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Week Three 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 3

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 1:00 P.M. ET

San Diego Chargers 22, at Buffalo Bills 10

After beating the defending champion Seattle Seahawks last week, the Chargers went on the road and subdued the undefeated Buffalo Bills. Buffalo fans are up there in terms of nervous fan bases, so prepare to do some comforting if you’re friends with a Bills fan.
Line: The Chargers might be for real this year.

Baltimore Ravens 23, at Cleveland Browns 21

Heartbreak for the Cleveland fans after their team gave up a late lead to big-brother-rival Baltimore Ravens.
Line: Cleveland deserves good things after the way they’ve started this year. I hope this is a bump in the road, not a fall into the same old pit of despair.

Tennessee Titans 7, at Cincinnati Bengals 33

The Chargers might be for real, the Bengals ARE for real. This game was no contest. The Titans might as well have saved themselves the trip if it weren’t for the frequent flier miles they racked up. (NFL teams have chartered planes, there are no frequent flier miles.)
Line: The Bengals are for real.

Dallas Cowboys 34, at St. Louis Rams 31

The drama-drama-drama Cowboys went down 21-0 before stumbling back to a close victory over a team starting its third quarterback of the year.
Line: Sure, the Cowboys won, but they shouldn’t feel good about winning like that.

Green Bay Packers 7, at Detroit Lions 19

The Packers are normally the victor in games against the Lions but they weren’t able to keep their star quarterback, Aaron Rodgers upright consistently enough to win this week.
Line: Do we give the Packers too much respect on reputation? Maybe they’re not that good this year.

Houston Texans 17, at New York Giants 30

The heretofore horrible Giants took out their frustration on the undefeated Texans.
Line: In past years, the Giants have been like one of those horror movie villains that just won’t die. Can they pull it off again?

Indianapolis Colts 44, at Jacksonville Jaguars 17

The Jaguars are terrible. Our “good cop” was right though, we did see rookie quarterback Blake Bortles get his first NFL playing time in this game. He looked half-decent and has already been announced as next week’s starter.
Line: It’s Week 3 and the Jaguars are already playing for next year.

Minnesota Vikings 9, at New Orleans Saints 20

The Saints were desperate after losing their first two games and they showed it, jumping up to a 13 point lead and never really letting the Vikings back into the game.
Line: Okay, the Saints are back!

Oakland Raiders 9, at New England Patriots 16

This game was way closer than most people would have expected. The Patriots, although 2-1, are not inspiring a lot of confidence the way they’re playing.
Line: What is going on up there in New England? They only beat the Raiders by seven?

Washington Redskins 34, at Philadelphia Eagles 37

This game was an offense lover’s paradise, with both teams scoring a lot and failing to defend very much. There was a rare bench-clearing brawl between these two teams which resulted in not much other than a couple of ejected players.
Line: [Former Eagle] Desean Jackson may have gotten some revenge by catching a long touchdown but the Eagles had the last laugh.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, AT 4:05 and 4:25 P.M. ET

San Francisco 49ers 14, at Arizona Cardinals 23

The Cardinals were widely thought of as the best team to miss the playoffs last year. The 49ers have made it at least to the conference finals the last three years. If the results of this game are to believed, things could be turning around in their NFC West division.

Line: This might be the Cardinals’ year!

Denver Broncos 20, at Seattle Seahawks 26

I mistakenly turned this game off two separate times when I thought the Seahawks had conclusively won it. Instead, Peyton Manning led the Broncos back and back and back… and then lost in overtime.
Line: I’m not sure if losing this way is better or worse for the morale of the Broncos than losing by a wider margin would have been.

Kansas City Chiefs 34, at Miami Dolphins 15

Just when you think you know something about the NFL, the results of a game seem to prove you wrong. We thought the Chiefs were falling apart. We thought the Dolphins were strong. Now, we just don’t know.
Line: The more you know, the less you know.

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

Pittsburgh Steelers 37, at Carolina Panthers 19

After looking like it was going to be a close, low-scoring game during the first half, the Steelers broke the game open with 28 points in the second half. Despite Carolina’s defense being thought of as one of the best in the league, the Steelers were able to run all over them. On the other side of the ball, the Steelers defense really beat up on Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.
Line: The Panthers better protect Cam Newton better if they want him to play for the rest of the year.

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

Dear Sports Fan,

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

Best regards,
Mengster

— — —

Dear Mengster,

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck in your fantasy game this weekend,
Ezra

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

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

Cue Cards 9-19-14

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.

Yesterday — Thursday, September 18

The U.S. Women’s National Soccer team rolls — Our women’s soccer team is to international soccer what our men’s national basketball team is to basketball. Dominant. Perhaps they aren’t quite as overwhelmingly dominant as the men’s basketball team but you wouldn’t know that from the easy 4-0 victory over Mexico last night. This followed an 8-0 win over the same team in their previous game. According to Liviu Bird of Sports Illustrated, these two games against Mexico are actually likely to be more challenging than any teams the team will face in official qualifying games for the 2015 World Cup.
Line: If only we could develop male soccer players in this country as well as we do women, we’d have been able to give goalie Tim Howard some support in the men’s World Cup in Brazil.
The Atlanta Falcons swoop the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — Last night’s NFL game was compelling like a fender bender is. The Falcons scored the first 56 points of the game. 56!! The Bucs? Well, they fumbled and bumbled and slipped and fell. It was ugly.
Line: I know they’re professionals and all but how can you not feel sympathy for a group of guys who just had their absolute worst day on the job watched by millions of people?
Auburn survives Kansas State — There was a rare high-profile college football game on Thursday last night. The Auburn Tigers have national championship aspirations and the way college football is set up, teams basically can’t lose more than one game all season if they want a chance at the championship. It’s far better to be undefeated. The Kansas State Wildcats showed a lot of talent and heart by putting a real scare into the Tigers late in the game.
Line: The good thing about college football is that the regular season is so important, the games feel like playoff games.

Do Not Watch This Game 9.20.14 Weekend Edition

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, New England Patriots vs. Oakland Raiders. It’s on CBS but do not watch this game!

Hmm, let’s see here: Oakland Raiders wins in the last ten seasons: 49; New England Patriots wins in the last ten seasons: 124. It’s just about that simple — both of these teams have been remarkably consistent over the last decade. The Patriots have had one coach and, except for one year lost to injury, one quarterback. The Raiders are on their sixth head coach and something close to their seventeenth starting quarterback. This year, the Raiders are led by Rookie Quarterback Derek Carr, who won the job in training camp from veteran Matt Schaub, who the team signed after what had to have been one of the most ignominious seasons ever for a quarterback. Meanwhile, Patriots coach Bill Bellichick and quarterback Tom Brady just keep on chugging. They’re like a pair of crusty old train engineers who won’t quit shoveling coal. When Brady was recently asked how he would approach retirement, he said, “When I suck, I’ll retire. I don’t plan on sucking for a long time.” Although he is in the tail end of his career, Brady hasn’t started sucking yet, and this game will almost certainly not be the moment he starts sucking.

If you look at team defensive statistics so far this year, the Raiders look like they are pretty good at defending the pass. They’ve allowed the third fewest passing yards. This is a case where statistics lie. They’re not good at defending the pass, they’re just wretched at defending the run. They’re by far the worst run defense in the league, having allowed an average of 200 yards per game against. That’s almost 25 yards more per game than the next worst team and almost four times the best team. Another factor to consider is that NFL teams often run once they have a lead. The Patriots aren’t like most teams. They generally choose what they think is going to work best against their opponent and then they do that mercilessly the whole game, no matter what the score is.

The battle between spiky leather and tricorn hats is going to be over before it starts. Do not watch this game!

Of course, if you or the fan in your life is a New England Patriots or Oakland Raiders fan, this isn’t a good game to skip. As an alternate, skip the Sunday early afternoon game between the New York Giants and the Houston Texans. Why? Because Ryan Fitzpatrick and Eli Manning don’t exactly scream “excitement.” I can see them antiquing together. No, really.

Is it ethical to keep Adrian Peterson on my fantasy team?

Dear Sports Fan,

This may be out of your wheelhouse, but … ever since Randy Cohen retired, I can’t bring myself to email the Ethicist.

I loved watching football last year, even though I didn’t understand a thing. It’s been suggested to me that in order to really learn what’s happening, I join a Fantasy Football league. So, I have. My friend is helping me and our first-round draft pick is Adrian Peterson… Yeah. So, assuming he eventually plays again this season — what do I do? Is it ethical to keep him on my team?

From,
Erica

P.S. If it helps you decide, I stopped watching the WWE mainly out of ethical concerns. Am I just done with sports?

— — —

Dear Erica,

You are facing an ethical quandary.

For those who don’t know, Adrian Peterson has been accused of child abuse. Peterson left deep cuts on his son’s legs after beating him with a switch (thin tree branch). His son is four years old. The facts in this case are undisputed because Peterson readily admits what he did. In an article from the local CBS in Houston, near where this happened, reporter Nick Wright describes Peterson as “very matter-of-fact and calm about the incident, appearing to believe he had done nothing wrong and reiterating how much he cared about his son and only used “whoopings” or “spankings” as a last resort.” Like in the Ray Rice domestic abuse case, this story is augmented by visual evidence. In this case, photos of a four-year-old’s wounded legs. They’re readily available online but the child’s mother is apparently asking for them to be taken down, so I won’t even link to them. I’ve seen them and they’re fairly deep, long cuts around the thighs. They’re bad, and they reinforce Amy Davidson’s brilliant argument in the New Yorker that this case should not be a part of the cultural conversation about the appropriateness of corporal punishment. About that conversation, she writes:

This is a valuable, crucial conversation, and Carter is an important voice. It’s not, though, what we’re really talking about in the Peterson case. This preschooler wasn’t paddled or, as Peterson put it to police, “swatted”; he was whipped with a stick and left with open wounds on his body.

When this news broke, Peterson’s team the Vikings deactivated him from their roster. Since then he was briefly activated and then, perhaps after some serious meetings on the part of team management, re-deactivated. That’s where we stand now.

To return to your question — is it ethical to keep Adrian Peterson on my fantasy team? It’s an interesting and complicated question. First of all, let’s establish that it is a reasonable question to ask. As I wrote in my post about why fantasy football drafts are so exciting, fantasy owners do sometimes make (one-directional) emotional connections with the football players on their fantasy teams. Your success becomes linked with their success, so as you root for yourself, you root for them. Once you know that’s likely to happen, you do think about whether or not you’ll want to root for a player when you choose to have him on your team. In the past, players like Ben Roethlisberger (accused of sexual assault,) or Riley Cooper (filmed using the racial epithet aimed at black people during a country music show) would give fantasy owners pause during their drafts. In this case, when you chose Adrian Peterson, his record was clear and clean. You certainly were not acting unethically when you drafted him.

Now that you know what you know, is it unethical to keep him on your team? Being on your fantasy team doesn’t help Adrian Peterson in any material way. I suppose you could make the argument that the more fantasy teams he’s on, the more popular he is, and the more popular he is, the more likely it is for companies to sign him to endorsement deals. Rest easy, he’s not going to be getting any endorsement deals any time soon. Playing fantasy football absolutely supports the National Football League, and I could see an argument for not playing fantasy football as part of a larger boycott of the NFL, but that’s not what you’re suggesting here. Likewise, dropping him is not going to punish him in any way. While athletes are often very concerned with their video-game alter egos’ skill ratings, very few seem to care about their fantasy instantiations.

When you play in a fantasy league, there’s another set of people you should think of when it comes to ethics: your friends who you’re playing fantasy football with and against. You owe them some ethical consideration too. Here, the ethics are clear — dropping a player who you think has more value based on the rules of your fantasy league than the player you’re replacing him with is unethical. It’s unethical because it means you’re intentionally not abiding by the spirit of the group activity you agreed to participate in. You’re throwing the competitive balance of the league off. If your league, like many, plays for money, this ethical consideration is reinforced. In fact, with a star like Peterson, you often cannot drop him. Fantasy sites maintain lists of “undroppable players” that protect leagues against unscrupulous fantasy owners who may decide that if they can’t win, they just want to mess it up for everyone. Peterson has been on that list for years but was just taken off either because of people asking your question or because his suspension makes dropping him defensible from a competitive standpoint.

Ethics don’t require you to drop Peterson but they don’t mandate that you can’t either. You may be so angry or upset from reading about this story or seeing the photos that you just flat-out don’t want to see his name near yours. That’s fine, I support you in that decision. If you do decide to drop Peterson for non-competitive reasons, you should email your league first, let them know what you’re doing and why, and give people a chance to chime in. Perhaps they will simply agree to let him sit, unclaimed on the waiver wire, as if he has been put in time-out, which, come to think of it, is a strategy he might benefit from learning about.

Thanks for the question, let us know what you decide to do,
Ezra Fischer

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football? Fantasy football owners can’t actually control who plays in a real football game, right? So what gives?

Thanks,
Sal

— — —

Dear Sal,

Ha! I can tell from your question that you understand a little more than you’re letting on. No, of course, you’re right that a fantasy football owner can’t control which real players play in real games each weekend. Like many aspects of fantasy football, this is made more complicated by the fact that fantasy vocabulary shares terms with football but they mean slightly different things in different contexts. The choice to start or sit a player on a fantasy football team decides whether or not that player’s real stats will count toward the fantasy team’s score for the weekend. Making these choices is a big part of what makes fantasy football so fascinating and addictively torturous for people who play fantasy football. We already published a comprehensive post on how fantasy football works, so we’ll stick just to your question about starting or sitting a player. Here’s how it works.

Fantasy leagues vary greatly in how they are set up, but a fairly standard fantasy team will consist of 16 players. Of those, each week, only the statistics from nine of them will count towards the fantasy team’s total. The decision of which nine players of the 16 should count each week is the choice you’re asking about. Players that a fantasy owner selects to have their stats count are said to “start” or “be starting.” Players whose statistics an owner chooses not to have count are said to “sit” or “be sitting.” These terms mirror the decisions that real football coaches make about players on their roster for reasons of injury, relative skill, game-plan, or other factors, but they decide different things. In real football, the decision determines who plays in the football game and potentially who keeps their job and who gets fired. In fantasy, the decisions don’t actually affect the players in question, they only affect the fantasy owner and her fortunes that week.

The interesting thing about the start or sit decision in fantasy football is that fantasy owners have to make it before the games start each week. It’s all about prediction. The decision to start one player over another can be a determining factor in a fantasy game. For example, this weekend, I decided to start Jarett Boykin, a wide receiver on the Green Bay Packers, over Brandon Marshall, a wide receiver on the Chicago Bears. Boykin caught one pass for six yards. Marshall? Five catches, 48 yards, and three touchdowns. If I had chosen to start Marshall, and therefore had his stats count towards my totals, I would have won. Instead, I started Boykin and lost. Why did I make this decision? Well, similar to a real coach, I made it based on injury, relative skill, game-plan, and other factors. Marshall had a badly sprained ankle, my twitter feed was telling me he wasn’t likely to even play, and I thought that Green Bay would have an easy time throwing the ball against the Jets and Boykin would benefit from it.

Hindsight is 20/20 but foresight is variable. The more information about football games a fantasy owner has, the more reading and listening and watching and studying they do, and the better they are at compiling the data in their brains and their guts, the better their foresight is going to be. The more work a fantasy owner does, the better his or her start or sit decisions are likely to be and the more likely they are to win. This is the logic that makes start or sit decisions such an integral part of fantasy football and fantasy football such a force in driving interest in the NFL and the sport of football.

Hope this all makes sense,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-17-14

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.

Yesterday — Tuesday, September 16

Two divisions settled in baseball — Yesterday we mentioned that the baseball season is coming to an end soon. Just to prove the point, two of the six division winners in Major League Baseball (MLB) were conclusively settled last night. The Washington Nationals won their National League East division after beating the Atlanta Braves 3-0. The Nationals have now completed their three-year journey from surprisingly good to incredibly disappointing and now to living up to the expectations of being good. Their geographic neighbors, the Baltimore Orioles, also clinched their division after winning 8-2 over the Toronto Blue Jays. The Orioles are in the same division as two giants of baseball, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, so division victories are hard to come by. Congratulations to both teams!
Line: Are you ready for the baseball playoffs? In case you don’t know how they work, here’s a Dear Sports Fan post explaining it.
Crime and punishment still reign over the NFL — The scandalous season of the National Football League (NFL) continued yesterday with three stories. In the Adrian Peterson story (arrested for child abuse in Texas for beating his four year-old child) the Vikings reversed course. After benching Peterson for a week, they had announced he would practice and play this week but then yesterday they changed their minds and re-benched him. Maybe it had something to do with a major sponsor dropping the team. Meanwhile, the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) is officially appealing Ray Rice’s suspension. When you think of it just from a labor/management perspective and look at the process, it is a pretty messed up process. First he was suspended for two games, then the league changed the rules about domestic abuse so that they called for a six game suspension for a first offense, and then a week or two after that, the league suspended him indefinitely and has still not put a time-frame on the suspension. It’s good that the players’ association is playing their role properly here, no matter how repugnant the crime is. In other policy-changing-after-the-fact news, the NFL and NFLPA is about to agree on more lenient punishment for drug violations which will retroactively lesson the punishment for 20 or so suspended players, including some high-profile ones like wide receiver Wes Welker of the Denver Broncos.
Line: So, lemme get this straight, Welker’s suspension gets shorter, Ray Rice’s is being appealed, and Adrian Peterson? After one day of practice, he’s “excused” from team functions again.

Cue Cards 9-16-14

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.

Yesterday — Monday, September 15

Eagles beat Colts, no one was arrested — The Monday night football game was between two teams that most everyone thinks are in the top third of the NFL. They played true to form by having a close, tightly contested, high scoring contest. The Eagles won, 30-27, moving to 2-0 (two wins, zero losses) while the Colts moved to 0-2.
Line: Did you know it’s the first time the Colts have lost two games in a row since Andrew Luck became their quarterback?
Rutgers apologizes for “classless fans” — Over the weekend, my alma mater, Rutgers, hosted their first ever Big Ten Conference game in football against what, geographically speaking, should be our new rivals, Penn State. Rutgers lost the game 13-10 but we upheld our reputation for vulgar behavior when some fans publicly and visually mocked Penn State for its recent sexual assault scandal. I can’t say I condone the behavior… but when I was at school there, we were way better at ceaselessly mocking the other team than we were at beating them in football.
Line: There’s been so many other scandals lately, Penn State’s issue feels antique in comparison.
Baseball’s checkered flag — In car racing, a checkered flag means ‘one more lap.’ Major League Baseball teams have about twelve games left in their 162 game season. Playoff races are in full swing (pun intended) and last night the first team clinched a playoff spot. That team was the Los Angeles Angels. The Kansas City Royals also helped their playoff cause by beating the White Sox in a “dramatic ninth-inning comeback.”
Line: Wow, the playoffs are coming up fast. I better start paying attention to baseball!

Why do quarterbacks slide?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do quarterbacks slide? I guess there’s some rule that you can’t touch the quarterback if he slides with the ball? Seems kind of unfair to me.

Thanks,
Fred

— — —

Dear Fred,

Why do quarterbacks slide? It’s a good question. You’re right that they are taking advantage of a rule when they do slide but it might not be as unfair as you think. We’ll look into the rule, discuss why it is that quarterbacks slide and other positions don’t, and check out a couple creative ways that players really do look to get an advantage out of sliding.

The sliding rule comes from a set of scenarios that end a play in football. In the NFL, that list includes criteria like, “when a forward pass (legal or illegal) is incomplete,”when the ball is out-of-bounds,” and the one that we care about in this post, “when a runner declares himself down by sliding feet first on the ground. The ball is dead the instant the runner touches the ground with anything other than his hands or his feet.” This rule applies equally to all the players on the field, quarterbacks are not special when it comes to sliding. Anyone who has the ball, can at any time for any reason, make the play end by sliding feet forward on to the ground. Once the play is over, of course, no one is allowed to hit the player with the ball unless they’ve already committed irrevocably to the motion of hitting the ball-carrier before the play ended. When we talk about rules on this site, we often end up categorizing them into rules intended to create even and exciting competition and rules intended to create relative safety for a sport’s participants. This one is definitely a safety rule but it has a competitive wrinkle built-in. As opposed to when a player dives forward with the ball, a player that slides feet forwards only advances the ball to the place where they first started their dive. Their team therefore loses out on a territorial advantage if a player decides to slide feet first.

The reason why sliding is commonly thought of as something only quarterbacks can do is because it’s usually something only quarterbacks actually do in practice. Part of this is tactical — there’s often a much greater difference between the starting quarterback and the backup compared to the starting running back or wide receiver and the next one on the team. It’s more harmful for a team to lose a quarterback than virtually any other position. Part of it is also cultural though. It’s simply not accepted for a running back or a wide receiver to voluntarily end a play by sliding the way it is for a quarterback. Quite the contrary, even running backs or wide receivers who run out-of-bounds or dive head first to avoid a hit are looked on slightly askance. As the impact of brain injury becomes more well understood, (and perhaps more importantly for this conversation, the protocols for handling potential brain injuries, because they take players off the field for a time, become more seriously enforced,) this cultural norm about sliding might change.

Some of the leagues craftier quarterbacks still look to get an advantage out of sliding. Not only do they protect themselves but, they think, what else can I get out of this process for my team and me? In Tom Brady’s case he thought, “maybe I can injure (or at least either scare or anger) my opponent while sliding.” So, he slid with his cleats up, like way up… like a baseball player sliding into second trying to cancel out a double-play. That’s a pretty perverse thing to do — to turn a move designed to guarantee one’s own safety into an attack. Smart man. Andrew Luck, quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts seemed to have been working the rules in a preseason game this year when he kind of slid sideways in a rolling kind of movement. Backup quarterback and connoisseur of treachery, Matt Hasselbeck, had this to say about it:

“It was sneaky,” backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said through a wry smile. “It wasn’t really a slide and it wasn’t really a dive.

“I thought he was trying to get away with the barrel-roll. I think he was trying to score. (If) nobody tags him down, he gets back up and runs. Watch the film. Genius.”

The slide in football is pretty much a quarterbacks only move now but I think we’ll begin to see that change over the next couple of years. My concern with the sliding rule, as a person with bad knees, has always been that sliding feet first, with cleats on, isn’t actually a safe move even if the rules say it’s safe. It’s way too easy to catch a cleat on the turf and end up with an injured knee. In college football, sliding is unnecessary because any contact with anything but hands or feet when a player has the ball immediately ends the play. That’s a safer rule and it doesn’t steal much excitement from the game at all. Maybe we’ll see that migrate to the NFL in time as well.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-15-14

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.

Yesterday — Sunday, September 14

The NFL plays football — After a week full of ancillary cultural stories, the NFL actually played football games yesterday. Read the Week Two NFL One Liners for full (and brief) coverage of each game.
Well, that was easy — The United States Men’s National Basketball team finished their romp through the FIBA World Cup of Basketball with a 129-92 victory. Looking back on the tournament, the toughest game the team had, was against Turkey in the group stage. It may have been different if Spain had made it to the finals, because they were expected to be around even with our team, but they were knocked out of the tournament in the quarterfinals by France.