Tag: football

Cue Cards 9-30-2013: NFL One Liners

clapperboardCue 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.

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 in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

Baltimore 20, Buffalo 23 — A great example of how the NFL is the least predictable league. The Bills were 6-10 last year and the Ravens were 10-6 and played in the Super Bowl. This year they are as close as can be; playing a close game that came down to the last few minutes and both having a 2-2 record after four games.

Cincinnati 6, Cleveland 17 — Cleveland won their second straight game after losing their starting quarterback to injury and trading their starting running back to the Colts.

Chicago 32, Detroit 40 — Detroit won this game by scoring 27 points in the second quarter, a feat more suited for a video game than a divisional game versus the Chicago Bears.

New York Giants 7, Kansas City 31 — The Giants are 0-4 and have been outscored 69-7 in the last two games. Coach Tom Coughlin’s job, despite his two Super Bowl wins with the team, may be in serious jeopardy.

Pittsburgh 27, Minnesota 34 — One of two games this year to be played in England, the players in this one put on quite a show in a game that was more likely to determine the team with the worst record at the end of the year than the best.

Arizona 13, Tampa Bay 10 — The Cardinals scored all 13 of their points in the fourth quarter to steal the victory from the floundering Buccaneers.

Indianapolis 37, Jacksonville 3 — Two years ago the Colts went 2-11 and selected quarterback, Andrew Luck, with the first pick of the draft. Jacksonville’s best bet this season and probably their only choice is to lose all their games and hope for the first pick in next year’s draft.

Seattle 23, Houston 20 — The Texans dominated this game in the first half, 20-3, but the Seahawks managed to wriggle back into the game, push it to overtime, and win it there with a field goal.

New York Jets 13, Tennessee 38 — The Titans continue to surprise the league with their strong play but may have to adjust to losing their starting quarterback, Jake Locker, to a hip injury.

Philadelphia 20, Denver 52 — Denver seems completely unbeatable right now. They’ve scored 179 points in four games, more than 5o points higher than the second highest scoring team.

Washington 24, Oakland 14 — The nation needed this outcome so that the inhabitants of Washington D.C. can take a few days off from their football crisis and concentrate on that whole government shut-down crisis.

Dallas 21, San Diego 30 — Although the Cowboys loss makes their record only 2-2, that’s still good enough for first place in the NFC East division. The NFC East is always the highest rated and most talked about division in the NFL but this year, the four teams have a combined 4-12 record.

New England 30, Atlanta 23 — The more things change, the more they stay the same. Quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick continue their 13 year run of success.

What Does Games Back Mean in Sports Standings?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does games back mean in sports standings? And how can a team be a half game back?

Thanks,
Greg

— — —

Dear Greg,

That’s a great question! Games back can be a confusing concept. Games back is a metric that attempts to show how far behind a team is, controlled for the number of games they have played. A team can be a certain number of games back from another team or from a position in the standings. In both scenarios, the target is moving. Games back is a concept that confuses many people who follow sports religiously so showing an understanding of this concept gives you a simple way of flashing your sports expertise, even among sports fans!

On the first day of a season, Team A beats Team B. Team A’s record is now 1 win and 0 losses. Team B’s is 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B is behind Team A in number of wins and in games back. So far those are the same thing. On the second day of the season, Team A plays Team C and wins again. Team B doesn’t have a game. Now Team A’s record is 2 wins and 0 losses and Team B’s record is still 0 wins and 1 loss. Team B now has two fewer wins in the standings but they are not two games back of Team A. This is because Team B has played one fewer game and the games back metric tries to control for that. Games back controls for unplayed games by counting them as one half of a win. You may hear these unplayed games called games in hand, so just remember that while a game in hand may be worth two in the bush, it’s only worth half a game in of games back. Team B is said to be 1.5 games back from Team A.

As the season goes on, this metric becomes a little harder to calculate in our heads like we just did for Team B and Team A. Wikipedia has a simple calculation for games back and though I don’t exactly understand why it works, I believe it works. It’s Games Back = ((Team A’s wins – Team A’s losses) – (Team B’s wins – Team B’s losses))/2. In our scenario, that’s ((2-0)-(0-1)/2 which simplifies to 3/2 or 1.5 games back.

In addition to calculating how many games back Team B is from Team A, it’s also common to express games back relative to a position in the standings. Two common ones are games back (or behind or out of) first place or the last team that would qualify for the playoffs. In this case, the calculation is the same, it’s just done by comparing Team B to whatever team represents that place in the standings. If today Team A is in first place, Team B would be 1.5 games out of first place. If tomorrow Team C, D, or E[1] is in first place, the calculation would be done between their record and Team B’s record.

AL StandingsBefore we leave this topic, let’s look at some real standings as of today in Major League Baseball. The WCGB column stands for WildCard Games Back. The way baseball playoffs work is that the three division winners all make the playoffs automatically and then the next two teams with the best records make it as well. These two playoff spots for non-division winners are called Wildcards. The WCGB column is calculating the number of games back a team is from getting that second and last wildcard playoff spot.

Right now the Indians are in the last playoff spot so they are zero games back. They are the target. The Rays have played the same number of games as the Indians and have one more win and one fewer loss so they are said to be +1 games back. Don’t worry about how stupid that sounds, this means they are a game ahead. The Rangers have also played exactly the same number of games as the Indians. They have one fewer win and one more loss though, so they are 1 game behind the last playoff spot as represented currently by the Indians.

We have to go all the way down to the Mariners to find a team that is an uneven number of games back. If you add their wins and losses, you see that the Mariners have played 159 games compared to the Indians’ 158. That explains the .5 in the games back column. The Indians have 18 more wins than the Mariners but because they have a game in hand, they are given an extra .5 when calculating how far back the Mariners are compared to the Indians.

Data visualization guru Edward Tufte uses sports standings to show how much data can be packed into a simple table and remain understandable (even to dumb sports fans is the unspoken ellipses that I hear) and why making a chart for any fewer than a few hundred data points is usually not necessary. As a devotee of his, I’m happy you asked this question. Hopefully this post has made all those tables in the sports section a little easier to read!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. GO TEAM E!!!↵

Plot in Football: A Case Study

Sports fans watch sports more like fans of dramas, sitcoms, or soap operas than one might expect. Sure, the sporting contest itself is interesting, but there is a whole lot of interest driven by plot and character. The NFL football game tonight between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is a particularly good example of this. As is most often the case with football, the most visible and compelling characters are the head coaches and the quarterbacks. Here’s a description of who they are and the plot that intertwines them.

Before this year, Andy Reid, head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, had spent the last 13 years as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. During that time, he led the team to five NFC Championship games (basically the semifinals of the NFL) and one Super Bowl but never won the championship. For the NFL, this is a notably long tenure and a very successful one, only partially marred by a sense that he was responsible for some of the failure to win “it all.” His last few years were saddened by the death of his son from a drug overdose. It’s unclear whether his death was intentional or not. The gravity of that situation and the way Reid handled it[1], his long history with the team, and his close relationship with the owner made his firing at the end of last year surprising despite the flagging success of the Eagles over the last few seasons.

Reid was hired soon after the season as head coach of the Chiefs and has won his first two games this season.

Chip Kelly, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the man who took over for Andy Reid, is a polarizing figure. Before this season, he was head coach at the University of Oregon. While there, he developed an offense that has become known as the “blur” offense because it emphasizes speed in all ways. He likes his players fast, and he has them run plays on offense as frequently as possible. Where most offenses may run a play every 25 or 30 seconds, Kelly’s teams aim for 10 to 15 seconds in an attempt to exhaust the opposing defense. Kelly does this by reducing the amount of thinking his players have to do between plays and increasing it during the play. Instead of calling a play with a voice command, Kelly’s teams use some still unbroken code involving hand gestures and large cardboard cut-outs. During the play, his quarterbacks often choose between handing the ball to the running back, running it themselves, or throwing it to a wide-reciever. Because the quarterback is supposed to make this decision based on what the defense is trying to do, this strategy is called the “read-option.” One of the big stories coming into this NFL season was whether this combination of speed and read would work as well in the pros as it did in college. So far it seems to be working although the Eagles are only 1 and 1.

The plot surrounding the two starting quarterbacks in the game is one of great heights, a great fall, and potential redemption but in very different ways.

The Eagles quarterback, Michael Vick, has prodigious physical talents. I once ran across Vick in an airport and I watched as a man went up to him and said, “Michael Vick??! I love playing with you in [the video game] Madden!” Vick’s talents were rewarded with great fame and fortune until he was charged and convicted for running a dog-fighting ring. He served over a year in prison and returned to the NFL when Andy Reid and the Eagles took a big PR gamble and signed him. His personal redemption has been successful, but he hasn’t reached the playing heights in Philadelphia that he did before his incarceration. Perhaps Chip Kelly can help him get there.

The Chiefs quarterback is Alex Smith. Smith was the first pick in the 2005 draft by the San Fransisco 49ers. Although he showed some promise in San Fransisco, he mostly struggled until last year. Last year it seemed he had finally put it together and was not only playing the best football of his career but also as one of the best quarterbacks, as judged by statistics, in the league through the first half of the season. That’s when Smith got a concussion and had to miss a couple of games. The backup quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, stepped in and played so well that Smith never got back on the field. The 49ers went to the Super Bowl. Alex Smith was sent to Kansas City where he will try, under Andy Reid, to prove that last year’s first eight games were no fluke.

Will the notoriously nasty Philadelphia fans boo Andy Reid when he walks onto the field tonight? Will the new whiz kid Chip Kelly stump the old maestro Andy Reid? Which quarterback will continue on his path to redemption? Tune in tonight at 8:30 to find out. Sports!

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Reid did not miss a game↵

How the NFL can Ruin Your Life

Fan is short for “fanatic” and the fanaticism of NFL fans is never too far from the surface. Two articles recently struck me as being representative, in different ways, of just how important sports can be to a fan’s life. Read on to hear about how sports can make you fat and broke or svelte and rich!

One of my favorite quotes about sports, attributed to the late Sam Kellerman, talks about why fans treat sport like a matter of life or death: “Sports is man’s joke on God, Max. You see, God says to man, ‘I’ve created a universe where it seems like everything matters, where you’ll have to grapple with life and death and in the end you’ll die anyway, and it won’t really matter.’ So man says to God, ‘Oh, yeah? Within your universe we’re going to create a sub-universe called sports, one that absolutely doesn’t matter, and we’ll follow everything that happens in it as if it were life and death.” An article[1] from the New York Times by Jan Hoffman, suggest[2] that Kellerman might have been right in a very concrete way:

Researchers found that football fans’ saturated-fat consumption increased by as much as 28 percent following defeats and decreased by 16 percent following victories. The association was particularly pronounced in the eight cities regarded as having the most devoted fans, with Pittsburgh often ranked No. 1. Narrower, nail-biting defeats led to greater consumption of calorie and fat-saturated foods than lopsided ones.

In my life, I observe that it is more the act of watching football that leads to the consumption of nachos, hot-dogs, mozzarella sticks, and other delicious and waist-band stretching foods.

If putting your life on the line is not enough for some fans, there’s now a brand new way for them to put their money on the line. Gambling has long been a central focus for many who follow sports. If you don’t believe me, go watch the 1932 Marx Brothers’ movie Horsefeathers and it’s incredibly contemporary story about the fixing of a college football game. Fantasy sports has brought gambling on sports out of the alley and onto main street, in part because it distances the raw gambling from the outcome of the game. Now startup company Fantex has come up with a new way to gamble (or invest as they would have us think about it) on sports — by investing money in a player. Billy Gallagher reports on this story for TechCrunch:

Fantex strikes deals with professional athletes who give up a certain percentage of their income (presumably over an allotted period of time, like the length of their active career) in exchange for the proceeds of [an] IPO. People can then buy shares of that player’s brand, like a stock… presumably, if San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis has a monster year and looks like he’s going to get a bigger endorsement deal or a larger contract in a few years, his stock would rise and a fan could sell their Davis stock and cash out with a real, monetary profit.

Gallagher argues that this is probably not going to be a great deal for the players (surely they can find something better to do with their money) but he is more optimistic about profit for the new class of fan/investors. I can’t wait until they create a market for people who blog about sports — I might be a penny-stock but who knows…

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Thanks to Patty Gibney for sending me this article!↵
  2. If you believe in the dangers of obesity↵

Cue Cards 9-15-2013: NFL One Liners

clapperboardCue 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.

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 in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

Panthers 23, Bills 24 — Buffalo Bills win dramatically on a touchdown pass thrown by rookie quarterback EJ Manuel with two seconds left in the game; wonder how many games the coach of the Panthers has left before he is fired?
Vikings 30, Bears 31 — Our second game that went down to the wire. This time the Bears got a touchdown with 10 seconds remaining to win the game. Vikings quarterback Christian Ponder left pondering what could have been if his name wasn’t Ponder. Ponder.
Redskins 20, Packers 38 — Maybe the Redskins’ poor start shouldn’t be surprising considering their quarterback, Robert Griffin III, tore his ACL less than 9 months ago; or maybe Aaron Rodgers and the Packers are really good at offensive football.
Dolphins 24, Colts 20 — Colts quarterback Andrew Luck could not create a dramatic comeback against the surprisingly 2-0 Miami Dolphins.
Rams 24, Falcons 31 — The Rams are seemingly on a quest to become a team like the Falcons; close, but no cigar.
Browns 6, Ravens 14 — Defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens rebound from a bad first week loss with a win against a bad team.
Cowboys 16, Chiefs 17 — Long-time former Eagles coach Andy Reid, now coaching the Chiefs, has the ability to beat old Eagles Rival, Dallas Cowboys, in his muscle memory.
Titans 24, Texans 30 — NFL games barely ever go to overtime, but this one did.
Chargers 33, Eagles 30 — The Eagles are supposed to have a revolutionary, fast moving offense, and they do, but today the Chargers out-paced and out-scored them.
Lions 21, Cardinals 25 — It’s a little hard to say this early in the season but it seems like the Cardinals are a good bad team and the Lions are a bad good team. Today the good bad team beat the bad good team. Go figure.
Saints 16, Buccaneers 14 — The Buccaneers spent all week acting like a bad reality show with feuding between coach and players but they were still able to almost beat the Saints. Who will get kicked off the island in this next week’s episode of The Buccaneers? Could be quarterback Josh Freeman.
Broncos 41, Giants 23 — Called the “Manning Bowl” because the quarterbacks of the teams are brothers Peyton and Eli Manning, this was a victory for older brothers everywhere. (Hey Jess!)
Jaguars 9, Raiders 19 — The team that everyone thought would be the worst team in the league before the year started beat the team everyone now thinks is the worst in the league.
49ers 3, Seahawks 29 — This was the most anticipated game of the weekend but it turned out to be a dud. Between the hour-long lightning delay filled with inane chatter and the lopsided score… I need to see Colin Kaepernick without an eyebrow to be happy.

The Good and the Ugly of Fantasy Football

Players that fantasy owners will be grouching about — Colin Kaepernick,  Maurice Jones-Drew, Frank Gore, and Larry Fitzgerald.

Players that fantasy owners will be crowing about — Marshawn Lynch, Michael Vick, Knowshown Moreno, and Pierre Garcon.

NFL Pregame Excess

As a sports fan, I am also a big fan of Sundays during the fall. I like nothing more than to have already had a weekend full of social events so that I can sit down on the coach and feel totally wonderful about watching football all day. As a fantasy football owner, I’ve also been known to have my laptop (and my phone, and my ipad, and whatever other screens I can find) propped open so that I can simultaneously follow my fantasy football team and as many of the non-televised games as possible. I’ve tried the NFL Red Zone channel a few times. Red Zone is a term which refers to an offensive team having the ball within 20 yards of the end-zone they are trying to score in. The Red Zone channel flips back and forth between games to show the most exciting parts of all of them — it will even split your screen into three or four games at times. I find it to be a dangerously hyperactive experience that leaves me feeling sort of shaky and not like I’ve enjoyed watching sports at all. But I understand the appeal of the Red Zone channel.

What I don’t understand is the appeal of NFL pre-game shows, so I was really happy to read the recent New York Times survey of them by Richard Sandomir. In it he describes the growth of the Sunday morning NFL shows as an inevitable but ridiculous consequence of the NFL’s popularity[1]

Starting Sunday, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. (all times Eastern), there will be 19 hours of pregame N.F.L.programming. Four of the new hours arrive courtesy of the CBS Sports Network, which is producing “That Other Pregame Show” next to the studio in Manhattan that is used by “The NFL Today,” the CBS broadcast network’s venerable pregame show. This flagrant addition of four hours, in one stroke, is excess piling on extravagance.

Keith Jackson, a retired legend of football broadcasting, was profiled recently in the LA Times by Chris Erskine. Erskine asked Jackson if he had any wisdom to impart on today’s broadcasters and Jackson replied, “They talk too damn much. You wear the audience out.” It’s likely Jackson was thinking about commentators during the game when he said that but I’d like to think he would feel the same about pre-game shows.

If there is one nice thing about all the NFL coverage and promotion, it’s that each channel has it’s own NFL theme song. These constants have become like Pavlovian conditional reflexes to me. They make me sprawl out, relax, maybe freak out a little about fantasy football, but mostly get ready to indulge myself in a day of sports. If you’re conditioned like I am, you might enjoy this inventive YouTube video by Ansel Wallenfang which I found on deadspin.com.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. And the low-cost of studio shows compared to other types of programming.↵

Cue Cards 9-9-2013: NFL One Liners

clapperboardCue 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.

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 in our cue cards series on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

NFL One Liners

Patriots 23, Bills 21 — Patriots were expected to win and did but the Bills made it interesting with their new coach and their rookie quarterback.

Dolphins 23, Browns 10 — A new coach didn’t do anything for the Browns who lost in a completely “meh” game.

Seahawks 12, Panthers 7 — The Panthers are probably not as good as this close game suggests.

Bengals 21, Bears 24 — The Cincinnati Bengals continue their long tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Vikings 24, Lions 34 — Adrian Peterson is amazing; the rest of the Vikings… not so much.

Raiders 17, Colts 21 — Raiders new quarterback Terrell Pryor exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations in this game and his team still lost.

Chiefs 28, Jaguars 2 — New Chiefs coach Andy Reid and quarterback Alex Smith start off their careers in Kansas City with a bang regardless of the lack of competition from the Jaguars.

Falcons 17, Saints 23 — A close game between two of the best teams in the league.

Buccaneers 17, Jets 18 — The Jets had all but lost this game, despite better than expected play from rookie quarterback Geno Smith, until a Buccaneer defender took a stupid penalty which led to a last second Jets field goal.

Titans 16, Steelers 9 — The Steelers season feels like it’s over before it even really started because of major injuries to Center Maurkice Pouncey and linebacker Larry Foote.

Packers 28, 49ers 34 — Packers waited all summer to avenge their playoff loss to quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the 49ers but failed in a very un-Inigo Montoya like way.

Cardinals 24, Rams 27 — A close, entertaining game between two moderately good but not great football teams.

Giants 31, Cowboys 36 — This high scoring game was brought to you by ugly, sloppy football, not skill and precision.

The Good and the Ugly of Fantasy Football

Players that fantasy owners will be grouching about — Marshawn Lynch, C.J. Spiller, Trent Richardson, Calvin Johnson

Players that fantasy owners will be crowing about — Colin Kaepernick, Reggie Bush, Victor Cruz, and Jared Cook

 

Cue Cards 9-8-2013: College Football & Tennis

clapperboardCue 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.

Sport: College Football
Teams: Innumerable
When: Saturday, September 7
Context: The second full Saturday of the season
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The first couple weeks of the college football season are full of uneven match-ups between big, powerful schools and the weaker teams that they actually pay to visit their home field. Yesterday had its share of that type of game (Clemson vs South Carolina State, Louisville vs Eastern Kentucky, Rutgers vs. Norfolk State, etc.) but it had some really even and exciting games too.
  • Michigan beat Notre Dame 41 to 30. This was the marquee matchup of the night because it was between to traditional football powers with big fan-bases that are both expected to do well this year. Michigan’s quarterback, Devin Gardner has an interesting story. He was recruited in 2010 to play quarterback but never got much playing time. Last year he switched to Wide Receiver and was excelling at that position until the quarterback got injured and he had to quickly switch back. Now he’s the starting quarterback and he is fun to watch.
  • Georgia upset South Carolina, also 41 to 30. The story will be about Jadeveon Clowney, the star defensive end on the South Carolina team. He became a star last year after this play and is likely to be the first pick of the NFL draft next year. He hasn’t played very well so far this year though, and his team is not doing great either.

What’s Next: No more College Football until Thursday night when Texas Tech faces Texas Christian University at 7:30.

Sport: Tennis
Players: Novak Djokovic vs. Stanislas Wawrinka and Raphael Nadal vs. Richard Gasquet
When: Saturday, September 7
Context: The Semifinals of the U.S. Open
Result: Novak Djokovic defeated Stanislas Wawrinka 2-6, 7-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 and Raphael Nadal defeated Richard Gasquet 6-4, 7-6, 6-2
Sports Fans will be Talking About:

  • The Djokovic-Wawrinka match was an epic. The five setter took four hours and nine minutes. A single game in the third set involved 30 points over 21 minutes — a game is won by the first player to get to four but you have to win by two, so these players were stuck at deuce for a long time! Djokovic is the #1 ranked player in the world, so he was expected to win but Wawrinka made a lot of fans yesterday by playing clever, valiant tennis.
  • Raphael Nadal, on the other side of the bracket, continued his dominant run to the finals. Brian Phillips (@runofplay) is one of my absolutely favorite people to follow on twitter. Here was his comment on Nadal from the quarterfinals but it would apply equally to yesterdays match:


What’s Next: The women’s final between Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka is on Sunday “not before” 4:30.  The men’s final will be on Monday.

An Introduction to Football for the Curious

Football is America’s favorite sport. The season is anticipated, watched, obsessed over, and celebrated to an incredible extent. From the first week of September to the first week of February, football is almost unavoidable. Football is one of the least accessible sports for new viewers but we believe that with a little care and effort put into explaining it, it can be quite rewarding for a new or beginner viewer. Here is a collection of posts that may spark an interest or explain a long harbored question.

General Questions About Football

Why Do People Like Football
How do I Begin to Enjoy Football
How Should I Feel About the NFL Concussion Settlement
What is a Good Football Book

Rules, Terms, and Other Important Minutiae

How Does Scoring Work in Football
What’s a Down in Football
What is a Fumble in Football

Football Positions

What is a Quarterback in Football
What is a Running Back in Football
What is a Wide Receiver in Football
What is a Tight End in Football
What is an Offensive Lineman in Football
What is a Defensive Lineman in Football
What is a Linebacker in Football
What is a Defensive Back in Football

Fantasy Football

How Does Fantasy Football Work
What are Some Tips for Your First Fantasy Draft
Why Are People Obsessing About Fantasy Football Now

Happy watching! And please submit questions as you think of them. Getting questions is by far my favorite part of this blog and all the best posts come from your questions!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How Should I Feel About the NFL Concussion Settlement?

Dear Sports Fan,

I read over the weekend that the NFL settled a lawsuit out of court with retired players on the subject of concussions. I know concussions are an increasing concern in sports. How should I feel about the NFL concussion settlement?

Thanks,
Tricia

— — —

Dear Tricia,

Every good settlement is going to leave people on both sides with mixed feelings. The agreement that the NFL made to give $765 million to retired players is no exception to that rule, but I think it is more good than it is bad. Here are a few reasons why:

People Need Help Now

Retired football players who are suffering from the result of head trauma need help now. This is clear from the high-profile suicides of former players like Junior Seau, Ray Easterling, and Dave Duerson as well as the heart-wrenching stories of Steve Gleason and Kevin Turner and many others who are alive but severely affected by early dementia and Alzheimer’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease, which has been linked in theory, even on nfl.com, to brain trauma), and other issues. You might expect NFL players to have enough money to take care of their own health care but salaries have only skyrocketed to the current  in the past thirty one years since the 1982 strike and there is still an enormous amount of inequality within NFL player salaries. There are a lot of older players and less successful players out there who never made a lot of money. It’s conceivable for recent retirees to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, but if you look at the bigger picture you will find many stories like Terry Tautolo‘s, who ended up homeless.

Retired NFL Players are Not the Public

One of the best arguments you will hear for why this settlement is a bad thing is that it allows the NFL to avoid being forced to reveal in court how much it knew about the effect of concussions and when it knew what it knew. Daniel Engber of Slate.com makes this case forcefully but I don’t totally buy it. It’s easy to see parallels between this situation and Watergate or cigarette companies. The questions “what did they know” and “when did they know it” are instinctive because of those cases. A key difference is that this is a dispute between employees and an employer, not between a government and its citizens or a group of consumer companies and its customers. In terms of being truthful to the general football-watching public, the breach of trust is happening more now that the NFL is trying to market a softer, safer sport than it has in the past. If the NFL knew that it had an unsafe work environment (okay, obviously it’s unsafe, but I mean…really unsafe) and they actively hid information about the hazards from its employees, they should pay and pay punitively. The NFL owes its former employees but it does not owe the public nor would justice be served by its public humiliation or destruction.

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

This settlement does not preclude future lawsuits. NFL players like Scott Fujita, who wrote a great article in the New York Times about the settlement, know this. Fujita writes that he did not get involved in the lawsuit because he didn’t want to “risk watering down a potential award for so many people who are legitimately suffering. There are numerous former players experiencing a wide range of brain-related health issues. Right now, I’m not really one of them.” If he starts experiencing symptoms he is free to open his own suit against the league. The NFL knows this too, and that’s why the settlement is not just for players who actively participated in the lawsuit. Any retired player suffering from brain injury is entitled through this settlement to up to $5 million depending on their particular ailment.

A timeline of the lawsuits and settlements against cigarette companies over the past fifty years is a good reminder that the first settlement can be followed by later, larger settlements. The deadspin.com timeline of the NFL concussion issue only has one settlement on it so far but otherwise it looks chillingly similar.

It Would Have Been Tricky in Court

Although it seems obvious that a profession that involves being smashed repeatedly in the head had something to do with the damage done to its employees, it might have been very difficult for the players to win this case in court. Brain injury is more clearly understood all the time, but it remains frustratingly elusive both from a medical standpoint and a legal one. Matthew Futterman and Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal made this point convincingly in their article about the settlement:

Legal experts familiar with the case say the plaintiffs’ attorneys didn’t believe they had enough firepower to win in court. NFL lawyers were prepared to probe each plaintiff about his athletic history to try to convince the court the NFL couldn’t be held liable for injuries that could have come from youth, high-school or college football—or substance abuse.

The NFL has virtually unlimited resources to throw against their former employees in court. It might not have been a pretty sight. It still might not be.

Which Lesson Has Been Learned?

It’s easy to point at the overall value of the settlement relative to the wealth of the NFL and argue that the only lesson this will teach the NFL is that they can continue to get away with downplaying the danger of brain injury among their players. This doesn’t seem likely. For one thing, it’s clear from the history of the 2012 NFL referee labor dispute that the NFL often operates on principle instead of or in addition to finance. That the NFL reached a settlement suggests to me that it is ready to understand (or has already understood) that brain injury represents one of the biggest potential threats to its existence as an institution and profit-making machine. If this is true, the league will accelerate its initiatives to create a safer environment for current players.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer