Learning to watch football: the run/pass game

Football is one of the more opaque sports to the uninitiated. It’s easy for someone who is curious about football but not an insider to look at a game of football on television and see nothing more complex than two lines of people smashing into each other. Once beginning viewers understand some of the basics of how football works: how the snap works, what down and distance are, and what roles the quarterback, running backs, and wide receivers play, they tend to focus on those positions when watching football. Honestly, watching the quarterback, running back, and wide-receivers is how lots of people watch football, even the most passionate football fans. There’s nothing wrong with that. Following the ball on its path from center to quarterback to running back or wide receiver is a great way to watch football. As someone who is drawn to supporting roles, however, it excludes the people I’m most drawn to on the football field and it never breaks down that initial interpretation of football as a brutish sport with lines of enormous men smashing into each other. The run/pass game is a trick that I use to unravel exactly what’s going on between those lines of giants. It focuses my eye on the supporting cast of football and helps me gain a greater appreciation for the sport. Here’s how it works.

The start of each play in football is like the opening of a play or the start of a chess game. The players are in place but the drama has not yet begun. Given the speed and violence of every football play, perhaps the better metaphor is a pair of old fashioned duelists waiting for their second to drop a handkerchief signaling them to start fighting. In any event, the two teams line up opposite each other, separated by an imaginary “line of scrimmage.” Here’s what it looks like:

Football Diagram - Start of Play

You’ll notice that the offense far outnumbers the defense in our diagram. That’s not the case in real life, of course, but I’ve simplified things for our purposes. The game we’re going to play involves predicting as quickly as we can whether the offense is going to try to pass the ball or run it. On a pass play, the quarterback takes the football, drops a few yards back, and then throws it to a wide receiver who has been running deviously around the field trying to get away from defenders. On a run play, the quarterback gives the ball to a running back who takes off down the field, seeing how far he can get before he is tackled. That’s what you see if you watch the ball and the players who have the ball. To excel at this game of prediction, it’s way better to watch the offensive line.

The offensive line are a group of five super-sized humans. There’s the center, who starts each play with the ball. There are two guards, one to either side of the center and two tackles who line up on either side of the guards. This unit works together to protect the quarterback on pass plays and to create prearranged lanes for the running back to run through on running plays. With a few exceptions, when the offense is going to pass, the offensive line moves backwards, giving ground in order to buy the quarterback time to throw before being tackled by defenders. This is what that looks like:

Football Diagram - Pass Play

Notice how the offensive line moves backwards, creating a little protective area called the pocket for the quarterback to stand in while the wide receiver runs down the field and gets in position to catch the ball.

On a running play this dynamic is reversed. The offensive line fires out of their stances to start the play. They don’t have to worry about protecting the quarterback because as soon as he gets the ball, he’s just going to hand it to the running back. Nope, during a running play, the offensive line moves forward, trying to knock the defensive line backwards or trying to push them left, right, or divide them so the running back can run through and get into the second or third level of defenders, the linebackers and defensive backs. Here’s what this looks like on a run play:

Football Diagram - Run Play

The run/pass game is a great way to understand the actions and importance of the offensive line. Play it against some football fans in your life and see if you can beat them at it. Just watch the offensive line and the moment you see them step backwards, say “pass!” If you see them lean forward, say “run!” As you play, you’ll begin to notice and appreciate what the offensive line does, particularly during run plays. The beauty of a run play is not always the acrobatic power of the running back, it’s more often found in the tightly coordinated movements of the offensive linemen.

There are two key exceptions to the back = pass, forward = run rule. Both exceptions play off the expectation that those rules will hold true. A draw is a run that begins with the offensive linemen moving backwards as if for a pass. They draw the defensive linemen towards them so that when the quarterback gives the ball to the running back, he can run through the space vacated by the defensive linemen. A play-action pass is the opposite of a draw. Instead of being a running play masquerading as a passing play, the play-action pass sees the offensive linemen pretend that it’s a running play while the quarterback continues the deception by pretending to hand the ball to the running back. Instead of handing it off, the quarterback holds on to the ball and throws it to a teammate who hopefully has been left open by a completely faked out defense. The draw play and play-action pass are tricky exceptions that prove the rule.

Play the run/pass game at home with your family or out with your friends. Let me know how it goes!

Stadium prints for sports fans

We’re always on the look-out for tasteful ways to represent beloved sports teams in home decor. Items that fit this bill are worth their weight in, well, not gold at current prices, but aluminum at least. They give the sports fan in the household a way to express pride and love while simultaneously giving their family, partner, or housemates a chance to express their own tasteful sense of home propriety. The large selection of colorful stadium prints from City Prints fits the bill on every detail.

City Prints is an online fine-art print shop founded and operated by Tony and Katie Rodono that specializes in prints of places. The idea for City Prints came to them years after Tony started a traffic counting company. That business didn’t take off but Tony took away an enjoyment of drawing intersections. When the couple had a child, Tony writes on the about page of the City Prints website, he “realized the importance of place” and the idea of making fine-art prints out of locations was born. City Prints sells a wide variety of map-art. I’ve personally purchased one of the few non-map prints, an Apple II computer schematic, so I can vouch for the quality of their work. Most of what they produce are maps of areas as large as the earth and as small as a sports stadium or race track.

All of the prints are available as 12 x 12 prints alone, matted, or matted and framed. You can also get them in 30 x 30 Gallery-Wrapped canvases. Here are some of my favorites with links to the specific product and category so that you can hunt for the print that’s most meaningful to you or the sports fan in your life.

Race Tracks

Churchill Downs — the legendary site of the Kentucky Derby. Put this print up in your living room and mix some refreshing mint juleps.

City Prints Churchill Downs

Talladega Track — for the NASCAR/Will Farrell fan in you(r life.)

City Prints Talladega

College Football

Michigan Stadium — called the Big House, this is one of the original and ultimate bowls in sports.

City Prints Michigan

College Basketball

Cameron Indoor Stadium — the home of the Duke Blue Devils, where Coach Krzyzewski roams the floor and the students stand the entire game.

City Prints Duke

Dean E. Smith Center — home of Duke’s main Rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels. This is a fair and balanced blog.

City Prints NC

NFL Football

Lambeau Field — home to the only collectively owned major professional sports franchise, the Green Bay Packers, Lambeau field is a national treasure.

City Prints Lambeau

NBA Basketball

Madison Square Garden — called basketball’s Mecca, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan is home to the New York Knicks but has also been an important location for the history of college basketball. It hosted the Big East championships for decades.

City Prints MSG

NHL Hockey

Bell Centre — What the New York Yankees are to baseball, the Montreal Canadiens are to hockey. The legendary franchise has won almost exactly one quarter of all the Stanley Cups in history.

City Prints Montreal

Soccer

White Hart Lane — City Prints has a wide selection of international and domestic soccer stadiums but if you’re looking for a typically British design, the map of Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium is unmatched.

City Prints Tottenham

The lesson of Randy Moss

Rand University, the latest in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series of documentary films about sports, premiered last night. The film was directed by Marquis Daisy and produced by Bomani Jones. The film tells the story of Randy Moss, one of the greatest wide receivers in football history, specifically his growth from a middle schooler in Rand, West Virginia, to being drafted in the first round of the NFL draft by the Minnesota Vikings. Rand University is simultaneously a  familiar, almost cliched story, and one that doesn’t get told nearly enough.

Randy Moss grew up in poor, predominantly black, rural West Virginia, in a town called Rand. He was a multi sport athlete, excelling at everything he tried his hand at: baseball, basketball, track, and football. Moss was raised in a church going family by a strong mother. His father was not in his life. Rand was a small enough community that it sent its children to nearby DuPont High School which was 98% white. Even (or maybe especially) as a star athlete at the school, Moss felt the racial tension acutely. He says in the film that he got into one racial fight every year at high school. In his senior year, Moss supported a fellow black student in a fight against a white classmate who had written “All niggers must die” on his desk. The white student was beaten badly and suffered, among other injuries, a lacerated spleen. The law was brought in and Moss plead guilty to assault charges and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. This conviction caused Notre Dame, the college Moss had his heart set on playing football for, to drop him from their team. Notre Dame helped Moss arrange attending Florida State a similarly strong college football team but with a well-known propensity for working with players with convictions in their past. One of the conditions of the arrangement was that Moss would redshirt (practice but not play) during his freshman year. Moss went along with this program, even though that can be a difficult thing for a young player to accept.

His freshman year went by smoothly but back in West Virginia, during the summer afterwards, Moss ran into more trouble. He was caught smoking weed which broke his probation and he was thrown back in jail. While there, he learned that Florida State wouldn’t take him back for his sophomore year. In interviews with Moss from prison and in footage from his subsequent trial, Moss sounds coached but sincere. It seems strange now, but in the context of mid-nineties fear/hatred towards black athletes following the OJ Simpson trial and a generally much more moralistic atmosphere (see congressional hearings about Eminem’s lyrics, the Clinton sex scandal, etc.) Moss came very close to losing his athletic future. As with almost everything, there was a more local context that may have effected his situation too. Moss claims that he was treated harshly by the legal system because he ignored the University of West Virginia while choosing a college. In retrospect, this seems totally reasonable given what we know from the Jameis Winston story at Florida State about the insidious influence of big-time college football programs in law enforcement. Moss had also fathered a child with a white woman while in high-school; not a popular move in mid-90s West Virginia (or almost ever in U.S. history.)

Moss found his one-last-shot at nearby Marshall University, a second tier college football program. This university provided Moss an opportunity that others couldn’t — because it was slated to play one more season in 1-AA before moving up to the top level 1-A college football league, Moss would not need to sit out a year because of his transfer. He could do what he wanted to do, what he lived to do: play football. And play he did. Moss played astoundingly well. He basically could not be stopped. Marshall’s coach Bob Pruitt said of Moss, “We had a simple package. If there was one guy out there guarding him, we threw him the ball.” Moss set all sorts of records that year and then, against tougher competition the following year, he did it again. He won the Fred Biletnikoff award given to the best wide receiver in the country and was a finalist for the Heisman trophy.

The message of the film is just how fragile the path to success is for even the most talented poor kids. The story of Moss’ friend and teammate, Sam Singleton Jr., was a sad reminder that just a smidge less talent and a few more misteps can easily tip the scales and consign someone to the tragic almost-inevitability of poverty. The term Rand University, which Moss sometimes claimed in NFL introductions when not repping Marshall University, was a long-lived sad, joking truism of their home town. A resident of Rand in the film explains that Rand University meant hanging out next to the 7-11 instead of going to play college or professional sports. It meant being in jail or arrested for drugs. It meant that something would go wrong and you wouldn’t be able to take the next step. No single image could make this point more poignant than the image of Randy Moss at his assault trial wearing ankle shackles. To really understand this image, you need to know how sports fans think about Moss. Grantland’s Andrew Sharp wrote an article about Moss to accompany the film. Here’s how he described Moss:

There may have been better players than Moss, but nobody ever made football look easier. He could run through defenses designed to break him in half, and run 10 yards past coverage designed to keep him from going over the top. He was faster than anyone in the league, but he never looked like he was going full speed. He could catch anything, outjump anyone, and when he was pissed, he played better.

The image of Randy Moss, who could not be stopped on a football field, literally shackled at the ankles is a bitter reminder of how tenuous the path out of poverty can be.

Rand University tells its story through one athlete’s. Michael Lewis’ book, The Blind Side, tells a similar story about Michael Oher, an offensive lineman. Lewis, an economist, more explicitly uses Oher’s tale to make a cultural point. He asks rhetorically how much raw talent could be harnessed if we, as a society, could make the path out of poverty more secure for young, poor, often black, kids? That’s exactly what U.S. Soccer is trying to do. In a wonderful article that coincidentally came out on the same day as Rand University, Stanley Kay examines the U.S. Soccer’s outreach program for Sports Illustrated. Youth soccer, as exists today, often overlooks poorer, often non-white children, because of the cost of playing on teams and maintaining soccer fields. These under-served populations end up playing more informal or street soccer. One of the interesting messages of Kay’s article is that not just are we missing out on a percentage of athletes who could become international soccer stars, because we don’t find ways to develop kids who grew up playing in street soccer games, we miss out on the creativity and ball-handling skills that informal soccer develops. Doug Andreassen, an important figure in the article, is the Chairman of U.S. Soccer’s Diversity Task Force tells Kay about:

The chemistry between Dempsey and fellow Seattle Sounders forward Obafemi Martins, who grew up playing street soccer in Nigeria. “You see this magic they have between them as forwards. It’s no-look passes, back-heel passes, stopping and starting the ball. You just don’t see that in players who come from structured backgrounds,” he says with admiration. “You can’t teach that.”

It’s inspiring to read about Andreassen and other people working to systematically harness the power of our entire country for their sport while at the same time working to make our country a better place, at least for athletic children of all colors and backgrounds. If they need any more inspiration, they should watch Rand University. Sure, Randy Moss grew up playing organized sports from a young age, but he credited some of his play to the informal game, razzle-dazzle, that he spent hours and hours playing as a kid in Rand, West Virginia. Moss had the talent to escape, he had the discipline and competitive drive to escape, but to make things easier for the next Randy Mosses, we need people like Marquis Daisy, Bomani JonesMichael Lewis, and Stanley Kay telling their stories and people like Doug Andreassen working full-time to make our society a better place.

Rand University, the 30 for 30 documentary will re-air Saturday, November 15, at 7:30 a.m. ET on ESPN2 and Saturday, November 22, at 3 a.m. ET on ESPNU. Set your DVRs.

Why does an offensive lineman slap the center's butt in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why does an offensive lineman slap the center’s butt in football? I see this all the time now when watching football and I never used to. What changed?

Thanks,
Melvin


Dear Melvin,

The offensive lineman next to the center, called a guard, slaps the center’s butt as part of the elaborate set of signals a team uses to coordinate the snap that starts a football play. The snap has been an evolving practice with league-wide trends and team specific wrinkles. The guard’s slapping of the center’s butt is the latest in a long line of innovations aimed at giving the offense a slight advantage against the defense. Here’s how it works and some of the history behind it.

In the old days, offenses in competitive football used basically the same system we all used when playing football in our backyards as kids. When the quarterback says “hike” the center snaps the ball to him and the rest of the offensive team begins to block or run routes as programmed by the play. As you might expect though, defenses caught on to the meaning of the word “hike” and charged at the quarterback as soon as he said it. So, teams went to great lengths to disguise their signal to snap the ball. They might use different words or alter the number of times the quarterback could say a word before it told the offense the play was starting. Soon though, the popularity of college and professional football, new stadium designs that seemed amplify noise, and the increasingly intentional involvement of screaming fans meant that offenses on the road simply couldn’t hear the quarterback. Offenses had to adjust to the noise and do so while maintaining the advantage of being in sole possession of knowing exactly when the ball is going to get snapped.

There is a simply wonderful article about how offenses adjusted and evolved to this challenge called, The Silent Treatment, by Mark Bowden in Sports Illustrated. I had absolutely no idea, but there was a time when the NFL actually had a rule which said that if the crowd was too noisy, the quarterback did not have to snap the ball. The ref would ask the crowd to quiet down and if they did not, the home team would be penalized. This seems totally crazy nowadays when we expect the home crowd’s noise to be an advantage for the home team by making it impossible for the visiting offense to hear each other. The rule was struck from the books in the early 1980s and from that moment, the defense had a big advantage at home. Offensive coaches had to adjust and finally, one of them did. Bowden tells the story of that adjustment through its integral figure, the former NFL guard and long-time offensive line coach, Howard Mudd.  Mudd was thinking about the problem of coordinating offenses without being able to hear when he talked to a fellow coach who had spent some time coaching football at a school for the deaf. If they could do it, he figured NFL athletes could do it to. He implemented a system called the “silent count.” In this system, the quarterback would give some visual signal to the center (who is looking backwards through his legs.) That would cue the center to raise his head or wiggle it side to side. This visual cue would tell the rest of the offensive line to begin counting: one one thousand, two one thousand, three… and at a pre-set number of thousands or Mississippis, the center would snap the ball to the quarterback while the rest of the team simultaneously began their movements. Mudd’s team, the Indianapolis Colts who had a young Peyton Manning and a great left tackle, Tarik Glenn, adopted Mudd’s silent count so effectively that it became a weapon for them:

The Colts got good at it. Glenn got very good at it. He learned to coordinate the count with the swivel of his head. It was like a dance move. “It made a huge difference,” he says. “It gave me time to face the task at hand. It’s all about timing, and pretty quick I could just feel it.” In fact Glenn started getting off the snap so fast that refs flagged him, claiming he had jumped too early. Mudd defended him. “He would send a man to the league office and have them review it,” says Glenn. “After a while they started to see that I wasn’t offside. Coach Howard didn’t just come up with the silent count, he sold it, to the team and then to the league.”

Like any good innovation, the silent count was soon adopted and altered by teams around the league. According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Giants tackle Luke Pettigout, “used to like to hold onto Mr. Seubert’s [the guard between him and the center] pinky. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the man he had to defend. When Mr. Seubert saw the ball snapped, he’d free his hand and Mr. Pettigout could go.” The New York Jets, according to NJ.com, are one of the teams who use the innovation you mentioned in your question — the guard hitting the center’s butt: “The center has such an important pre-snap job – identifying the linemen’s attack point for blocking on running plays – that some offensive coordinators don’t want the center to take his eyes off the defensive front. So those coordinators will have one guard look back through his legs for the quarterback’s leg lift. When the guard sees it, he will tap the center, who then begins his head nodding.” So that’s the answer to your question. When the guard hits the center’s butt, he’s relaying a signal from the quarterback to the center to ask him to begin a silent count that will lead to the ball being snapped.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

Week 10 NFL One Liners

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

Week 10

Sunday, November 9, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Kansas City Chiefs 17, at Buffalo Bills 13

After starting the season with two losses, the Chiefs have won six of their last seven games and are hurtling towards a playoff spot. The Bills are the exact opposite. They started the year with two wins and are now sinking towards missing the playoffs for the 15th straight season.
Line: Two teams headed in opposite directions pass each other in week 10. If they are both traveling at the speed of light, how far will they…

Tennessee Titans 7, at Baltimore Ravens 21

The Titans scored seven points in the first quarter and then not again for the rest of the game. That had to be frustrating for Titans fans. Frustrating for Ravens fans? They’re stuck in a division with three other really good teams.
Line: Are they the Tennessee Titans or the Titanics? ’cause their season is sinking fast.

Dallas Cowboys 31, vs. Jacksonville Jaguars 17 (In London)

Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo came back from missing one game with two broken bones in his back and led the team to a relatively easy win over the Jaguars. These London games might be fun to go to, but for some reason they’re almost always bad examples of what an NFL game should be like.
Line: Why do we keep sending the worst matchups over to London?

Miami Dolphins 16, at Detroit Lions 20

This game was one of the weekend’s best matchups. The Lions and Dolphins both seem to be on the upswing this season and they played a great game. Vegas’ common logic says that home-field advantage is worth three points, so this game suggests that the Lions are better than the Dolphins by a hair.
Line: I really enjoy both these teams.

San Francisco 49ers 27, at New Orleans Saints 24

The 49ers needed to win this game more than the Saints because, although they were both 4-4 coming into the game, the Saints division is much weaker than the 49ers. First it looked like the 49ers were going to win comfortably, then it looked like the Saints were going to beat them, then there was OVERTIME, and finally the 49ers won.
Line: Just like the Dolphins, Lions game, this one lived up to expectations.

Pittsburgh Steelers 13, at New York Jets 20

A classic “any given Sunday” game to use as evidence that even seemingly lopsided matchups in the NFL can have unexpected outcomes. After throwing 12 touchdowns in two weeks, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger couldn’t seem to get anything going against the canny Jets defense.
Line: Was this enough to save (Jets coach) Rex Ryan’s job?

Atlanta Falcons 27, at Tampa Bay Buccaneers 17

This game could be used as exhibit A for another NFL lesson. Even a game between two bad teams with almost no chance of making the playoffs is played in a spirited fashion. Why? Because every player on both teams is playing for their job each week.
Line: This game was more exciting to watch than you would think from the score and the, uh, teams involved.

SUNDAY, November 9, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Denver Broncos 41, at Oakland Raiders 17

This was a good game for almost a quarter and a half of football. Then the Broncos woke up and remembered they were the Broncos and the Raiders remembered they were the Raiders and fell asleep.
Line: Sheeesh, the Broncos are good.

New York Giants 17, at Seattle Seahawks 38

The Giants were actually winning this game at halftime but the Seahawks scored 24 straight points in the second half and the Giants scored none. Seahawks running back, Marshawn Lynch, scored four touchdowns.
Line: BEAST MODE [Lynch’s nickname/catch phrase]

St. Louis Rams 14, at Arizona Cardinals 31

The Cardinals won this game to move to eight wins and one loss on the season, but the question of the day will be, “at what cost?” Their starting quarterback, Carson Palmer, went down with what looked like a bad knee injury in the fourth quarter.
Line: Arghh. The Cardinals were such a fun story. I hope Palmer is not too badly hurt.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears 14, at Green Bay Packers 55

This game was as lopsided as any game I’ve ever seen. The Packers came out and were simply better than the Bears in every facet of the game. It’s one of the few games where I wouldn’t have been surprised if the owner had fired the coach at halftime.
Line: If you were watching that game after the first half, you must have either had money riding on the outcome, or you just love rubbernecking.

NFL Week 10 Good Cop, Bad Cop Precaps

The NFL season has started but how do you know which games to watch and which to skip? Ask our favorite police duo with their good cop, bad cop precaps of all the Week 10 matchups in the National Football League this weekend. To see which games will be televised in your area, check out 506sports.com’s essential NFL maps. If you’re worried about watching too much football or if you’re negotiating for a little break during the weekend, read our weekly feature, Do Not Watch This Game.

Week 10

Sunday, November 9, at 1:00 p.m. ET

Kansas City Chiefs at Buffalo Bills

Good cop: This game is for the real football fans out there! The teams may not be glamorous but they’re both 5-3 and playing great football! I can’t wait to see it!

Bad cop: Not glamorous is an understatement for teams featuring Alex Smith and Kyle Orton as starting quarterbacks. Even the biggest football fans in the world wouldn’t know those guys if they bumped into them in the super market. Unless Orton had his famous neck beard. Neck beard.

Tennessee Titans at Baltimore Ravens

Good cop: The Baltimore Ravens are the best last place team in football! A win this weekend is going to start their run to the playoffs!

Bad cop: The Tennessee Titans are the WORST third place team in the NFL by far. Can you say blowout? 

Dallas Cowboys vs. Jacksonville Jaguars (In London)

Good cop: Will Cowboys Quarterback Tony Romo play with two broken bones in his back?!? What a tough guy! That’s a game I want to watch!

Bad cop: The Jaguars always play with at least two broken elements of their team. The Cowboys could beat them without ever even attempting a pass.

Miami Dolphins at Detroit Lions

Good cop: Without ever making headlines, these two teams are quietly among the best in the league! They have great defenses! Neither team gave up a point last weekend!

Bad cop: Sure… the Dolphins shut out the Chargers and the Lions… had a bye week. Cheap stat.

San Francisco 49ers at New Orleans Saints

Good cop: Whoooo! This is an exciting game! Both teams have underachieved this year and both teams need to win this game! At 4-4, a loss here could end the playoff chances of either team!

Bad cop: You’re overselling that a little. A loss would be disastrous for the 49ers but the Saints are actually in first place of their division at 4-4, that’s how bad their division is. The Saints can afford a loss here.

Pittsburgh Steelers at New York Jets

Good cop: Ben Roethlisberger has thrown twelve touchdowns in the last two weeks!

Bad cop: The New York Jets have eight passing touchdowns this whole year. I keep mistakenly typing their name as the Jest and I think I should stick with it.

Atlanta Falcons at Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Good cop: If 8-8 might win this division, the 1-7 Buccaneers still have life!

Bad cop: Amazingly, that’s what they’re thinking too. As evidenced by them switching back to unsuccessful veteran quarterback Josh McCown.

SUNDAY, November 9, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

Denver Broncos at Oakland Raiders

Good cop: These teams hate each other! The Raiders would love to continue the Broncos losing streak!

Bad cop: One loss creates a losing streak? The Broncos lost last weekend and now they’re mad. You think the Raiders are going to even score in this game? Bah.

New York Giants at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: This is an unexpectedly important game for the standings! With the Cardinals running out to a two game lead over the Seahawks and the Eagles and Cowboys ahead of the Giants and looking strong, these two teams need to win to stay in the divisional race!

Bad cop: I have no idea what will happen in this game. But I can’t see it being exciting. These teams induce my afternoon football nap more than any other teams in the league.

St. Louis Rams at Arizona Cardinals

Good cop: The Rams may be a losing football team but they love playing within their division! They are 2-1 against divisional opponents and they just beat the 49ers in a close game! Will they make it two in a row?!!?

Bad cop: Rams are sheep. Sheep need water. Arizona is a desert. No, the Rams won’t win.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Chicago Bears at Green Bay Packers

Good cop: Old time football! Outside! Freezing cold! The forecast says it will be 34 degrees at kickoff!

Bad cop: So it will probably be 65° and sunny. Did you see Patriots quarterback and star curmudgeon, Bill Belichick go off on the weather forecasters this week?

MONDAY, November 10, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Carolina Panthers at Philadelphia Eagles

Good cop: It’s a classic matchup of star quarterback versus offensive system! The Panthers have the quarterback, Cam Newton, but the Eagles have the system! Even with a new quarterback, Mark Sanchez, coming in, my bet is on the system!

Bad cop: You do know that the offenses don’t actually play against each other, right? There are so many other factors that go into winning a football game, something that, dare I mention it, the Panthers haven’t done since October 5.

What is identifying the Mike linebacker in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Thanks,
Jordan


 

Dear Jordan,

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Monday, October 20

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

Week 7 NFL One Liners

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

Week 7

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

Minnesota Vikings 16, at Buffalo Bills 17

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

Atlanta Falcons 7, at Baltimore Ravens 29

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

Cleveland Browns 6, at Jacksonville Jaguars 24

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

Carolina Panthers 17, at Green Bay Packers 38

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

Miami Dolphins 27,  at Chicago Bears 14

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

Cincinnati Bengals 0, at Indianapolis Colts 21

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

New Orleans Saints 23, at Detroit Lions 24

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

Seattle Seahawks 26, at St. Louis Rams 28

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

Tennessee Titans 17, at Washington Redskins 19

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

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

Kansas City Chiefs 23, at San Diego Chargers 20

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

New York Giants 21, at Dallas Cowboys 31

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

Arizona Cardinals 24, at Oakland Raiders 13

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

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

San Francisco 49ers 17, at Denver Broncos 42

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

News Clippings: October 18

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me.

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

Inside Out

By Brian Phillips for Grantland

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

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

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

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

By Eric Kester for The New York Times

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

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

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

Welsh Rugby Songs

by Daryl Leeworthy for The Allrounder

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

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

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

A Glamorous Event Injects Cash and Concerns

by Sam Borden for The New York Times

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

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

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

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

Remembering the Quake

by Richard Justice for Sports on Earth

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

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

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

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