Tag: nfl

Super Bowl XLIX: What was going on after the Patriots' interception?

In my daily podcasts where I give a forecast of the next day’s sports happenings, I always start out with the refrain, “Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on!” That might never have been more true than last night at the end of the Super Bowl. A lot of dramatic things happened very quickly at the end of the game and if you weren’t well versed in football’s rules, tactics, and language, it was probably difficult to understand what was happening. Lord knows, the football fans in the room were too busy screaming and hollering to explain it rationally to you. This morning I ran through the biggest play of the game, the interception that Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler made to win the game. The truth of the matter is that the game wasn’t completely over after that play. There were still  20 seconds on the clock. This was enough time for a few confusing things, including a scuffle between players that almost turned into a brawl, and an important penalty. Here’s what happened after the interception and why.

After Malcolm Butler’s interception, there were 20 seconds left and the Patriots had possession of the ball. With that little time, and with the Seahawks only having one timeout, the rest of the game would normally be a formality. There’s a funny little end-game trick about the NFL. It goes back to the rules we talked about in this morning’s post that dictate when the clock runs and when it stops at the end of a play. The clock keeps running if a player is tackled within the field. Because of a loophole in the NFL rule book, a quarterback can simulate being tackled in this manner by simply kneeling with the football. I wrote a whole post about how the kneeling thing works if you want more details. By kneeling with the ball, a team can run up to 40 seconds off the clock on a single play. With only one timeout, Seattle could only stop the clock once — therefore the Patriots needed to kneel twice to win the game.

The problem for the Patriots was where they had the ball. They were so close to their own goal line that there wasn’t enough room to kneel without kneeling in their own end-zone. Remember that the kneel-down is a simulation of being tackled. If a player is tackled with the ball in his own end-zone, the other team has scored a safety. A safety, (covered in more detail in our post about how scoring works in football) is worth two points. Giving up two points wouldn’t have been the end of the world for the Patriots because they were up by four points, but after a safety, the Patriots would have had to kick the ball to the Seahawks. Given even as few as 15 seconds, the Seahawks could possibly have completed a pass or two and kicked a game winning field goal. No way did the Patriots want to risk that!

The Patriots had two options. They had to either call a play that moved the ball forward and then execute it without mistakenly turning the ball over to the Seahawks — a dangerous proposition — or they could try the sneaky way out. As is their M.O., the Patriots went sneaky. They lined up for the play and then just sat there while Tom Brady hollered and screamed to make the Seahawks think he was about to snap the ball and start the play. Movement on both sides of the ball before the play begins is heavily regulated. If members of the offense flinch, their team gets a false start penalty. If members of the defense come across the line of scrimmage where the ball is and touch the offense or force the offense to move in response, they have committed an encroachment penalty. The Patriots knew that Seattle’s defense was furious at the change of fortune from the interception and that they understood the only chance they had left was to tackle whoever had the ball in the end-zone. The Patriots used Seattle’s aggression against them and tricked them into taking a penalty.

The penalty moved the ball five yards up the field and with that much room, the Patriots could easily kneel the ball twice (kneel, Seahawks use their last timeout, kneel again and the clock would run out) and win the Super Bowl. The Seahawks knew that too and the Patriots knew they knew that. It’s customary in these situations for the defense to allow the kneeling to happen. It’s virtually impossible for a defender to get to the quarterback after the ball is snapped but before he can kneel. All that can reasonably happen is an injury. Whether it was because of the unique situation before the penalty where attacking the kneel-down was a reasonable thing to do or just because the Seahawks were angry, they attacked. When this happened, the Patriots got a little angry back at them, more for breaking with convention than anything else, and there was a little bit of a brawl. Once the brawl ended, the Patriots kneeled one last time and then began the celebration in earnest.

Hopefully that made some sense out of what was legitimately a confusing situation, even for football fans. Thanks for reading!

 

Super Bowl XLIX: What happened when the Seahawks lost the ball at the end?

In my daily podcasts where I give a forecast of the next day’s sports happenings, I always start out with the refrain, “Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on!” That might never have been more true than last night at the end of the Super Bowl. A lot of dramatic things happened very quickly at the end of the game and if you weren’t well versed in football’s rules, tactics, and language, it was probably difficult to understand what was happening. Lord knows, the football fans in the room were too busy screaming and hollering to explain it rationally to you. We’ll start with the biggest play of the game, the interception that Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler made to win the game. This play is being called one of the stupidest in Super Bowl history. It was definitely one of the most dramatic.

Let’s pick up the action right after Jermaine Kearse’s insane bobbling catch. This left the Seahawks with a first down on the Patriots five yard line with 1:06 left in the game. First down and five means that the Seahawks have four more chances to get a touchdown by moving the ball into the end zone which is only five yards away. For a review of how down and distance work, read our post on the topic here. Situations at the end of football games are all about down, distance, score, and time. How many more chances do you have to run a play, how far do you need to move the ball to earn more chances or to score, how many points do you need to tie or win the game, and how much time do you have remaining. In this case, the answers were: four more chances, five yards, four points to tie (which means the Seahawks needed to score a touchdown because a field goal would only have given them three points), and 1:06 with two timeouts. At the end of football games, the clock stops at the end of some plays and keeps running at the end of others. The quick run-down is that the clock keeps running if a player with the ball is tackled on the field and stops if a player with the ball runs out of the field or if the quarterback throws a pass that hits the ground without anyone catching it (that’s called an incompletion). At the end of every play, both teams have a chance to call a timeout, which stops the clock, if they have one left. Each team gets three timeouts to use per half.

From this moment on, the teams trading making mistakes (or at least questionable decisions) until Seattle made the final mistake that would cost them the Super Bowl. First — in the confusion following Kearse’s catch, the Seahawks took the second of their three timeouts. This was a relatively minor mistake. A team never wants to use a timeout when the clock is already stopped, as it was in this case because Kearse went out-of-bounds after he caught the ball, but the Seahawks were still in a very good position. 1:06 is plenty of time and four downs is plenty of chances for a team to score a touchdown.

On the next play, the Seahawks handed the ball to running back Marshawn Lynch who ran it four yards, almost scoring a touchdown before he was tackled on the one yard line.

This sets up a second down with one yard to go to score a touchdown and about one minute left on the clock. The Seahawks have one timeout. The Patriots have two. The clock continues to count down because Lynch was tacked on the field.

At this point, you might think that Seattle’s coaches are single-mindedly obsessed with scoring a touchdown and New England’s coaches are thinking of nothing other than stopping them. That’s not quite true. The other thing that each set of coaches is thinking about is timing. If Seattle had scored a touchdown and kicked the extra point, that would have given them seven points to put them up by three. Three is the number of points a team can get for kicking a field goal. New England has a great quarterback, a set of clever wide receivers, and an excellent field goal kicker. Seattle had to have been afraid of scoring too fast and leaving New England time to storm down the field and kick a field goal to force the game into overtime. This is the essentially what had happened to them against Green Bay in their last game when quarterback Aaron Rodgers drove the Packers 48 yards in 1:12 with no timeouts before kicking a field goal to send the game to overtime. Seattle’s ideal scenario is to score a touchdown with as little time left as possible, so that New England cannot do anything on offense. That is why, after Lynch’s run to the one yard line, they chose to let the clock run down, all the way to 26 seconds before running their next play.

And here’s where things went horribly, horribly wrong for Seattle. They decided to throw the ball. You’ve seen the result, but let’s watch it again. Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson throws to his right, towards the bottom of the screen, and, instead of his teammate catching it, Patriots defender, Malcolm Butler catches it. When a defender catches the ball, it’s called an interception,(Inter- because the defender has come between the quarterback and his teammate, and -ception because the defender has caught the ball which in football language is often called making a reception.), and his team gets to switch to offense on the next play. By taking the ball away from the Seahawks offense, this single play took the Patriots’ chance of winning from a very, very slim chance to a near certainty.

It’s being widely called one of the stupidest calls in football history. Why? To understand this, the first thing you need to know is that football players are usually a little like mannikins. Before each play, an offensive coach decides what he wants his players to do and he radios the call into the helmet of the quarterback. The quarterback tells the rest of his teammates and then they execute the play as it was designed. Seattle’s players didn’t decide to throw the ball, their coaches did. Running the ball is safer than throwing it. It varies by situation and by player, but this year 2.6% of all the passes that were thrown in the NFL led to interceptions. Compare this to the percent of running plays that ended with a fumble, which was only 1.6%. When you consider that close to half of all fumbles are recovered by the team that fumbled the ball (which means they get to stay on offense) the percentage drops to .7%. By this metric, passing the ball is almost exactly four times more dangerous than running it. Running, especially for the Seahawks, was also very likely to have been successful. Their running back, Marshawn Lynch is almost the perfect player for this situation. He’s powerful, determined, and good at holding on to the ball. In 2014, he fumbled four out of the 280 times he ran with the ball. That’s only 1.4% of the time. In his career, he’s run the ball 2,033 times and fumbled only 27 times or 1.3% of the time. Both are better than average. He also only needed to go one yard. During the Super Bowl against the Patriots, Lynch had run the ball 26 times. Here was how far he got each time: 3, 5, 0, 4, 3, 5, 5, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5, 3, 3, 3, 15, 7, 0, 3, 14, 1, 2, 2, 1, 5, 4. If his 27th rushing attempt had been anything like his first 26, he would have scored between 85-92% of the time.

There are all sorts of more detailed arguments for why the Seattle coaches did what they did, but hopefully this gives you enough background to understand why people are so down on the play they called. This afternoon we’ll investigate what happened after the interception, when the Patriots had the ball on their own one yard line and then there was a penalty and then there was a fight and then the game was over… until then, thanks for reading.

How to save football: a solution to brain injuries and concussions

The National Football League has a complicated problem. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the league will disappear into oblivion if it can’t find a way to change its product so that football stops killing its workforce without ruining its entertainment value. My favorite simple solution is to reduce the roster size of football teams. From the 53 active players a team is allowed today, I propose reducing the number to 20. This single change will make football a safer and more interesting sport. Think of it as one small step for a rules committee but one giant step for football.

In four posts over the last week, we’ve established the need for football to evolve and explained some of the important factors that constrain how this can be done. Brain injuries are a serious problem for the long term health of football players, whether in the form of concussions or subconcussive injuries. We also know how and when brain injuries happen during a football game. The majority of subconcussive impacts happen in the clash between offensive linemen and defensive linemen, and that concussions are caused primarily when players collide at great speed or can’t prepare themselves for a collision. We chronicled football’s long history of changing rules to protect players from the most violent forms of physical contact, and we discovered that these rules largely made the game more dangerous in terms of concussions by allowing players greater freedom to speed up before hitting or being hit by an opponent. While we are unlikely to take back rules that protect football players’ knees, shoulders, and faces, it is hard to imagine further restricting the game by layering on another set of rules for preventing brain injuries. If football continues on without addressing these problems, it risks having no future at all. If we’re going to fix football, we need to think bigger than that. Or, as it may be in my suggestion, smaller.

Reduce the roster size? Why?

There’s a saying in football, “Speed kills.” In a tactical sense, this phrase means that a fast player, usually a wide receiver or running back on offense, can ruin even the best defensive plan and win a game for his team. What’s also true is that speed is the primary factor in the potentially widespread brain injuries that threaten the future of football. The speed of the game is why wide receivers and defensive backs have no time to brace themselves before they collide and why they are the two most commonly concussed positions. It’s why players can’t avoid kneeing their teammates in the back of the head as they run by. Speed kills.

Speed, not simple physicality, is the reason that football has the highest incidence of concussions of all sports. If it were simply a question of how physical a sport is, then wrestling would top the list. If we could magically slow football down, like a record on a turntable, we could keep the sport we love and rid it of the cancer tearing it apart from within. The easiest way to make football safer is to slow it down.

The problem is: how can you slow football down? I’m not the only one to ask this question. Malcolm Gladwell asked it in his landmark 2009 New Yorker article on this topic: “But how do you insure, in a game like football, that a player is never taken by surprise?” In considering this problem, I asked myself,”What is the biggest factor contributing to football’s speed?”

The reason why football is such a fast game is because its players are able to go at full speed almost all the time. Football players are underutilized. That is, football has less active time than other sports. Active play also takes up a smaller percentage of game time than other sports. Football has larger rosters than other sports and players play a dramatically lower percentage of the game than athletes in other sports. We’ll go into all of this in some detail below. As a result, football players are able to get to full speed and power on every play. They explode off the line of scrimmage, they launch themselves into tackles, they churn their legs, grinding out every inch of every play.

In addition to having the energy to go all out on every play, football’s luxurious roster size gives players the ability to become highly specialized. Players who play offense do not play defense. Players who play offensive line do not run with the ball or catch passes. Players who play cornerback would be lost if asked to play even a position as similar as safety. Teams have players who play defensive end basically only when they know the other team is going to pass. Teams have slot receivers and outside receivers, blocking tight ends and receiving tight ends. Each role on a football team favors a particular body type. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be done by an unusually shaped person, but there is an ideal.

In his brilliant book, The Sports Gene, David Epstein writes about the “big bang of bodies” that occurred in the mid-20th century. As sports leagues became simultaneously more accessible to people of different backgrounds (both non-North Americans and people of color) and exponentially more financially rewarding to players, the diversity of body types across all athletes grew and the specialization of body types in particular sports or positions rocketed. Nowhere is this more obvious than in football, where the average running back today is 5’11” and 215 pounds while the average tackle on the offensive line is 6’5” and 313 pounds.

With few exceptions, specialization has meant increasingly enormous players. Craig M. Booth tracked player weight by position back to the 1950s and created a set of wonderful charts to visualize the changes. The increase in size over time, especially among the largest players on the field, the offensive and defensive linemen, is remarkable. Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton wrote about this in a piece for the Wall Street Journal in 2013: “When I entered pro football in 1961, every member of my offensive line weighed less than 250 pounds. In my last year, 1978, our biggest linemen were only around 260 pounds. No Super Bowl-winning team had a 300-pounder on its roster until the 1982 Washington Redskins. Now it is unusual for a team to have fewer than 10 300-pounders.“

Tarkenton speculates that the increase in size is due to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It’s certainly possible, and stronger enforcement of existing rules against performance-enhancing drugs would be a good thing. Whether or not drugs are involved in helping players bulk up, it’s football’s specialization that enables them to succeed at that size. Ben McGrath, writing for the New Yorker about the future of football agrees: “with specialization came increased speed and intensity, owing, in part, to reduced fatigue among the players, as well as skill sets and body types suited to particular facets of the game.”

The best way, perhaps the only way, to slow football down is to tire out its players. Reducing roster sizes will force players to play more, which will make them play at a slower pace. As a bonus, it will encourage them to train for endurance, lowering their weight and therefore the power they have to hit each other. Even a marginally slower football would be much safer. Remember, these are elite athletes with incredible reflexes. Give them an extra few tenths of a second to see a hit coming and to prepare for it and they can usually prevent a concussion.

A great part about this evolution of football is that it will make the game more interesting to follow. That may seem like small potatoes next to making it safer for its players and by doing so, ensuring the sport’s continued existence, but it’s something almost no other solution can claim. Let’s theorize about the effect of reducing NFL rosters from 46 to 20.

How would reducing roster size change football?

20 still seems like a lot of players, especially if only 11 are needed on the field at one time. It’s two short of twice the number of players you would need if you wanted everyone to play only on offense or only on defense and if you ignored special teams plays and never wanted to have the flexibility to use different formations on offense or defense. I imagine in reality, this is roughly how rosters would break down.

  • 2 quarterbacks (probably still specialists)
  • 7 little guys – wide receivers and running backs who also play defensive back
  • 7 big guys – offensive linemen and defensive linemen
  • 3 medium guys – linebackers or hybrid offensive players, a little like Charles Clay or Marcel Reece today on the Miami Dolphins and Oakland Raiders who play a little fullback, running back, and tight end.
  • 1 kicker/punter

Of the 20 players on the roster, 17 might regularly play both sides of the ball. That’s a big change! It would mean more than doubling the number of plays per game for most NFL players. How would teams react?

Luckily for us, we do have some clue about what would happen. College football is a great experimental sandbox for the NFL. Players in college are smaller and slower than NFL players and because of that, a wider range of strategies is tried and proven successful. Mike Leach is one of the most extreme football scientists who experiment in college football. When he came to national attention in the mid-2000s, Leach was head coach of Texas Tech. His approach to football offense was to raise the tempo of the game until his team was regularly running around twice the number of plays compared to a normal offense; and twice the number of plays that a normal defense was prepared to play in a single game.

In 2005, Michael Lewis wrote an article about Leach for the New York Times magazine and described what happened to the Texas A&M defense when they were forced to defend Texas Tech’s high tempo offense:

The A.& M. front line appeared tired. “The minute you see the defensive line bent over and their hands on their hips,” Hodges told me, “that’s when you know you have them.” The A.& M. linemen were a lot bigger than the Texas Tech linemen. They may or may not have been fatter – Leach insists they were – but their bodies were clearly designed for a different sort of football game than this frenetic one. “That’s the risk of playing 330-pound guys,” Leach said later. “You get good push, but if you got to run around a lot, you get tired.” Before the game, Leach had said to Hodges: “Get those fat guys up front and make them run. They’re already a little slow. By play 40, they’ll be immobilized.” That was one reason he kept sending so many receivers on deep routes: to force the defense to run with them.

Teams like Texas A&M never had an incentive to change the makeup of their roster because they only played at Leach’s pace once a year and against teams their own size the rest of the time. If NFL rosters were cut to 20, teams would have to adjust. A 6’5” 330-pound man can only play so hard and so fast for so long.

There’s no way that I can accurately predict what hundreds of coaches, all working overtime on figuring out the best way to win given the new realities of the sport, would come up with, but I believe these are some likely tactical outcomes:

  • Teams would choose to hire smaller players. The average size of players, particularly offensive linemen, defensive linemen, and linebackers, would come down significantly. 330-pound players would become obsolete and 300-pound players would be relatively rare. Not only would this be because of the greater aerobic demands of the game but also because smaller rosters will reward versatility. In a pinch caused by injured teammates, players will need to be able to play many positions.
  • Most teams would play at a slower tempo. On average, the time between plays would go up as players leverage the full play clocks to catch their breath.
  • A few teams would sell out on a high tempo offense, roster even smaller players who can run all day, and try to do what Mike Leach did to Texas A&M.
  • Regardless of tempo, players will be significantly slower. They’re more likely to be fatigued in-game. Just that factor will slow them down as they conserve their energy for the fourth quarter. Also, because of the increased demand on their endurance, they will train more for that and less for explosiveness. Football players will carry less fast-twitch muscle and much less fat.
  • Players would enter games carrying preexisting injures much less frequently. It’s harder to play through pain when you’re playing twice the number of plays and it’s more risky for a team to bring an injured player into a game when it has so many fewer available substitutions if he cannot finish the game.
  • A greater number of strategies would be used by teams. By encouraging smaller players and slowing the game down just a bit, the field will effectively expand. Tactics like running an option offense, which work today in college football but not the NFL because players in the NFL are too big and fast, will work better in this future NFL. This will make coaches who are great strategists even more important than they are today.

The simple rule change and its likely strategic adjustments will single-handedly make football safer. It will reduce the effect of subconcussive brain injuries as well as concussions.

Is football really less active than other sports?

We think of football as one of the toughest, most physically demanding sports out there. In some ways, this is true. There is no doubt that football players are incredible athletes. Football players run faster, hit harder, and catch better than any other athletes. They endure more spectacular impacts than people in most other sports as well. It’s also true that football players play through injuries that would leave players in other sports sidelined for days and normal people laid up for weeks. In one particular set of ways, though, football is surprising in how little it demands from its players. Football players don’t have to play very much football. It’s this factor that reducing football’s roster size would counteract. Although it sounds dramatic, the figures that follow will show how doing this would be bringing football closer to other sports. What’s actually dramatic is how much of an outlier football is today.

Football has the shortest season of all American professional sports by far: only 16 games. Compared to Major Leagues Soccer’s 34, the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League’s 82 or Major League Baseball’s astounding 162, 16 is a tiny figure. Football players expect to play once a week for around 20 weeks. Players of other sports play several times a week over a longer period.

Football is not the shortest game in terms of game time but look beyond the clock and you see another story. If you focus only on the time that players are actively playing, football has by far the least actual play time. An NFL game is said to have just 11 minutes of action within the 60 minutes of game time. Soccer games are estimated to have 68 minutes of action out of 90 (yes, make your zero minutes of action joke now). I wasn’t able to find a stat for basketball or hockey but because their official clocks stop whenever there is a whistle, it’s safe to assume that they are close to 100% active.

The chart below shows that football players play less and do it over a longer time than players in other major sports. To show this in a single metric I divided the amount of active time during each sport by the amount of real time from the start of a game to the end. As you can see, football players are active only 6% of that time. This is far less than other sports.

Pro Sport Game Time Real Time Active Time Percent Active
Football 60 min 190 min 11 min 6%
Soccer 90 min 105 min 68 min 65%
Basketball 48 min 138 min NA (Assume 100%) 35%
Hockey 60 min 139 min NA (Assume 100%) 43%

One would be forgiven for thinking that this relative idleness makes football safer. If football is dangerous, this line of thought would say, then how can playing less of it make it more dangerous? The problem is that the less active players are during a game, the more they are able to exert themselves when they are active. A football player, playing only 6% of the time over more than three hours can exert themselves to the fullest on every play. They can go full speed and as we already discussed, speed kills.

Even six percent is actually a gross overstatement of how active a football player is during a game. Football is divided into three phases: offense, defense, and special teams. Offensive players virtually never play on defense, defensive players almost never play on offense, and special teams (for kickoffs, field goals, and punts) often are a separate group of players. At most, an offensive or defensive player will be active not for 11 minutes but for around four minutes and 40 seconds, but even that overstates how much active playing time players get because most players don’t play all the plays, even in their phase of the game. Football is a game of specialist players who are deployed when the situation calls for their skills.

Football’s specialization is made possible by the deep rosters of football teams. Football teams have the largest rosters of any sport. For every football game, a team can have 46 players on the sidelines, in pads and helmets, ready to step onto the field when needed. That’s close to double the sport with the next largest roster! Let’s see how it compares to other sports:

Pro Sport Players on Field Players Available Percent Utilized
NFL Football 11 46 24%
NHL Hockey 6 20 30%
NBA Basketball 5 13 38%
MLB Baseball 9 25 36%
English Premier League Soccer 11 25 44%

As you can see, the numerical discrepancy in utilization is not as large as it is with active playing time but it is still noticeable. College football is even worse, with rosters varying from 60 to 105 players, all eligible to play in a single game! Realistically, there are factors in other sports that artificially lower their utilization numbers. Common wisdom in the NBA says that a winning team cannot have more than a seven or eight-man rotation, nine at most. NBA teams carry 13 players but a handful of players play very little. Baseball’s roster includes a rotation of starting pitchers that only play once every five games and relief pitchers who play only small portions of games. Soccer has limited substitution rules that limit a team to three substitutions per game. So while 25 players are eligible to play in each game, only 14 may actually do so. If we take those factors into consideration, the table looks more like this:

Sport Players on Field Players Available Percent Utilized
NFL Football 11 46 24%
NHL 6 20 30%
NBA 5 9 55%
MLB (position players) 8 13 62%
EPL 11 14 79%

Hockey is the only sport close to the NFL in terms of player utilization. Hockey players, who play between one third and one half of the game in 40-second to one-minute spurts, are the second most underutilized athletes. It’s no surprise that hockey’s brain injury crisis rivals football’s.

Is this the perfect solution?

This isn’t a perfect solution. For one thing, it’s almost impossible to imagine it happening. Despite being a safety measure intended to protect football players, it would also result in the loss of three fifths of the current NFL jobs. That’s a problem! Not only would it violate the terms of the current collectively bargained agreement between the NFL and the NFL Players Association but it’s pretty crazy to think any future Players Association would allow it. The truth is that a combination of factors will need to be in play to solve the concussion crisis. Here are some other things that should be considered.

  • Fix the helmets. Whole essays could and have been written about just this topic but a brief summary is that football helmets have evolved to protect against cracked skulls and broken noses but not concussions. They are so good at doing the job that they were designed to do that players use them as weapons. A lighter football helmet would help prevent concussions. Creating a football helmet with no face-mask or by removing them completely might teach football players to play in a safer way. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds, one college football team is already practicing without helmets.
  • Increase the penalties for dangerous play. Football could adopt something like soccer’s yellow card/red card or hockey’s power play. Both of these systems promote safer play by disproportionately penalizing the team of players who break the rules. One hockey executive also proposed fining coaches and team owners in addition to players for unsafe play.
  • Add limited substitution rules. The sport that does this today is soccer. Although soccer teams carry 25 players, they are only allowed to substitute three times during a game. The benefit of this would be that you could preserve more jobs for football players while having the same effect on the speed of the game. The downside is that, like soccer is facing now, football would face the serious issue of an injured player staying in a game because his team has run out of substitutions and cannot replace him.

Although I hope football reduces its rosters to protect players from brain injuries, I’m not holding my breath. A more realistic hope is that medicine catches up to the demands of the sport. Progress is already being made. A recent study was able for the first time to find evidence of damage in the brains of living football players. Given time and the continued incentive to study this topic, we will develop tests that can diagnose signs of future debilitating problems early enough to prevent young football players from continuing to play until their brains are irrevocably damaged.

Still, a writer can dream, can’t he? In my dream world, the NFL doesn’t wait for scientists to figure this one out. Instead, they do what the leaders of their sport have been doing for over 100 years and change the rules of the game to improve the safety of its players. The simplest solution is to reduce teams’ rosters down from 46 to 20 players. This leaves football’s core rules the same and makes football more interesting to watch. By rewarding versatility and endurance, this single change would make players lighter and slightly slower. Asking football players to do more is not an intuitive way of protecting them, but it’s the best solution out there.

Here’s to saving football! To celebrate, I’ve invented a time machine, traveled three years into the future and made a copy of a Super Bowl preview from 2018 — the year after the NFL reduced its roster size to 20. Enjoy the game, both today and in the future.

Super Bowl Preview

Thursday February 1, 2018 • Minneapolis, Minnesota,

Roster construction is the overwhelming story leading up to Super Bowl LII between the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles. The action on the field won’t begin until Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 6:30 p.m. ET but the games are already under way. The Super Bowl coaches don’t have to show their hands until the morning of the big game and both New England’s Bill Belichick and Philadelphia’s Chip Kelly are planning on using every minute of that time to perfect their strategies and keep the other side guessing.

We sent our best investigative football reporters to team practices this week but they came away with more questions than answers. Here are three of the hottest questions from each side of the big game.

New England Patriots

  1. Will the Patriots dress 6’5” 300 pound OT/NT Marcus Cannon or will they leave him out of the lineup and go small? The Eagles have been forcing their opponents to go small against them all season by not dressing anyone over 265 pounds. Belichick does not like to have the style of play dictated to him but it’s hard to imagine Cannon playing more than 15 or 20 plays if he is in the lineup.
  2. If New England dresses only four linemen, that’s a hint that they’ll be doing more of the flexbone/triple option plays that helped them get by the Oakland Raiders in the last round. The Patriots are fully capable of surprising us all but one would imagine that similarities between the Eagles and Raiders, who both go by the 2/7/7/4 rule would suggest a similar approach.
  3. Who will suit up at quarterback? Since Jimmy Garoppolo was injured in week 15, the Patriots have gone with a three-man rotation at QB: Cardale Jones, Julian Edelman, and Denard Robinson. Each QB/WR/RB has played in all of the Patriots playoff games and Belichick frequently mixes two or three qbs in the backfield simultaneously. After Robinson’s 4-7, 2 interception performance in the Conference Championship, there are rumors of a shortened rotation.

Philadelphia Eagles

  1. What chance does LeSean McCoy have to play this Sunday? He is said to be making good progress in recovering from the brain injury which he suffered making a game-saving tackle in the first round 34-32 victory over the Minnesota Vikings. Kelly is known for having very little appetite for dressing a player carrying even a slight injury but McCoy could be the rare exception. It’s hard to imagine a more important player for the Eagles than McCoy if he could play throughout the game.
  2. How long can starting quarterback and defensive end Colin Kaepernick hold up? Word from Eagles camp is that their closer, Philip Rivers, would be available as early as the third quarter, but it’s been ten weeks since the last time they asked the 36-year-old to begin his aerial assault earlier than the fourth quarter.
  3. Will the Eagles roster a kicker after missing out on three fourth down attempts that could easily have been converted to points? Head coach Chip Kelly and OC, Mike Leach, are known for their principled stand against kicking but is the Super Bowl really time to hold to principles? 6’, 193-lb Cody Parkey is not much of a field player but did make a couple of good plays at linebacker when pressed into service during the Eagles week six game against the Washington Warriors.

2015 NFL Super Bowl Good Gop, Bad Cop Precap

All year, we’ve been bringing you previews of every NFL game thanks to our two football focused members of the police force. Well, some police force anyway, we’re not really sure what they do when they’re not arguing about football. We weren’t going to have them do a Super Bowl precap edition (mostly for contractual reasons, their rate goes up as the season goes along) but I happened to overhear them in the break room. I quickly turned my recorder on and later transcribed what I heard. Here it is.

Super Bowl XLIX

Sunday, February 1, at 6:30 p.m. ET, on NBC

New England Patriots vs.  Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: It’s the Super Bowl! All the excitement of the football season wrapped into a single game! I can’t wait!!

Bad cop: That’s just the thing. There are only two teams left. Football is at its best on Sundays when you can sit down on the couch and watch 28 teams play for ten hours straight without moving. In so many ways, the Super Bowl is a let down. There are only two teams, there’s only one game. Most likely, even if you’re a football fan, your team isn’t playing. No fantasy football.

Good cop: But this Super Bowl is the culmination of the whole year! And we’ve got the best two teams playing! The Patriots and Seahawks were the two teams with the best records in each of their conferences and now we get to see who’s better! It’s one of the most closely matched Super Bowls in history!!

Bad cop: Did you read Five Thirty Eight’s article headlined, “The Patriots And Seahawks Are The Best. This Could Be The Worst Super Bowl Ever?” All the most closely matched Super Bowls have resulted in not very good games.

Good cop: Come on! It’s such a small sample size! This is only the… uh… well… What does XLIX mean anyway?

Bad cop: It sounds like a diarrhea medicine to me.

Good cop: 49!! That’s what XLIX means!

Bad cop: Ugh. 49. Next year is going to be insufferably full of 50th anniversary nonsense. Still, it can’t possibly be more insufferable than the lead-up to this year’s Super Bowl. All this talk of deflated footballs and cheating. Makes me not want to even watch the game.

Good cop: No way! You’ve got to watch the game! For all the distractions, this is still one of the most exciting Super Bowls ever! Everything about it is compelling! From characters like New England coach Bill Belichick and Seattle coach Pete Carroll to the quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Russell Wilson, to the Seahawks near legendary defense to the excellent philosophical contrast in the game’s plot!

Bad cop: The problem is not really the game, it’s just that the Super Bowl always kind of stinks. Either you go to a party and it’s too distracting to watch the game or you sit at home and watch it yourself and feel left out. You can probably guess which one I do.

Good cop: Hey, you wanna come over? I’m just having a few people over! They’re all either football fans or openminded people who are curious about the game! Also, we’re following a bunch of Albert Burneko’s Super Bowl recipes!

Bad cop: Yeah, sure. I’ll come over at 5:30. I’ll bring some whine.

Who should you root for in Super Bowl XLIX?

Dear Sports Fan,

After weeks of annoying football coverage, it’s time to actually sit down and watch the game. But I have one question left: who should you root for in Super Bowl XLIX? The Seattle Seahawks or the New England Patriots?

Thanks,
Percy

Dear Percy,

I am assuming you don’t live in New England or near Seattle. If you do, then the choice is easy. Unless you are a hater of historic proportions, it’s way more fun to root for your local team than against it. So, if you live anywhere Northeast of the Yankees/Red Sox divide (different sport but the principle is the same) root for the Patriots. If you live in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, or the Western side of Montana, root for Seattle. If you live in any other part of the country or the world, you’re a rooting free agent. You can choose a team to root for based on a thousand different things: you like one team’s uniform color, you had a player from one team on your fantasy team this season, you have a crush on a player on one team, you think one team is going to win and you like rooting for the winning team. All of these are perfectly legitimate reasons. If you’re a completely blank slate and need help choosing a team to root for, I do think the two teams have a clear philosophical difference that may be interesting to you.

One of the reasons why football is so popular is that it’s an intriguing mix of brain and brawn. All sports rely on brain and brawn but football balances the intellectual with the physical more delicately than most. Football derives this quality from the fact that the game restarts all the time. A football game consists of around 164 plays that each take an average of between four and five seconds. There is a tremendous amount of athleticism packed into those four or five seconds. Players do amazing things with their bodies: make diving catches while controlling their bodies so just the tips of their toes stay on the ground; leaping over someone to tackle someone else; continuing to run forward with four opponents draped all over them. Between those plays, there’s an immense amount of communication from coaches to players and between players. This is where the intellectual side of the game comes in. Each play is choreographed in incredible detail and practiced meticulously beforehand. Football coaches design how their players are going to move and then choose which play they want the players to execute. In every football game, the best athletes in the world compete to be faster, stronger, and better than their opponents. At the same time, the two opposing sets of coaches are competing to outsmart each other.

Which is more important: a great coach or great players? It’s an open question in football. The two Super Bowl teams this year represent opposing sides in this argument. The New England Patriots franchise is built around their coach, Bill Belichick. It’s often said of him that he could beat your team with his players and then switch sides and beat his team with your players. The Patriots are a living testament to this idea. They regularly cut or trade good, veteran players and trade down in the draft to pick more, less regarded players. They are known for designing a new game plan for each of their opponents. They study their opponents, figure out what their weaknesses are, and then design plays to beat them. The Seattle Seahawks are the opposite. They do what they do best regardless of who their opponent is. On offense, that’s mostly running the ball with their powerful running back, Marshawn Lynch. On defense, they play tight man-to-man coverage on their opponents wide receivers with their two great cornerbacks and play a zone defense against everyone else.

The Seahawks players have nicknames like “Beast Mode,” “Bam Bam Kam,” and “The Legion of Boom.” The Patriots players don’t have nicknames that we know of. They’re too busy cramming for the impromptu pop quizzes their coach gives them about world history. Admittedly, this is both a generalization and a gross simplification but it’s also a good way to choose a team to root for. If you want to root for the team that wants to win by playing harder and better than the other team, then root for the Seahawks. If you want to root for the team that’s going to try to win by outstudying, outpreparing, and outsmarting the other team, then root for the Patriots.

Enjoy the game,
Ezra Fischer

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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Test your knowledge of the characters in Super Bowl XLIX

Happy Friday sports fans and sports agnostics alike! If you’ve been following along this week with our series of posts about the most compelling characters from the two Super Bowl teams, the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, then you should have no problem solving this crossword puzzle. Do it in ink! If you get stumped or would just like to review the characters in detail our posts are still available.

Learn about the New England Patriots

Learn about the Seattle Seahawks

Puzzle away

A couple notes about the puzzle. You know you’ve gotten an answer right when the words (confusingly) are highlighted in a light red. If your answer remains black text on a white background, it’s wrong. To get the answers, click on the little key icon on the top left.

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.

Ten things to watch if you're going to watch Super Bowl XLIX

One third of the people in the United States will sit down on Sunday and watch the Super Bowl. Sure, there’s lots to enjoy beyond the game. The commercials are sometimes fun, the food should be great, and the half-time show has mostly recovered from its post-Timberlake/Jackson malaise. Still, if you want to have a really great time on Sunday, it’s a good idea to prepare yourself to enjoy the football game itself. I invited my friend Brendan to record a podcast with me about ten things to watch for if you’re going to watch the Super Bowl.

This podcast should be informative for football fans and casual viewers alike. I hope you enjoy it! You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Joint Health

Seahawks defensive backs Richard Sherman and Earl Thomas were both injured in the last Seahawks game. Sherman hyperextended his elbow and Thomas separated his shoulder. Both players stayed in the game despite being in fairly obvious and serious pain. Both also say that their injuries have healed completely and will not be an issue in this game but are they telling the truth?

Vince Wilfork

Vince Wilfork’s job as the Patriots defensive tackle is to use his enormous body and unlikely athleticism to push offensive linemen back towards the quarterback and to plug gaps in the defense so running backs have no where to go. Watch for #75 when the Patriots are on defense. If he moves forwards, the Patriots are in good shape. If the Seahawks can push him backwards, they are in control.

Bill Belichick’s brain vs. Russell Wilson’s brain

Bill Belichick has made his name as a coach largely on his ability to confound quarterbacks by confronting them with exotic defensive formations and tactics that they don’t know how to deal with. Russell Wilson is highly accomplished but he’s still early on in his career. Can Belicheck fool him or will Wilson be able to decipher whatever the Patriots throw at him?

Marshawn Lynch

There’s no more divisive or important figure in this game than Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch. He’s been constantly in the news lately for his strange behavior. He’s refused to say anything more than a single phrase to the media during recent press conferences and has been grabbing his crotch after scoring touchdowns. The NFL has fined him for both issues but is he being defiant or disturbed? What’s really going on with him? And what if he scores a touchdown in this game?

Which running back will we see from the Patriots?

More than other teams, the Patriots create a game plan specifically designed each week to attack the opposing team’s weaknesses. One way to tell whether they think they can overpower the other team or whether they think they need to outsmart them is which running back they choose to feature. If LeGarrette Blount is out there, that means they think they can bully and bludgeon the Seahawks to a victory. If Shane Vereen is featured, it means they’ll need to trick their way to a win.

Who is covering Rob Gronkowski?

Rob Gronkowski is the only truly remarkable athlete the Patriots have on offense. He’s big, fast, strong, good at catching the ball, and neigh unstoppable once he starts running towards the end-zone. The Seahawks don’t like to modify what they normally do on defense to accommodate an opponent but can they afford not to do plan something special for stopping the Gonk?

Freak on freak

Seattle’s quarterback, Russell Wilson, and running back Marshawn Lynch are both freakishly athletic. Can Patriots linebacker Jamie Collins have a break out performance and neutralize either or both of the Seahawks best athletes?

Who is spying Russell Wilson?

One way to neutralize a quarterback who is capable of running the ball in addition to throwing it is to assign a defender to “spy” him by mimicking his side-to-side movements and tackling him if he tries to run forward. Will the Patriots use this tactic? If so, who will they assign to do it?

Who else?

We’ve talked a lot about some of the biggest stars in this game but the Super Bowl often is decided by a big game from an unexpected source. If it’s not Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, Marshawn Lynch, or Rob Gronkowski, who will it be? Could Seattle get a big game from tight end Luke Willson or backup running back Robert Turbin? Might Brandon LaFell or Julian Edelman take the Patriots to the promised land?

The Arrogance Bowl

Both head coaches, Bill Belichick for New England and Pete Carroll for Seattle, are brilliant coaches for whom almost everything has gone right during this year’s playoffs. They both like to try to outsmart and out-coach the other team. If either are going to end up being tragic heroes, it’s pretty clear that their tragic flaw will be arrogance. Will one try something a little too smart for their own good in this game and will it backfire on them?

Super Bowl XLIX: Meet the Seattle Seahawks defense

In the week leading up to Super Bowl XLIX, we’re profiling the important characters of the game. We’ve already run posts on Seattle’s coach, Pete Carroll, quarterback, Russell Wilson, and the rest of the Seattle Seahawks offense. Now it’s time to learn a little about the Seattle Seahawks defense.

Michael Bennett, Defensive End

I’m a pretty big football fan and I write about sports close to full time but I didn’t know much about Michael Bennett before this year’s playoffs. Now, he’s one of my favorite characters in the league. Bennett was initially signed out of college as a free agent by the Seattle Seahawks in 2009. He was released before ever playing a game and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers signed him. He played there for four years and improved every year. During the offseason before last season, the Seahawks signed him to a one year contract and, after they won the Super Bowl, re-signed him for another four years. He grew up in Texas and has a brother who also plays in the NFL, Martellus Bennett. Martellus has been a well-known jokester for a while now, having given himself the nickname, “The Black Unicorn” in 2013. Michael Bennett has been letting his humorous side show this year too. After the Seahawks win over the Green Bay Packers, Bennett commandeered a police bicycle and rode around the field:

During media day this Tuesday, Bennett had a series of great lines, including comments about his wife’s booty and great beards of history as well as doing imitations of some of his more famous teammates.

Bobby Wagner, Linebacker

The Seahawks defense is full of brash characters who talk as brashly as they play. Wagner is the exception. He’s an undersized, soft-spoken middle linebacker who helps the rest of the defense when they gamble to make a spectacular play by using his speed to cover for them. He’s the defensive signal caller which means his helmet has a green dot on the back, the symbol for a helmet with a radio receiver in it. Wagner gets the defensive play calls from a coach and then relays them to his teammates. Wagner will have his hands full trying to counter Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s offensive creativity. Since Wagner came back from an early season injury, the Seahawks have not lost a game.

Richard Sherman, Cornerback

Richard Sherman is now more famous for being controversial than he is actually controversial. It all started a year ago when the Seahawks beat the San Francisco 49ers and Sherman was interviewed on the field after the game by reporter Erin Andrews. Sherman said that he was the best player at his position (an audacious claim, but he is certainly in the top handful of players and, like a surgeon, don’t you want him to think he’s the best?) and then, in answering a question about the last play of the game, when he cliched the win for the Seahawks with an interception, he said that was the result the other team should expect when they tried to throw the ball to a “sorry receiver” like the one he was covering. Nothing there seems all that controversial but it set off weeks of commentary on Sherman and who or what he represents. What he represents in this game, is an extraordinary defender who will probably be able to prevent whichever wide receiver he’s covering from catching the ball. If Tom Brady is brave enough to challenge him by throwing in Sherman’s direction, watch for Sherman to make a play on the ball and try to catch it himself.

Kam Chancellor, Safety

Let’s let our last character, Richard Sherman describe his teammate Kam Chancellor and his role in the Seahawks defense. This comes from Robert Mays‘ Grantland profile of Chancellor: “He just brings that menacing force,” Sherman says. “We’re a bunch of wild dogs, and a pack of wild dogs is pretty dangerous. But a lion running with a pack of wild dogs … that’s something.” Chancellor’s athletic play has inspired a bunch of nicknames. He’s known as Bam Bam Kam, Kamtrak, and The Commissioner. Chancellor was the guy who kept leaping over the offensive line to try to block a field goal a few weeks ago. In this game, if the Seahawks choose to change their defensive strategy to focus on Patriots Tight End, Rob Gronkowski, Chancellor would likely be the one to get the assignment of taking him out of the game.

Earl Thomas, Safety

Earl Thomas rounds out the Seahawks group of wildly successful defensive misfits. At 5’10”, he’s way too short to be as good at his position as he is. But he is. He was drafted in the first round of the 2010 NFL draft by Seattle and has yet to miss a single game. As opposed to his safety partner, Kam Chancellor, Thomas is more likely to go after interceptions than knock-out hits. Off-the-field, Thomas is a conundrum. Seattle Times columnist, Larry Stone described Thomas as the most “paradoxical” of the Seahawks and commented that “after an interview, you don’t want to shake his hand so much as engage in a group hug.” Thomas separated his shoulder in the Seahawks last game but tweeted recently that his shoulder is completely recovered. In what could not have been a coincidence, the NFL blood tested him soon after the tweet.

Prepare for the Super Bowl with Dear Sports Fan. We will be running special features all week to help everyone from the die-hard football fan to the most casual observer enjoy the game. So far we’ve profiled Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks secondary offensive characters, and the New England Patriots defense. If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter or either of our Football 101 or 201 courses, do it today!