NFL Week 7 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 7 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 7

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

Minnesota Vikings at Buffalo Bills

Good cop: This is a must win game for both teams!

Bad cop: If you’re playing a must win game in Week 7 it’s because you’re not very good. Two not very good teams = a not very good game.

Atlanta Falcons at Baltimore Ravens

Good cop: Birds vs. Birds! The Quarterbacks even played at bird-related colleges — Joe Flacco for the Delaware Blue Hens and Matt Ryan for the Boston College Eagles! Birds!

Bad cop: You’re right. Birds. Very exciting.

Cleveland Browns at Jacksonville Jaguars

Good cop: This is a “trap game” for the Browns! One week after beating the dreaded Steelers, will they trip up against the Jaguars!??!

Bad cop: No. No one trips while playing the Jaguars except the Jaguars.

Carolina Panthers at Green Bay Packers

Good cop: Last week, these teams played in two of the most exciting games I’ve seen in a long time! The Panthers tied and the Packers won in the last eight seconds!

Bad cop: Ugh. This will not be a feast for the eyes. Teal and silver vs. green and gold. Clash city.

Miami Dolphins at Chicago Bears

Good cop: It’s the Brandon Marshall revenge game! A few years ago he was run out of town by the Miami organization, fans, and media! Now he gets a chance to beat them as a wide receiver on the Bears!

Bad cop: They paid him millions of dollars and then traded him. That’s not exactly tarring and feathering in the grand scheme of things.

Cincinnati Bengals at Indianapolis Colts

Good cop: It’s the new elite of the NFL! The Bengals and the Colts are the two top ten teams without recognizable, veteran stars! I want to see this!

Bad cop: The Colts are for real but the Bengals are not. In the last two weeks, they’re defense has given up eighty points!

New Orleans Saints at Detroit Lions

Good cop: The Saints haven’t won an away game yet this year but this will be the week! The Lions are ripe for an upset and they play in a dome, just like the Saints! A dome is a dome, amiright?

Bad cop: You’re right. Football is always better played outside on grass instead of inside on a carpet though.

Seattle Seahawks at St. Louis Rams

Good cop: The Seahawks lost last week to the Cowboys! They’re gonna be out for blood this week!

Bad cop: The poor Rams. So many good teams to play, so little hope.

Tennessee Titans at Washington Redskins

Good cop: Oh boy! That’s all I can say! Oh boy!

Bad cop: Things are really bad when Good Cop is speechless. This is a bad game. Watch something else. Like paint drying or grass growing. Even grass not growing or paint getting wetter would be better.

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

Kansas City Chiefs at San Diego Chargers

Good cop: This is going to be rock-em-sock-em, full throttle, no-holds-barred, offensive football!

Bad cop: Too bad I’m going to miss it. I’ll be watching the National Mixed Metaphor Championship.

New York Giants at Dallas Cowboys

Good cop: If I could scream like James Brown, I would for this game! It’s a titanic clash of popular divisional opponents! Great teams, great players, great game!

Bad cop: The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Do not watch this game.

Arizona Cardinals at Oakland Raiders

Good cop: The Raiders almost broke through last week in their game against the Chargers! I think they have a chance!

Bad cop: Did you really just say “I think they have a chance” in defense of this game? Sure they have a chance. Just not a very good one.

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

San Francisco 49ers at Denver Broncos

Good cop: It’s the Super Bowl runners-up versus the team that’s made the NFC championship game the last three years! It’s a game with star power all over the field! Will San Francisco’s physicality beat out Denver’s precision?!!

Bad cop: Yeah… but you never know… it wouldn’t be fun to watch if the field was made of quicksand!!!

MONDAY, October 20, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

Houston Texans at Pittsburgh Steelers

Good cop: Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is 6’5″, 241 pounds, and has a habit of holding the ball longer than most quarterbacks, trusting on his size and instincts to make plays! J.J. Watt is 6’5″, 289 pounds, and loves tackling quarterbacks who hold onto the ball even a second too long!

Bad cop: That’s a recipe for an undramatic game if I’ve ever heard one. Pshhh.

Friday, October 17

And then there were two: The San Francisco Giants finished off their series with the St. Louis Cardinals in a 6-3 victory. The game was closer than it sounds from the score. The last three runs were scored on a home run by Travis Ishikawa in the ninth inning. The Giants actually had to score one run in the eight to tie the game at three runs apiece before winning it in the ninth. Although the game was close, the series was not — the Giants won four games to one. It’s been a pattern this playoffs. For all the excitement over the Royals run and the close individual games, the series scored have all been sweeps or three or four games to one. I, for one, would like to see the World Series go six or seven games.
Line: The Giants don’t lose championships on even years but the Royals don’t seem to lose at all!
What’s Next: The Giants play game one of the World Series against the Royals on Tuesday, October 21, at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
The Jets were valiant but the Patriots won: In the continuing feud between the New York Jets and the New England Patriots, last night’s game was typical. The Jets came into the game with a losing record, the Pats with a winning one. The Jets played the Pats better than one would expect given their respective records and rosters. Tom Brady played great and the Pats found a way to win. The final score was 27-25 and the Jets had a chance in the last second to win on a 58 yard field goal. That’s pretty far to kick a football, two yards farther than the Jets’ kicker had ever successfully kicked before, but we’ll never know if he was going to make it because a Patriot managed to block it at the line of scrimmage.
Line: Brady and Bellichick won’t be around forever to beat the Jets infinitely but they’ll probably outlast the Jets quarterback and coach if the Jets keep losing.
Double overtime in college football: The Utah Utes barely got by the Oregon State Beavers (how come pro teams don’t have such awesome names?) 29-23 last night. In fact, they needed double over time and 229 and three touchdowns from running back Devontae Boooker to do it. That’s a good two or three games for most running backs! This game does nothing to dispel the sneaking suspicion that the PAC 12 might be the strongest conference in the country.
Line: You gotta say, the college football overtime rules, where teams get alternating possessions starting at the 25 yard line until one scores more than the other, are really exciting!

Deciphering TV Graphics: Fox and CBS NFL Football

Sports is no fun when you don’t know what’s going on. That’s never more true than when a beginner sports fan sits down to watch football with a bunch of die-hards. One of the constant challenges in that scenario are the television graphics that overlay the football game. Every network has a different way of displaying information to the viewer. These graphics are packed with information and mostly well designed but they are never explained. Networks simply assume that viewers will be able to decipher the TV graphics for themselves. Most long-time football fans can but for casual fans, it’s just one more artifact that makes getting into the sport difficult. That’s not how it should be! I took screenshots of the Fox and CBS NFL Football TV graphics so that I could explain them in detail. Both graphics show exactly the same set of information but they arrange it in different ways. I’ll do the other two NFL stations next week and more sports later. Send me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com or leave a comment if you have a particularly problematic graphic for me to unravel.

What information is encoded in these TV graphics?

Possession

Possession is simply which team has the ball at the moment. This is one of the harder things to discern from the graphics. Fox uses a yellow bar which is easy to miss and looks a little like the timeout counter. CBS uses a small white dot next to the name of the team that has the ball.

Score

The score should be one of the easiest things to see from the graphic and indeed, it is. Fox does a better job of this by making the score by far the biggest numbers out there. CBS’s score is only marginally bigger than the other numbers on its graphic.

Timeouts remaining

Each team gets three timeouts per half. Fox and CBS both show the number of time outs remaining by using yellow bars. In our screen captures, both teams have three time outs remaining in both games.

Quarter

Pretty intuitive, this is just which quarter the game is currently in. Since quarters range from 1st to 4th and so do downs, it’s better to have the quarter close to the time remaining and far from the down and distance. I like CBS’ approach to displaying the quarter better than Fox’s.

Time left in quarter

NFL games are organized into four quarters of 15 minutes each. Like basketball and hockey, the clock counts down from 15 as opposed to soccer which counts up to 90.

Down and distance

Down and distance are football shorthand to express the situation of the game. Which of the four chances a team has to move the ball ten yards are they on and how far do they have left to travel? I wrote a whole post on this which I recommend if you, like the person who asked me this question, have always wanted to know what down and distance were but were afraid to ask.

Play time left on clock

Teams with the ball have forty seconds from the end of one play to start running another. This is an important tactical factor because teams can stretch out the time between plays if they are ahead or rush them if they are behind. A penalty is assessed for letting the play clock run out without running a play. For viewers it can also tell them when to look up from whatever else they’re doing so they don’t miss a play.

Got it, let’s see the graphics

Tuesday, October 14

Niners win, Rams lose — There were two things that stood out in last night’s football game which ended as a 31 – 17 victory for the San Francisco 49ers over the St. Louis Rams: The first was a phantom penalty call against the Rams at the end of the first half which stopped them from increasing their lead from 14-3 to 21-3. After that bad call, the 49ers scored 28 of the next 31 points in the game. The other notable thing was the Rams wearing their bright, beautiful (to my eyes) yellow and blue uniforms from the 1990s. Fun!
Line: If it hadn’t been for that phantom offensive pass interference call at the end of the second quarter, things might have turned out a little differently.
Baseball playoffs quaintly rained out — It seems like a remnant of a nicer, kinder past for sports, but the baseball playoff game last night between the Baltimore Orioles and the Kansas City Royals actually got rained out! It’s kind of cool that some things, even if they are elemental, are more important than sports and television schedules.
What’s Next: The game has been rescheduled for tonight at 8 p.m. ET and will be televised on TBS.
Topsy turvy start for some hockey teams — The Boston Bruins played a rare Monday matinee hockey game yesterday against the Colorado Avalanche and lost 2-1. This brings their record to 1-3 and means that after a win on opening night, the Bruins have lost three games in a row. This is a rare bad patch for the Bruins. It’s been 145 games since they last lost three in a row. That said, it’s probably a little bit too early to worry. Just like no one really expects the Tampa Bay Lightning or Nashville Predators to remain undefeated.
Line: It’s a long season, let’s all just take a deep breath.

What is a spike in football? Why would you fake it?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the Green Bay Packers play the Miami Dolphins yesterday and Aaron Rodgers “faked a spike.” The announcers acted like it was a big deal but I don’t really understand what happened. What is a spike in football? And why would you fake it?

Wondering,
Ana

Dear Ana,

Great question! When Aaron Rodgers faked that spike yesterday, it was exciting for a bunch of different reasons, some topical and some historic. Before I explain the specific play though, let’s get into the nature of a spike in football.

Spiking the football just means slamming the ball straight down onto the ground. A spike is a physical act. It’s often done in celebration, particularly, it seems by the New England Patriots. They’re just one team but they seem to loom large in the celebratory spiking world. Their star tight end, Rob Gronkowski is a spiking artiste of the highest order. Alan Siegel of Boston Magazine wrote in his A Brief History of the Gronkowski Spike that “Rob Gronkowski’s method of celebrating a touchdown is blissfully unsophisticated performance art.” In a recent game, quarterback Tom Brady and wide receiver Julian Edelman played hot potato until Brady finally spiked in triumph. Spiking the ball in celebration is an instinctive thing but it’s not what you’re asking about.

Spiking the ball can also have a very specific tactical use within the game of football. When a team is trailing at the end of a half or game, they’re compete not just against the other team but against the clock. Depending on what happens in each play, the clock either runs between plays or it stops. It’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of the various clock rules but here are the most common ones:

The Clock Stops
- When a team takes a time out
- When the ball goes out of bounds
- When a pass is incomplete
- When there’s a score
- When there’s a penalty
The Clock Runs
- When a runner or receiver is tackled in the field

Spiking the ball is like a special form of the incomplete pass. According to the NFL rules, “A player under center is permitted to stop the game clock legally to save time if, immediately upon receiving the snap, he begins a continuous throwing motion and throws the ball directly into the ground.” Spiking in this form is also called “clocking the ball” because you’re spiking to stop the clock.

So, when a team is running out of time late in the game and they either don’t have any time outs left or don’t want to take one, they can line up as for a regular play and then have the quarterback spike the ball. This stops the clock but it does count as a down. So, if it’s first and ten and the quarterback spikes the ball, the clock stops but the downs shift to second and ten. If you don’t know what that means, that’s fine — check out our post on understanding downs in football.

The thing with spiking the ball, is that usually it’s pretty obvious when a team is going to do it. The context of the game dictates when a team should spike and, just in case it wasn’t obvious, the quarterback is usually gesticulating wildly with spike-like arm motions to make sure that his teammates know what he’s going to do. It’s natural for the defense to pick up on what’s going on, and because they know their opponents aren’t really trying to do anything other than stop the clock by spiking, they have a tendency to relax and catch their breath for the next play. This leaves them vulnerable to a crafty quarterback who decides to take advantage of their assumptions.

If a quarterback decides to trick the defense, he can pretend to spike the ball and then run a regular play. This is what Aaron Rodgers did yesterday. The context of the game (down four points, twelve seconds remaining, first down) dictated a spike and so did the Packers’ body language. Instead of spiking it, Rodgers made a vague spiking motion and then quickly threw the ball to receiver Davante Adams who ran the ball about ten yards before being pushed out of bounds. The Packers went on to score a touchdown and win the game, partially because of this play. So why don’t more teams do this? There’s real risk in trying it. If Adams had been tackled in bounds, instead of getting out of bounds, the game would probably have ended without the Packers getting another play. It’s far safer to spike the ball and then use the remaining ten seconds to throw the ball into the end-zone where the only possibilities are a touchdown (Packers win), an incomplete pass (clock stops, they get another chance as long as there’s time remaining), and an interception (Dolphins win.) The Packers would probably have had two or three chances if they chose the safe route.

As an added bonus, the most famous fake spike ever was executed by the most famous Miami Dolphin ever, Dan Marino. His fake spike resulted in a touchdown and victory over the New York Jets in 1994. When Rodgers pulled the fake spike yesterday, the announcers pointed out that, by doing it in Miami, he was almost performing an homage to Marino. I doubt Rodgers himself was thinking about that during the game yesterday. In fact, it came out after the game that the receiver who caught it had no idea it was coming.

The fake spike is a big deal because it happens rarely but when it does, it often is pivotal to the result of the game. It’s also enjoyable because it’s one of the ultimate chutzpah moves in sports. A quarterback who fakes a spike is taking all of football’s conventions and breaking them to trick their way to a win.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Week 6 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 6

Sunday, October 12, at 1:00 p.m. ET

New England Patriots 37, at Buffalo Bills 22

Tom Brady and the Patriots are red-hot after a slow start to the season. The Bills, as is often the case, are fading to blue after a hot start of their own.
Line: One day the Bills will be better than the Patriots, one day.

Baltimore Ravens 48, at Tampa Bay Buccaneers 17

The wisdom about professional sports teams is that even the most lopsided matchup between teams should be relatively even. That doesn’t seem to be the case this year with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who flip wildly from horrible to mediocre and back.
Line: I am so glad I’m not a Tampa Bay fan. [Conversely, if you are a Tampa Bay fan, just say “ouch.”]

Pittsburgh Steelers 10, at Cleveland Browns 31

This game has traditionally been like the Patriots versus the Bills — one team always wins and one team always loses. Today, the order of things flipped for the Browns and the Steelers, much to the delight of Cleveland fans.
Line: Cleveland is for real!

Carolina Panthers 37, at Cincinnati Bengals 37

What? A tie?! Ties are really, really unusual in the NFL. They happen so rarely that sometimes even some of the players don’t think they are possible and expect that the game will just keep going.
Line: How crazy is a tie? Crazy, that’s how.

Denver Broncos 31, at New York Jets 17

The Jets played so much better than anyone reasonably thought they would. And they still lost by 14 points.
Line: The Jets could play the Broncos ten times and lose all ten.

Detroit Lions 17, at Minnesota Vikings 3

At the start of the day, one could have argued that all four teams in the Lions’ and Viking’s division had realistic shots to win it. That’s no longer the case, not because the Vikings lost, but because they looked so helpless doing it.
Line: It’s October and the Vikings’ season looks over already.

Green Bay Packers 27, at Miami Dolphins 24

Miami has a sneakily effective home field advantage. Teams from the north just don’t seem ready to play in the heat. Green Bay is better at football but Miami is better at running around in the sun and heat. Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers had to pull a little magic to get his team over the hump.
Line: The Packers were in a tight spot but Aaron Rodgers pulled it out.

Jacksonville Jaguars 14, at Tennessee Titans 16

This game was all about expectations. The Jaguars are winless and were expected to be bad. The Titans were supposed to be kinda good. So, even though the Titans won, it’s easier to see positives for the Jaguars than the Titans after this game.
Line: Sure, the Titans won, but I think the Jaguars fans are happier.

SUNDAY, October 12, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

San Diego Chargers 31, at Oakland Raiders 28

The same could be said of this game. No one expected the Raiders to play the Chargers as well as they did but they did… and then they lost.
Line: Chargers Quarterback Phillip Rivers might be the MVP of the league so far.

Chicago Bears 27, at Atlanta Falcons 13

The Bears and Falcons are mirror images in many ways. Both have good quarterbacks, great wide receivers, and a shaky defense. Yesterday the difference between the teams was that the Bears could run the ball and the Falcons couldn’t.
Line: It’s a passing league but being able to run can still help a team win.

Dallas Cowboys 30, at Seattle Seahawks 23

This matchup lived up to its hype. The lead went back and forth and back and forth until finally the Cowboys had won against the defending champion Seahawks in Seattle where they almost never lose. It was a great game.
Line: If there were any doubts left about the Cowboys, they erased them, at least for now.

Washington Redskins 20, at Arizona Cardinals 30

The Cardinals starting quarterback had missed the last four games because one of the nerves in his throwing shoulder went “dead.” It came alive late last week and he jumped right into this game to kill, for once and all, the nerves of Washington fans. No need to be nervous anymore, their season is over.
Line: I think we can safely say that the Redskins season is a loss.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

New York Giants 0, at Philadelphia Eagles 27

Hasn’t it seemed like a disproportionate number of prime-time games have been blow outs? It seems that way to me. The Eagles jumped the Giants early by scoring fast and knocking Giants Quarterback Eli Manning down even faster. They never looked back except to chuckle at their struggling rivals.
Line: That wasn’t even fun to watch.

News Clippings: Sunday, October 12

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.

This article profiles former NBA player Keyon Dooling and his life long struggle to come to terms with and recover from being abused as a child. It’s a fascinating and eventually uplifting piece that reminds us that no matter how big, strong, and fearless athletes look when they’re on stage, they are real people with their own struggles.

Keyon Dooling’s Secret

By Jordan Ritter Conn for Grantland

Now, when Dooling looks back on those years, he sees how he tried to cope with the trauma of his past. He sees himself in fourth grade, sneaking to his father’s liquor cabinet, pouring himself strong drinks and sipping them until the world was gone. He sees himself in middle school, smoking weed with friends, letting the drug ease the anxiety he’d felt since that afternoon. He sees himself at that same age, flirting with girls and then taking them home. The more girls he slept with, he thought, the more he proved that he was no longer that little boy.

Basketball helped. On the court, he could assert his dominance. With the ball in his hands, he never felt like a victim. He loved the power his talent gave him, the confidence that grew from knowing that almost every kid in his school and his neighborhood could only dream of doing what he could do on a hardwood floor. The first time he dunked — as a freshman, in a game — he felt invincible. As he grew older, the memory of that afternoon faded, but the coping strategies remained.

This past week, I reblogged a piece about how baseball fans need to decide — do they want a clean game or an exciting game. This triggered a back and forth with a baseball fan and friend of Dear Sports Fan who sent me this well-written piece as a rebuttal. I have to admit, after reading this defense of the pace of baseball, I question how much of my attitudes towards the sport are the product of hearing other people’s cliched criticism.

What Pace of Game Problem?

By Russell Carleton for Fox Sports

Allowing for the fact that some of the rule changes would spawn some workarounds, you might save 20 minutes off the average game. All it would cost you is the clock-less-ness of baseball, the idea of free substitution, and a small piece of the integrity of the game. In other words, baseball would become a different game and for not much benefit.

What I find interesting is that baseball seems to have a pace of game problem because everyone says that it does… Maybe it’s just time that baseball recognized that there are people out there who enjoy a slower game and stopped trying to be all things to all people… Baseball should simply embrace the fact that it is a slower game and market itself accordingly. It’s a feature, not a bug. There’s no pace of game problem because there’s nothing morally superior about playing rushed games that take two and a half hours instead of three, no matter what United States culture tries to say.

This essay grapples with the difficulty of producing accurate statistics comparing NFL players to… well, to who, exactly? That’s part of the problem. With all of the scary statistics flying around about the health effects of playing professional football, it’s very hard to know what is real and what isn’t. I hope someone can take the work of this charmingly skeptical article and do the hard work to produce more reasonable and accurate scientific studies. There’s undeniably something scary happening to some percent of pro football players. Let’s figure it out.

NFL Players Die Young. Or Maybe They Live Long Lives.

By Daniel Engber for Slate

For every 770 men who play the sport on a professional level, we can expect one extra death from ALS. (Extra deaths from Alzheimer’s are even more unusual.)

Any extra death is cause for grave concern, but if you look at other, much more common deadly conditions, the change in risk goes the other way. The same dataset suggests that for every 770 football retirees, we should expect 13 fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease and 14 fewer from cancer. So while it’s true that Alzheimer’s and ALS rates among NFL athletes could reasonably be described as “through the roof,” the number of players’ lives saved from heart disease and cancer exceeds the number of lives lost to those diseases by 2,150 percent.

But the methods used to find these stats raise a familiar and important question: Should football players really be compared to average men their age, of any race or body size or income level? How much does the choice of analysis affect its outcome?

So is it better to control for income or race, or should studies strive for both? And what about body size?

These may sound like simple questions, but they’re exceedingly difficult to answer. To some extent, the best approach depends on how you think about the NFL, and what point you’d like to make.

This charming story about the financial plight of the Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer teams reminds us that not all athletes have financial support on NFL levels. Sometimes it takes a desperate tweet and a kind opponent to get things started so that the Clinton foundation can finish things up!

Haiti pledges money to Trinidad and Tobago soccer

By Kurt Voigt and Anne M. Peterson for the Associated Press

Upon getting word that the Trinidad and Tobago women’s national soccer team might not even have enough money for lunch, Haiti’s team took a look at its fundraising for World Cup qualifying — an account totaling a little over $1,300 — and decided to turn it over to the competition.

NFL Week 6 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 6 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 5

Sunday, October 12, at 1:00 p.m. ET

New England Patriots at Buffalo Bills

Good cop: The Bills always play the Patriots tough! It’s their downtrodden but tough Upstate New York personality!

Bad cop: You’re saying one team always loses and you want me to watch?

Baltimore Ravens at Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Good cop: I admire the Bucs spirit! After a thwacking on national TV, they’ve come back to play two great games in a row! I expect three!

Bad cop: Games down in Florida depress me once it’s October. Football is a fall sport. It should be chilly.

Pittsburgh Steelers at Cleveland Browns

Good cop: The Browns have been good this year but beating the Steelers would make them great!

Bad cop: Cleveland Browns = Charlie Brown. Pittsburgh Steelers = Lucy pulling the ball away.

Carolina Panthers at Cincinnati Bengals

Good cop: Two cats enter, only one will leave!

Bad cop: Two exposed, under-achieving teams enter. Both will leave.

Denver Broncos at New York Jets

Good cop: It’s the offensive brilliance of Peyton Manning against the defensive scheming of Rex Ryan! A chess game extraordinaire!

Bad cop: The only scheming Rex Ryan is doing is how he can keep his job for one more week.

Detroit Lions at Minnesota Vikings

Good cop: The NFC North division is wide open! This game between the Lions and the Vikings might be the difference between playoffs and bust!

Bad cop: Hmm. The Vikings without Adrian Peterson versus the Lions without Calvin Johnson. I think I’m going to do some vacuuming instead.

Green Bay Packers at Miami Dolphins

Good cop: Packers Quarterback Aaron Rodgers has been on fire the last couple weeks! Can the aquatic Dolphins quench his flame?

Bad cop: Fire? Flame? Has my wit scorched you?

Jacksonville Jaguars at Tennessee Titans

Good cop: This might be the Jaguars best chance to win a game this season!

Bad cop: This might be the Jaguars best chance to win a game this season.

SUNDAY, October 12, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

San Diego Chargers at Oakland Raiders

Good cop: I’m always interested when two teams from the same state play each other!

Bad cop: San Diego is over 500 miles from Oakland. The Chargers are about 500 times better than the Raiders.

Chicago Bears at Atlanta Falcons

Good cop: These teams are like mirror images of each other! Good quarterbacks, great wide receivers, mediocre defenses!

Bad cop: Always the best men, never the grooms.

Dallas Cowboys at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: This is a colossal matchup of titans! Two of the best teams in the league this year! This could be an NFC Championship game preview!

Bad cop: Did you say Titans? Have I already said how bad the Titans are? I have nothing bad to say about these two teams. Let’s move on.

Washington Redskins at Arizona Cardinals

Good cop: After burying their season and waving it goodbye, Washington has a sliver of life left if they can beat the Cardinals.

Bad cop: Washington, led by their second string quarterback, visits Arizona, led by their third stringer. The only interest I have in this game is what would happen if these quarterbacks got injured.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

New York Giants at Philadelphia Eagles

Good cop: An NFC East battle! A tri-state area struggle! Both teams with winning records! Who could ask for anything more?

Bad cop: All I have to say is that this game doesn’t lend itself to themed cuisine very well.

MONDAY, October 13, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

San Francisco 49ers at St. Louis Rams

Good cop: The Rams may not be great but their defense always puts up a good fight against San Francisco!

Bad cop: Do not watch this game.

What does the green dot on a football helmet mean?

The green dot on a football helmet signifies the player whose coach can talk to him through a radio. It has a long and curious history to explore…

Dear Sports Fan,

I notice that some football helmets have little green dots on the back of them. What does the green dot on a football helmet mean?

Thanks,
Gordon

Dear Gordon,

The green dot on the back of a football helmet means that there is a small radio receiver and set of speakers inside that helmet so that the player wearing it can hear their coach talk to them at specific times during the game. This seems like a really weird thing to have in the middle of sporting event but it’s not as rare as you might think. Race car drivers and cyclists have two-way radio capabilities during races and, although without radio technology, most team-sport athletes can hear their coaches during games. National Football League stadiums are just so loud during games that without radio, coaches would not be able to talk to their players. Let’s find out a little more about the history and use of radio in the NFL.

The first coach to put a radio receiver into a helmet was legendary Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown (not related) way back in 1956. Mark Bechtel wrote a great article about this for The MMQB. A few themes that will follow us throughout the history of the helmet radio were present at its inception: radio interference and attempts to cheat and counter-cheat with the radio. At this point, there were no rules legislating the use of helmet radios, so just having them was seen as cheating. It didn’t work that well for the Browns though because their opponents quickly, “became suspicious when they realized that Brown was no longer using offensive linemen to shuttle in plays.” Soon, another opponent got wise to what was happening and, “simply listened in and asked a former Browns player to decipher what was being said, then prepared accordingly.” Not that listening to the radio was all that helpful to anyone. Radio technology being what it is, there was a little bit of cross-pollination. According to Bechtel, the Browns stopped using the helmet radio when their quarterback, “called timeout, took off the helmet and reported to Brown: “Coach, some guy just got stabbed over on Fifth Avenue.” Not so long after, the radio was officially outlawed by the commissioner of the NFL.

The radio made a comeback in 1994 when its use was legalized as part of a sweeping set of changes intended to make life easier for the offense. Kevin Craft chronicles the history of these changes in a Slate article on the topic. The rule allowed for quarterbacks and only quarterbacks to have radio receivers in their helmets so that their coaches could talk to them. The only real caveat to their use was that the receivers would shut off for the last 15 seconds of the 40 seconds each team has to run a play. As soon as the rule went into effect, the race to cheat started. ESPN’s Mike Sando wrote an article in 2007 about all the various ways a team could try to beat the system and communicate all the way through the play clock. Jamming your opponents’ ability to communicate is another good cheat that teams have been trying (or accusing other teams of trying) since the radios were legal. And although the radios are now digital, jamming complaints continue despite highly encrypted and monitored systems. Meanwhile, the interference that led the Browns to give up the system in disgust back in 1956 have been a comedic trope all the way through. The articles I read for this post were full of funny interference stories. My favorite is from Sando’s article:

“I remember one time I was playing, I forget where it was, but I could hear the concession communication,” said Tennessee’s Kerry Collins, a veteran of 148 regular-season starts. “They were asking for popcorn on the second level or something like that.

In 2008, the NFL modified the helmet radio rule to allow for one defensive player to wear a radio in their helmet as well. In Jim Corbett’s article about the rule change for USA Today, he surmised that it was part of a league effort to “counter-balance the New England Patriots’ illegally video taping of the New York Jets’ defensive hand signals in last year’s season opener.” The same fifteen second cutoff applies to the defensive radio helmet which is most often worn by a middle or inside linebacker. Basically team’s want their best, smartest defensive player who almost never leaves the field and is centrally located enough to pass messages on to the rest of his unit to wear the helmet.

Back to the green dot. The dot is actually a sticker with a small NFL logo on it that the guys over at Uni Watch absolutely hate. The NFL rules about radios make it very clear that only one player from each team is allowed on the field at a time with a radio in their helmet. On offense, this is simple — it’s the quarterback — but on defense, there may be some packages that even the best middle linebacker isn’t in. In that case, an alternate player, who registered with the refs before the game as being a radio alternate, can come in off the sidelines with a second radio helmet, designated with a green dot. Before the play starts, he has to tell an official that the primary radio player has left the field and that he’s now the radio guy. The green dot helps officials make sure that there’s only one player from each team with a radio helmet on during each play.

My question has always been — what are the coaches really saying to their players? Oh, I’m sure they say the name of a play, but that only takes a second or two. Coaches are crazed, egotistical people. Are they really able to resist the temptation of being able to talk to a player who can’t talk back? Corbett provided us just a glimpse of this one-way communicative world:

Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder would appreciate calmer and clearer communication from excitable defensive coordinator Paul Pasqualoni.

“It scares the hell out of you sometimes because Pasqualoni is not the calmest guy in the world,” Crowder says. “He gets to yelling in there every play. He’ll say, ‘Watch the run! Watch the pass! Watch it!’

“What else can I do? It’s run or pass.”

I guess in the end, the green dot on football helmets lets us know which player is most thoroughly being harassed by his coach.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Thursday, October 9

Finally a good Thursday Night NFL Football Game — Thursday Night National Football League games have been taking heat in the media lately. It’s one thing that we all sort of know they’re cruel and unusual for players who get only three days to heal their bodies between a Sunday game and having to play again Thursday. It’s another thing that they’re not fun to watch. Every Thursday game this year had been a blow-out. That’s when the complaints really heated up. The game last night between the Indianapolis Colts and the Houston Texans looked like it was going to follow suit after the Colts went up 24-0 in the first half. “Here we go again, another blow out” people were saying all over the world. The Texans came back to make it interesting though and had the ball, down only five points, with two minutes to go. After their quarterback fumbled, the game was over and the comeback attempt had come up short.
Line: At least it wasn’t another boring Thursday Night game like it looked like it was going to be.
Hockey’s back again — Last night was the second night in the National Hockey League season but the first for many teams. There were twelve games played last night and if you were a fan of one of the teams playing their first game, you were excited about the start of the season.
Line: I know it sounds wimpy but I just want my team to get through the first week with no major injuries. Seems like players are falling like leaves this year.
International soccer? — It’s not the world cup but the countries of Europe are playing each other in games to qualify for the next European Championships. Some games, like England’s 5-0 win over San Marino are mismatches in size and power, but others like Russia and Sweden playing to a 1-1 draw are exciting and even rivalries. The most interesting game was Slovakia’s 2-1 win over Spain, whose World Cup swoon now looks more like the end of an era than a glitch in the matrix.
Line: Every “golden generation” of soccer players comes to an end. Looks like Spain’s generation is at its end now.