football Archives - Page 21 of 43

16 days until the Super Bowl: Penalty Flags

One of the visually appealing elements of football is the way that fouls are signaled by the sports many referees. When a referee sees an infraction of the rules, they don’t necessarily blow whistles or make arm gestures like in other sports, instead, they reach to their belts, grab the small yellow flags they have tucked into their pants, and throw them onto the field. The gently arcing yellow flag is such a perfect visual expression of the emotion a foul call can create in players and fans. When you suspect the penalty is on the team you’re rooting for, the fluttering of the flag seems to happen in the slow motion of a horror movie. When you think the penalty is going to save your team’s bacon, the flight of the flag speaks of a desperately desired deliverance. What could be better?

Kirk Goldsberry of Grantland thinks it would be better if you knew right away which team the penalty was on. The problem, as he explains it, is that seeing a yellow flag “leaves a strange interval between the time a flag is thrown and the time that the charges are explained.” Players and fans know that a foul has been called but they don’t know which team the foul is on. Goldsberry things that “In the information age, this “flag lag” is one of the most annoying parts of the whole football experience. And it’s unnecessary.” His solution is an appealingly simple one:

Football needs two different colored penalty flags — one color for offensive infractions and a separate color for defensive ones…. [that way,] spectators, announcers, players, and coaches would all immediately recognize the guilty side, and consequently their emotions wouldn’t be held hostage by some unneeded informational embargo.

I love this idea! The NFL should absolutely do this. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time penalty flags have been tweaked. They were colored white in the NFL until 1965 and red in college football until the 1970s. Following a semi-tragic eye injury suffered by offensive lineman Orlando Brown (nicknamed Zeus, he died in 2011 at the age of 40,) NFL refs stopped weighting the flags down with BBs or ball bearings. Moving to a two color flag system would be a small but positive change that serves fans and players alike.

If you want to learn the basics of football in time for this year’s Super Bowl, sign up for our Football 101 course. It’s the easiest way to learn football, and I promise that by the time you’re through, you’ll be able to impress the football fan in your life with your newfound knowledge.

In this free course, you’ll learn all about why people like football, what down and distance are, how football scoring works, the inside scoop on fantasy football and football betting, how to decipher TV scoreboard graphics, and finally my favorite way to start having fun while watching football. At the end of the course you will get a fully unaccredited diploma of graduation, which you can hang on your wall with pride. If you enjoy the course, (and I hope you do!), I’d be thrilled to have you as a regular subscriber to our daily or weekly digests and for Football 201, coming soon!

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Football: the good and the very, very bad

It’s been a while since I cleaned out my short-term storage box of the best articles I’ve been reading about sports. Lately it’s been mostly full of articles about football, which is no surprise considering football is the most popular sport in the country and now is a particularly exciting time for both college and professional football. The articles that I was most interested in grouped roughly into two piles: those that make football seem interesting by revealing an unexpected facet of the sport and those that reveal the corrosive nature of football as a business, especially at the college level.

What Cowboys Have in Common With Ballerinas

by Kevin Clark for the Wall Street Journal

The Dallas Cowboys were eliminated from the playoffs this weekend but it certainly wasn’t from a lack of athletic ability or fitness. In fact, the most single spectacular athletic feat of the weekend was probably Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant’s leaping almost-catch near the end of their game against the Green Bay Packers. Was he able to do that without injuring himself because of the Cowboys innovative use of an old, low-tech ballet apparatus?

Stretching in the NFL is a shockingly archaic endeavor, possibly the only thing in this tightly controlled game that is left up to players. So, looking for an edge, the Dallas Cowboys changed it up this year. And they started with ballet bars.

“Yeah, it’s funny to see a 300-pound guy holding on to a ballerina bar, but in the NFL, if you are going to play for any length of time, you’ve got to take care of your body,” said linebacker Cameron Lawrence. “They don’t care that it’s a ballerina bar—if it helps them, they are on it.”

Confessions of a Fixer

by Brad Wolverton for the Chronicle of Higher Education

College sports are full of hypocrisy. The adults in the room — the coaches, universities, and governing bodies like college conferences and the NCAA — make gobs of money while the kids take all the risk and do most of the hard work. Players who work on football 40+ hours per week in one of the most highly competitive workplaces in the world are also expected to be college students, even the ones who could theoretically make a living in football already if it weren’t for an NFL rule that keeps teams from drafting them until two full years after their high-school graduation. These hypocrisies are already well known and the academic short-cuts or outright cheating that they encourage should not be a surprise to anyone. The most interesting part of this article for me is how you can read between the lines and see in this story, a larger story of how colleges themselves are in a race to the bottom to attract paying but students for online courses that might not actually serve the students all that well even if they were taken honestly. It’s a discouraging mess.

The fixer’s name is Mr. White. His side business was lucrative. One year, he says, he made more than $40,000 arranging classes. But he says money wasn’t his motive. Part of it was about the players. He believes that many would not have earned a major-college scholarship without his help.

A coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference was recruiting one of the top junior-college players in the country, but the player was short on credits. The coach called Mr. White to “get him done.” He made some students believe they were completing the classes, handing them packets of practice problems he had picked up from the math lab at his community college and making sure they logged time in study halls as if they had done the work. After they finished the packets, he would toss them in the trash. Then he would log in to BYU’s website to complete the real assignments. That’s how some coaches preferred it, he says, as it assured them there wouldn’t be any slip-ups. That also meant that the coaches didn’t have to worry about retaliation. If the players had no knowledge of the fraud, Mr. White says, they couldn’t hold it against anyone.

The Men Who Protect the Man

by Robert Mays for Grantland

In football, the “man” is frequently the quarterback. The leader of the offense, the quarterback is the most important and irreplaceable part of a football team. That’s why he’s the most tempting target for defenses to try to hit hard enough to injure or dissuade him from continuing to play as well as he would otherwise play. This dynamic makes the offensive line, the group of players charged with protecting the quarterback from opposing defenders, the most interesting people on a football team. Grantland football writer Robert Mays spent some time recently with the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers who protect quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and wrote this article about who they are as individuals and as a unit.

By keeping the same five linemen almost the entire season, the Packers have been able to build their vocabulary into an entire language. “We’ve got so many dummy calls,” Sitton says. “Half the shit we say doesn’t mean a thing. It’s pretty cool when you can evolve within the season, learning a whole new thing.” In past seasons, the line has been a band forced to replace its drummer or bassist every week. The entire offense goes from writing songs to relearning chords. This year, they can riff, take chances. They can be a 1,500-pound Radiohead.

“When you get a hodgepodge line that’s changing week to week, you just kind of have to go by the base rules on a lot of plays,” Rodgers says. “The base rules are decent, but when you can incorporate your own creativity to the plays at the offensive line positions, you can really enhance them. So the communication has been amazing.”

“If we were ’N Sync,” Lang says, “[Josh would] be Justin Timberlake. He’s Frankie Valli, and we’re the Four Seasons.” Bakhtiari goes on, thinking ahead an album or two: “If he wanted to, he could go solo, and we’d all fizzle out.”

USC Football Team Doctor Admits to Ignoring FDA and NCAA Painkiller Regulations

by Aaron Gordon for Vice Sports

Football players never cease to amaze with their fearless nature and their seeming invulnerability to pain. Surely they are among the toughest athletes in the world (along with ice hockey players and ballet dancers) but this article suggests that they are also much more commonly shot up with drugs before and even during games than we might expect. This is the story of one NFL prospect who is now suing his college team for giving him irresponsible medical advice and treatment which led not only to the demise of his professional dream but also to some very serious immediate medical risk.

In some cases, the use of Toradol was prophylactic—that is, given before games in anticipation of future pain, and not to treat current injuries—and accompanied by little or no physical examination of players… Although the Minnesota pregame shot provided temporary relief, Armstead was still in pain during halftime, at which point he said Tibone “poked and prodded my shoulder, and he stuck a needle in my shoulder.” Again, Armstead said, his pain became manageable for a brief period, but by the fourth quarter he was taken out of the game because his left arm hurt so much that he couldn’t use it at all.

After the season ended, Armstead reported to the University Park Health Center three times between February 4 and February 23 of 2011, complaining of constant chest pain… As a result of this diagnosis, two of Armstead’s visits to the Health Center resulted in additional Toradol injections. By the beginning of March, Armstead’s condition worsened. A MRI exam revealed that he had suffered an acute anterior apical myocardial infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack. Myocardial infarctions are specifically mentioned by the FDA as a possible risk of Toradol use, made likelier by repeated off-label use and combining the painkiller with other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories such as Ibuprofen and Naproxen, drugs that Tibone and USC training staff also had administered to Armstead during the season.

In his deposition, Tibone said he didn’t “agree with” FDA warnings about Toradol’s cardiovascular risks. He did not provide supporting evidence for his position, admitting that before and during the period he gave the drug to Armstead and other USC players he: (a) conducted no research or surveys on Toradol’s adverse effects; (b) read no peer-reviewed journal articles on the matter prior to Armstead’s heart attack; (c) did not investigate the drug beyond talking to NFL trainers he knew and having a brief, informal conversation with a friend who is a cardiovascular surgeon.

18 days until the Super Bowl

Union Civil War general Phillip Sheridan is credited with saying, “If I owned Texas and hell, I’d rent Texas and live in hell.” A modern day equivalent of that could be, “If I owned an NFL football team and was elected President of the United States, I’d resign immediately and go back to work on my football team.” Football is the biggest sport in America today. The most valuable of the 32 National Football League (NFL) teams has been valued at over $3 billion dollars. 46 of the 50 most watched sporting events on television in 2013 were football games and in recent years, around 75% of all American televisions have been tuned to football for the Super Bowl. It often seems like no matter where you turn, someone is talking about football.

For people who don’t understand or enjoy football, the experience of living in today’s football obsessed world can be, in turns, annoying, frustrating, confusing, or curiously compelling. As a football fan and the founder of Dear Sports Fan, my goal is to make football understandable so that you have an ease in football-laden situations that you didn’t have before. My goal isn’t to convert you into a football fan, but if you find that happening, I’ll be the first to welcome you into the fold.

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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.

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.
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.
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.

2015: College Football Championship plot and characters

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

Texas — The College Football Playoff Championship Game

College Football — January 12, 2015 — Oregon Ducks vs. Ohio State Buckeyes, 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.

For the first time ever, college football is using a playoff system to determine the best team in the country. In the past, the national championship was decided by vote (until 1998) or by the result of a single game with its two competitors decided by a mixture of computer and human ranking systems. This year, there was a selection committee made up of thirteen people including some former college coaches, players, athletic directors, as well as a journalist and Condoleezza Rice. These thirteen people chose four teams to play in two semi-final games on New Year’s Day. The winners of those games, Oregon and Ohio State, get to play tonight in the College Football Playoff Championship game. The national championship game is always a big deal but this year it seems even bigger. Having a playoff may or may not be a more fair way of deciding the best team in the country but it absolutely makes it a more compelling sporting event. One of the main problems with the way college football was done in the past was that by the time the national championship game came around, the two teams playing hadn’t played competitively for over a month. That was bad for them and bad for viewers. This way, the teams just played the week before last. They should be at the top of their game and they’re fresh in spectators’ minds.

What’s the plot?

This is Coke vs. Pepsi. Ohio State and Oregon are both big time college football programs. Ohio State has a longer history than Oregon, so they will be playing the role of Coke. Oregon sometimes gets cast as the happy-go-lucky, quirky Pacific Northwest team but actually, they’re the prototypical nouveau riche of college football. The Oregon football program is basically a branch of Nike. Nike co-founder Phil Knight is an alumnus of Oregon, where he ran on the track & field team. As a proud alum but also in what has probably been a smart business decision, he’s donated a lot of money to Oregon athletics. Wikipedia cites figures well above $100 million! The Oregon Ducks football team is famous for their fast-paced style of play and their many, many uniforms. It seems like every game, the team comes out with a brand new style of uniform and all of them make the team seem like the fastest one out there. Or wait, maybe that’s just because they are great athletes. Oregon is Pepsi — a little less traditional, a little quirky, but materially the same as Coke.

Part of the plot, or at least the fun, of this game is how it’s going to be produced on ESPN. ESPN is rallying all of its channels to provide different choices of how to consume the game. If you just feel like watching the football game, you can see it on ESPN in English or ESPN Deportes in Spanish. If you want to watch the game but get different commentary, you have three main options: ESPN2 will be doing a “Film Room” take on the game with a bunch of coaches breaking down the tactics, ESPNU will have a group of random ESPN personalities blabbing about the game as they watch it together, and ESPN News will be showing the game with a group of ESPN analysts talking. On ESPN3, the online streaming service, you can get the game synched up with either the Ohio State radio announcers or the Oregon radio announcers, or you can watch the whole thing from that cool “Spider Cam” that roams over the field, suspended by wires. My favorite option is the “Sounds of the Game” option on ESPN Classic that shows the game without any commentators at all! How cool will it be to just hear sounds from the stadium itself?

Regardless of which team wins this game, it will be a fairy tale ending for the winning team’s quarterback. If Oregon wins, their quarterback Marcus Mariota will be like the cowboy wearing the white hat, riding off into the sunset after vanquishing all his enemies. If Ohio State wins, their quarterback, Cardale Jones, will be a true Cinderella story. The third quarterback on his own team, winning this game would indelibly leave a mark on college football history. Let’s find out more about the characters.

Who are the characters?

Cardale Jones — Quarterback is by far the most important single position in football. Great quarterbacks are extremely rare and even functional ones are difficult to find. Teams that lose their starting quarterback to a long term injury very rarely have an acceptable backup who can maintain the level of play at a high enough level for the team to succeed. Teams that lose their first and second string quarterback are almost always dead in the water. We’re seeing that now in the NFL with the Arizona Cardinals whose play has declined dramatically as they descended from Carson Palmer to Drew Stanton to Ryan Lindley. Ohio State has been through the exact same series of injuries this year but each time they lose a quarterback, a new one steps in and the team doesn’t miss a beat. Cardale Jones is the third quarterback up for Ohio State and in his first game as a starter, he led the Ohio State team to a 59-0 win over Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship game. He followed that up with an unbelievable performance in the team’s semi-final win over Alabama. Jones has an almost stereotypically hard-luck back-story and I certainly hope that he beats the odds to play well in this game.

Marcus Mariota — As long as Mariota can get through this game without shredding his knees, he will be the first pick of next year’s NFL draft. He’s the prototypical modern quarterback. He’s tall (6’4″), fast (sub 4.5 seconds for the 40 yard dash, which is faster than you can imagine), and a good decision maker. If we were better than terrible at identifying good NFL quarterbacks, Mariota would be a sure thing. He’s also a senior, playing his third year for the Oregon Ducks (he sat out his freshman year.) When he won the Heisman trophy this year, he became the first Hawaiian born player to ever get that honor given to the best college football player each year. If he can win this game, he’ll leave college on top of his sport.

Mark Helfrich — Who? Right, that’s the point. Even sports fans don’t know who Mark Helfrich is. He’s the head coach of the Oregon Ducks. Reading this excellent article about him by Michael Weinreb in Grantland makes me feel like maybe there are some college football coaches out there who care about more than just winning and getting paid. Here’s a few tidbits about Helfrich. He grew up in Oregon and loved the Ducks as a kid, even when they were terrible. He played college quarterback for Southern Oregon and later as a pro in Austria during the NFL’s flirtation with developing a minor league in Europe. Instead of screaming and yelling, like many coaches do during the game, he is “thorough and utterly prepared and calm on the sideline, an intellectual at heart who happens to be a football coach.”

Who’s going to win?

Oregon is favored by six points. That may seem like a lot but the over/under (you can bet on whether the combined total of both teams’ scoring is over or under a number set by Vegas) is 74, so six points is only eight percent of the expected scoring. The odds suggest a close, high-scoring game, but I always think that college kids (and they are really kids, after all) tend to get a little more nervous than we expect in the biggest games. My guess is that it takes a little while for the offenses to settle down. That might be enough to give Ohio State a chance to keep up with Oregon and squeak by them for victory in a relatively low scoring game.

2015 NFL Divisional One Liners

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by Google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

Divisional Weekend

Saturday, January 10, at 4:35 p.m. ET, on NBC

Baltimore Ravens 31, at New England Patriots 35

This was the best played game of the weekend. Like predicted pretty much everywhere, the Ravens were completely unintimidated by playing against New England in New England, and started out the game with two quick touchdowns. New England responded nicely though, and for most of the game, the teams went back and forth scoring touchdowns against each other. In the second half, the Patriots broke out a few tricky strategies that worked well against the physical Ravens defense. On one play, quarterback Tom Brady threw the ball backwards to wide receiver Julian Edelman, who, because it had been a backwards pass, was allowed to pass the ball all the way down the field to fellow wide receiver Danny Amendola for a touchdown. The other tricky thing the Patriots did a few times was use four offensive lineman, one fewer than normal, which seemed to totally befuddle the Ravens. In the end, the Patriots scored just a little more than the Ravens and won the game 35-31.
Line: Those tricky Patriots flat out outsmarted the Ravens.

Saturday, January 10, at 8:15 p.m. ET on Fox

Carolina Panthers 17 at Seattle Seahawks 31

I fell asleep on the couch at halftime of this game and probably so did you. We didn’t miss much as the second half went exactly how everyone expected it to go. Seattle, playing at home and close to full strength, was simply a superior football team. This is no surprise. The Panthers only won seven games out of 16 this season and made it to the playoffs only because of a wrinkle in NFL rules. Seattle easily put them in their place… on the couch with us, snoozing away.
Line: I fell asleep. No great loss.

Sunday, January 11, at 1:05 p.m. ET on Fox

Dallas Cowboys 21, at Green Bay Packers 26

The most highly anticipated game of the weekend did not disappoint in the drama department. One of the stories all week leading up to the game was Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers and his partially torn calf muscle. Sure enough, he looked pretty gimpy out there. He normally is a graceful and powerful player when he runs with the ball but in this game, he was limping around. You could tell he had to rely on arm-strength to throw the ball because he couldn’t step into his throws the way he’s used to. Luckily, he’s got more arm strength than a 10 normal people (or 15 bloggers) and he was able to compensate. The biggest moment of the game was a controversial call in the fourth quarter that pretty much ended the game for the Cowboys. The Cowboys had the ball but it was fourth down (last chance!) and they had to move the ball two yards to get another set of downs. Instead of trying to get two yards, quarterback Tony Romo threw the ball way down the field, where wide receiver Dez Bryant leapt high, high in the air, snagged the ball, and reached for the end zone as he fell. It was an incredible play, and the refs on the field called it a complete pass but not a touchdown. After reviewing the tape, the refs reversed themselves and declared the Bryant had actually been unable to hold onto the ball all the way to the ground. The pass didn’t count, Green Bay got the ball, and Dallas never had another chance. This was a true reversal in fortunes from last week when many people thought that Dallas had unfairly been aided by a bad call against their opponents in that game, the Detroit Lions.
Line: Live by the refs, die by the refs.

Sunday, January 11, at 4:40 p.m. ET on CBS

Indianapolis Colts 24, at Denver Broncos 13

This was the only real let-down of the weekend. We billed this game in our preview as the “Peyton Manning bowl.” Manning, the legendary quarterback of the Denver Broncos, was the centerpiece of most people’s interest in the game but once the game actually started, we pretty quickly saw that he was playing terribly. At one point in the second half, the had only completed something like 9 of the 23 or 24 passes he had attempted. That’s not a good average and for him, it’s an unusual disaster. The game went Indianapolis’ way and you never felt like Denver could catch up. It’s a disappointment for Denver Broncos fans and it may be Peyton Manning’s last game. He’s said he was planning on playing next year but he isn’t sure.
Line: If this was Peyton Manning’s last game, it wasn’t a very good way to go out.

2015 NFL Divisional Weekend Good Gop, Bad Cop Precaps

It’s the NFL Divisional round weekend. The second of two weekends with four NFL playoff games spread across Saturday and Sunday like an octopus with each limb representing a team still alive to make the Super Bowl. Divisional weekend is, in my mind, the best weekend of the NFL season. This year, my friend Brendan and I recorded 10-15 minute preview podcasts of each of the games. I’ve linked to those in the game titles below. But, lucky for you, it’s not just Brendan and me blathering on about the NFL. Fresh of a season of previewing all the NFL games, our favorite police duo bring their good cop, bad cop act into the playoffs and preview all the matchups in the National Football League this weekend.

Divisional Weekend

Saturday, January 10, at 4:35 p.m. ET, on NBC

Baltimore Ravens at New England Patriots

Good cop: Forget about Peyton Manning, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s true nemesis is Baltimore’s Joe Flacco! Flacco has sauntered into New England three times in the last five years and won twice! If Brady is known as the golden boy, Flacco should be known as the alchemy boy! During the regular season, he looks like coal, but he transforms into gold during the playoffs! Flacco is 10-4 in the playoffs! Brady is 18-8 but only 9-8 since 2004! Plus, this game has the ultimate skill vs. will matchup between Patriots defensive back Darrelle Revis and Baltimore wide receiver Steve Smith Sr.!!

Bad cop: I’ve never even heard of the defensive backs on the Ravens. They’re not good. Bellichick and Brady have had two weeks to figure out how to exploit them. That’s more than enough.

Saturday, January 10, at 8:15 p.m. ET on Fox

Carolina Panthers at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: Cam Newton likes to dress up and act like Super Man! He’ll need his cape if the Panthers are going to have any sort of shot at beating the Seahawks! Crazier things have happened though! The only thing Seattle has looked vulnerable to all year has been a powerful running game and that’s exactly how the Panthers are going to attack them!

Bad cop: No chance. The Panthers have no chance. If this were a regular season game, we wouldn’t even bother watching it.

Sunday, January 11, at 1:05 p.m. ET on Fox

Dallas Cowboys at Green Bay Packers

Good cop: This is the big one! The Cowboys and Packers are enormously popular teams with huge fan bases! Quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Tony Romo are two of the biggest stars in the game! The setting is perfect! Lambeau Field in Green Bay is a classic stadium! Frozen tundra!

Bad cop: Tundra is “a vast, flat, treeless Arctic region of Europe, Asia, and North America in which the subsoil is permanently frozen.” A closely groomed football field with a built-in heating system is not frozen tundra. Just like the legend of the frozen tundra, reports of this game’s greatness will prove to have been exaggerated.

Sunday, January 11, at 4:40 p.m. ET on CBS

Indianapolis Colts at Denver Broncos

Good cop: It’s the Peyton Manning bowl! Peyton goes up against his old team led by his young, prodigal replacement, Andrew Luck! Plus, who can resist a nicely themed football game?! It’s a battle for horse supremacy in the NFL!

Bad cop: Mmmmm hmmm. Since October, the Colts have only won two games against teams with winning records, and those were games against the Texans (barely winning at 9-7) and last week against the Bengals who predictably turn into pumpkins in the playoffs. They’re pretty fraudulent for an 11-5 playoff team. The only thing that could keep the Broncos from winning would be if the wind or cold picked up and made Manning lose his ability to play football. If you watch this game, you’re pretty much just rooting for or against weather.

2015 NFL Divisional Preview Indianapolis at Denver

Hello sports fans and friends, family, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, cousins and aunts of sports fans.

For many NFL football fans, this coming weekend is the best weekend of sports for the year. Like last weekend, there are four playoff games over two days. What makes it even better than last weekend is that the four teams with the best records in the league rested last weekend and now all host the winner of last weekend’s games. It’s the NFL Divisional round of the playoffs! To help prepare for the games, I invited my old friend Brendan Gilfillan to join me in a series of podcasts. We’ll go through each NFL playoff game and talk through the most interesting characters, the basic plot of the game, who we want to win and who we think is going to win, and just for fun, we’ll share our favorite player names from each playoff team. I hope you enjoy it.

The NFL Wildcard Round

NFL Football — Sunday, January 11, 2015 — Indianapolis Colts at Denver Broncos, 4:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning — why this game is all about him and what’s so interesting about him.
Denver Broncos wide receiver Wes Welker — how he epitomizes the concussion crisis in the NFL and why we all feel so comfortable telling him what to do.
Indianapolis Colts running back Daniel “boom” Herron — why he might actually be the key to this game.
A plot synopsis of the game — Peyton Manning dominates the plot. It’s him against his old team. It’s him potentially playing in cold weather. It’s him playing for potentially his last chance at a Super Bowl. It’s him and the Broncos trying to recover from last year’s playoff loss. But, funny enough, in terms of the outcome of the game, the Broncos defense vs. the Colts offense might be more important.
The players on both teams whose names we most envy and enjoy
Who we want to win and who we think is going to win
And much, much more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

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

Music by Jesse Fischer.

2015 NFL Divisional Preview Dallas at Green Bay

Hello sports fans and friends, family, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, cousins and aunts of sports fans.

The NFL Wildcard Round

NFL Football — Sunday, January 11, 2015 — Dallas Cowboys at Green Bay Packers, 1:05 p.m. ET on Fox.

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers — he’s the best quarterback in the league, but he’s injured. How good can he still be?
Green Bay Packers wide receiver Jordy Nelson — why does he seem to be open deep, all the time? Could assumptions of race play into it?
Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews — and why you’ll want to “reach out and touch his hair.”
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo — has his sports narrative conclusively changed after last week’s game? Is there actually a clutch gene? What about an “oops” gene?
Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Cole Beasley — talking about open, why does it seem like he’s open on every play?
A plot synopsis of the game — This is the biggest game of the weekend from a spectacle standpoint. It’s America’s Team (the Cowboys) vs. the only collectively owned major sports franchise in the country (Green Bay.) As for the actual game, Green Bay should probably win, but if Tony Romo and the Cowboys can win, the’ll remove the playoff monkey from their backs forever. Aaron Rodgers’ injured calf is the other big plot point of the game. How bad is his leg? What will the weather be like?
The players on both teams whose names we most envy and enjoy
Who we want to win and who we think is going to win
And much, much more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

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

Music by Jesse Fischer.

2015 NFL Divisional Preview Carolina at Seattle

Hello sports fans and friends, family, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, cousins and aunts of sports fans.

The NFL Wildcard Round

NFL Football — Saturday, January 10, 2015 — Carolina Panthers at Seattle Seahawks, 8:15 p.m. ET on Fox.

Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman — why he might be the most dangerous defensive back in the league.
Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch — is he unhappy or do the Seahawks just not want to pay him next year? And what’s up with the Skittles?
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson — on his knack of not making mistakes and not getting hit.
Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton — how injured is he?
Carolina Panthers fullback Mike Tolbert — an unsung hero.
Carolina Panthers running back Jonathan Stewart — after many years of being criticized for underperforming or being injured, he’s played wonderfully for the past few weeks. Can he keep it up this week?
A plot synopsis of the game — this really should be the end for the Carolina Panthers. Seattle is the defending champions and they look great. To add injury to insult, Carolina’s best defensive lineman broke his foot in practice this week. Seattle’s home field advantage is the best in the league.
The players on both teams whose names we most envy and enjoy
Who we want to win and who we think is going to win
And much, much more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

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

Music by Jesse Fischer.