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Cue Cards 10-3-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Thursday, October 2

The Royals magic continues — The Kansas City Royals won game one of their playoff series with the Los Angeles Angels 3-2. Like their first game of the playoffs, this game went into extra innings. Mike Moustakas hit a home run in the eleventh inning to push the Royals ahead of the Angels.
Line: The Royals sure are exciting!
What’s Next: Game two is Friday night at 9:37 p.m. ET on TBS.
Beat down in Baltimore — The Baltimore Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers 12 – 3 in game one of their playoff series. Baltimore isn’t quite the feel-good story that the Royals are but they have only made the playoffs one other time since 1997, so they’re a good underdog to root for also.
Line: Detroit has such great pitchers, you don’t expect to see them lose in such a lopsided, high-scoring game.
What’s next: Game two is Friday at noon ET on TBS.
You wanna buy a duck? — The Oregon Ducks’ college football team went into last night’s game ranked number two in the country. They lost 31-24 to Arizona. This is the second straight year that Arizona has upset them. The Ducks are famous for their dynamic spread-offense and their flamboyant uniforms. The coach of Arizona’s team, Rich Rodriguez, spent many years coaching at West Virginia about ten years ago where he was one of the early adopters of the spread-offense. Perhaps he knows how to defend it better than most.
Line: Sad to see the Ducks lose so early in the season. That said, they’re the most exciting when they are looking to upset the top teams, not the other way around.
Thursday Night NFL games continue to stink — There’s so many reasons to dislike having NFL games on Thursdays. It breaks the rhythm of the weekend, it sullies fantasy games, it’s terrible for the health of the players, and it’s a unabashed money grab by the NFL, but perhaps the best argument against them is that they stink! So far this year, of the five Thursday games, the scores have been 36-16, 26-6, 56-14, 45-14, and now, 42-10 with last night’s Green Bay Packers win over the Minnesota Vikings. No fun!
Line: It’s barely even worth watching these Thursday night games. They’re over before they even get started.

Do Not Watch This Game 10.4.14 Weekend Edition

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Monday, 8:30 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Washington Redskins vs. Seattle Seahawks. It’s on ESPN but do not watch this game!

If you enjoyed last Monday’s lopsided game between the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs, then you’ll probably love this game. It’s likely to be at least as lopsided as the 41 – 14 shellacking we just witnessed. Why? Let’s count the ways:

Washington is on their second quarterback of the year, Kirk Cousins, who just threw four interceptions against the Giants last week.
Seattle’s quarterback is Russell Wilson who has thrown four interceptions in his last ten regular season or playoff games.
Seattle won the Super Bowl last year. Washington last won in 1991, when Cousins and Wilson were three or four years old.
Vegas thinks Seattle will win by 7.5 points even though they are on the road and playing at home is usually the equivalent of a three point advantage.
Seattle has players and positional units nicknamed “Beast Mode” and “The Legion of Boom.” Washington’s nickname is so bad that announcers won’t even say it on television anymore.
Washington has lost their last six night games. Seattle is 10-1 since 2010.
Stats like that are pretty meaningless because it’s always easy to find counterpoints: Washington has won the last six regular season games against Seattle.
The truth is that Washington and Seattle don’t play that often. Those six games have been played over fourteen years. In that same time, the two teams have played three times in the playoffs and Seattle has won every time.
Football Outsiders thinks Seattle has an 80% chance of making the playoffs. Washington? 6%.
Washington themselves doesn’t think they have much of a chance in this game. The Washington Post got offensive lineman Trent Williams on record as saying, “Can we beat them? Yeah,” Williams said, nonchalantly. “At the end of the day, they’re not robots. They’re human beings and nobody’s perfect. Nobody plays perfect every Sunday. They have been beaten before. It’s not like they’re unstoppable. They’re a great team, no doubt about it, but anything is possible in the NFL.”

There’s ten ways of saying roughly the same thing: Seattle is very good at football and Washington is pretty bad. I’m not going to bother giving an alternate game this weekend because really, even if you are a Washington or Seattle fan, I think you can do without this game. Go for a hike. Read a book. Play some bridge.

Cue Cards 9-30-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, September 29

Down and out in Kansas City — The Kansas City Chiefs beat the New England Patriots 41-14 last night and the game didn’t even seem that close. The Chiefs dominated the Patriots in just about every way possible. They were better at running the ball. They were better at throwing the ball. They were able to keep the Patriots from running the ball successfully and, when the Patriots tried to pass, the ball seemed just as likely to end up in an opponents hands as one of their own. It was a complete beat-down.
Line: I know the Patriots always seem to turn it around, but this year their team seems really bad.
Two little bits of soccer — Other than the football game, the sports world was pretty quiet yesterday. You know it’s quiet when the other biggest score of the day is Stoke City 1, Newcastle United 0. Both these teams are relatively weak teams in the top British soccer league, the English Premiere league. According to this ESPN article, Newcastle United’s manager might get fired because of the result. Also their nickname is the Magpies! The other interesting soccer news is that Chivas USA is being sold and as part of the deal will skip the next two seasons! It’s an unorthodox move. Chivas had been one of Major League Soccer’s most interesting franchises because it was owned by the owner of a Mexican soccer team and operated almost as a minor league team. Apparently that has not been successful and the new owners insisted on the team taking a break from competition while they rebrand and potentially relocate the team.
Line: Soccer seems so wacky compared to other sports. Who names a team the Magpies? Who buys a team but insists that it stop playing?

News Clippings: Want the truth? Ask the players!

Football players have been in the news a lot this fall and mostly for the wrong reasons. A string of high profile domestic abuse and child abuse cases has left many observers wondering about the present and future of the National Football League. Luckily, some great journalists and organizations have given platforms to players and former players and I have appreciated hearing from them. I’ve chosen just a few of the many public contributions to share with you today. These three athletes are a great reminder that as physical as sports are, they are equally a mental pursuit. It’s a mistake to think that just because a football player can run through a brick wall that they think like a brick wall.

Take Him Off the Field

Chris Carter on ESPN NFL Countdown

Former wide receiver Chris Carter was impressive on television discussing the Adrian Peterson child abuse case. He two best points were that taking a player off the field is really the only way to adequately punish him and that tradition is no excuse for wrongdoing.

Looking Through Bulletproof Windows

William Gay for The MMQB

On the subject of domestic abuse, there could be better voices out there, but there’s none more immediately relevant than an active NFL football player who volunteers regularly at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse and whose mother was killed by his stepfather. William Gay is all of those things and an effective writer as well. Here he is on the balance between punishment and assistance:

A lot of people have asked me for my thoughts about the Ray Rice situation. They want to know if I think the punishment has been fair. With all due respect to the commissioner, I couldn’t care less about what the punishment was. My concern is not about how many games Ray Rice is going to play or not play. This isn’t about games or football; it’s about the bigger picture. It’s about life itself…

If we’re going to fix this problem in the NFL, our focus can’t be solely on what the punishments should be. The main priority needs to be helping victims—to show them how they can be heroes. The league needs to be asking, Why is this occurring? And how can we help prevent this? The NFL needs to focus on setting up programs that can help men and women have healthy relationships.

The NFL Made Me Rich. I Won’t Watch It Now.

Anna Sale for Death, Sex & Money on WNYC

Death, Sex & Money is an excellent weekly interview show on WNYC. Its title is a clever reference to a cliché about the only inevitable things in life being death and taxes. The NFL is nowhere near as inevitable as death, sex, or money but during the past decade, during football season… it has been right up there! Now, due to an increasing reluctance among its audience for its violence on and off the field, many are wondering whether they will keep following it. With that uncertainty as the backdrop, Sale interviewed former player Dominique Foxworth about his experience in college football and the NFL and his reflections on it now that he has retired and graduated from Harvard Business School. We’ll cut into Foxworthy answering a question about the end of his career. He retired the fall after participating in a collective bargaining negotiation as president of the NFL Players Association:

I just participated as the president in the negotiations for the collective bargaining, the most recent collective bargaining agreement, and I sat across the table from the owners of the teams and negotiated over the ten billion dollars the NFL was supposedly making. And days later, I was on the practice field. Like, sweating and listening to coaches yell and all that, and that—at this point in my life, I felt more comfortable at the table than I did on the field. It didn’t feel like—I went from the top of the totem pole to the bottom. We get paid well because the talents that we have are so rare. But you’re still the labor.

Do you enjoy watching football now?

Nope.

No? Do you just not watch?

Nah. I have a hard time watching injuries. It’s difficult for me to watch guys get knocked unconscious. The strategy and the mental part of football, I still love. It’s a lot more like chess, and these calculated decisions, than these other sports are. And I love that about football, and I love that about business, and I love that about chess. But, the play-by-play guys don’t know what they’re talking about, which is shocking considering there’s so many ex-athletes, and maybe they just simplify it for the sake of the common fan, but I can’t listen to them. Most of them. because they don’t know what they’re talking about, and it makes it hard for me to watch, like, no that’s wrong. And I want to see the entire field, so I can, like, really analyze the chess match. TV copy, I can’t—the angles that they have, what I enjoy about football, I can’t see.

Cue Cards 9-29-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, September 28

Football, football, football — It was a full day of football, replete with amazing performances, unfortunate blunders, strange coaching decisions. With Monday comes a slew of analysis and heated debate. Brush up on your lines about all the games with our NFL One Liners.
Line: How about them Cowboys? [They won big over the Saints, that’s how.]
Europe retains the Ryder Cup — The verb retain will be used by almost everyone talking about the European victory of the United States in the Ryder golf tournament. This is because of a small wrinkle in the rules that calls for the defending champions (the Europeans) to hold on to the championship if the two teams tie after three days of play. This rule didn’t come into play — Europe beat the U.S. by a comfortable 16.5 to 11.5 margin — but the verb will anyway.
Line: That’s three Ryder Cup wins in a row for Europe.
Baseball playoffs are set — The last spot in the MLB postseason was settled yesterday when the Oakland Athletics clinched by beating the Los Angeles Angels. This eliminated the Seattle Mariners from contention. The dates and times for the playoffs are set, starting with two one game playoffs on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you’re curious, here’s how the baseball playoffs work.
Line: Can you imagine playing 161 games and being eliminated on the 162nd? Brutal.

Week Four NFL One Liners

On Mondays during in the fall, the conversation is so dominated by NFL football that the expression “Monday morning quarterback” has entered the vernacular. The phrase is defined by Google as “a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event.” With the popularity of fantasy football, we now have Monday morning quarterbacks talking about football from two different perspectives. We want you to be able to participate in this great tradition, so all fall we’ll be running NFL One Liners on Monday. Use these tiny synopses throughout the day:

Week 4

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, AT 1:00 P.M. ET

Buffalo Bills 17, at Houston Texans 23

The Texans played less worse than the Bills and snuck away with the victory.
Line: The Texans won but I don’t think either team’s fans are all that happy with how their team looked.

Carolina Panthers 10, at Baltimore Ravens 38

The story will be Steve Smith’s great play against his former team but the story should be how the Panthers have now been blown out in two straight games.
Line: I’m worried about the Panthers. If they don’t turn things around fast, they could lose most of their games this year.

Green Bay Packers 38, at Chicago Bears 17

Close at half-time, the Packers shut out the Bears in the second half while scoring 17 points of their own.
Line: I guess Packers Quarterback Aaron Rodgers was right when he told the Packers fans to “relax” this week.

Detroit Lions 24, at New York Jets 17

The Lions are very quietly 3-1 this year and have winnable games against the Bills and the Vikings coming up in the next two weeks.
Line: Don’t look now, but this could be the Lions’ year.

Tennessee Titans 17, at Indianapolis Colts 41

The Colts lost their first two games by a combined 10 points. Since then, they’ve won two games by a combined 51 points. Losing close games and winning big are often the sign of a good team.
Line: Through four games, the Colts look like they can play with anyone.

Miami Dolphins 38, at Oakland Raiders 14

This was the first of three games this season to be played in England. There’s already news suggesting Raiders coach Dennis Allen may be fired following this big loss.
Line: If I were the Raiders coach, I might just stay and do a little sight-seeing in London.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers 27, at Pittsburgh Steelers 24

After a humiliating loss last week on national television, the Buccaneers won a dramatic game in Pittsburgh. The motivational and emotional swings are one thing, but having ten days between a Thursday game and a Sunday one might have been the bigger factor in this game.
Line: NFL teams are all more evenly matched than people think. An extra three days of rest and preparation are a big deal.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, AT 4:05 AND 4:25 P.M. ET

Jacksonville Jaguars 14, at San Diego Chargers 33

The Jaguars, like the Raiders, remain winless after this loss in San Diego. Being 0-4 must be a helpless feeling for the players, fans, coaches, and everyone involved and invested in the team’s performance. The Chargers camp is the exact opposite — happy and excited.
Line: Doesn’t it just feel like the Chargers’ year? Not that beating Jacksonville is a sign of anything other than professionalism.

Atlanta Falcons 28, at Minnesota Vikings 41

The Vikings’ excitement over the performance of their rookie starting quarterback Teddy Bridgewater was muted when Bridgewater was carted off the field with an injured ankle. X-rays were said to be negative but a sprain so severe that it requires a cart is sometimes worse than a clean break would be.
Line: The Vikings can’t catch a bre

Philadelphia Eagles 21, at San Francisco 49ers 26

This was a weird game. The Eagles defense and special teams played so well in the first half that their team had the lead without the offense doing anything substantive. The offense were barely even on the field. This lack of rhythm came back to haunt the Eagles because when they needed the offense to do something in the second half, they couldn’t count on them.
Line: The Eagles defense and special teams players must be pissed at their offensive players.

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

New Orleans Saints 17, at Dallas Cowboys 38

With the Saints’ ability to score quickly and the Cowboys penchant for blowing leads, I kept waiting for the inevitable comeback during this game. It never really materialized. After starting the year 0-2, people were describing the Saints as the best 0-2 team in the league and counseling patience. I’m not sure anymore.
Lead: Eventually, your record does define you as a team, that’s where we might be with the Saints now.

What is the red zone in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the red zone in football? The announcers during football games are always talking about one team or another being “in the red zone.” What does that mean? Do the rules change when a team is in the red zone?

Thanks,
Sammy

— — —

Dear Sammy,

The red zone is a term used to refer to the area from the twenty yard line to the goal-line of the side of the field that the football team with the ball is trying to score on. A team that is “in the red zone” is one that has the ball and is less than twenty yards from scoring. The red zone is purely a convention, it has no implication on the rules of football at all.

Wikipedia writes about the red zone, that it, “is mostly for statistical, psychological, and commercial advertising purposes.” In terms of psychology and statistics, you’ll often see statistics about how often a team scores once they are in the red zone and what percent of those scores are touchdowns versus field goals. Fans feel like once their teams are in the red zone, they should score. Missed “red zone opportunities” are seen as disappointing and as potentially pivotal to the result of a game. This psychological understanding of the red zone is true of at least some football players as well. Reporter Sam Borden asked a football player about the red zone in an article on the topic from 2012:

Tight end Martellus Bennett says the irritation a unit feels when a red zone trip goes unconsummated is unique.

Initially, Bennett hesitated when asked to describe the emotion that came with walking off the field with the ball so close to the end zone. “I’m not sure this is printable,” he said. He ultimately offered a “cleaned-up” analogy that likened it to the frustration felt by an anxious, apprehensive man who spends hours working up the courage to talk to a pretty woman and then is only steps away when another man sidles up and slips his arm around her.

Sports statisticians have looked into the red zone and, for the most part, come up empty. As you might expect, there’s nothing magical about the 20 yard line that makes scoring easier or more likely once it is crossed. The best visual proof of this comes from NFL Stats Blog and it shows likelihood to score based on first down field position. Note that even the terms of this chart belie the red zone as a simple statistical reality because, of course it’s better to have the ball at the 22 yard line on first down than the 19 yard line on third. The likelihood to score curve is relatively smooth all the way down the field. A team in the red zone has a better chance of scoring as a team out of the red zone but there’s no statistical cliff that supports making a big deal over it. (As an aside, the most interesting part of the graph to me is that a team that gets a first down on the 11-15 yard line is more likely to score than if they get it on the ten yard line. This matches my instinct about football — it’s hard to go a full ten yards to get a touchdown — it’s better to at least be able to get another first down on the 1-5 yard line than have to score in one set of downs.)

No one seems to know exactly where the term comes from. One popular theory, which has floated to the top of this question on the sports question & answer portion of Stack Exchange, is that the term has military origins and means, “generally close to the enemy (red having been a symbol for danger for a long time).” I buy that as an explanation. Football has a long history of emulating the military. The same New York Times article from above, related a story about longtime New York Giants coach, Tom Coughlin, who early in his career:

Decided a psychological change of language was in order. Instead of describing the area as the red zone, Coughlin said, he consciously switched it to the green zone when referring to his team’s offense. His reasoning was simple.

“Green is go and red is stop,” he said. “What are you trying to do in the green zone? You’re trying to score. It’s not the red zone. If you’re on offense, it’s green.”

Coughlin’s got an interesting point. If you follow the analogy closely, the team in question seems to be the defending team, not the team playing offense. I think at some point, as football itself flipped to being far more about successful offense than successful defense, we flipped how we use the term red zone. My guess is that originally, the red zone was used primarily to describe the last twenty yards a defending team had to concede before allowing a score.

The red zone is a made-up concept but it’s a compelling one. Hearing that a team is in the red zone makes most football fans look up from their nachos (if they’re lucky!) and attend to the game. Some programming genius at the NFL thought about this and realized there was an opportunity to be had. The NFL created a television network called the NFL RedZone that springs from game to game on Sundays, showing every red zone trip all day, sometimes multiple games simultaneously. It’s a smashing success and will be the subject of a Dear Sports Fan post soon.

Until then,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-26-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Thursday, September 25

A Fitting Farewell to Derek Jeter — Derek Jeter has been the shortstop of the New York Yankees for as long as I can remember. It seems like forever. In actuality, it’s been since 1996. He’s retiring after this year and last night was his last game at home in Yankee Stadium. He’s a divisive player, partially because the Yankees are at once the most popular and the most hated team in the league, but also because he’s widely thought of as a great player but a close study of his statistics often leaves room for doubt about how good he actually is. Last night, he further cemented his legend as a winner by hitting a single in the bottom of the ninth inning which helped his teammate score the winning run. Basically, as soon as he hit that ball, the game was over and the Yankees had won. Believe it or not, there were plenty of damp eyes among Yankees fans in the stadium and at home.
Line: You couldn’t have written a more Jeter-like ending if you had tried.
The Good Night for New York Continued in Football — Meanwhile, back in the NFL, the New York Giants were beating the Washington Redskins 45 – 14. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong for Washington, and everything that could go right, went right for New York. After many seasons playing with the same offensive coach and offensive strategy, the Giants installed a new coach and a new strategy over this past off-season. They started the season looking horribly. It’s possible they are a bad team that had a good night but it’s also possible that they just needed some time to get used to new ways of playing. On Washington’s side of the ball, the enthusiasm they had for quarterback Kirk Cousins when he took over for injured Robert Griffin III might be waning slightly (okay, dramatically) after he threw four interceptions in the second half.
Line: Maybe Kirk Cousins isn’t the savior everyone thought he was.
The Ryder Cup Begins — Not strictly, yesterday’s action, this international golf tournament started very early in the morning, East Coast time. So far, the European team is slightly ahead of the team from the United States, but that’s not bad for the U.S. because we were underdogs coming into the tournament. Play continues at 8:15 a.m. ET. If you’re curious about how the Ryder Cup works, read my explanation of it here.

Why is an NFL star driving a 1991 Mazda?

If you’re watching the Thursday NFL game between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins, you might be thinking that the Washington running back, Alfred Morris, seems pretty cool. He is! Here’s an excerpt from a great story you should read about him — Why Redskins Star Alfred Morris’ Dream Is This Humble 1991 Mazda 626 by Patrick George for Jalopnik.

Morris, a Pensacola native, said he bought the 626 from his pastor for $2 back when he was playing for Florida Atlantic University. (The car still has an expired parking sticker from the college on its windshield.)

Morris is a cheerful, affable, down to earth guy. Even though he’s an NFL star with an NFL salary, he said he had more reasons to keep The Bentley than to get rid of it.

“This is my baby, man,” he said. “It’s more than just a car. I didn’t grow up with a lot. This helps me remember where I come from and where I’m going.”

Do Not Watch This Game 9.27.14 Weekend Edition

Sunday, 1:00 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Baltimore Ravens vs. Carolina Panthers. It’s on CBS but do not watch this game!

I’ll start this week by copping to the truth about this game — there is a reason to watch it. There’s a single plot that will be played out on Sunday that’s almost fascinating enough to make the game worth watching. Steve Smith Sr. was a wide receiver on the Panthers team for 13 years. He’s their all time leader in basically every receiving statistic out there. He was also the heart of the team for more than a decade. At 5’9″, he’s a lot smaller than you’d expect for a player of this reputation, but what he lacks in size, he’s made up for in furious intensity. He’s a great player. Over this past summer, the Carolina Panthers let Steve Smith walk. He walked right into the Baltimore Ravens starting lineup and has been one of their best players this year. Now, he gets to play against his old team. This story is the focus of this game — the Charlotte Observer called this “Steve Smith Week.”

You know what? That’s going to make for a really frustrating game to watch. Revenge fantasies very rarely come to fruition in sports, especially not in football where there are so many players on each team and so many factors which go into winning or losing. Smith is likely to have a couple big plays that, if you want to, you could point to as being a big narrative deal. But no one player, not even Steve Smith, can decide the outcome of a game. There are larger issues at hand — can Cam Newton’s offensive line keep him from adding another injury to his bruised ribs and sprained ankle? Who will run the ball for the Panthers since their running back core looks like an ambulance corps? Can the Panthers’ defensive line win over a Baltimore offensive line that hasn’t allowed a sack in two games?

The coverage of this game is going to be so slanted towards the Steve Smith story that it’s going to be frustrating to listen to and a let-down to watch. Do not watch this game!

Of course, if you or the fan in your life is a Baltimore Ravens or Carolina Panthers fan, this isn’t a good game to skip. As an alternate, skip the Sunday early afternoon game between the New Orleans and the Dallas Cowboys. Why? Because the Cowboys have the worst pass defense in the league and the Saints are going to feast on them like they’re étouffée.