Tag: football

Cue Cards 9-29-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

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Yesterday —  Sunday, September 28

  1. Football, football, football  — It was a full day of football, replete with amazing performances, unfortunate blunders, strange coaching decisions. With Monday comes a slew of analysis and heated debate. Brush up on your lines about all the games with our NFL One Liners.
    Line: How about them Cowboys? [They won big over the Saints, that’s how.]
  2. Europe retains the Ryder Cup — The verb retain will be used by almost everyone talking about the European victory of the United States in the Ryder golf tournament. This is because of a small wrinkle in the rules that calls for the defending champions (the Europeans) to hold on to the championship if the two teams tie after three days of play. This rule didn’t come into play — Europe beat the U.S. by a comfortable 16.5 to 11.5 margin — but the verb will anyway.
    Line: That’s three Ryder Cup wins in a row for Europe.
  3. Baseball playoffs are set — The last spot in the MLB postseason was settled yesterday when the Oakland Athletics clinched by beating the Los Angeles Angels. This eliminated the Seattle Mariners from contention. The dates and times for the playoffs are set, starting with two one game playoffs on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you’re curious, here’s how the baseball playoffs work.
    Line: Can you imagine playing 161 games and being eliminated on the 162nd? Brutal.

Week Four NFL One Liners

NFL One LinersOn 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 4

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, AT 1:00 P.M. ET

Buffalo Bills 17, at Houston Texans 23

The Texans played less worse than the Bills and snuck away with the victory.
Line: The Texans won but I don’t think either team’s fans are all that happy with how their team looked.

Carolina Panthers 10, at Baltimore Ravens 38

The story will be Steve Smith’s great play against his former team but the story should be how the Panthers have now been blown out in two straight games.
Line: I’m worried about the Panthers. If they don’t turn things around fast, they could lose most of their games this year.

Green Bay Packers 38, at Chicago Bears 17

Close at half-time, the Packers shut out the Bears in the second half while scoring 17 points of their own.
Line: I guess Packers Quarterback Aaron Rodgers was right when he told the Packers fans to “relax” this week.

Detroit Lions 24, at New York Jets 17

The Lions are very quietly 3-1 this year and have winnable games against the Bills and the Vikings coming up in the next two weeks.
Line: Don’t look now, but this could be the Lions’ year.

Tennessee Titans 17, at Indianapolis Colts 41

The Colts lost their first two games by a combined 10 points. Since then, they’ve won two games by a combined 51 points. Losing close games and winning big are often the sign of a good team.
Line: Through four games, the Colts look like they can play with anyone.

Miami Dolphins 38, at Oakland Raiders 14

This was the first of three games this season to be played in England. There’s already news suggesting Raiders coach Dennis Allen may be fired following this big loss.
Line: If I were the Raiders coach, I might just stay and do a little sight-seeing in London.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers 27, at Pittsburgh Steelers 24

After a humiliating loss last week on national television, the Buccaneers won a dramatic game in Pittsburgh. The motivational and emotional swings are one thing, but having ten days between a Thursday game and a Sunday one might have been the bigger factor in this game.
Line: NFL teams are all more evenly matched than people think. An extra three days of rest and preparation are a big deal.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, AT 4:05 AND 4:25 P.M. ET

Jacksonville Jaguars 14, at San Diego Chargers 33

The Jaguars, like the Raiders, remain winless after this loss in San Diego. Being 0-4 must be a helpless feeling for the players, fans, coaches, and everyone involved and invested in the team’s performance. The Chargers camp is the exact opposite — happy and excited.
Line: Doesn’t it just feel like the Chargers’ year? Not that beating Jacksonville is a sign of anything other than professionalism.

Atlanta Falcons 28, at Minnesota Vikings 41

The Vikings’ excitement over the performance of their rookie starting quarterback Teddy Bridgewater was muted when Bridgewater was carted off the field with an injured ankle. X-rays were said to be negative but a sprain so severe that it requires a cart is sometimes worse than a clean break would be.
Line: The Vikings can’t catch a bre

Philadelphia Eagles 21, at San Francisco 49ers 26

This was a weird game. The Eagles defense and special teams played so well in the first half that their team had the lead without the offense doing anything substantive. The offense were barely even on the field. This lack of rhythm came back to haunt the Eagles because when they needed the offense to do something in the second half, they couldn’t count on them.
Line: The Eagles defense and special teams players must be pissed at their offensive players.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 8:30 P.M. ET

New Orleans Saints 17, at Dallas Cowboys 38

With the Saints’ ability to score quickly and the Cowboys penchant for blowing leads, I kept waiting for the inevitable comeback during this game. It never really materialized. After starting the year 0-2, people were describing the Saints as the best 0-2 team in the league and counseling patience. I’m not sure anymore.
Lead: Eventually, your record does define you as a team, that’s where we might be with the Saints now.

What is the red zone in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the red zone in football? The announcers during football games are always talking about one team or another being “in the red zone.” What does that mean? Do the rules change when a team is in the red zone?

Thanks,
Sammy

— — —

Dear Sammy,

The red zone is a term used to refer to the area from the twenty yard line to the goal-line of the side of the field that the football team with the ball is trying to score on. A team that is “in the red zone” is one that has the ball and is less than twenty yards from scoring. The red zone is purely a convention, it has no implication on the rules of football at all.

Wikipedia writes about the red zone, that it, “is mostly for statistical, psychological, and commercial advertising purposes.” In terms of psychology and statistics, you’ll often see statistics about how often a team scores once they are in the red zone and what percent of those scores are touchdowns versus field goals. Fans feel like once their teams are in the red zone, they should score. Missed “red zone opportunities” are seen as disappointing and as potentially pivotal to the result of a game. This psychological understanding of the red zone is true of at least some football players as well. Reporter Sam Borden asked a football player about the red zone in an article on the topic from 2012:

Tight end Martellus Bennett says the irritation a unit feels when a red zone trip goes unconsummated is unique.

Initially, Bennett hesitated when asked to describe the emotion that came with walking off the field with the ball so close to the end zone. “I’m not sure this is printable,” he said. He ultimately offered a “cleaned-up” analogy that likened it to the frustration felt by an anxious, apprehensive man who spends hours working up the courage to talk to a pretty woman and then is only steps away when another man sidles up and slips his arm around her.

Sports statisticians have looked into the red zone and, for the most part, come up empty. As you might expect, there’s nothing magical about the 20 yard line that makes scoring easier or more likely once it is crossed. The best visual proof of this comes from NFL Stats Blog and it shows likelihood to score based on first down field position. Note that even the terms of this chart belie the red zone as a simple statistical reality because, of course it’s better to have the ball at the 22 yard line on first down than the 19 yard line on third. The likelihood to score curve is relatively smooth all the way down the field. A team in the red zone has a better chance of scoring as a team out of the red zone but there’s no statistical cliff that supports making a big deal over it. (As an aside, the most interesting part of the graph to me is that a team that gets a first down on the 11-15 yard line is more likely to score than if they get it on the ten yard line. This matches my instinct about football — it’s hard to go a full ten yards to get a touchdown — it’s better to at least be able to get another first down on the 1-5 yard line than have to score in one set of downs.)

No one seems to know exactly where the term comes from. One popular theory, which has floated to the top of this question on the sports question & answer portion of Stack Exchange, is that the term has military origins and means, “generally close to the enemy (red having been a symbol for danger for a long time).” I buy that as an explanation. Football has a long history of emulating the military. The same New York Times article from above, related a story about longtime New York Giants coach, Tom Coughlin, who early in his career:

Decided a psychological change of language was in order. Instead of describing the area as the red zone, Coughlin said, he consciously switched it to the green zone when referring to his team’s offense. His reasoning was simple.

“Green is go and red is stop,” he said. “What are you trying to do in the green zone? You’re trying to score. It’s not the red zone. If you’re on offense, it’s green.”

Coughlin’s got an interesting point. If you follow the analogy closely, the team in question seems to be the defending team, not the team playing offense. I think at some point, as football itself flipped to being far more about successful offense than successful defense, we flipped how we use the term red zone. My guess is that originally, the red zone was used primarily to describe the last twenty yards a defending team had to concede before allowing a score.

The red zone is a made-up concept but it’s a compelling one. Hearing that a team is in the red zone makes most football fans look up from their nachos (if they’re lucky!) and attend to the game. Some programming genius at the NFL thought about this and realized there was an opportunity to be had. The NFL created a television network called the NFL RedZone that springs from game to game on Sundays, showing every red zone trip all day, sometimes multiple games simultaneously. It’s a smashing success and will be the subject of a Dear Sports Fan post soon.

Until then,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-26-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

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Yesterday —  Thursday, September 25

  1. A Fitting Farewell to Derek Jeter  — Derek Jeter has been the shortstop of the New York Yankees for as long as I can remember. It seems like forever. In actuality, it’s been since 1996. He’s retiring after this year and last night was his last game at home in Yankee Stadium. He’s a divisive player, partially because the Yankees are at once the most popular and the most hated team in the league, but also because he’s widely thought of as a great player but a close study of his statistics often leaves room for doubt about how good he actually is. Last night, he further cemented his legend as a winner by hitting a single in the bottom of the ninth inning which helped his teammate score the winning run. Basically, as soon as he hit that ball, the game was over and the Yankees had won. Believe it or not, there were plenty of damp eyes among Yankees fans in the stadium and at home.
    Line: You couldn’t have written a more Jeter-like ending if you had tried.
  2. The Good Night for New York Continued in Football — Meanwhile, back in the NFL, the New York Giants were beating the Washington Redskins 45 – 14. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong for Washington, and everything that could go right, went right for New York. After many seasons playing with the same offensive coach and offensive strategy, the Giants installed a new coach and a new strategy over this past off-season. They started the season looking horribly. It’s possible they are a bad team that had a good night but it’s also possible that they just needed some time to get used to new ways of playing. On Washington’s side of the ball, the enthusiasm they had for quarterback Kirk Cousins when he took over for injured Robert Griffin III might be waning slightly (okay, dramatically) after he threw four interceptions in the second half.
    Line: Maybe Kirk Cousins isn’t the savior everyone thought he was.
  3. The Ryder Cup Begins — Not strictly, yesterday’s action, this international golf tournament started very early in the morning, East Coast time. So far, the European team is slightly ahead of the team from the United States, but that’s not bad for the U.S. because we were underdogs coming into the tournament. Play continues at 8:15 a.m. ET. If you’re curious about how the Ryder Cup works, read my explanation of it here.

Why is an NFL star driving a 1991 Mazda?

If you’re watching the Thursday NFL game between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins, you might be thinking that the Washington running back, Alfred Morris, seems pretty cool. He is! Here’s an excerpt from a great story you should read about him — Why Redskins Star Alfred Morris’ Dream Is This Humble 1991 Mazda 626 by Patrick George for Jalopnik. 

Morris, a Pensacola native, said he bought the 626 from his pastor for $2 back when he was playing for Florida Atlantic University. (The car still has an expired parking sticker from the college on its windshield.)

Morris is a cheerful, affable, down to earth guy. Even though he’s an NFL star with an NFL salary, he said he had more reasons to keep The Bentley than to get rid of it.

“This is my baby, man,” he said. “It’s more than just a car. I didn’t grow up with a lot. This helps me remember where I come from and where I’m going.”

 

Do Not Watch This Game 9.27.14 Weekend Edition

Do not watch this game 1

 

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Sunday, 1:00 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Baltimore Ravens vs. Carolina Panthers. It’s on CBS but do not watch this game!

I’ll start this week by copping to the truth about this game — there is a reason to watch it. There’s a single plot that will be played out on Sunday that’s almost fascinating enough to make the game worth watching. Steve Smith Sr. was a wide receiver on the Panthers team for 13 years. He’s their all time leader in basically every receiving statistic out there. He was also the heart of the team for more than a decade. At 5’9″, he’s a lot smaller than you’d expect for a player of this reputation, but what he lacks in size, he’s made up for in furious intensity. He’s a great player. Over this past summer, the Carolina Panthers let Steve Smith walk. He walked right into the Baltimore Ravens starting lineup and has been one of their best players this year. Now, he gets to play against his old team. This story is the focus of this game — the Charlotte Observer called this “Steve Smith Week.”

You know what? That’s going to make for a really frustrating game to watch. Revenge fantasies very rarely come to fruition in sports, especially not in football where there are so many players on each team and so many factors which go into winning or losing. Smith is likely to have a couple big plays that, if you want to, you could point to as being a big narrative deal. But no one player, not even Steve Smith, can decide the outcome of a game. There are larger issues at hand — can Cam Newton’s offensive line keep him from adding another injury to his bruised ribs and sprained ankle? Who will run the ball for the Panthers since their running back core looks like an ambulance corps? Can the Panthers’ defensive line win over a Baltimore offensive line that hasn’t allowed a sack in two games?

The coverage of this game is going to be so slanted towards the Steve Smith story that it’s going to be frustrating to listen to and a let-down to watch. Do not watch this game!

Of course, if you or the fan in your life is a Baltimore Ravens or Carolina Panthers fan, this isn’t a good game to skip. As an alternate, skip the Sunday early afternoon game between the New Orleans and the Dallas Cowboys. Why? Because the Cowboys have the worst pass defense in the league and the Saints are going to feast on them like they’re étouffée.

How are punts in football exciting?

Dear Sports Fan,

I don’t get why some people find punts exciting. Isn’t a punt basically a negative thing? It happens when a team decides they can’t advance the ball anymore and instead of trying, they punt. How are punts in football exciting?

Confused,
Connie

— — —

Dear Connie,

You’re absolutely right that punts only happen when one team decides they cannot advance the ball anymore and instead of risking giving the ball to the other team where it currently is, they choose to trade field position for possession and give the ball up. This doesn’t mean it’s not exciting though. In fact, I think the punt is one of the most exciting plays in football and I’m happy to explain some reasons why. If you missed our post yesterday on how punts work, you might want to brush up on that before you read this one. Don’t forget to come back though!

Why the punt is exciting for the receiving team

The receiving team starts out pretty excited about the punt because it means they’ve succeeded on defense. They prevented the opposing team from scoring or even moving the ball ten yards to get a new first down. It’s also exciting because it means they’re about to get the ball back. The excitement doesn’t stop there though, because if they play the punt return right, they might even score on that play!

Although it may look a little chaotic, every player on the field while their team returns a punt has a very precise mission. First, the receiving team tries to worm through or around the guys protecting the punter to see if they can block the punt before it gets going.

If that doesn’t work, and it normally doesn’t, the players switch over to slowing down the opposing team’s players so that their punt returner has room to catch the ball and doesn’t need to call for a fair catch. Then, once the punt returner has caught the ball, the other players on his team turn into blockers — trying to prevent the kicking team’s players from hitting him and also trying to shove them around to create running lanes for the returner. This sounds like a thankless job, and a lot of times it is, but once in a while, someone blocking for a punt returner will make a block so spectacular that the crowd roars in appreciation. Of all the hits in football, hits while blocking for a returner can be among the most violent because of the speed and the potential to hit someone who is focusing on something else. Here’s an example of a player getting “decleated” on a punt return:

 

Once a returner catches the ball, he takes off like a wild deer and sprints upfield, dodging and spinning and hurtling until he’s either caught and tackled or scores a touchdown. Punt return touchdowns are among the most exciting in the game. Take a look at this one from the Dallas Cowboys and watch how all the players on their return team block for punt returner Dez Bryant:

 

Sometimes, even when the blocking fails, a supremely talented and fearless punt returner can create a touchdown on his own. These are the most exciting punt return touchdowns. This one from Dante Hall in 2003 has stuck in my memory as being one of the best I’ve ever seen:

That type of return is few and far between, but the potential is there on every punt. That’s what makes the punt so exciting for the return team.

Why the punt is exciting for the kicking team

The punt can be very exciting for the kicking team because they have clear goals that take extreme coordination, precision, and often a little bit of luck. They also have things that they don’t want to have happen. The good outcomes are often incredibly close from the bad outcomes. For instance, the punting team might be aiming to kick the ball out of bounds at the two yard line because then the opposing team has to start from their own two yard line on offense. If the ball flies an extra two yards, and goes out of bounds in the end-zone, it’s a touchback and the receiving team gets the ball on their twenty yard line. The same thing holds with a punt that bounces around within the field of play. If it goes into the end-zone, the receiving team starts on the twenty. If it stops on the one… that’s a nineteen yard advantage for the kicking team. Here, the kicking team can do something to aid their own cause. If they can run down the field in time to do it, they can grab the ball before it rolls into the end-zone or even bounce it back to one of their teammates. This can be an exciting adventure because it involves players trying to control a frustratingly oblong bouncing object after sprinting for fifty or sixty yards. Here’s a great example of a punt that the kicking team saved from bouncing into the end zone:

Another strategy is to aim for a corner of the field so that it either goes out of bounds or it’s harder for the punt returner to find space to dodge around the guys trying to tackle him. This strategy is called a “coffin corner” punt. Here’s a great example of a successful one:

Playing on the unit that covers punts for the kicking team can also be exciting because you and your buddies get to (if all goes well) tackle the punt returner. If you like playing football, it’s probably in part because you like to hit people in a completely sanctioned way. It’s pretty satisfying to watch too unless it gets too violent. Here’s a prime example of good punt coverage that ends in a decisive but not cringe worthy hit:

Cue Cards 9-25-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

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Yesterday —  Wednesday, September 24

  1. More champagne in baseball  — It’s traditional in baseball to celebrate division titles or even just making the playoffs in flamboyant fashion. This tradition has evolved over time and today it involves wearing ski goggles and spraying champagne all over the locker room. For a sport whose regular season is an almost-every-day grind with teams playing 162 games over only around 180 days, the release is well earned. Yesterday the L.A. Dodgers clinched their division, the National League West division and celebrated ecstatically after beating the San Francisco Giants 9-1.
    Line: I should celebrate my next achievement at work that way… Wonder what would happen to me if I did?
  2. ESPN VIP suspended — Bill Simmons is one of the biggest names in sports media. He’s one of the original independent bloggers but as long since moved into the mainstream media within ESPN. He’s now a television personality, the driving force behind Grantland.com, a television producer, and one of the biggest podcasters out there. None of that kept ESPN from suspending him for three weeks for (we assume) critical comments he made about NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on his latest podcast. This suspension is a big news item because of Simmons’ celebrity and because it fans the flames of outrage among people already angry at sports establishments. There’s a #freesimmons going around on twitter with some great stuff which, as of now is the third highest trending topic on all of twitter. The first is just “Bill Simmons”… so yeah, people are paying attention to this story.
    Line: No matter how big you get, you’re still an employee, I guess. [Lots of people are also saying:] Wow, that’s one more week than the NFL originally gave Ray Rice for the domestic violence itself.

The history of football team names

If the sports fan in your life loves football and history, this beautiful and comprehensive The Genealogy of Football Teams poster from HistoryShots might be a perfect gift. The 40″ by 21″ poster tracks the names, locations, divisions, conferences, and existence of all of the professional football teams from today all the way back to around 1900. Here are some of the historical highlights:

  • St. Louis named their team the All-Stars in the 1920s. It folded after a couple seasons.
  • Boston’s first football team, in the 1930s, was named the Braves. They changed their name to Redskins and then moved to Washington D.C. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Patriots came into existence. Between the Redskins moving to Washington and the Patriots being created, the only time Boston had a team was during World War Two when they had a team called [gasp] the Boston Yanks!
  • World War Two created a shortage of players, so some teams merged during that time, often with rivals. My favorite tidbit is that the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles merged to become the “Steagles.” Try that one out at a cocktail party in Central Pennsylvania soon!
  • Then there’s just great names that haven’t survived, like the Los Angeles Dons, the Providence Steam Roller, the Staten Island Stapletons, and the Dayton Triangles.

HistoryShots is the product of partners Larry Gormley and Bill Younker. Their stated goal is to “create visual stories about subjects and topics by combining deep amounts of data with thoughtful designs” and I think they’ve succeeded with this poster. Nice work, guys! Go buy it on their website here.

Cue Cards 9-23-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

clapperboard
Yesterday —  Monday, September 22

  1. The Bears ground the Jets — There’s really only one thing in the sports world that happened yesterday which will create conversation today, and that’s the Chicago Bears beating the New York Jets 27-19 on Monday Night Football. It wasn’t an unexpected result, the Bears seem like they are pretty good and Jets seem like they’re tragically flawed in many of the ways they often are: mediocre quarterback, unreliable wide-receivers, slightly dysfunctional organization. The most notable aspect of the game last night was how many injuries there were on particular positional groupings. By the end of the game, the Bears were scraping the bottom of the barrel for their defensive backs but the Jets were missing their best wide receiver so it was hard for them to take advantage of it.
    Line: [Jets quarterback] Geno Smith shows just enough promise to keep luring you in without delivering.
  2. Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy — Tuesdays after otherwise quiet Mondays are the perfect time for fantasy football owners to crow or gripe about their teams. They “absolutely crushed” their league this week or they “lost by a fraction of a point because [name of player] had a touchdown called back because of [penalty, usually offensive holding]” or because they started [player] when they should have started [other player.]
    Line: [Nod head, make sympathetic noises, and then launch into telling them about your hobby of fishing/crocheting/model trains/historic reenactment. Fair is fair.]