definitions Archives - Page 5 of 6

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

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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

What is the magic number in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the magic number in baseball?

Thanks,
Mike

— — —

Dear Mike,

The “magic number” is a calculation used to state how far a team is from achieving a goal. Most frequently, it’s a metric that show how close a team is to winning their regular season division or conference title, or to making the playoffs.

The term “magic number” is used in other sports as well as baseball, but these days, with the baseball playoffs quickly approaching, we’re seeing it most often in baseball news stories. Some recent examples are this article on The Detroit Sports Site which begins, “The Detroit Tigers’ Magic Number to clinch the AL Central stayed stuck on seven with Sunday’s loss in Kansas City.” or this article on SB Nation’s LA Dodgers blog, True Blue L.A., entitled, “MLB standings 2014: Dodgers and Giants both lose, magic number now 5.” There are websites devoted completely to following the magic number, like Playoff Magic. We’ll look at their Major League Baseball (MLB) section later. First, let’s talk about how the magic number works.

I find the easiest way of thinking about the magic number is that it is the number of games a team needs to win for them to achieve a goal no matter what another team does. This makes some intuitive sense. Let’s take a simple scenario. There are two games remaining in a season. My team, the Flywheels, is ahead of the Steampunks by two games in the standings. All I have to do is win a single game to make it impossible for the Steampunks to catch up. My magic number to end the season ahead of the Steampunks is therefore one. Let’s say though, that the Steampunks play one of their remaining games before our team, the Flywheels, does. If they lose, then they only have one game left and they are still down by two games in the standings. My magic number moves from one to zero. I don’t need to win any more games to assure myself that I’m going to finish the season ahead of my rivals. A team’s own result can change their magic number but so can another team’s win or loss. The magic number is a relative calculation.

In more complex situations, the magic number is harder to derive by instinct. Luckily, there are a few easy formulas to follow to calculate it. The best follows the logic of our previous example. It’s the second option on the Wikipedia entry about the magic number:

The magic number can also be calculated as WB + GRB – WA + 1, where

WB is the number of wins that Team B has in the season
GRB is the number of games remaining for Team B in the season
WA is the number of wins that Team A has in the season

This second formula basically says: Assume Team B wins every remaining game. Calculate how many games team A needs to win to surpass team B’s maximum total by 1.

Let’s use this formula on our example of the Flywheels and the Steampunks. We didn’t say how many games there had been in the season, only that there were two left. Let’s say it’s a 20 game season. The standings today look like this:

Team A: Flywheels – 12 wins, 6 losses, 2 games remaining
Team B: Steampunks – 10 wins, 8 losses, 2 games remaining

To calculate the Flywheel’s magic number, we take the number of wins the Steampunks have (10) add the number of games remaining for the Steampunks (2) subtract the number of wins that the Flywheels have (12) and add one to get… one! It works!

One important thing about the magic number that makes more sense when you see how it is calculated, is that it can only ever measure the distance between two teams. In a three way race for a division title, the leading team will have a magic number in comparison to each of the teams chasing them. If someone says that a team has a single magic number showing how far they are from achieving a goal, it’s safe to assume that every other team other than the one used to calculate that number has been mathematically eliminated from contention.

Returning to Playoff Magic’s MLB page, here’s one example of how the magic number is working in this year’s run to the baseball playoffs.

The AL or American League Central still has three teams in contention. The Tigers are in the lead with 86 wins after 155 games. The Royals are in second place with 84 wins after 154 games. The Cleveland Indians are running third with 81 wins after 155 games. There are 162 games in a baseball season, so the Tigers and Indians have seven games left while the Royals have eight. The magic number is most easily understood as how many games does a team need to win to stay ahead of the teams behind them even if they win every remaining game. If the Royals win all their remaining games, they’ll end the season with 92 wins. If the Indians win every remaining game, they’ll end the season with 88 wins. To end the season ahead of the Indians, the Tigers need to win a total of 89 games or three more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Indians is three! To end the season ahead of the Royals, the Tigers would need 93 wins or seven more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Royals is seven! Those magic numbers show up in the table on the Tigers’ row. The 5 on the Royals row in the Cleveland Indians column is the Royals magic number in relation to the Indians. In this case, the achievement is not winning the division but ending the season ahead of the Indians.

I hope that helps explain the magic number. In case you’re wondering what the GB means in the standings table, it stands for “games back.” Games back is another story completely but luckily, I wrote all about what “games back” means last year.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What does probable or questionable mean on the NFL injury report?

Dear Sports Fan,

First time playing fantasy football here. What does it mean when someone is listed as Probable or Questionable? If someone (say Andre Ellington) has a Sunday game and has not been seen in practice till Wednesday, is it a sign they won’t start that week? Also, what kind of injuries are the worst? Ankle?

Best regards,
Mengster

— — —

Dear Mengster,

It sounds like you’ve really caught the Fantasy Football bug! As I wrote in my recent post about what it means to start or sit a player in fantasy football, predicting which players on your fantasy team are most likely to play well in their real games is a big part of playing fantasy football. A player who is too injured to play is 100% positive to not score any points for your team, so researching and following your players’ injuries is important business. Luckily for us, NFL teams are required to put out injury reports every day which file all of their players as either healthy or under one of the four possible standard injury designations: out, doubtful, questionable, and probable. It’s actually not luck, the NFL requires teams do this because having this information makes gambling on football and fantasy football games possible. Oh, the NFL wouldn’t say that if you asked it^[1] but it’s true nonetheless.

NFL injury designations are officially tied to percentages. Out = 0% likely to play. Doubtful = 25% likely to play. Questionable = 50% likely to play. Probably = 75% likely to play. In reality, that’s not actually the case. The Wall Street Journal ran an article a few years ago about what the real percentages for these labels were. In it, they discovered that Doubtful players played less than 3% of the time, Questionable was closest to its “proper” percentage, just a little higher than 50% — around 55%. Probably players played more than 90% of the time. Although the article is from 2011 and the stats go back to 2006, I don’t think much has changed. I wrote my own qualitative descriptions of what each designation means in an answer to similar question last year from someone who asked about the injury report:

Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.

When thinking about fantasy football, I generally assume that players listed as “probable” are fine. For players listed as “questionable,” I dig in and do some research about their specific situation. Have they, like you said, been practicing? What kind of injury do they have? Did it knock them out of the last game or were they able to finish? You can generally learn a lot about a “fantasy relevant” player’s injury. For example, in Andre Ellington’s case, I can tell from Rotoworld.com that he “remains on track to play in this week’s game against the 49ers.” So, he’s probably fine for this week. A lot of players, especially running backs (who take the most hits) and veterans will regularly skip a day of practice. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. What you want to watch out for is someone who’s designation gets worse during the week (moves from Probably to Questionable) or someone who wasn’t on the injury at the start of the week but is by the end. Those are both bad signs for their likelihood of playing on Sunday.

In terms of what injuries are the worst, that’s probably worth its own post. I can say from having played fantasy football for years and followed a lot of sports in general, that the injuries which seem to keep players out for the longest are (excluding obvious things like broken bones, torn ligaments, and concussions): high ankle sprains, turf toe, and foot sprains. I know, those things sound less serious than rib or hip injuries, but an athlete lives and dies by his or her ability to plant off one foot and switch directions. You need your ankles, toes, and feet healthy to do that!

Good luck in your fantasy game this weekend,
Ezra

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

It would probably say, “AHH!! A talking league??!”↵

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

What is Selection Sunday?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is Selection Sunday?

Thanks,
Siobhan

031311_SPT_Selection Sunday_MRM — Teams get together with fans to see if their team gets selected for March Madness.

— — —

Dear Siobhan,

Selection Sunday is the day that the 68 teams who have qualified for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament (March Madness) are announced. It’s also today, so let’s get down to the business of explaining how it works.

Like another facet of college, the admissions process, not all 68 open spots are open to every team equally. In college admissions, some spots (a majority at some schools, I believe) are reserved for the children of University employees, legacies whose parent attended the school, or star athletes. In the case of Selection Sunday, 32 of the 68 teams are reserved for conference champions. There are so many schools in the top division of college basketball with teams that they can’t all play each other in the regular season. Instead, their schedules are largely driven by what conference they are in. Conferences are federations of schools who agree to play with and against each other — one day soon we will write a post all about conferences. In the week leading up to Selection Sunday all but one of these conferences hold championship tournaments of their own. These conference championships are miniature versions of March Madness — single elimination tournaments that end in a championship game. The one exception is the Ivy League who disdains tournaments and simply declares the team with the best regular season record to be their champion. Each of the 32 conference winners are guaranteed a spot in the field of 68 teams that make it into the NCAA tournament. These 32 spots are called automatic bids.

The other 36 spots in the 68 team field are called at-large bids and are chosen by a selection committee. The selection committee is made up of ten college athletic directors or conference commissioners and functions just like committees everywhere. It creates controversy. According to a post about March Madness on howstuffworks.com the committee selects based on the following factors:

Rating Percentage Index (RPI) (For more information on RPI, go to CollegeRPI.com.)

Ranking in national polls

Conference record

Road record

Wins versus ranked opponents

The way a team finishes the regular season

Also, I would add, just like the college admissions process, the factors of instinct based on having watched the team during the year, luck, and how much coffee the committee member has had in the last half hour.

Conference is one of the most visible factors in the selection process. There’s a few conferences like the Big 12, Pac-12, Big Ten, and Atlantic 10 that are likely to get five or more teams into the tournament, then there’s a small middle of conferences that will get two or three teams, and a long tail of conferences where only the winner of their conference championship tournament will make the NCAA tournament. These three groups of conferences can colloquially be referred to as power conferences, mid-major conferences, and one-and-done conferences. Traditionally the overall winner of March Madness has almost always come from a power conference but the mid-majors are getting stronger every year. This year a mid-major, Wichita State, won every game throughout the regular season and conference championship and is thought to have a good shot to win the big tournament. The one-and-done conferences are called that because they usually only get one team into March Madness and that team usually loses in its first game.

The excitement of Selection Sunday is mostly about the ten or so teams that realistically don’t know whether they will be selected for the tournament or not. These teams are called bubble teams or are said to be on the bubble which is a nice visual. In addition to the secret whims of the selection committee these teams are effected by the outcomes of the conference championships. This is because of the automatic bids that conference champions receive. In most conferences, the team (or teams depending on what type of conference this is) with the best regular season performance are pretty much locks to get into the NCAAs. If a team outside of this group surprises everyone and wins the conference tournament, they will get the automatic bid, and, if the selection committee doesn’t subtract one of the teams from that conference from their selection, then all of the teams from that conference that were going to get in will get at-large bids, the under-dog upstart will get the automatic bid, and there will be one fewer at-large bid for the bubble teams to fight over. An example of this happened last night in the Big East when Providence upset Creighton. Creighton is still likely to make the tournament but as an at-large team. Providence, which wasn’t likely to qualify, now will on an automatic bid. And a bubble team like Minnesota or Xavier, as The Big Lead supposes, will not qualify as a result.

The selection will be announced on CBS around 6 p.m. ET after the conclusion of the SEC championship game. Enjoy!

What is a Southpaw? Why Are They Called Southpaws?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a southpaw and why are they called southpaws? Where does that term come from?

Thanks,
Sally,

— — —

Dear Sally,

A southpaw is someone who is left-handed. I’m guessing that you’re asking me instead of an etymologist because you heard the word used in the context of a sporting event. That’s apropos because the term comes from sports, baseball in particular, and was first used to refer to the handedness of a pitcher in particular. Here’s some background about baseball to lead into an explanation of the southpaw phrase.

Of all the major sports, baseball is probably the one that makes the biggest show of respecting its own tradition. One of its longest held tradition is playing games at night but not fully embracing it. According to Wikipedia, there have been night baseball games since the 1880s but major league teams “initially dismissed as an unwelcome gimmick by the big-league clubs.” The last hold-out in the major leagues, the venerable Chicago Cubs, succumbed to the night game trend in 1988, a hundred years or so later. There are still more day games in baseball than any other sport.

Hitting a major league pitch is an incredibly difficult feat and it requires, more than any other quality, great eyesight. As we know from the excellent book, The Sports Gene, the average vision of professional baseball players is 20/13 (they can see at 20 feet what most people can see at 13.) Doing anything to damage this vision, like painting the seams of the baseball white so that they cannot be distinguished from the rest of the ball, makes it virtually impossible for even the best baseball players to hit a pitch.

One naturally occurring factor that could effect the eyesight of the batter is, of course, the sun! If a batter were forced to look towards the sun in a low (rising or setting) position, it would seriously effect the game. Baseball at sunrise is unlikely but baseball games, particularly because of the tradition of playing during the day, could easily be played at or around sunset. You never hear about a batter with the sun in his eyes — fielders, yes, but not batters. This is because baseball stadiums are almost universally designed so that a batter standing at home plate facing the field will be pointed somewhere between due East and due North. This gets them away from the setting sun and, in the Northern Hemisphere, away from the Southerly winter sun as well. Popchartlab has a wonderful poster for sale that shows this.

In a baseball diamond where the batter faces East, the pitcher, standing opposite him, faces West. Imagine facing West and using your body as a map’s key or compass. Your eyes point West, your butt points East, your right arm points North, and your left arm… points South! This is how left-handed pitchers first became known as southpaws. Their paws literally face South in a traditional baseball stadium.

From baseball, the word has moved into other sports and into common use. I hear it most frequently in sports where handedness is a major tactical factor. Sports like hockey and tennis where which hand you favor marks which way you are more comfortable swinging your racket or stick are nice fits for using the term. I’ve also heard it used in basketball and boxing, two sports with motions (shooting in basketball, punching in boxing) that are asymmetrical and handed. In a recent episode of the NPR show, Radiolab, the hosts interviewed an English professor turned mixed martial artist, Jonathan Gottschall, whose first experience fighting was against a lefty and who talked about a theory for why lefties have been evolutionarily retained. The theory suggested that despite many negative aspects of left-handedness (lefties are more prone to any number of diseases and other early deaths,) they have a significant advantage in hand-to-hand combat because their relative rareness means that righties who are used to fighting righties can’t make sense of what’s coming at them until it’s too late.

I hope this answer has been both helpful and interesting. If not, can we blame it on the fact that I’m a life-long northpaw?
Ezra Fischer

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

What Does it Mean to be Mathematically Eliminated?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean to be “mathematically eliminated” from something?

Thanks,
Will

There’s nothing worse as a fan than having your team mathematically elminated

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Dear Will,

“Mathematically eliminated” is one of those phrases that you hear often in sports but not in too many other contexts. A team or player that is mathematically eliminated cannot win or qualify for something in any of the possible permutations of future outcomes. This can happen within a game, within a season, or within a tournament or playoffs. You’re probably hearing it a lot now because the NFL season is in its 16th of 17 weeks and teams are being mathematically eliminated left and right. Let’s explore some of the common forms of mathematical elimination.

Mathematically eliminated from qualifying for the playoffs

A team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs when no possible permutation of wins and losses in all the remaining games in a season result in them qualifying for the playoffs. This is a surprisingly high bar. For instance, with only two games remaining, the 6-8 Pittsburgh Steelers are still alive for a playoff spot according to CBS. What would have to happen for them to qualify? According to the Altoona Mirror, the Steelers need “about 10 things to happen” and the chances of them all happening are around 100 to 10. They detail all of the necessary dominoes here. Stranger things have happened, for sure, but it certainly stretches the imagination to think that all ten of the items are going to happen just the way the Steelers need them to to make the playoffs. One could say they have been plausibly eliminated but as long as there is a single path for them to make the playoffs, the team and their fans will keep hoping.

Other forms of mathematical elimination — shootout edition

Although the phrase “mathematically eliminated” is almost only ever used about the playoffs, as explained above, there are other types of mathematical elimination in sports. A shootout is one example. In many hockey and soccer leagues, if a game is tied the teams play timed overtime periods. If it is still tied after that, the game is decided by a series of one-on-one contests between a player and a goalie. This is called a shootout. The shootout is arranged like you or I would play odds-and-evens or rock-paper-scissors. In the NHL it is a best of three, in Major League Soccer and international soccer, it is a best of five. Both of these contests work in frames — first one team goes, then the other, repeat. This leaves the door open for mathematical elimination within the shootout. If a team has scored more goals than the other team has remaining shots (in hockey, a team would have to score the first two with the other team missing the first two. In the longer soccer shootout, there are more ways for this to happen,) it’s impossible for that second team to win. In this case, the game is over. The final shots cannot possibly have an effect on the outcome of the game, so they aren’t taken.

Other forms of mathematical elimination — playoff edition

The same logic found in the shootout is also used during the best out of five or seven game series found in the NHL, NBA, and MLB playoffs. Earlier this year, we answered the question, “what is a sweep?” A sweep is when a team wins the first three games of a five game playoff series or the first four in a seven game series. In either case, this is a decisive victory because the winless team doesn’t have enough games in the series left to have any chance of winning the majority of games. They are mathematically eliminated from the playoff series. Like the shootout, the final games of the playoff series are not played because they could not possibly have any affect on the outcome.

Other forms of mathematical elimination — end of game edition

Mathematical elimination can also happen during a game in some sports. Baseball games and tennis matches are organized like little miniature playoff series or shootouts. Tennis matches are organized into best-of-three or five set contests. Each set is organized into best of thirteen game contests. In each of these layers, if a player mathematically eliminates their opponent by winning seven games or two or three sets, the theoretical remainder of the set or match is not played. Baseball is roughly the same. The contest is divided into innings that each have a first half (or top as it’s called) and second half (bottom.) The away team bats in the top of the inning and the home team in the bottom. In the ninth and final inning, if the home team is winning at the end of the top of the inning, the game is over. There is no way for the road team to score any runs in the half of the inning when they are in the field, so there is no reason for that half-inning to be played. They are mathematically eliminated from the game.

Football is perhaps the most curious sport when it comes to in-game mathematical elimination. Football isn’t organized into innings or frames or sets and matches. It’s one continuous game but a wrinkle in the rules makes it possible for a team to (more or less) be mathematically eliminated. In football, the clock either runs or doesn’t run between plays based on the outcome of the play. If there is an incomplete pass, a player runs out of bounds with the ball, or there is a penalty, the clock stops. When a player is tackled with the ball within the boundaries of the field, the clock keeps running, and only a time-out can stop it. If a team is winning AND they have the ball AND the opposing team has no time-outs left, the team with the ball can simulate being tackled on the field by snapping the ball to the quarterback and having him kneel down. This keeps the clock running for up to 40 seconds between each play and a team with the ball can do this three times consecutively. Teams use this strategy as a form of mathematical elimination. If there is less time left in the game (40 x 3 = 2:00) than a team can waste by kneeling, the game is effectively over.

This is really only an almost mathematical elimination because the team with the ball could mistakenly fumble the ball during the snap and if the other team picked it up, they could have a chance of winning. Teams on the losing side of the football game almost never even try to make this happen because it’s so unlikely that it seems lacking in common and professional courtesy to shoot for it. In my memory, the only coach to instruct his team to go for this was former Rutgers head coach, Greg Schiano. Trust my alma mater to foster this type of radical (and rude) thinking! All jokes aside, mathematical elimination is a tricky thing for sports leagues to figure out because it undermines a basic motivation for teams and players: once you have been mathematically eliminated, what is the purpose of continuing to try? This problem is most common when teams have been eliminated from the playoffs during a season and, because the order they get to draft players for next season in is set in inverse (or roughly inverse) order of their record in this season, they have an incentive to lose as many games as possible. This is called tanking and is a scourge to the sports world roughly equal to the flu in the normal world or sarcoidosis on House.

It’s a scourge for another post though, so until then, happy holidays!
Ezra Fischer

What is a Snap in Football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a snap in football? I hear it all the time in what sounds like many different contexts. Can you explain them all?

Thanks,
Ollie

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Dear Ollie,

You’re right, there are a lot of different uses of the word snap in football. There’s a snap count, there’s a person on a football team called the “long snapper,” and a snap can refer to the act of snapping or the moment of the snap. In this post, we’ll go through them all and connect them to other elements of football. Finally, we’ll ask why it’s called a snap and what it tells us about football.

The Act of Snapping a Football

When a football play begins, the ball is motionless on the ground, positioned on an imaginary line which stretches from side-line to side-line, called the line of scrimmage. One player grabs the ball with his hand and moves it backwards between his legs to another player. That action is called the snap. The player who performs the act of snapping is the center. There are two main kinds of snaps, referred to by the position of the quarterback. A quarterback is either “under center” to receive the snap or “in the shotgun.” With a quarterback under center (right behind the center, so close that he rests one hand on the under-side of the center’s butt,) the center quickly hands him the ball through his legs. When a quarterback is in the shotgun formation, he is a between five and seven yards behind the quarterback. Snapping the football in this formation is a more challenging task — it requires spinning the football while throwing it backwards between his legs so that it flies in a straight, easy to catch spiral. You may also hear that there was a “direct snap.” This is a totally normal snap — either under center or shotgun but instead of a quarterback receiving the ball, it is a running back.

The act of snapping the football connects football to its past when, like rugby, throwing the ball forwards was not allowed. Although the majority of plays in most football games today involve throwing the ball forward, all of them begin with a backwards pass in the form of a snap. In case you’d like to learn how to snap a football, wikihow.com has a great tutorial.

Snap Count

The phrase “snap count” is pretty common but has two only tangentially related meanings. One meaning refers to any vocal cue that a quarterback gives to his own team to synchronize their movement with the snapping of the football. Because only one player on the offensive side is allowed to move at a time before the snap, a good snap count provides the offense with an advantage over the defense; it knows when to start moving and can get a head-start on the defensive players. Once in a while defensive players will mimic a quarterback’s snap count in an effort to get the offense to move at the wrong time. This is illegal and a defensive team may be penalized for “simulating the snap count.” Another meaning of the phrase snap count is the number of plays a player is a part of, usually in a single game. In this use, the snap is representative of a play and the count is just the act of counting the number of plays or snaps someone is a part of.

The Snap as a Moment

As described in the first paragraph, before a play begins, the football is motionless on the ground. The act of snapping the football begins the play and, confusingly, the moment that this happens is also called a snap. This is important because the exact moment a play begins is vital for a couple of important rules in football. Aside from the one offensive player who is allowed to move before the snap (said to be “in motion”) if any other player moves before the snap, they are offside. If a defensive player moves across the line of scrimmage and is not able to get back to his side of that line before the snap, he has encroached and will be called for a penalty. Dear Sports Fan covered both of these rules in our post on offside rules in various sports. Football, similar to basketball, has a play clock that counts down and requires a team to make an offensive play. In the NFL, the play clock is forty seconds long. If the clock runs out before the snap, there is a delay of game penalty.

The Snapping Specialist

While most snapping is done by someone playing the center position, there are some snaps that are so critical and so technically difficult that teams pay someone to perform them, even if that is almost all they can do on a football field. This player is the long snapper. He snaps the ball for punts and field goal attempts. For a punt, the long snapper needs to spiral the ball backwards to someone standing closer to 15 yards behind him than the five yards of a shotgun snap. The mechanics of a field goal snap are even more exacting because the snapper has to snap the ball in such a way that it spins exactly the right number of turns. This way the field goal holder has an easy job of placing the ball with the laces facing away from the kicker’s foot so that the kick flies true. The New York Times produced an amazing multi-media feature on this a few weeks ago.

Why is it called a snap? And what can we learn about football from it?

There doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus about why the snap is called this snap. This delights me because making up derivations runs deep in my family. Google defines snap as “a sudden, sharp cracking sound or movement” and as a secondary meaning, “in football: a quick backward movement of the ball from the ground that begins a play.” Football can be inaccessible or less pleasing to fans of other sports because it lacks the fluid motion and continuous play present in sports like soccer, basketball, and hockey. Instead of fluid play, football is characterized by quick bursts of action beginning from a standstill and creating havoc in a matter of seconds before coming to a halt. It’s no wonder then that we call the act that initiates these sudden, sharp bursts of movement a “snap.”

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why do Sports Teams Report Injuries?

Dear Sports Fan,

One thing I’ve never understood about sports fans is why they seemed to be obsessed with injuries? Why do sports teams even report injuries?

Thanks,
Rhea

This player is likely to get a Probable (neck) designation on next week’s injury report.

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Dear Rhea,

Like many artifacts of sports culture, the reporting of injuries has historically been driven by gambling. Sports and gambling have a long and curious symbiotic relationship and even omnipresent elements of sports like the injury report often have gambling origins. An injury can affect a player’s performance and therefore the outcome of the game. Information about which players are injured therefore is helpful if you are predicting what will happen in a game, which is essentially what sports gambling is. In the major American professional sports leagues, teams are required to give information about their players’ injuries to the press. I always believed that this was evidence of the hypocrisy of the leagues. How can you claim to be anti-gambling when you require teams to publish information that is only really useful to sports gamblers? In fact, this is only partially true. The requirement of reporting injuries began in the late 1940s as a response to a plot to fix the 1946 championship game. Then NFL commissioner, Bert Bell, figured that publishing who might not play in a game or who was likely to play at less than 100% effectiveness was a good way to prevent gamblers or bookies from profiting from inside information.

Fantasy football is a form of sports gambling and is similarly, if not more, obsessed with injury reports. Fantasy owners pay very close attention to the injuries of their players. Because of how fantasy football works, owners get a chance each week to choose from among the players on their team those who they think are going to perform the best. Injuries to their players or to players who affect their players, like the quarterback who throws the ball to one of their wide-receivers or the linebacker whose job it is to hit their running back go a long way to helping decide whose stats to have count each weekend.

Injury reports have their own peculiar vocabulary. Here’s some of the common words and phrases and what they mean:

Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.
Upper/Lower Body Injury — Searching for a way to avoid exposing injured players from being targeted by their opponents, hockey teams are now only required to release whether an injury is an “upper body” or a “lower body” injury. This is silly in an era when players can watch replays of plays that happened five seconds ago or five months ago equally easily on team ipads.
(body part) — In sports that do give a little more specific information about where the injury is located than hockey does, you’ll often see this: Player Name, Probable (knee). This has led to the convention of announcers saying that a player is “out with a knee.” Sports columnist Bill Simmons has been poking fun at this convention for years.
(neck) — In the past few years there has been an increasing understanding of the seriousness of head injuries, particularly concussions. As a result, I believe that teams have started defaulting to the neck when reporting any head injury when they are not absolutely sure it is a concussion. Calling an injury a neck injury instead of a concussion allows the team more freedom in how and when the player returns to play. Crooked and dangerous but true.

One last thing to think about when it comes to injury reports is that they are evidence of how cooperative sports truly are. Sports has the reputation of being a refuge for the extremely competitive but the sharing of injury reports belies that to some extent. If the Jets were really trying to put the Dolphins out of business, they wouldn’t tell them about their injuries on their offensive line before playing them. Sports teams are at least as much collaborating with one another to make a communal profit within agreed-upon guidelines of behavior as they are competing to win at all costs.

Hope this has answered your question,
Ezra Fischer