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What is this football deflation story about?

Dear Sports Fan,

Can you explain the big story that’s going around right now about the New England Patriots intentionally deflating footballs? What the what?

Adam

Dear Adam,

When I was a kid, my Dad taught me a joke about a lawsuit between two Russian neighbors. We’ll call them Laskutin Kvetoslav Konstantinovich and Ungern Zinoviy Georgiy (this random Russian name generation website is insane!) Anyway, Laskutin sues Ungern, claiming that Ungern borrowed a cooking pot from him and returned it with a big hole in the bottom of the pot. The case goes to trial. Ungern, who happens to be a lawyer, represents himself and wins the case after arguing that the hole was in the pot when he borrowed it, the pot was in perfect condition when he returned it, and he never even borrowed the pot!

The joke (did you laugh?) is meant to poke fun at the insanity of a legal system that, by only requiring the creation of doubt about the truth to acquit a defendant, encourages lawyers to use many different arguments, even if they contradict themselves. The biggest story in football today is a scandal being variously called, “deflate-gate” and “ball-ghazi”. Even if you don’t follow football, you’ve probably heard or seen something about this. I’ll give a quick summary of the story and then explain why it reminds me so much of my Dad’s joke.

During the New England Patriots 45-7 win over the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship game, Colts linebacker D’Quell Jackson intercepted a pass from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. After running to his own sidelines with the ball, Jackson handed the ball to a Colts equipment manager who noticed that the ball seemed under-inflated. He mentioned it to someone who mentioned it to someone else until it became a thing. What we now believe to be true, based on a leak from the NFL itself, as reported by Chris Mortensen on ESPN, is that 11 of the 12 balls the Patriots used on offense were significantly under-inflated.

That may not seem like much, but that’s basically the whole story. The NFL is investigating the incident and will surely be heard from sometime before the Super Bowl. In the meantime, sports fans and the sports media are in full-on freak out mode. Some are saying that this is the biggest cheating scandal since the last time the Patriots were punished for cheating in the 2007 Spygate scandal and that the Patriots should be both ashamed of themselves and punished by the league. Others are saying that this is totally normal and not a big deal. Shockingly, part of what’s helping people decide which side to be on is whether they root for the Patriots or not. In any event, partially because it’s an interesting story and partially because the two-week gap before the Super Bowl is hard to fill with stories, this has become the biggest thing in the sports world right now.

How could this happen? What happens to football before and during a game?

A reasonable person might assume that the NFL itself would be in charge of providing footballs for each game and that their officials would be in charge of handling the balls to ensure they are not tampered with. That’s not true. Like many things about football, the rules that govern the football used in a game are Byzantine and bizarre. Even in articles from reputable sources, there are discrepancies about how it’s supposed to work, but as far as I can gather, this is basically what is supposed to happen:

Before the game, each team brings 12 (24 if there is bad weather predicted) balls to the refs. These balls don’t have to be new, they can be handled, scuffed up, or conditioned by the teams.
135 minutes (why? who knows?) before the game, the refs check the balls to make sure they are inflated properly — between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch. This can be done with either a pressure gauge or a scale or both. If the balls are off, the refs inflate them or deflate them themselves. When they are good, the refs initial them with a sharpie before giving them back to the teams’ equipment managers or ball-boys. Read a behind-the-scenes account of this here.
During the game, each team uses their own twelve (or 24) balls when they are on offense.
Since 1999, the league itself has provided special kicking balls to be used by both teams’ kickers and punters. These balls, sometimes called ‘K’ balls, are brand new but each team is given 45 minutes under supervision of a referee to mess with the kicking balls before the game.

As you can tell, the rules seem to be written with the intention of allowing teams (primarily quarterbacks, since they handle the ball the most during the game) to customize the balls they are going to use on offense within reason. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the league simply provide brand new balls for each game and keep them under supervision throughout the game?

Okay, now tell us why this is like that joke

Imagine that instead of two Russians, it’s the Patriots who are in court and need to come up with a defense. So far, the Patriots have not said much about this issue other than that they will cooperate with the league investigation. If they were to defend themselves and they had Ungern as their lawyer, he might argue that tampering with the balls is totally normal and everyone does it, that sure, they deflated the balls but no one really knows whether deflating the balls would provide an advantage, and that you can’t prove they did anything to the balls anyway!

Everyone does it

In most arenas, this is not the best defense against cheating but in sports it seems to fare a little bit better. Sports is a culture where rule-breaking is acceptable up to a certain point. You’ll often hear football announcers say that there is “holding on every play.” It’s true, if referees decided to apply the strict letter of the law, they could call a penalty on every play. What ends up happening is that in every game, there is a level of holding that is accepted and what really gets called is holding more blatant than normal. No one thinks a player that holds is cheating. The same thing might be true about doctoring footballs but until this scandal, it wasn’t widely known. Since this scandal has broken out, we’ve heard reports that quarterback Brad Johnson paid $7,500 before the Super Bowl in 2003 to scuff up the balls to his liking. Deadspin dug up some footage of announcers discussing a conversation they had with Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers who told them that he likes to inflate his teams footballs past the legal limit and hope that the referees don’t catch him. If tampering with footballs is normal (and the NFL has certainly created rules and an enforcement plan with enough wiggle room to allow for this) than the worst we could say about the Patriots is that they tampered more blatantly than normal and got caught.

Deflating the balls didn’t help

Everyone in football seems to have strongly held beliefs about the condition of the football but what’s the truth? Does over-inflating the ball make it fly faster and straighter, easier to hold on to, and better to catch? Aaron Rodgers thinks so. Or is it under-inflating the ball that makes all of those things better? Tom Brady certainly thinks that is true. In 2011 he was quoted as saying he loved when teammate Rob Gronkowski spikes the ball, “because I like the deflated ball. But I feel bad for that football, because he puts everything he can into those spikes.” But what the heck does he know? In a 2006 New York Times article by Judy Battista, a quarterback who played with Brady mentions that Brady likes his balls, “so broken in that it looked as if he had been using them since junior high school” and that Brady insists on rubbing the balls down before using them to rid them of a substance that coats the balls when they are made. Brady was quotes as saying, “The preservative on the football, when you get it off, it’s easier to get a grip.” This is despite the fact that the maker of the balls is quoted as saying in that same article that that substance makes the balls “about as sticky as a Post-it note, and that improves the grip.”

Meanwhile, in the universe of kickers, there seems to be a similar disagreement. A Business Insider article by Tony Manfred reports that “In 1999, the NFL switched to special “K balls” for special teams plays because they were paranoid that players were manipulating regular balls to make them fly higher and straighter” and quotes from a Sports Illustrated article (now lost from posterity because they basically destroyed their online archive) saying that “New footballs are hard, unforgiving, smallish (with a correspondingly small sweet spot) and coated with a film that makes them slippery. They don’t travel as far as game-worn balls, and they can’t be “guided” as accurately as roundish, softer balls. When you see a kicker squeeze a ball, it’s because he wants to soften it and make it rounder.” But wait, but wait, now that the Patriots are accused of being cheaters, Jason La Canfora writes for CBS in this article that sources of his from the Baltimore Ravens are complaining that in their game against the Patriots, “Baltimore’s kicking and punting units were not getting their normal depth and distance, and some believed the balls they were using may have been deflated.”

So, which is it? Is a soft ball better or a hard ball? Is there a scientist in the house?

The league can’t prove anything

It’s going to be difficult for the NFL to prove wrong-doing in this case. Oh, the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong that someone did something to those balls on behalf of the Patriots but how and when, unless they were caught on video doing it, is going to be tough to prove. Were the balls under-inflated to begin with and the refs simply didn’t notice or didn’t care until the Colts complained? Were the balls properly inflated, approved, and then later doctored by a member of the Patriots? If so, who was it? Did any of the key players or coaches ask for this to happen or did a ball-boy or equipment manager do it himself?

At best, the league may be able to prove that someone tampered with the balls but not exactly who. In that case, I think that the NFL should tread somewhat lightly on this issue. It would be tough to come down hard on the Patriots, arguing that the lack of institutional control needed to prevent this type of tampering is itself worthy of serious punishment. After all, it’s still widely thought that the NFL was seriously negligent at best and totally corrupt at worst in its handling of the Ray Rice domestic abuse case in the past year.

Short-term, I can’t imagine that this story will affect the Super Bowl. The game between the Colts and Patriots will not be replayed, nor will the Patriots be barred from playing the Super Bowl. Coach Bill Belichick may be suspended but my guess is that the suspension would start after the Super Bowl is over. There will definitely be fines or draft picks that get taken away, but not organization changing ones. The rules governing balls will almost definitely be changed to prevent this from happening again and football will keep flying along, under, over, or properly inflated.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

p.s. In case you’re looking for humor about deflate-gate that actually makes you laugh, take a look at this or this.

What is a false start in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a false start in football? I get that it’s a penalty against the offense and that when it happens the play stops before it even starts but what I don’t understand is why it’s called or what a team can do to avoid it.

Thanks,
Chelsea

Dear Chelsea,

You’ve got most of it already but I’ll fill in the rest as best I can. A false start is a penalty in football that can only be called against the team with possession of the ball. The penalty for a false start is that the offense has to move the ball back five yards (or half the distance to their own goal line if they are within five yards of it) and start the play over again. A false start penalizes the offense if one of their players moves in an illegal way before the ball is snapped to start the play. One thing that’s cool about the penalty is that its inflexibility exhibits and reinforces one of the primary characteristics of football: it’s stop and start, tactical nature.

As we covered in our article answering What is a snap in football? every football play begins when the center snaps the ball backwards between his legs to another player. During the time before that happens, there are a separate set of rules that dictate what the teams on the field can do. For example, the offensive team is allowed to gather to talk (called a huddle) but not if there are more than eleven people in the group. The false start is a penalty in that set of rules that dictate what a team, specifically the one with the ball, can do before the ball is snapped. Roughly speaking, the offensive team is supposed to set themselves up in a particular way, pause, and then without moving, snap the ball to start the play. As you might expect, there are some technicalities and exceptions that dictate how this must happen: there must be at least seven offensive players set up right on the line of scrimmage (where the ball is set up at the start of the play); when the ball is snapped, one and only one player is allowed to be running around and he must be moving backwards or sideways and may not be one of the seven players set up on the line of scrimmage. The false start is called when one of a variety of things happen to violate these rules:

A player in the offensive line “moves abruptly” once they are set up. This rule is so minute that even a flinch of the head will be called a false start.
Any player on the offense moves “in such manner as to lead defense to believe snap has started.”
The quarterback moves or acts in a way that is an “obvious attempt to draw an opponent offside”. (on this one, you might rightly be thinking that TV commentators often talk about quarterbacks trying to draw the defense offside by shouting like they are about to start the play. This is true but because those shouts could theoretically convey information to the quarterback’s teammates, they are allowed even though we all know exactly what they’re trying to do. It’s a conundrum wrapped in an enigma.)

The false start is one of the most typical penalties in football. No single penalty defines the sport as well as the false start. If you wanted to explain football to a fan of soccer or basketball or hockey or any number of other sports, the easiest way to do it would be to say that football is like those sports except that everything stops between plays. When a player is tackled or runs out-of-bounds, the teams have forty seconds to set up again for the next play. It’s a stop-and-start game. This makes it look boring to a lot of people used to the fluidity of other sports but it’s also responsible for the complexity and tactical interest that football and really only football of all the sports has. If football is a game where the teams are supposed to stop and then set up in a static way before starting again then the false start is the penalty that makes sure the offense has really stopped before they start the next play.

The false start also represents a failure of synchronization. The players on the offensive side of a football team train tirelessly to move in exact unison. A successful offense is one that moves with precision as one unit. You’ll often see quarterbacks pass the ball to a spot, knowing that by the time the ball gets there, their teammate will be there to catch the ball. Every successful offensive play is a triumph of moving in unison. When players move out of time with each other during a play, the play usually fails. When one player moves out of sync before the play begins, it’s a false start and their whole team is penalized. One of the funniest things to see on a football field is what happens when the one player who moves out of time is the player who starts the play with the ball, the center. When this happens, all his teammates move while he stays still. The mistake is really the center’s but because the play doesn’t start until he snaps the ball, the foul is officially called on his teammates, like this:

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

The Super Bowl is just around the corner. If you’d like to learn more about football, sign up for our Football 101 course to learn the basics of the game or Football 201 to learn all about football positions.

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.

Get started now

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Dear Sports Fan's got you covered for the NFL Championship games today

If you’re going to be watching football today but don’t feel 100% confident that you’ll understand all of the intricacies of the game, keep your laptop, tablet, or phone around. I’m going to be live-Tweeting/Facebooking/Fancredding/Google-Plussing the game with explanations and observations. If you’re not already following me on one of those platforms, do it! I’ll also be available to answer specific questions you have. Hit me up on any of those social networks or send an email to dearsportsfan@gmail.com.

There’s only three games left in the National Football League (NFL) season and two of them are today. At 3:05 p.m. ET on Fox the Green Bay Packers play against the Seattle Seahawks for the National Football Conference (NFC) championship. At 6:40 p.m. ET on CBS, the Indianapolis Colts play against the New England Patriots for the American Football League (AFC) championship. The winners of these two games will play each other in the Super Bowl in two weeks.

If you’d like to catch up on some background material before the game, there’s a variety of option on the website. My friend Brendan and I recorded a brief podcast about each of today’s games. You can find the Seattle vs. Green Bay podcast here and the New England vs. Indianapolis podcast here. Both are also available for download on iTunes. For a glass half-full/glass half-broken take on the games, check out the Good Cop, Bad Cop Precaps of the games. If you haven’t already, you should sign up for our brand new and totally free Football 101 email course. In just eight days, you’ll understand the most critical building blocks of football.

2015 NFL Championship Weekend Good Gop, Bad Cop Precaps

It’s the NFL Championship round weekend. There’s a counter-intuitive waxing and waning in the football world around this time. This weekend’s games are the second most important games of the year. Win this one and you go to the Super Bowl. They are among the most exciting games of the year. But at the same time, there’s only two of them. After weekends of 11-16 games all fall and then two weekends in a row of four games each in the earlier playoff rounds, two games seems like just a little bit of football. In this way interest wanes as it waxes.

This year, my friend Brendan and I recorded 10-15 minute preview podcasts of each of the games. I’ve linked to those in the game titles below. But, lucky for you, it’s not just Brendan and me blathering on about the NFL. Fresh of a season of previewing all the NFL games, our favorite police duo bring their good cop, bad cop act into the playoffs and preview all the matchups in the National Football League this weekend.

Championship Weekend

Sunday, January 18, at 3:05 p.m. ET, on Fox

Green Bay Packers at Seattle Seahawks

Good cop: The best quarterback in the league, Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers, against the best defense in the league, the Seattle Seahawks?!! Sign me up for that! Seattle had the record for loudest stadium in the world stolen from them earlier this season by the Kansas City fans! My guess is that they take it back on Sunday! They make so much noise that they need to be monitored for seismic consequences! Yikes!!

Bad cop: The story of this game is either going to be ‘quarterback on one leg plays hero and wins against all odds’ or ‘smothering defense key to back-to-back championship run.’ Either one is too cliched and mundane for words. Show me something new, please.

Sunday, January 18, at 6:40 p.m. ET, on CBS

Indianapolis Colts at New England Patriots

Good cop: Tom Brady, Tom Brady, Tom Brady! Andrew Luck, Andrew Luck, Andrew Luck! This game is a massive battle between two quarterbacks at the top of their games!! It’s old school vs. new school! Both teams have earned their spot in this championship game! The Patriots came back from being down by 14 points twice against their playoff arch-nemesis, the Baltiomre Ravens! The Colts went into Denver and took down the big, bad, Super Bowl or bust Denver Broncos!

Bad cop: Indianapolis beat Cincinnati without their best player, A.J. Green, and then Denver without their best player, Peyton Manning, being healthy enough to play at even close to his normal level. New England needed to pull out all their trickiest trick plays to beat the Ravens, a team with one of the worst pass defenses around. This game features two average teams masquerading as great teams. Bah.

Why shouldn't football players play the Settlers of Catan?

Kevin Clark wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal this week where he describes, with some glee, how the board game Settlers of Catan has become an obsession of some members of the Green Bay Packers football team this season. The article has gone viral. It’s the number one trending topic on Facebook, which tempts users to click on it with the teaser, “Green Bay Packers’ players ‘completely addicted’ to board game, tight end says.” The article is currently the number one search result on Google’s web search for “Settlers of Catan” and also for “Wall Street Journal.” It’s number one on the Wall Street Journal’s self-reported Most Popular articles right now too. The article clearly struck a nerve.

Wikipedia describes Settlers of Catan as a multi-player board game where “players assume the roles of settlers, each attempting to build and develop holdings while trading and acquiring resources. Players are rewarded points as their settlements grow; the first to reach a set number of points is the winner.” Green Bay Packer’s backup quarterback Matt Flynn is quoted in Clark’s article describing the game as “a nonviolent version of Risk.” The Green Bay Packers, especially their offensive line, love it and seem to approach it with a competitive zeal close to that they show for football. Here’s Clark:

The competitive nature of the Green Bay’s Catan tradition is now legendary in the locker room. Two weeks ago, Linsley won the game, but Bakhtiari, who typically hosts the games at his house, had briefly gone outside to cook a chicken for the group. He furiously protested Linsley’s victory because of this.

If one half of the appeal of the article is the humor in a group of grown men taking a board game too seriously, the other half seems to be pointing out that it’s funny for football players to play a game that is as intellectual and intricate as Settlers of Catan. That’s a theme the article hits from start to finish:

There may not be a more unusual bonding tradition in the NFL than the gang of Packers who get together regularly to play a board game called “Settlers of Catan.”

Any player in the locker room will readily admit that it’s a nerdy endeavor.

“The rules of the game can be complex—making it all the funnier that the Packers have embraced it.”

The Packers’ embrace of the game become such a phenomenon that [a local gaming store, Gnome Games] put a sign up that said “Be cool like [Packers tight end] Justin Perillo, play Catan!” The Packer players quickly noticed it. “We thought it was hilarious,” Linsley said.

The message is clear: it’s funny for football players to play a Settlers of Catan because football is cool but not very intellectual and Settlers of Catan is intellectual but not very cool. I believe that the article has been viewed and forwarded and shared and tweeted so many times primarily because of the perceived incongruity of football players spending their leisure time in an activity that’s so unlike football.

I don’t blame Clark one bit for taking this approach. Not only is this a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” moment but I enjoyed the article. It was well written and it made me want to hang out with the Green Bay Packers. What bothers me is the underlying assumption about football not being an intellectual pursuit. A big part of my rationale for writing Dear Sports Fan is that I don’t believe the gap between sports and non-sport activities is as great as many people think it is and I don’t believe there should be as large a divide between sports fans and non-sports fans as there is. This article and the response to it widens the cultural divide over sports ever so slightly by encouraging people to think it’s unusual and funny for football players to play an intellectual board game like Settlers of Catan.

Football is an incredibly complex game that requires not only amazing physical feats from its players but also remarkable mental acuity. Every player is expected to learn (simple memorization will fail when decisions need to be made so quickly and under such intense pressure) up to a thousand plays in their own time using mostly diagrams. Then, when a play is called in the middle of a football game, they have to recall what they and at least what their neighboring teammates do to execute the play. And it’s not like the play names help very much. Football language is as obtuse as diner short-hand and each team has their own language. Here’s an example of a play call as described by Kansas City quarterback Alex Smith in a Kansas City Star article:

“There’s times I’m in the huddle and I might go, ‘Alright, listen up for the call here fellas,’ and they know it’s gonna be a doozy,” Smith said. “We’ve got ‘shift to halfback twin right open, swap 72 all-go special halfback shallow cross wide open.’”

Understanding a play call is just the start. NFL football players need to be tuned into the exact situation within each game and have an encyclopedic understanding of their opponents. Nowhere is this more true than in New England, where the Patriots head coach Bill Belichick terrorizes his team with his own perfect recall and penchant for impromptu pop quizzes. You know how I know this? Another article by Kevin Clark (and Daniel Barbarisi) in the Wall Street Journal! Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

“According to players, if a younger member of the team offers an answer, Belichick will often ask a studious veteran if that player is correct. Evans particularly remembers Belichick doing this with star quarterback Tom Brady and then-backup Matt Cassel. As Evans tells it, Belichick would ask a detailed question: “Hey, we’re in the high red zone, it’s second-and-six from the 18. What’s Indianapolis’ favorite blitz?” Cassel would answer “overloading the weak side.” Then Belichick would turn to Brady and ask “do you concur?” On the times Brady said the backup was incorrect, the room would erupt with laughter.”

I don’t mean to be a kill-joy. There is something instinctively unexpected about 350 pound world-class athletes sitting down to play Settlers of Catan. Kevin Clark’s Wall Street Journal article captured that humor with grace and not a trace of meanness. The problem is that the article and our enjoyment of it furthers some unnecessary and damaging misconceptions about the nature of sports, sports fans, and athletes. The Green Bay Packers compete in a high-stakes workplace with intense physical and mental demands. Is it really surprising that some of them keep themselves primed intellectually and competitively by playing an brainy board game?

2015 AFC Championship Preview Indianapolis at New England

Hi everyone,

It’s a very exciting time in the football season for football fans and non-fans alike. There are only three games left! That’s right. This Sunday, the four teams left in the playoffs will play in two semifinal games which are confusingly called the NFC and AFC Championship games, and the winners will go on to play in the Super Bowl on February 1st. To preview this weekend’s action, I asked my friend Brendan to come back on the podcast.

The AFC Championship Game

NFL Football — Sunday, January 18, 2015 — Indianapolis Colts at New England Patriots, 6:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

The one thing television commentators are most likely to say about this game.
The one thing we would say if we were television commentators.
The player on each team most likely to be the star if their team wins the game and why. For New England, our choices were Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski (but also Legarrette Blount and Darrell Revis because we had trouble choosing.) For Indianapolis, our choices were T.Y Hilton and Vontae Davis.
Who we want to win and who we think is going to win
And much, much more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

2015 NFC Championship Preview Green Bay at Seattle

Hi everyone,

The NFC Championship Game

NFL Football — Sunday, January 18, 2015 — Green Bay Packers at Seattle Seahawks, 3:05 p.m. ET on Fox.

The one thing television commentators are most likely to say about this game.
The one thing we would say if we were television commentators.
The player on each team most likely to be the star if their team wins the game and why. For Seattle, our choices were Marshawn Lynch and Luke Willson. For Green Bay, our choices were Aaron Rodgers and Eddy Lacy.
Who we want to win and who we think is going to win
And much, much more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse 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.

18 days until the Super Bowl

Union Civil War general Phillip Sheridan is credited with saying, “If I owned Texas and hell, I’d rent Texas and live in hell.” A modern day equivalent of that could be, “If I owned an NFL football team and was elected President of the United States, I’d resign immediately and go back to work on my football team.” Football is the biggest sport in America today. The most valuable of the 32 National Football League (NFL) teams has been valued at over $3 billion dollars. 46 of the 50 most watched sporting events on television in 2013 were football games and in recent years, around 75% of all American televisions have been tuned to football for the Super Bowl. It often seems like no matter where you turn, someone is talking about football.

For people who don’t understand or enjoy football, the experience of living in today’s football obsessed world can be, in turns, annoying, frustrating, confusing, or curiously compelling. As a football fan and the founder of Dear Sports Fan, my goal is to make football understandable so that you have an ease in football-laden situations that you didn’t have before. My goal isn’t to convert you into a football fan, but if you find that happening, I’ll be the first to welcome you into the fold.

If you want to learn the basics of football in time for this year’s Super Bowl, sign up for our Football 101 course. It’s the easiest way to learn football, and I promise that by the time you’re through, you’ll be able to impress the football fan in your life with your newfound knowledge.

In this free course, you’ll learn all about 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 finally my favorite way to start having fun while watching football. 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 201, coming soon!