-inflated footballs was more than marginally below the permitted range, which you must have known when you tested them at halftime of the game, why did you only correct the story that all 11 we’re significantly under-inflated on the day of the Super Bowl?

I’m simultaneously interested in figuring out if the NFL chose to use Deflategate as misdirection so people would not be thinking or writing about more serious topics leading up to the Super Bowl and also happy that people like Cyd ZIegler are focused on what is important.

College football: If you can't beat them, make them join you

College football is a notoriously hypocritical business. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry but the people who are the main attraction and who take all the physical risk, the players, don’t have salaries. College football players are meant to be amateurs — college kids who also play football. That the NCAA and member Universities are able to maintain this fiction, despite all evidence to the contrary, is absurd. College football is big business. Being a college football player requires well over a 40 hour work week. And, although it varies from school to school and player to player, football is the primary focus for most college football players.

If we’re honest about it, playing football so intensely doesn’t leave that much time for academics. Now, you might be thinking that you didn’t spend that much time on academics when you were in college either. Maybe you spent most of your time following your favorite rock bands, crushing on your classmates, or exploring drugs and alcohol for the first time. Well, you weren’t as focused as most college football players, now were you? These athletes are basically holding full-time jobs down AND going to college while you were just messing around. It’s a lot to ask and frankly, there are lots of ways around it. Many big football schools find a way to make the academic side of college life easier for their football players. They get them private tutoring or help them figure out which classes are easiest to pass. There are also countless more shady means that universities use to help their football players concentrate on football while playing into the charade of academics that the NCAA requires of them.

This is all pretty stupid. The most obvious suggestion would be to divorce football from academia. Create a minor-league for the NFL so that young football players can concentrate 100% on developing their skills while also making a fair salary for the entertainment value they help create. For years, however, I’ve been fascinated by another option. What if, instead of divorcing football, universities embraced it even more fully? Create a football major and allow football players to major in their sport. You can already graduate college with a major in ballet or bassoon. What’s the difference? Like football, ballet is primarily a physical activity. Like football, the market for high-paying bassoon jobs is harsh and limited. That doesn’t stop either of those pursuits from being thought of as legitimate studies. If anything, I would argue that you could create an extremely interesting major around football.

For the first time, this idea seems to be gaining a little bit of mainstream attention, if not steam. Ben Strauss wrote an article in the New York Times about the idea recently. In the article, he quotes two key supporters of the idea, “David Pargman, a professor emeritus in educational psychology at Florida State University, and William D. Coplin, director of the public affairs program at Syracuse University.” I recommend reading the whole thing but here are some highlights:

Dr. Pargman, who started a doctoral program in sports psychology at Florida State and has written several books on athletes, proposes a sample curriculum for a sports performance major that follows two years of basic studies, including anatomy and physiology, educational psychology and a particular sport’s offensive and defensive strategies. By graduation, players would have taken courses in public speaking, nutrition, kinesiology and business law. Practices become labs, supervised and graded by their coaches, though grades wouldn’t depend on game performance — no A for scoring a touchdown.

Dr. Coplin, who has spent his career designing programs to serve students in the job market, believes the skills learned through sports — from highly specialized training to learning a complex playbook to simply being a good teammate— are more valuable to employers than classroom knowledge… He envisions a three-credit seminar in conjunction with an “internship” — a semester on the team. The course could require players to keep logs of what they do each day and write a self-evaluation on career-building skills. “Athletes sometimes don’t realize the value of the skills they’re learning,” Dr. Coplin said. “But employers do.” He argues that their skill set — competitiveness, drive, the ability to work toward a common goal and take responsibility — is particularly valuable in sales and business management. Another idea for the class: an Excel lesson in which a player tracks his performance using trend lines and percentage change.

In the uneasy marriage between higher education and football, divorce is more likely than a renewal of vows, but I am fascinated by the idea of the two sides embracing more fully. I’m a lover not a hater, I guess.

What the top ten dirtiest phrases in football actually mean

If you’ve ever watched a football game on television, you know that some football phrases are a little… umm… dirty sounding? The internet is littered with websites that celebrate these phrases but very few of them actually explain what they mean in the context of football. Not to worry, here are simple explanations of the top ten dirtiest phrases in football. We want you to know what they mean so that you can feel free to giggle at them without restraint!

Illegal touching

During every football play, there are eleven players on the field for each team. Of the eleven players on the offense, only six are eligible to catch a forward pass. The other five are ineligible. Illegal touching is a penalty called against the offensive team if one of the five ineligible players catches or intentionally touches a football thrown forward by the quarterback. An eligible receiver can make himself ineligible by running out of bounds. If an eligible receiver runs out of bounds, returns to the field, and catches a pass, it’s also illegal touching.

Illegal use of the hands

Illegal use of the hands sounds dirty for the same reasons as illegal touching, but it’s a completely different penalty. Instead of mandating how a player can touch the ball (like illegal touching does), this rule mandates how players can touch each other. Mostly this means that players, with the sole exception of a player running with the ball, cannot use their hands to hit each other in the face, neck, or head.

Tight End

There’s no denying that for many, admiration of football players’ butts is a big part of the enjoyment of watching football. However, that’s not what the phrase “tight end” refers to. Tight end is a position on the offensive side of football. If you picture a football field right before a play starts, there are usually a group of big dudes on the offense lined up parallel on the line of scrimmage where the ball is. It’s customary for five of these players to be offensive linemen; the center, the guards on either side of him, and the tackles on either side of the guards. There is often a sixth man on the line. This is the tight end and he plays a hybrid position, blocking like an offensive lineman sometimes and looking to catch passes like a wide receiver at other times. They are called the tight end because they start each play as the receiver closest (tight) to either side (end) of the offensive line.

Sack

Jumping into the sack with a consenting partner should be great fun for both parties but a sack in football is only fun for one side. In football, the use of the word sack is more akin to an invading army that sacks a castle than sack referring to a bed. Defenders sack the quarterback if they tackle him to the ground while he is holding the ball. Sacks are a big deal because they are one of the few ways a defense can force the offense to start their next play with the ball farther from the end-zone they are trying to score in than where they started. As a bonus dirty sounding phrase, a strip sack is when a defender knocks the ball away from the quarterback while he is tackling him to the ground.

Penetration in the backfield

The word penetration has been falling in popular use steadily since 1982 which makes it all the more jarring when you hear it during a football game. In football, a defensive team is said to penetrate the backfield when one of their defenders pushes through the offensive line trying to block them. Like with sack, the metaphor of a castle siege is helpful. Think of the offensive line as the castle walls and the player with the ball — quarterback or running back — as the prize the defenders are trying to get. When a defensive player breaks through that wall, he has penetrated. The area behind the offensive line is called the backfield — which is why the players who start the play back there are called quarterbacks, fullbacks, running backs, and halfbacks.

Hit the hole

So far we’ve used the metaphor of a castle wall to describe a team’s offensive line. On running plays, when the offense is planning to hand the ball to a running back who then sprints towards the end zone, the offensive line transforms from a wall to a series of bulldozers. Individually and as a unit, they attempt to block, shove, push, and trick the defenders opposite them in particular, predetermined directions. Their goal is to create lanes clear of defenders for their running back to sneak through on his way down the field. From the running back’s perspective, these lanes look like openings or holes in the virtually solid mass of humanity on the field. A running back who takes advantage of one of these holes by running through it is said to have hit the hole.

Gap discipline

Calm down Prince fans, this phrase is about control but only in terms of the positioning of defenders on a football field. In our post earlier this year about identifying the mike linebacker, we learned that many terms on both sides of football are relative as opposed to absolute. That makes sense because the offense has to plan a play that’s flexible enough to adjust to whatever the defense is running and vise-versa. One way defenses do this is by labeling the space between offensive linemen, centered on the center who starts each play with the ball. The space between the center and the players on either side of him are called the A gaps. The next two spaces between offensive linemen are called B gaps and after that, C gaps. During a defensive play, a defensive player may have the responsibility of trying to get through one of these gaps to sack the quarterback or to plug one of the gaps and make sure the offensive line cannot move him to create a hole for their running back. A defender shows gap discipline when he sticks to his assignment despite seeing something that could tempt him to leave and chase another opportunity. Offenses love to trick defenders away from their assignments with clever fakes and then punish them for their lapses.

Getting stripped

Although football players do sometimes have wardrobe malfunctions during the game, getting stripped refers to a player who loses the ball, not his pants. Holding on to the football is the primary responsibility of every player who handles the ball because losing it can be an enormous mistake. A ball that is lost or fumbled is up for grabs and if the defense grabs the ball, their team gets to switch to offense on the next play.

Ball skills

In the last two weeks, because of Deflategate, we’ve heard enough sophomoric ball puns for a lifetime. Ball skills is a common football phrase that refers to the abilities of a wide receiver or defensive player to catch the football, even while moving at full speed through a chaotic environment. Many football players have remarkable ball skills. The greatest example of ball skills during this past season was this stunning catch from New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. Quarterbacks also demonstrate their ball skills by convincingly executing fake hand offs or fake throws.

Double teamed

Double teaming in football is when two players are assigned to either attack or defend a single member of the opposing team. This could be two defenders covering a single wide receiver to prevent him from catching the ball or two offensive linemen blocking a single defensive lineman from getting to the quarterback. In any scenario, spending two of your players to deal with one player on the opposing team is risky business. It means that somewhere else on the field, your team is likely to be outnumbered. Some players like defensive lineman J.J. Watt or wide receiver Calvin Johnson are so dangerous that they get double teamed on almost every play. Not only are they frequently still able to make plays, but by forcing the other team to double team them, they make it easier for their teammates to succeed.

 

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Why is it hard to make football safer by changing its rules?

This week, we’ve published three posts about the impact of brain injuries on football. Each post has been setting the stage for tomorrow’s post on how to fix football. The first post set the stage by establishing that brain injuries suffered by football players are severe and can be life-threatening. The second explored how, why, and when brain injuries occur during a football game. What are the factors that contribute to their frequency? In the third post we answered the seemingly rhetorical but important question of why the leaders of football and the National Football League, specifically need to take this issue seriously; that brain injuries threaten the very existence of football as we know it. Today, we’ll take a look at the history of rule changes in football and some of the factors that make finding a rule-based way of preventing brain injuries so difficult.

There are a million ways to change football to reduce or eliminate head injuries. It’s easy! In fact, there are some versions of football that we’ve been playing for years that have very few brain injuries. Why not convert the NFL to a touch football or flag football league? Or we could think outside the box and allow tackling but play on a field made of rubber, filled with water four feet deep. Technology could provide another way forward. Each player could be fitted with sensors and a virtual reality headset and then left in individual padded rooms, each 120 yards by 53 yards big. They could safely play a virtual game of football that was as athletically challenging without any risk of injury.

Of course, I’m not serious about any of these suggestions (although, I would pay a lot of money to see the football-in-a-pool game played). Each would, in its own way, be unacceptable. Brain injuries in football are a problem in part because people love football so much. If a less prized activity was damaging its participants, it would be much easier to change it or write it off completely. Our goal is to find a way to reduce or eliminate football’s brain injuries without stealing football’s essence.

In this mission we should be heartened by one element of football’s history: it’s constantly changing rules. For more than a hundred years, football organizations have changed the rules of football, sometimes quite significantly, to improve the safety of its players. Some of these rule changes are obvious in their intent, like the move in the mid-60s to shift the goalpost from on the goal line to behind the end zone. This was a protective measure to keep players from running full speed into concrete or metal goal posts. Likewise, rules like the 1962 prohibition against grabbing another player’s face mask and the 1980 rule against (I kid you not) clubbing an opponent’s head or neck with your fist, were obvious safety measures.

The problem that we face today is that many of the safety measures introduced since 1906 sought to make football safer by reducing the time players spent literally engaged with each other. The theory seems to have been that players running in space were safer than players grappling and wrestling with each other. As we know from our coverage of how brain injuries happen in football, as sound as this logic sounds, it runs almost totally counter to the truth when it comes to brain injuries. The more space there is for players to run, the faster they go, and the faster they go, the worse the collisions with other players are for their brains. Let’s take a quick trip through the history of football rule changes. Note how each safety measure encourages less close grappling and more running freely around the field.

In 1906 a rules committee was brought together to save football. In the past five years, 45 people had died playing football, 18 in 1905 alone. Political pressure, coming from as far up as President Theodore Roosevelt, was sending a strong message: “Make the game safer or face it being outlawed.” The two biggest changes the committee made were to legalize the forward pass and change the distance required for a first down from five yards to 10 yards. These may not seem like safety measures but before then, without the forward pass and needing only to get five yards to earn a first down, football resembled nothing more than hand-to-hand combat. The play was packed into a small space where kicking, punching, tearing, and gouging could leave players with broken ribs, necks, or skulls. Spreading the game out was meant to prevent these types of injuries.

This idea has continued into modern football. In 1974, a rule was created to limit defenders to touching a wide receiver only once when more than three yards from the line of scrimmage. In 1978, this was extended to five yards. Also that year, offensive linemen were allowed to block with their arms extended instead of having to be body-to-body with the defender they were trying to block. In 1979 the NFL got more particular about how players could block each other, eliminating blocking below the waist on kicking plays. In 1987 offensive linemen were protected from having one player dive at their knees while another engaged them higher up. In 1989 defensive players with a clear path to the quarterback were prohibited from hitting them in the knees. In 1992 defenders got a little protection when offensive blocking below the thigh was made illegal. In 1995 the chop block and lure blocking techniques were prohibited. In 1999 blocking from behind was prohibited. It wasn’t quite a rule change, but in 2004 refs were instructed to begin actually enforcing illegal contact, pass interference, and defensive holding rules. In 2007 the penalty for blocking a wide receiver below the waist was expanded from 5 to 15 yards.

Over more than 100 years, the way that football players engage each other has moved from fighting to grappling to tackling to hitting and now to colliding. Every rule that has limited the times and places that players can make contact with each other has contributed to giving players more time and space. For an athlete, time and space equal speed. Speed makes for an exciting game but it also makes for more explosive collisions when players do meet up.

Even as we acknowledge that historic rule changes, even those put in place for player safety, have made the game more dangerous, it’s hard to imagine undoing them. Sure, it’s better to break an ankle than bruise a brain, but would we really make the dangerous practice of blocking below the thigh legal again? In an era that is so concerned about player safety, changing the rules of football to legalize more brutal but less damaging forms of violence does not seem like a good way forward.

The problem is that continuing to add prohibitive rules to football might not work either. There are two problems with continuing along the path of outlawing more and more different forms of hitting. First, given the freedom and athleticism of offensive players, defenders are reaching a limit. They simply don’t have time to get their bodies into a position to hit someone the right way all the time. The defender is moving at high speed, the running back or wide receiver is moving equally fast. Penalties, fines, and suspensions won’t prevent all the dangerous hits in the game, much less the subconcussive injuries caused by the offensive and defensive lines clashing, or the fluke injuries that result from the game’s chaos. These types of prohibitive safety rules are also unpopular among football players and fans. Central to the popularity of football is a culture of toughness. There’s no sport that is more reliant on its players to sublimate their bodies, thoughts, and desires to the team. No football play works thanks to one player, each play is the product of eleven players moving in lockstep. Even the greatest football player in the most important position is relatively unimportant compared to a great player in another sport. Wide receivers cannot catch passes thrown poorly and quarterbacks cannot throw if they don’t get good blocking. The violence of football is important to its culture because it reinforces the core truth football teaches, that no single person is as important as a team.

If we cannot undo the decades of well-intentioned, safety-first rules that have counterintuitively made football into an even more dangerous sport for its players’ long-term health and we cannot protect them by continuing to prohibit even more forms of violence, then what can we do to save football? Tomorrow I’ll suggest a single, small change that would unilaterally make football safer without changing the essential nature of the game. We can save football.

Why shouldn't football players play the Settlers of Catan?

Kevin Clark wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal this week where he describes, with some glee, how the board game Settlers of Catan has become an obsession of some members of the Green Bay Packers football team this season. The article has gone viral. It’s the number one trending topic on Facebook, which tempts users to click on it with the teaser, “Green Bay Packers’ players ‘completely addicted’ to board game, tight end says.” The article is currently the number one search result on Google’s web search for “Settlers of Catan” and also for “Wall Street Journal.” It’s number one on the Wall Street Journal’s self-reported Most Popular articles right now too. The article clearly struck a nerve.

Wikipedia describes Settlers of Catan as a multi-player board game where “players assume the roles of settlers, each attempting to build and develop holdings while trading and acquiring resources. Players are rewarded points as their settlements grow; the first to reach a set number of points is the winner.” Green Bay Packer’s backup quarterback Matt Flynn is quoted in Clark’s article describing the game as “a nonviolent version of Risk.” The Green Bay Packers, especially their offensive line, love it and seem to approach it with a competitive zeal close to that they show for football. Here’s Clark:

The competitive nature of the Green Bay’s Catan tradition is now legendary in the locker room. Two weeks ago, Linsley won the game, but Bakhtiari, who typically hosts the games at his house, had briefly gone outside to cook a chicken for the group. He furiously protested Linsley’s victory because of this.

If one half of the appeal of the article is the humor in a group of grown men taking a board game too seriously, the other half seems to be pointing out that it’s funny for football players to play a game that is as intellectual and intricate as Settlers of Catan. That’s a theme the article hits from start to finish:

There may not be a more unusual bonding tradition in the NFL than the gang of Packers who get together regularly to play a board game called “Settlers of Catan.”

Any player in the locker room will readily admit that it’s a nerdy endeavor.

“The rules of the game can be complex—making it all the funnier that the Packers have embraced it.”

The Packers’ embrace of the game become such a phenomenon that [a local gaming store, Gnome Games] put a sign up that said “Be cool like [Packers tight end] Justin Perillo, play Catan!” The Packer players quickly noticed it. “We thought it was hilarious,” Linsley said.

The message is clear: it’s funny for football players to play a Settlers of Catan because football is cool but not very intellectual and Settlers of Catan is intellectual but not very cool. I believe that the article has been viewed and forwarded and shared and tweeted so many times primarily because of the perceived incongruity of football players spending their leisure time in an activity that’s so unlike football.

I don’t blame Clark one bit for taking this approach. Not only is this a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” moment but I enjoyed the article. It was well written and it made me want to hang out with the Green Bay Packers. What bothers me is the underlying assumption about football not being an intellectual pursuit. A big part of my rationale for writing Dear Sports Fan is that I don’t believe the gap between sports and non-sport activities is as great as many people think it is and I don’t believe there should be as large a divide between sports fans and non-sports fans as there is. This article and the response to it widens the cultural divide over sports ever so slightly by encouraging people to think it’s unusual and funny for football players to play an intellectual board game like Settlers of Catan.

Football is an incredibly complex game that requires not only amazing physical feats from its players but also remarkable mental acuity. Every player is expected to learn (simple memorization will fail when decisions need to be made so quickly and under such intense pressure) up to a thousand plays in their own time using mostly diagrams. Then, when a play is called in the middle of a football game, they have to recall what they and at least what their neighboring teammates do to execute the play. And it’s not like the play names help very much. Football language is as obtuse as diner short-hand and each team has their own language. Here’s an example of a play call as described by Kansas City quarterback Alex Smith in a Kansas City Star article:

“There’s times I’m in the huddle and I might go, ‘Alright, listen up for the call here fellas,’ and they know it’s gonna be a doozy,” Smith said. “We’ve got ‘shift to halfback twin right open, swap 72 all-go special halfback shallow cross wide open.’”

Understanding a play call is just the start. NFL football players need to be tuned into the exact situation within each game and have an encyclopedic understanding of their opponents. Nowhere is this more true than in New England, where the Patriots head coach Bill Belichick terrorizes his team with his own perfect recall and penchant for impromptu pop quizzes. You know how I know this? Another article by Kevin Clark (and Daniel Barbarisi) in the Wall Street Journal! Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

“According to players, if a younger member of the team offers an answer, Belichick will often ask a studious veteran if that player is correct. Evans particularly remembers Belichick doing this with star quarterback Tom Brady and then-backup Matt Cassel. As Evans tells it, Belichick would ask a detailed question: “Hey, we’re in the high red zone, it’s second-and-six from the 18. What’s Indianapolis’ favorite blitz?” Cassel would answer “overloading the weak side.” Then Belichick would turn to Brady and ask “do you concur?” On the times Brady said the backup was incorrect, the room would erupt with laughter.”

I don’t mean to be a kill-joy. There is something instinctively unexpected about 350 pound world-class athletes sitting down to play Settlers of Catan. Kevin Clark’s Wall Street Journal article captured that humor with grace and not a trace of meanness. The problem is that the article and our enjoyment of it furthers some unnecessary and damaging misconceptions about the nature of sports, sports fans, and athletes. The Green Bay Packers compete in a high-stakes workplace with intense physical and mental demands. Is it really surprising that some of them keep themselves primed intellectually and competitively by playing an brainy board game?

Three lessons about free thought from the New England Patriots

In football, like many other pursuits, it’s important to abide by the rules of the game. Football is chock full of technicalities; intricate rules which mandate when and where players can move down to the inch, how teams can set up for plays, how players can dress, and even the minute details that determine the difference between a catch, a fumble, or an incompletion. In addition to its deep and complicated rules, football (like so many other aspects of life), also has a set of conventions. These unwritten rules are so woven into the culture of football that they seem as incontrovertible as the rules themselves. Convention has a powerful impact on how football games are played but as long as everyone abides by them they don’t have a significant impact on who wins football games. The New England Patriots, led by their brusquely radical coach Bill Bellichick are the one team that shows over and over again that they know the difference between a convention and a rule and that they are willing (and gleefully excited?) to break with convention in order to win football games. This past weekend, the Patriots beat the Baltimore Ravens 35-31 in the Divisional Round of the NFL playoffs. It was a close game and the Patriots might easily have lost the game if they had prepared for the game and reacted to its events in a conventional way. Let’s examine some of the conventions the Patriots broke and how then benefited from breaking them.

  1. Teams have playbooks and stick to them: In the NFL, the team playbook is a top-secret document of monumental importance. When players are cut, the conventional phrase used is, “Pick up your playbook and go see the coach.” Teams are obsessive about keeping the design and terminology of their offense secret. Minnesota Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway was quoted in an ESPN article saying this of NFL playbooks “you always have it with you. That’s the one thing that’s sacred to football. It has all our secrets.” The issue with all this secrecy is that it creates an assumption that teams run a set of plays that is particular to them from game to game and season to season and that these plays give them an advantage over other teams. The Patriots don’t particularly believe this. In 2006 the Hartford Courant wrote an article about this element of New England Patriotism and quoted Bellichick as saying, “It’s kind of there as a reference manual… I’m sure teams have our playbook.” The Patriots are less protective of their own playbook in part because they are more resourceful than other teams in sourcing and installing new plays. As we’ll see later, one of the biggest factors in their win over the Ravens was a set of plays which were inspired by Alabama’s college football team and one of the Patriots’ NFL competitors.
    Lesson: Don’t be a one or even a ten trick pony. Focus on flexibility and fit your tactics to the task at hand.
  2. Balance is good: Offensive football plays are generally divided into two main groups: running plays and passing plays. A running play is when the quarterback takes the ball and hands it to someone behind the line of scrimmage where the ball was when the play started. A passing play is when the quarterback tries to throw the ball across or down the field to one of his teammates. Although football has generally been evolving over the past twenty years into a league where teams pass more and more of the time, most teams abide by the convention that they should use a mix of running plays and passing plays during a game. There’s no rule against a team running all the time or throwing all the time but the common belief is that if you slant your tactics too far in one direction or the other, you give up the element of surprise and a defense that knows what is coming will find it easier to stop what you’re trying to do. In this weekend’s game against the Ravens, the Patriots ran the ball seven out of the 58 offensive plays they used and not a single time in the decisive second half. The Patriots believed they could exploit a Baltimore pass defense that Football Outsiders ranked 15th in the league more easily than their run defense which Football Outsiders ranked 5th in the league and they didn’t care who knew it, nor were they going to stop doing it once it started to work.
    Lesson: If you find a competitive advantage, use it. Don’t let convention soften your advantages.
  3. A football team looks like this: Football is a very ritualistic game. In a normal game, the two teams will line up against each other in 100 to 120 plays that each begin from a stand-still. This rigid structure is what makes football perhaps the most tactically interesting of all the major sports but it can also lead to rigidity in thought. Sometimes this rigid thought leads coaches or general managers to believe that a player who does not “look the type” cannot succeed. For decades (and still perhaps to some extent today,) this was played out in the sad discrimination against Black quarterbacks. Even today, players with unusual body types for their position, like short wide receivers (the Patriots have two starting wide receivers under six-feet tall) find their path to the NFL more difficult than their taller competition. Another way this plays out on the football field is in what blend of players a team uses and in what formations they set them up in. The Patriots have been more flexible about this than other NFL teams for years. In the early 2000s, when the Patriots won three Super Bowls, one of their best players was named Troy Brown. During the Patriots first two Super Bowl seasons, Brown was one of their leading wide receivers. In their run to the playoffs in 2004, the team suffered a series of defensive injuries, so they used Brown as a cornerback. They won the Super Bowl again. The Patriots also demonstrate flexibility in how they deploy players. A traditional formation on offense calls for a quarterback, five offensive linemen, one tight end, and a combination of running backs and wide receivers to fill out the eleven man team. In 2010, the Patriots shook up the league by regularly deploying two tight ends that were both threats to catch the ball. They led the league in points scored that season.
    Just this weekend, the Patriots subverted the norms of football even farther when they ran four plays against the Ravens with only four offensive linemen on the field. This was extremely clever because the convention of having five offensive linemen on the field is bolstered by a rule which requires that exactly five players on the offense declare themselves as “ineligible receivers” on every play. What this means is that those players cannot catch a pass and run with the ball, nor can they run down the field to hit a defender while the quarterback has the ball. It’s generally assumed that these restrictions apply to offensive linemen but it’s not a rule. When the Patriots used four offensive linemen, they were potentially putting themselves at a disadvantage. There’s a reason why offensive linemen are behemoths with overly developed protective instincts. Without good offensive linemen, the defense would pummel the quarterback before he has a chance to throw the ball. This is especially true if the defense knows the offense is going to pass! By putting a smaller player on the field (and one who could only run backwards and could not touch the ball,) the Patriots were risking the safety of their quarterback and their ability to win. What they relied on and what indeed happened is that the defense was so confused by what was going on and so bound by convention, that they treated the ineligible receiver as a real threat. They took players away from attacking the quarterback to follow this ineligible receiver around. It wouldn’t have confused them forever but it worked for four plays and that might have been enough.
    Lesson: Don’t allow convention to blind your common sense and by all means, if you can better your chances by legally and morally taking advantage of someone else’s devotion to conventional thought, do so.

The Patriots radical thought is not all good. It gives them a somewhat cold-blooded approach to personnel decisions. They understand the cost of paying a player a salary during their twilight years in the NFL based on performance in their prime years and so they err on the side of trading or cutting players slightly before the end of their primes. In making these decisions, they don’t seem to care at all if the player is a fan favorite or even very much about whether they are beloved by their teammates. It also means they knowingly choose to take risks on players that other teams may be wary of for off-the-field reasons. Tight end Aaron Hernandez, one of the two tight-ends the Patriots used in 2010 to lead the league in offense, is now awaiting trial for murder. For the most part though, the Patriots are good for the league. They encourage innovation and are a fine exhibition of how intellect and design can win in even the most muscle-bound competitions. Plus, they’re fun to watch. You never know what they’ll try next.

What is a corner three in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a corner three in basketball? I hear announcers talking about it and I get that it’s some special kind of three point shot but I don’t know what makes it so special.

Thanks,
Lora

 

Dear Lora,

This is going to sound a little like a definition by repetition but a corner three is a three point shot in basketball taken from the corner of a basketball court. If you picture a basketball court, the three point line is the largest curve that arcs from the baseline on one side of the basket up towards the center of the court before curving back to the baseline on the other side of the basket. It is not one half of a circle, it’s a part of an ellipse. What this means is that the distance from any point on the three point line to the basket varies depending on its position. If you draw a line from the basket straight up the court, (perpendicular to the baseline), it will hit the three point line at its farthest from the basket. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), that distance is 23.75 feet. If you follow the baseline towards the corner of the court, you will hit the three point line at its closest to the basket. In the NBA, that distance is 22 feet. The corner three is the shortest shot a basketball player can take to earn their team three points if it goes in. Based just on this mundane 1.75 foot distinction, the corner three has become a cultural and tactical lodestone in the NBA.

The three point line was introduced to the NBA in 1979 and it had an instant impact on the game. Before the three point shot, basketball was dominated by big men like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If all shots were worth the same amount, why wouldn’t the game be dominated by the players who could make the closest shots most easily? For the first twenty five years of its existence the three point line gave a measure of equality to smaller players who could shoot three-point shots with some consistency but it didn’t materially change the nature of the game. The most dominant players in basketball were still giants like Hakeem Olajuwon and Shaquille O’Neill or guys half a foot shorter like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant who used their ferocious athleticism to drive to the hoop and convert lay-ups, dunks, or get fouled. Sure, championship teams often had a player or two who specialized in lurking at the three point line, ready to catch a pass and shoot a quick three pointer, and yes, these guys frequently preferred the shorter corner three to the longer threes on the court (and yes, they were stereotypically less athletic and white) but this was a side-show to the main attraction.

In the past five years, this has started to change, and all signs point to us being at the front edge of a basketball revolution sparked by the corner three. When Michael Lewis published his book, Moneyball, in 2003, he didn’t just popularize the statistical revolution in baseball, he also helped legitimize the use of statistics in other sports as well. Basketball has found more success in using statistics than football or hockey, perhaps because its relatively small number of players and high number of scores and scoring attempts create simpler and better data sets than other sports. The relatively clear conclusion of a statistical analysis of basketball shots tells teams that shots from very close to the basket and three point shots from the corner are by far the most effective and efficient tactics in the game. Teams and players have acted on this knowledge and by 2015 probably 26 or 27 of the 30 NBA teams use offenses designed to maximize the team’s chances of ending possessions with either a lay-up, dunk, or corner three. Today, it’s not just the stereotypical unathletic white guy who lurks in the corner and jacks three pointers, now it’s the best players in the league who do that.

No combination of team and player represent this new way of playing better than the Houston Rockets and James Harden. Kirk Goldsberry wrote a wonderful article about this for Grantland. If you want to learn more about how the corner three is changing basketball, I suggest you go read his article! Here’s a short excerpt that summarizes the emotional and perceptual issue that basketball fans over the age of 30 are having with watching this new style.

For those of us who grew up watching Bird, Magic, and Jordan, there’s an increasing dissonance between what we perceive to be dominant basketball and what actually is dominant basketball. Sometimes the two are aligned, but they seem to be increasingly divergent — and perhaps the most tragic analytical realization is that the league’s rapidly growing 3-point economy has inherently downgraded some of the sport’s most aesthetically beautiful skill sets.

Like everything in sports, the corner three is subject to change. Whether it’s a rule change or simply a strategic adjustment, something will come along that threatens the dominance of today’s ascendant basketball shot. Until that time though, watch out for the open player in the corner!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer