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Can you explain conference championship tournaments in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

I don’t get it. College basketball has the perfect tournament called March Madness. Why does it need to have these extra conference championships? What’s the point? Why would anyone bother watching when the real competition is yet to come?

Thanks,
Lori

Dear Lori,

It’s true, the NCAA Basketball tournament, popularly called March Madness, is a wonderfully fun event. The tournament is 64 (technically 68 teams for the men’s tournament now, but most people still think of it as 64 for men and women) of the best college basketball teams in the country, playing in a single-elimination tournament until only one team is left. Before that happens though, almost every conference (all but one, the Ivy League) will have a conference championship tournament. These tournaments are happening now, in the two weeks before the NCAA tournament begins. Compared to March Madness, these tournaments may seem underwhelming, but they’re important for a variety of reasons. Their most important meaning does relate to the NCAA championship tournament. Every winner of a conference championship will get an automatic bid or place in March Madness. This shapes the conference tournaments and their meaning for the teams that play in them. It all depends on what type of team you are in what kind of conference.

Conferences come in all shapes and sizes but we can break them up into three categories: power conferences, tiny conferences, and in-between conferences. Tiny conferences usually only get one place in March Madness. Power conferences may get five, six, seven, or even eight teams into the tournament. The in-between conferences vary from year to year, depending on the quality of the teams in their league that year, but they might get two or three teams in.

For a team in a tiny conference, winning the conference championship is the only way to qualify for March Madness. For these teams, their conference championship is the pinnacle of competition. They know that they probably don’t have much of a chance to win a game in the NCAA tournament, much less win the overall championship. This transforms March Madness from being the tournament to being almost thought of as a prize for winning the conference tournament. Win the conference tournament and they’ll get to say, for the rest of their lives, that they played in March Madness. Being a dominant team in a one-bid league also means that the conference championship is a perilous time. There’s no rule that says a league only gets one bid. Non-automatic bid teams are selected for March Madness by a committee and there’s no guarantee that the committee will select a team with a very good record from a weak conference if it doesn’t win its conference tournament.

The situation in power conferences are different. The top teams in these conferences are basically guaranteed a tournament spot, even if they don’t win their conference tournaments. For these teams, the conference tournament is a chance to show off for the committee and hopefully get a higher seed in (and therefore an easier path through) the NCAA tournament. The teams in the middle of the power conference standings are the ones playing for bigger stakes. Win the conference tournament or at least get close, and they could rescue a mediocre season by qualifying for the tournament.

The experience in the in-between conferences, as you might guess, falls in-between the tiny and the power conference championship experience with one twist. These conferences often have one or two teams that are virtually guaranteed a tournament spot based on their regular season success. If they win their conference tournament, they get an automatic bid as well. If a surprise team from the in-between conference wins the conference tournament instead, that team will get the automatic bid. The favored team or teams in these conferences will probably still get their spots, meaning that instead of two spots in March Madness, the conference might get three; instead of three, they might get four. Every spot comes at the cost of another team elsewhere in the country, so you’ll see teams in one conference root for the favorite in another conference just so that a surprise team doesn’t eat up an automatic spot in the tournament.

Conference tournaments are exciting in their own right, but they do lead to some potential for counter-intuitive incentives. Like in European club soccer, as I recently explored in a post on whether or not teams always actually “play to win the game,” some teams may go into their conference championships with other things on their mind. Avoiding injury or testing a new strategy could be more important to a team that already feels it has a spot in March Madness wrapped up than winning the conference championship. For years, the Big East was widely thought of as the best and most physical basketball conference in the country. Teams that won or even just went very far in the Big East conference championships often were so physically and mentally drained by the effort that they couldn’t play their best in the NCAA Tournament. This sparked two competing lines of thought. One was that Big East teams shouldn’t try to hard to win their conference championship. The other was that winning the Big East title was in some ways more prestigious than winning March Madness itself.

This year, the power conferences (for the men’s tournament) are the Big 12, Big Ten, Big East, ACC, and SEC. The in-betweens are the American, Mountain West, Pac-12, Atlantic 10, West Coast, and Missouri Valley conferences. The other leagues are mostly tiny conferences with one bid, but of course, we won’t know until the selection committee releases their choices. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Errol Morris on streaking and stealing

I’m not sure Errol Morris is a sports fan. As I watched the second and third installment of his six part series of short films on Grantland, it became increasingly clear to me that Morris is in this primarily for humor. The Heist and The Streaker, like the first film in the series, The Subterranean Stadium focused exclusively on the strange behavior of non-athletes.

The Heist tells the story of four Duke men’s college basketball fans who sneak into the stadium of their arch-rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels, and steal a ceremonial jersey which was hanging on the rafters. There’s a tradition in American sports of honoring a great player by “retiring” his or her jersey. Once a jersey is retired, no one on that team can use that jersey number again. To symbolize this, a giant jersey is ceremonially hung from the rafters of the stadium. In this case, the number was 23 and the player was Michael Jordan. The four Duke fans, who remain nameless throughout the film and whose faces and voices are are obscured, concocted a plot to sneak into the stadium, steal the jersey, and then reveal it during a game between the two team, temporarily modified to support Duke instead of North Carolina. This simple, sophomoric prank goes smoothly, although the hoped for reveal never happens. It’s not, by itself, an extremely interesting subject for a short film but Morris clearly enjoys himself applying all of the tropes of a true-crime film to this nominally illegal act.

The hijinks continue in Morris’ third film in the It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports series with The Streaker. Mark Roberts, the eponymous streaker who gives the film its name, is the world’s most famous streaker. He has streaked at every major sporting event and despite the fact that police forces and security companies all over the world know who he is, he manages to keep doing it. Now in his fifties, he’s still blithely unapologetic about what has become his life’s work. To my disappointment, Morris does not press him on the real potential danger of allowing or encouraging other people to run onto the field. I would have been fascinated to hear what Roberts said if confronted with questions about the times when a fan has run onto the court with violent intent, like the fan who stabbed tennis star Monica Seles in 1993. Instead, we get more high-spirited frivolity, including Roberts’ answer to the question, “would you want to die while streaking?”

I can’t say that I haven’t enjoyed these short films but I am mildly disappointed so far. Morris is such a wonderful film maker and interviewer but I feel his choice of topics is limiting the quality and meaning of these films. In my review of the first film, The Subterranean Stadium, I enjoyed how Morris used a light-hearted subject to examine deeper and more emotive aspects of real life. That second level was missing in these two films for me. What did you think?

2015: North Carolina vs. Duke

In 2015 Dear Sports Fan will be previewing the biggest sporting event of the year in each of the 50 states in the United States plus the district of Columbia. Follow along with us on our interactive 2015 US Map.

North Carolina — North Carolina vs. Duke

College Basketball — February 18, 2015 — 9 p.m. ET on ESPN. Also, March 7, 2015.

It may seem funny that we chose a regular season college basketball game as the biggest sports event in North Carolina for 2015. The thing is… we’re right. There is no bigger sporting event in North Carolina than when Duke University and the University of North Carolina play in men’s college basketball. Indeed, it would be easy to make the case that there’s no bigger college basketball game all year than when these two teams play.

It’s said that familiarity breeds contempt and Duke and North Carolina are a prime example of this. The two schools are only eight miles apart and have played against each other at least two times a year since 1920. For people who live in North Carolina, it’s hard to remain uncommitted to one side or another. You’re either a Blue Devil (Duke supporter) or you bleed Tar-Heel Blue (North Carolina’s nickname is the Tar Heels and they wear baby blue but don’t call it that… 😉 ) It’s a rivalry that cuts through race, class, and family. The Wikipedia article on the rivalry has two wonderful quotes which together paint a wonderful picture of sports antipathy. The first is from Will Blythe’s book about the rivalry, To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever:

To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses sports; it is locals against outsiders, elitists against populists, even good against evil… The rivalry may be a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals.

The other quote is from former U.S. Congressperson Brad Miller, who actually told an AP reporter this in 2012:

If Duke was playing against the Taliban, then I’d have to pull for the Taliban.

What’s the plot?

With Duke and North Carolina, there’s a macro plot about the rivalry as a whole and a micro plot about each edition. We’ll start macro. Like many great college rivalries, the one between Duke and North Carolina can be characterized easily as a rich private school against a public school. Duke is the elite, private school. If you know it mostly for its sports teams or don’t know much about it at all, it’s easy to not realize just how elite it is. Duke accepts only 10% of its undergraduate applicants and 4% of its graduate level applicants. It’s regularly listed as one of the top ten colleges in the country by all sorts of organizations that do that type of ranking. It has an enormous endowment — over $7 billion — and it spends a lot too — over a billion dollars in 2012 on research alone! Duke students and alumni are quite reasonably proud of their school and that pride translates for many of them into obsessive rooting for their school’s sports teams, men’s basketball first and foremost. North Carolina plays the role of the public school. The university is, indeed, a public school, as you can tell from its size — 18,000 undergrads and 12,000 graduate students compared to Duke’s 6,500 and 8,000 — and from its admission stats, which are much more forgiving than Duke’s. Other than that though, the mantle of public schools falls a little uncomfortably on North Carolina’s shoulders. Like Duke, North Carolina is sneaky elite when it comes to academics. North Carolina is consistently sited as one of the top five public universities in the country and claims its place as one of the “public ivies.”

Likewise in basketball, the similarities between the two schools are greater than their differences. They both have incredible histories of winning with no apparent plans to stop any time soon. They are number three and four in all-time wins. Together, they account for nine championships and 33 Final Four appearances. Since the beginning of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) that they both play in, the two teams have won 79% of the regular season titles and 59% of the conference tournaments. They both win. A lot. They’ve also been lucky enough to have two of the top three most well regarded coaches of all time. Dean Smith, who just died recently, coached at North Carolina for 36 years. My favorite story about him, which illustrates his stature and character the best, is that he was so well loved and respected by his former players, including basketball greats in their own right like Michael Jordan and Larry Brown among others, that they continued to call Smith for advice on any important life decision, well into their forties, fifties, and even sixties. Smith would get calls from former players asking for his advice on engagements, house purchases, etc. Duke’s current coach, Mike Krzyzewski is the current holder of the best coach in basketball mantle. He’s coached for Duke since 1980 and, with 932 victories, is the all-time winningest coach. Although he’s rejected countless offers to coach in the NBA, he has coached the USA Basketball team for the last ten years. In a rare but touching show of inter-rivalry solidarity, many Duke fans will be wearing a shirt honoring their late rival, Dean Smith.

This year, Duke is the more highly regarded and ranked team. Duke is currently 21-3 and ranked fourth in the country. North Carolina is no slouch themselves, but they are significantly behind at 18-7 and ranked 15th. Duke is coming off five straight victories. North Carolina has actually lost three of their last four games although two of those losses came in back to back games against highly ranked Louisville and Virginia.

Who are the characters?

Roy Williams — Roy Williams is the current coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels. Williams was not the direct successor of legendary Coach Dean Smith, but he’s the first one who’s stuck. He was born and grew up in North Carolina and went to the University of North Carolina where he played freshman basketball and volunteered for the Varsity team. After graduation, he took a job as a high school coach nearby and after five years there, returned to become an Assistant Coach under Smith at UNC. He stayed for ten years before striking off on his own to become the head coach of the University of Kansas. At Kansas, Williams succeeded admirably, taking the team to four Final Fours and losing two National Championship games. Still, when the North Carolina job opened up in 2003, Williams jumped at it. In his twelve years coaching for UNC, he’s succeeded even more than at at Kansas — three Final Fours and two National Championship victories. He may still live in the shadow of his one time mentor, but he’s comfortable there.

Jahlil Okafor — For years, Duke seemed to be a hold-out against the trend of recruiting athletes of such promise that they were likely to remain in college for only the one year that is required until they turn professional and enter the NBA draft. Jahlil Okafor is exhibit A that that is no longer a reality. Okafor is likely to be the first overall pick of the NBA draft for this year. He’s listed at 6’11 and 270 pounds. Guys that big don’t grow on trees (they’re so big, perhaps it would be more likely for trees to grow on them?) and to be as polished an offensive player as Okafor is extraordinarily rare. Okafor is deadly when he gets the ball around the basket. Watch for Duke to try to get the ball to him close to the basket so he can overpower or out-skill his defender. Okafor’s only weakness is that he’s not a great defender. North Carolina may try to attack him on that end and hope that the refs call a few fouls on him, forcing Duke to limit his playing time.

Who’s going to win?

Duke. Duke should win. They have the best player on the court and the best coach on the sidelines. It is a rivalry though and rivalries bring out strange performances, especially from college kids, so who really knows?

How do free throws work in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

How do free throws work in basketball? It seems like usually a player gets two shots, but then sometimes it’s only one. Can you explain?

Thanks,
Justin

Dear Justin,

A free throw is one element of the penalty given to a player who commits a foul in basketball. The player who the foul has been committed on, if he or she is given a free throw, gets to shoot the ball from the free throw line without any interference from the defending team. The free throw line is fifteen feet away from the basket and, although it is a few feet long, most players shoot from the middle of it, so that they have a straight shot at the basket. Each made free throw is worth one point. Free throws are a valuable commodity because they are among the easiest shots in basketball. Towards the end of games, they become even more valuable to the team that’s behind because they are a way to score without any time elapsing. There are a bunch of different ways to earn a free throw. It’s technical but not incredibly complicated.

Any time a player is fouled while she is shooting (or in the overly technical jargon of sports, “in the act of shooting”) she is awarded the same number of free throws as points she would have scored if her shot had gone in. Usually this is two free throws, but if she was shooting from behind the three-point line when she was fouled, she would get to shoot three free throws. If, despite being fouled, the shot goes into the basket, the basket counts for two or three points (depending on where it was shot from) and the shooter is given a single free throw in recognition of having been fouled. This is called an “and one” and we wrote an entire (and somewhat entertaining, if I remember right) post about it. Fouling a three-point shot is never a good idea, because the expected value of a three-point shot is lower than three successive free throws. Figure that a good three-point shooter will make between 30% and 50% of their three-point shots. One way of looking at this percentage is to imagine that every time they shoot a three, you should expect their team to get between 1 and 1.5 points from that action. Most good shooters make around 80% of their free throws, so if they are given three of them, using the same logic, you should expect them to earn 2.4 points. Fouling a three-point shot that goes in is just about the worst thing you can possibly do, because it gives the other team the chance to earn four points in a single possession.

Depending on the situation, a player that is not shooting the ball when they get fouled may still get to shoot free throws. The most common reason for them to shoot free throws is if the fouling team has fouled too many times in that period of the game. In the NBA, teams are allowed four fouls per quarter before non-shooting fouls earn free throws. In college basketball, it’s a little more complicated. A team is allowed six fouls per half before the other team starts earning free throws. From foul seven to foul nine the player that has been fouled must make their first free throw in order to earn a second. This period is called the bonus or one-and-one. After the ninth foul in the half, any player who gets fouled earns two free throws, just like they would in the NBA after the fourth foul of the quarter. This is called the double bonus. The only other oddity about free throws is the one that is shot as the result of a technical foul. A technical foul is given for a violation of the rules that doesn’t involve physical play within the game. The two most common reasons for technical fouls are arguing, cursing, or otherwise antagonizing a ref and for staying under the basket on defense for more than three seconds without actively guarding an opposing player. When a technical foul is called on one team, the other team gets to choose any player on their team to shoot one free throw and then the game picks up wherever it left off.

As we mentioned in the opening, the clock stops while free throws are being shot. This leads to some tactics at the end of the game that are useful but often very unappealing to watch. If a team is down near the end of the game, they may choose to foul the other team, intentionally giving them free throws but stopping the clock. The idea is to trade free throws for time. Instead of letting the other team run 24 seconds in the NBA or 35 seconds in college basketball off the clock, the trailing team can foul almost immediately, stop the clock, and get the ball back after the free throws. If the team that’s up misses a few free throws and the trailing team can hit three pointers when they have the ball, they can sometimes catch up. When the alternative is certain defeat, even a long-shot strategy like this one is better. Sometimes teams will adopt this strategy earlier in the game if they feel they can take advantage of a player’s inability to hit free throws. Except for technical fouls, the player who gets fouled has to shoot the free throws, so fouling a particularly inept free throw shooter can be an advantage. The most famous example of this was when it was used against Shaquille O’Neill and it picked up the nickname, “Hack-a-Shaq.” Like how the suffix “-gate” is used generically for all scandals now, the prefix “hack-a-” is used for any version of this tactic now.

The last tactic teams use when they choose to give away free throws is actually adopted by teams that are winning in the last few seconds of a game. If a team is up by three points, they may choose to intentionally foul a player to give up two free throws with the knowledge that two points cannot hurt them. The risk of this is that if the player they try to foul can immediately jump up and shoot and convince the ref that they were in the act of shooting a three pointer, they could be given three free throws. In disastrous, doomsday scenarios, that player might also be able to make the three point shot, earning an extra free throw for a fourth point and the lead. That’s what happened to the Indiana Pacers against the New York Knicks in the 1999 playoffs:

So, yes, free throws can be given out in quantities of one, two, or three. There are lots of different rules that dictate when and how many are given but they are mostly understandable. Free throws are a good way of penalizing teams who foul but they lead to some tactics at the end of the game that are almost always (with some notable exceptions) ugly, boring, and unsuccessful.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

College football: If you can't beat them, make them join you

College football is a notoriously hypocritical business. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry but the people who are the main attraction and who take all the physical risk, the players, don’t have salaries. College football players are meant to be amateurs — college kids who also play football. That the NCAA and member Universities are able to maintain this fiction, despite all evidence to the contrary, is absurd. College football is big business. Being a college football player requires well over a 40 hour work week. And, although it varies from school to school and player to player, football is the primary focus for most college football players.

If we’re honest about it, playing football so intensely doesn’t leave that much time for academics. Now, you might be thinking that you didn’t spend that much time on academics when you were in college either. Maybe you spent most of your time following your favorite rock bands, crushing on your classmates, or exploring drugs and alcohol for the first time. Well, you weren’t as focused as most college football players, now were you? These athletes are basically holding full-time jobs down AND going to college while you were just messing around. It’s a lot to ask and frankly, there are lots of ways around it. Many big football schools find a way to make the academic side of college life easier for their football players. They get them private tutoring or help them figure out which classes are easiest to pass. There are also countless more shady means that universities use to help their football players concentrate on football while playing into the charade of academics that the NCAA requires of them.

This is all pretty stupid. The most obvious suggestion would be to divorce football from academia. Create a minor-league for the NFL so that young football players can concentrate 100% on developing their skills while also making a fair salary for the entertainment value they help create. For years, however, I’ve been fascinated by another option. What if, instead of divorcing football, universities embraced it even more fully? Create a football major and allow football players to major in their sport. You can already graduate college with a major in ballet or bassoon. What’s the difference? Like football, ballet is primarily a physical activity. Like football, the market for high-paying bassoon jobs is harsh and limited. That doesn’t stop either of those pursuits from being thought of as legitimate studies. If anything, I would argue that you could create an extremely interesting major around football.

For the first time, this idea seems to be gaining a little bit of mainstream attention, if not steam. Ben Strauss wrote an article in the New York Times about the idea recently. In the article, he quotes two key supporters of the idea, “David Pargman, a professor emeritus in educational psychology at Florida State University, and William D. Coplin, director of the public affairs program at Syracuse University.” I recommend reading the whole thing but here are some highlights:

Dr. Pargman, who started a doctoral program in sports psychology at Florida State and has written several books on athletes, proposes a sample curriculum for a sports performance major that follows two years of basic studies, including anatomy and physiology, educational psychology and a particular sport’s offensive and defensive strategies. By graduation, players would have taken courses in public speaking, nutrition, kinesiology and business law. Practices become labs, supervised and graded by their coaches, though grades wouldn’t depend on game performance — no A for scoring a touchdown.

Dr. Coplin, who has spent his career designing programs to serve students in the job market, believes the skills learned through sports — from highly specialized training to learning a complex playbook to simply being a good teammate— are more valuable to employers than classroom knowledge… He envisions a three-credit seminar in conjunction with an “internship” — a semester on the team. The course could require players to keep logs of what they do each day and write a self-evaluation on career-building skills. “Athletes sometimes don’t realize the value of the skills they’re learning,” Dr. Coplin said. “But employers do.” He argues that their skill set — competitiveness, drive, the ability to work toward a common goal and take responsibility — is particularly valuable in sales and business management. Another idea for the class: an Excel lesson in which a player tracks his performance using trend lines and percentage change.

In the uneasy marriage between higher education and football, divorce is more likely than a renewal of vows, but I am fascinated by the idea of the two sides embracing more fully. I’m a lover not a hater, I guess.

What the top ten dirtiest phrases in football actually mean

If you’ve ever watched a football game on television, you know that some football phrases are a little… umm… dirty sounding? The internet is littered with websites that celebrate these phrases but very few of them actually explain what they mean in the context of football. Not to worry, here are simple explanations of the top ten dirtiest phrases in football. We want you to know what they mean so that you can feel free to giggle at them without restraint!

Illegal touching

During every football play, there are eleven players on the field for each team. Of the eleven players on the offense, only six are eligible to catch a forward pass. The other five are ineligible. Illegal touching is a penalty called against the offensive team if one of the five ineligible players catches or intentionally touches a football thrown forward by the quarterback. An eligible receiver can make himself ineligible by running out of bounds. If an eligible receiver runs out of bounds, returns to the field, and catches a pass, it’s also illegal touching.

Illegal use of the hands

Illegal use of the hands sounds dirty for the same reasons as illegal touching, but it’s a completely different penalty. Instead of mandating how a player can touch the ball (like illegal touching does), this rule mandates how players can touch each other. Mostly this means that players, with the sole exception of a player running with the ball, cannot use their hands to hit each other in the face, neck, or head.

Tight End

There’s no denying that for many, admiration of football players’ butts is a big part of the enjoyment of watching football. However, that’s not what the phrase “tight end” refers to. Tight end is a position on the offensive side of football. If you picture a football field right before a play starts, there are usually a group of big dudes on the offense lined up parallel on the line of scrimmage where the ball is. It’s customary for five of these players to be offensive linemen; the center, the guards on either side of him, and the tackles on either side of the guards. There is often a sixth man on the line. This is the tight end and he plays a hybrid position, blocking like an offensive lineman sometimes and looking to catch passes like a wide receiver at other times. They are called the tight end because they start each play as the receiver closest (tight) to either side (end) of the offensive line.

Sack

Jumping into the sack with a consenting partner should be great fun for both parties but a sack in football is only fun for one side. In football, the use of the word sack is more akin to an invading army that sacks a castle than sack referring to a bed. Defenders sack the quarterback if they tackle him to the ground while he is holding the ball. Sacks are a big deal because they are one of the few ways a defense can force the offense to start their next play with the ball farther from the end-zone they are trying to score in than where they started. As a bonus dirty sounding phrase, a strip sack is when a defender knocks the ball away from the quarterback while he is tackling him to the ground.

Penetration in the backfield

The word penetration has been falling in popular use steadily since 1982 which makes it all the more jarring when you hear it during a football game. In football, a defensive team is said to penetrate the backfield when one of their defenders pushes through the offensive line trying to block them. Like with sack, the metaphor of a castle siege is helpful. Think of the offensive line as the castle walls and the player with the ball — quarterback or running back — as the prize the defenders are trying to get. When a defensive player breaks through that wall, he has penetrated. The area behind the offensive line is called the backfield — which is why the players who start the play back there are called quarterbacks, fullbacks, running backs, and halfbacks.

Hit the hole

So far we’ve used the metaphor of a castle wall to describe a team’s offensive line. On running plays, when the offense is planning to hand the ball to a running back who then sprints towards the end zone, the offensive line transforms from a wall to a series of bulldozers. Individually and as a unit, they attempt to block, shove, push, and trick the defenders opposite them in particular, predetermined directions. Their goal is to create lanes clear of defenders for their running back to sneak through on his way down the field. From the running back’s perspective, these lanes look like openings or holes in the virtually solid mass of humanity on the field. A running back who takes advantage of one of these holes by running through it is said to have hit the hole.

Gap discipline

Calm down Prince fans, this phrase is about control but only in terms of the positioning of defenders on a football field. In our post earlier this year about identifying the mike linebacker, we learned that many terms on both sides of football are relative as opposed to absolute. That makes sense because the offense has to plan a play that’s flexible enough to adjust to whatever the defense is running and vise-versa. One way defenses do this is by labeling the space between offensive linemen, centered on the center who starts each play with the ball. The space between the center and the players on either side of him are called the A gaps. The next two spaces between offensive linemen are called B gaps and after that, C gaps. During a defensive play, a defensive player may have the responsibility of trying to get through one of these gaps to sack the quarterback or to plug one of the gaps and make sure the offensive line cannot move him to create a hole for their running back. A defender shows gap discipline when he sticks to his assignment despite seeing something that could tempt him to leave and chase another opportunity. Offenses love to trick defenders away from their assignments with clever fakes and then punish them for their lapses.

Getting stripped

Although football players do sometimes have wardrobe malfunctions during the game, getting stripped refers to a player who loses the ball, not his pants. Holding on to the football is the primary responsibility of every player who handles the ball because losing it can be an enormous mistake. A ball that is lost or fumbled is up for grabs and if the defense grabs the ball, their team gets to switch to offense on the next play.

Ball skills

In the last two weeks, because of Deflategate, we’ve heard enough sophomoric ball puns for a lifetime. Ball skills is a common football phrase that refers to the abilities of a wide receiver or defensive player to catch the football, even while moving at full speed through a chaotic environment. Many football players have remarkable ball skills. The greatest example of ball skills during this past season was this stunning catch from New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. Quarterbacks also demonstrate their ball skills by convincingly executing fake hand offs or fake throws.

Double teamed

Double teaming in football is when two players are assigned to either attack or defend a single member of the opposing team. This could be two defenders covering a single wide receiver to prevent him from catching the ball or two offensive linemen blocking a single defensive lineman from getting to the quarterback. In any scenario, spending two of your players to deal with one player on the opposing team is risky business. It means that somewhere else on the field, your team is likely to be outnumbered. Some players like defensive lineman J.J. Watt or wide receiver Calvin Johnson are so dangerous that they get double teamed on almost every play. Not only are they frequently still able to make plays, but by forcing the other team to double team them, they make it easier for their teammates to succeed.

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Why is it hard to make football safer by changing its rules?

This week, we’ve published three posts about the impact of brain injuries on football. Each post has been setting the stage for tomorrow’s post on how to fix football. The first post set the stage by establishing that brain injuries suffered by football players are severe and can be life-threatening. The second explored how, why, and when brain injuries occur during a football game. What are the factors that contribute to their frequency? In the third post we answered the seemingly rhetorical but important question of why the leaders of football and the National Football League, specifically need to take this issue seriously; that brain injuries threaten the very existence of football as we know it. Today, we’ll take a look at the history of rule changes in football and some of the factors that make finding a rule-based way of preventing brain injuries so difficult.

There are a million ways to change football to reduce or eliminate head injuries. It’s easy! In fact, there are some versions of football that we’ve been playing for years that have very few brain injuries. Why not convert the NFL to a touch football or flag football league? Or we could think outside the box and allow tackling but play on a field made of rubber, filled with water four feet deep. Technology could provide another way forward. Each player could be fitted with sensors and a virtual reality headset and then left in individual padded rooms, each 120 yards by 53 yards big. They could safely play a virtual game of football that was as athletically challenging without any risk of injury.

Of course, I’m not serious about any of these suggestions (although, I would pay a lot of money to see the football-in-a-pool game played). Each would, in its own way, be unacceptable. Brain injuries in football are a problem in part because people love football so much. If a less prized activity was damaging its participants, it would be much easier to change it or write it off completely. Our goal is to find a way to reduce or eliminate football’s brain injuries without stealing football’s essence.

In this mission we should be heartened by one element of football’s history: it’s constantly changing rules. For more than a hundred years, football organizations have changed the rules of football, sometimes quite significantly, to improve the safety of its players. Some of these rule changes are obvious in their intent, like the move in the mid-60s to shift the goalpost from on the goal line to behind the end zone. This was a protective measure to keep players from running full speed into concrete or metal goal posts. Likewise, rules like the 1962 prohibition against grabbing another player’s face mask and the 1980 rule against (I kid you not) clubbing an opponent’s head or neck with your fist, were obvious safety measures.

The problem that we face today is that many of the safety measures introduced since 1906 sought to make football safer by reducing the time players spent literally engaged with each other. The theory seems to have been that players running in space were safer than players grappling and wrestling with each other. As we know from our coverage of how brain injuries happen in football, as sound as this logic sounds, it runs almost totally counter to the truth when it comes to brain injuries. The more space there is for players to run, the faster they go, and the faster they go, the worse the collisions with other players are for their brains. Let’s take a quick trip through the history of football rule changes. Note how each safety measure encourages less close grappling and more running freely around the field.

In 1906 a rules committee was brought together to save football. In the past five years, 45 people had died playing football, 18 in 1905 alone. Political pressure, coming from as far up as President Theodore Roosevelt, was sending a strong message: “Make the game safer or face it being outlawed.” The two biggest changes the committee made were to legalize the forward pass and change the distance required for a first down from five yards to 10 yards. These may not seem like safety measures but before then, without the forward pass and needing only to get five yards to earn a first down, football resembled nothing more than hand-to-hand combat. The play was packed into a small space where kicking, punching, tearing, and gouging could leave players with broken ribs, necks, or skulls. Spreading the game out was meant to prevent these types of injuries.

This idea has continued into modern football. In 1974, a rule was created to limit defenders to touching a wide receiver only once when more than three yards from the line of scrimmage. In 1978, this was extended to five yards. Also that year, offensive linemen were allowed to block with their arms extended instead of having to be body-to-body with the defender they were trying to block. In 1979 the NFL got more particular about how players could block each other, eliminating blocking below the waist on kicking plays. In 1987 offensive linemen were protected from having one player dive at their knees while another engaged them higher up. In 1989 defensive players with a clear path to the quarterback were prohibited from hitting them in the knees. In 1992 defenders got a little protection when offensive blocking below the thigh was made illegal. In 1995 the chop block and lure blocking techniques were prohibited. In 1999 blocking from behind was prohibited. It wasn’t quite a rule change, but in 2004 refs were instructed to begin actually enforcing illegal contact, pass interference, and defensive holding rules. In 2007 the penalty for blocking a wide receiver below the waist was expanded from 5 to 15 yards.

Over more than 100 years, the way that football players engage each other has moved from fighting to grappling to tackling to hitting and now to colliding. Every rule that has limited the times and places that players can make contact with each other has contributed to giving players more time and space. For an athlete, time and space equal speed. Speed makes for an exciting game but it also makes for more explosive collisions when players do meet up.

Even as we acknowledge that historic rule changes, even those put in place for player safety, have made the game more dangerous, it’s hard to imagine undoing them. Sure, it’s better to break an ankle than bruise a brain, but would we really make the dangerous practice of blocking below the thigh legal again? In an era that is so concerned about player safety, changing the rules of football to legalize more brutal but less damaging forms of violence does not seem like a good way forward.

The problem is that continuing to add prohibitive rules to football might not work either. There are two problems with continuing along the path of outlawing more and more different forms of hitting. First, given the freedom and athleticism of offensive players, defenders are reaching a limit. They simply don’t have time to get their bodies into a position to hit someone the right way all the time. The defender is moving at high speed, the running back or wide receiver is moving equally fast. Penalties, fines, and suspensions won’t prevent all the dangerous hits in the game, much less the subconcussive injuries caused by the offensive and defensive lines clashing, or the fluke injuries that result from the game’s chaos. These types of prohibitive safety rules are also unpopular among football players and fans. Central to the popularity of football is a culture of toughness. There’s no sport that is more reliant on its players to sublimate their bodies, thoughts, and desires to the team. No football play works thanks to one player, each play is the product of eleven players moving in lockstep. Even the greatest football player in the most important position is relatively unimportant compared to a great player in another sport. Wide receivers cannot catch passes thrown poorly and quarterbacks cannot throw if they don’t get good blocking. The violence of football is important to its culture because it reinforces the core truth football teaches, that no single person is as important as a team.

If we cannot undo the decades of well-intentioned, safety-first rules that have counterintuitively made football into an even more dangerous sport for its players’ long-term health and we cannot protect them by continuing to prohibit even more forms of violence, then what can we do to save football? Tomorrow I’ll suggest a single, small change that would unilaterally make football safer without changing the essential nature of the game. We can save football.

Announcing Football 201: All About Positions

The Super Bowl is coming up quickly but there’s still enough time to impress your friends or family at their Super Bowl party! In Football 101 we went over why people like football, what down and distance are, how football scoring works, the inside scoop on fantasy football and football betting, how to decipher TV scoreboard graphics, and a great way to start having fun while watching football. Today, we’re announcing the release of our newest course, Football 201. This one is all about the mysteries of football positions. You’ll learn all about each of various positions in football: quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end, offensive line, defensive line, linebacker, defensive back, and kicker. Our content covers the basics of how to identify each position when you watch football, what responsibilities players in each position are expected to fulfill, and what characters are usually attracted to playing or rooting for each position. At the end of the course you will get a fully unaccredited diploma of graduation, which you can hang on your wall with pride. If you enjoy the course, (and I hope you do!), I’d be thrilled to have you as a regular subscriber to our daily or weekly digests and for Football 301, coming soon! If you haven’t taken Football 101 yet and would like to, click here, or sign up in the form below.

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Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Football: the good and the very, very bad

It’s been a while since I cleaned out my short-term storage box of the best articles I’ve been reading about sports. Lately it’s been mostly full of articles about football, which is no surprise considering football is the most popular sport in the country and now is a particularly exciting time for both college and professional football. The articles that I was most interested in grouped roughly into two piles: those that make football seem interesting by revealing an unexpected facet of the sport and those that reveal the corrosive nature of football as a business, especially at the college level.

What Cowboys Have in Common With Ballerinas

by Kevin Clark for the Wall Street Journal

The Dallas Cowboys were eliminated from the playoffs this weekend but it certainly wasn’t from a lack of athletic ability or fitness. In fact, the most single spectacular athletic feat of the weekend was probably Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant’s leaping almost-catch near the end of their game against the Green Bay Packers. Was he able to do that without injuring himself because of the Cowboys innovative use of an old, low-tech ballet apparatus?

Stretching in the NFL is a shockingly archaic endeavor, possibly the only thing in this tightly controlled game that is left up to players. So, looking for an edge, the Dallas Cowboys changed it up this year. And they started with ballet bars.

“Yeah, it’s funny to see a 300-pound guy holding on to a ballerina bar, but in the NFL, if you are going to play for any length of time, you’ve got to take care of your body,” said linebacker Cameron Lawrence. “They don’t care that it’s a ballerina bar—if it helps them, they are on it.”

Confessions of a Fixer

by Brad Wolverton for the Chronicle of Higher Education

College sports are full of hypocrisy. The adults in the room — the coaches, universities, and governing bodies like college conferences and the NCAA — make gobs of money while the kids take all the risk and do most of the hard work. Players who work on football 40+ hours per week in one of the most highly competitive workplaces in the world are also expected to be college students, even the ones who could theoretically make a living in football already if it weren’t for an NFL rule that keeps teams from drafting them until two full years after their high-school graduation. These hypocrisies are already well known and the academic short-cuts or outright cheating that they encourage should not be a surprise to anyone. The most interesting part of this article for me is how you can read between the lines and see in this story, a larger story of how colleges themselves are in a race to the bottom to attract paying but students for online courses that might not actually serve the students all that well even if they were taken honestly. It’s a discouraging mess.

The fixer’s name is Mr. White. His side business was lucrative. One year, he says, he made more than $40,000 arranging classes. But he says money wasn’t his motive. Part of it was about the players. He believes that many would not have earned a major-college scholarship without his help.

A coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference was recruiting one of the top junior-college players in the country, but the player was short on credits. The coach called Mr. White to “get him done.” He made some students believe they were completing the classes, handing them packets of practice problems he had picked up from the math lab at his community college and making sure they logged time in study halls as if they had done the work. After they finished the packets, he would toss them in the trash. Then he would log in to BYU’s website to complete the real assignments. That’s how some coaches preferred it, he says, as it assured them there wouldn’t be any slip-ups. That also meant that the coaches didn’t have to worry about retaliation. If the players had no knowledge of the fraud, Mr. White says, they couldn’t hold it against anyone.

The Men Who Protect the Man

by Robert Mays for Grantland

In football, the “man” is frequently the quarterback. The leader of the offense, the quarterback is the most important and irreplaceable part of a football team. That’s why he’s the most tempting target for defenses to try to hit hard enough to injure or dissuade him from continuing to play as well as he would otherwise play. This dynamic makes the offensive line, the group of players charged with protecting the quarterback from opposing defenders, the most interesting people on a football team. Grantland football writer Robert Mays spent some time recently with the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers who protect quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and wrote this article about who they are as individuals and as a unit.

By keeping the same five linemen almost the entire season, the Packers have been able to build their vocabulary into an entire language. “We’ve got so many dummy calls,” Sitton says. “Half the shit we say doesn’t mean a thing. It’s pretty cool when you can evolve within the season, learning a whole new thing.” In past seasons, the line has been a band forced to replace its drummer or bassist every week. The entire offense goes from writing songs to relearning chords. This year, they can riff, take chances. They can be a 1,500-pound Radiohead.

“When you get a hodgepodge line that’s changing week to week, you just kind of have to go by the base rules on a lot of plays,” Rodgers says. “The base rules are decent, but when you can incorporate your own creativity to the plays at the offensive line positions, you can really enhance them. So the communication has been amazing.”

“If we were ’N Sync,” Lang says, “[Josh would] be Justin Timberlake. He’s Frankie Valli, and we’re the Four Seasons.” Bakhtiari goes on, thinking ahead an album or two: “If he wanted to, he could go solo, and we’d all fizzle out.”

USC Football Team Doctor Admits to Ignoring FDA and NCAA Painkiller Regulations

by Aaron Gordon for Vice Sports

Football players never cease to amaze with their fearless nature and their seeming invulnerability to pain. Surely they are among the toughest athletes in the world (along with ice hockey players and ballet dancers) but this article suggests that they are also much more commonly shot up with drugs before and even during games than we might expect. This is the story of one NFL prospect who is now suing his college team for giving him irresponsible medical advice and treatment which led not only to the demise of his professional dream but also to some very serious immediate medical risk.

In some cases, the use of Toradol was prophylactic—that is, given before games in anticipation of future pain, and not to treat current injuries—and accompanied by little or no physical examination of players… Although the Minnesota pregame shot provided temporary relief, Armstead was still in pain during halftime, at which point he said Tibone “poked and prodded my shoulder, and he stuck a needle in my shoulder.” Again, Armstead said, his pain became manageable for a brief period, but by the fourth quarter he was taken out of the game because his left arm hurt so much that he couldn’t use it at all.

After the season ended, Armstead reported to the University Park Health Center three times between February 4 and February 23 of 2011, complaining of constant chest pain… As a result of this diagnosis, two of Armstead’s visits to the Health Center resulted in additional Toradol injections. By the beginning of March, Armstead’s condition worsened. A MRI exam revealed that he had suffered an acute anterior apical myocardial infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack. Myocardial infarctions are specifically mentioned by the FDA as a possible risk of Toradol use, made likelier by repeated off-label use and combining the painkiller with other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories such as Ibuprofen and Naproxen, drugs that Tibone and USC training staff also had administered to Armstead during the season.

In his deposition, Tibone said he didn’t “agree with” FDA warnings about Toradol’s cardiovascular risks. He did not provide supporting evidence for his position, admitting that before and during the period he gave the drug to Armstead and other USC players he: (a) conducted no research or surveys on Toradol’s adverse effects; (b) read no peer-reviewed journal articles on the matter prior to Armstead’s heart attack; (c) did not investigate the drug beyond talking to NFL trainers he knew and having a brief, informal conversation with a friend who is a cardiovascular surgeon.

2015: College Football Championship plot and characters

Texas — The College Football Playoff Championship Game

College Football — January 12, 2015 — Oregon Ducks vs. Ohio State Buckeyes, 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.

For the first time ever, college football is using a playoff system to determine the best team in the country. In the past, the national championship was decided by vote (until 1998) or by the result of a single game with its two competitors decided by a mixture of computer and human ranking systems. This year, there was a selection committee made up of thirteen people including some former college coaches, players, athletic directors, as well as a journalist and Condoleezza Rice. These thirteen people chose four teams to play in two semi-final games on New Year’s Day. The winners of those games, Oregon and Ohio State, get to play tonight in the College Football Playoff Championship game. The national championship game is always a big deal but this year it seems even bigger. Having a playoff may or may not be a more fair way of deciding the best team in the country but it absolutely makes it a more compelling sporting event. One of the main problems with the way college football was done in the past was that by the time the national championship game came around, the two teams playing hadn’t played competitively for over a month. That was bad for them and bad for viewers. This way, the teams just played the week before last. They should be at the top of their game and they’re fresh in spectators’ minds.

What’s the plot?

This is Coke vs. Pepsi. Ohio State and Oregon are both big time college football programs. Ohio State has a longer history than Oregon, so they will be playing the role of Coke. Oregon sometimes gets cast as the happy-go-lucky, quirky Pacific Northwest team but actually, they’re the prototypical nouveau riche of college football. The Oregon football program is basically a branch of Nike. Nike co-founder Phil Knight is an alumnus of Oregon, where he ran on the track & field team. As a proud alum but also in what has probably been a smart business decision, he’s donated a lot of money to Oregon athletics. Wikipedia cites figures well above $100 million! The Oregon Ducks football team is famous for their fast-paced style of play and their many, many uniforms. It seems like every game, the team comes out with a brand new style of uniform and all of them make the team seem like the fastest one out there. Or wait, maybe that’s just because they are great athletes. Oregon is Pepsi — a little less traditional, a little quirky, but materially the same as Coke.

Part of the plot, or at least the fun, of this game is how it’s going to be produced on ESPN. ESPN is rallying all of its channels to provide different choices of how to consume the game. If you just feel like watching the football game, you can see it on ESPN in English or ESPN Deportes in Spanish. If you want to watch the game but get different commentary, you have three main options: ESPN2 will be doing a “Film Room” take on the game with a bunch of coaches breaking down the tactics, ESPNU will have a group of random ESPN personalities blabbing about the game as they watch it together, and ESPN News will be showing the game with a group of ESPN analysts talking. On ESPN3, the online streaming service, you can get the game synched up with either the Ohio State radio announcers or the Oregon radio announcers, or you can watch the whole thing from that cool “Spider Cam” that roams over the field, suspended by wires. My favorite option is the “Sounds of the Game” option on ESPN Classic that shows the game without any commentators at all! How cool will it be to just hear sounds from the stadium itself?

Regardless of which team wins this game, it will be a fairy tale ending for the winning team’s quarterback. If Oregon wins, their quarterback Marcus Mariota will be like the cowboy wearing the white hat, riding off into the sunset after vanquishing all his enemies. If Ohio State wins, their quarterback, Cardale Jones, will be a true Cinderella story. The third quarterback on his own team, winning this game would indelibly leave a mark on college football history. Let’s find out more about the characters.

Who are the characters?

Cardale Jones — Quarterback is by far the most important single position in football. Great quarterbacks are extremely rare and even functional ones are difficult to find. Teams that lose their starting quarterback to a long term injury very rarely have an acceptable backup who can maintain the level of play at a high enough level for the team to succeed. Teams that lose their first and second string quarterback are almost always dead in the water. We’re seeing that now in the NFL with the Arizona Cardinals whose play has declined dramatically as they descended from Carson Palmer to Drew Stanton to Ryan Lindley. Ohio State has been through the exact same series of injuries this year but each time they lose a quarterback, a new one steps in and the team doesn’t miss a beat. Cardale Jones is the third quarterback up for Ohio State and in his first game as a starter, he led the Ohio State team to a 59-0 win over Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship game. He followed that up with an unbelievable performance in the team’s semi-final win over Alabama. Jones has an almost stereotypically hard-luck back-story and I certainly hope that he beats the odds to play well in this game.

Marcus Mariota — As long as Mariota can get through this game without shredding his knees, he will be the first pick of next year’s NFL draft. He’s the prototypical modern quarterback. He’s tall (6’4″), fast (sub 4.5 seconds for the 40 yard dash, which is faster than you can imagine), and a good decision maker. If we were better than terrible at identifying good NFL quarterbacks, Mariota would be a sure thing. He’s also a senior, playing his third year for the Oregon Ducks (he sat out his freshman year.) When he won the Heisman trophy this year, he became the first Hawaiian born player to ever get that honor given to the best college football player each year. If he can win this game, he’ll leave college on top of his sport.

Mark Helfrich — Who? Right, that’s the point. Even sports fans don’t know who Mark Helfrich is. He’s the head coach of the Oregon Ducks. Reading this excellent article about him by Michael Weinreb in Grantland makes me feel like maybe there are some college football coaches out there who care about more than just winning and getting paid. Here’s a few tidbits about Helfrich. He grew up in Oregon and loved the Ducks as a kid, even when they were terrible. He played college quarterback for Southern Oregon and later as a pro in Austria during the NFL’s flirtation with developing a minor league in Europe. Instead of screaming and yelling, like many coaches do during the game, he is “thorough and utterly prepared and calm on the sideline, an intellectual at heart who happens to be a football coach.”

Who’s going to win?

Oregon is favored by six points. That may seem like a lot but the over/under (you can bet on whether the combined total of both teams’ scoring is over or under a number set by Vegas) is 74, so six points is only eight percent of the expected scoring. The odds suggest a close, high-scoring game, but I always think that college kids (and they are really kids, after all) tend to get a little more nervous than we expect in the biggest games. My guess is that it takes a little while for the offenses to settle down. That might be enough to give Ohio State a chance to keep up with Oregon and squeak by them for victory in a relatively low scoring game.