Tag: nfl

Cue Cards 8-28-14

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

Yesterday — Wednesday, August 27

  1. A Slew of Suspensions • #1 — NFL player Josh Gordon was finally suspended after a long appeals process for a full year because of testing positive for weed. The knee-jerk reaction is going to be to compare the length of his suspension for a non-violent offense to Ray Rice’s two games after assaulting his fiancée. It’s a little bit of a false comparison because the penalties for substance abuse were collectively bargained for and agreed to by the owners and the players union. Also, the chemicals in an athletes body seem more reasonably the jurisdiction of a sports league interested in protecting the fairness of their competition than any crime off the field, no matter how horrible. Then again, weed seems to be on its way to being legalized most everywhere and sexual assault is really, really, really awful. Maybe the knee-jerk reaction is the right one.
  2. A Slew of Suspensions • #2 — University of Southern California football player John Shaw has been suspended indefinitely after admitting his story about spraining his ankles while saving his nephew from drowning was a lie. The indefinite duration probably has something to do with the fact that the true story of the ankle sprains is still either not known or not known publicly. This type of blundering is a good way to remind ourselves, right before the college football season starts, that as much as they look like grown, professional, super-hero athletes, college athletes are still basically kids.
  3. A Slew of Suspensions • # 3 — The University of North Carolina has suspended four of their college football players after an “alleged hazing incident that left walk-on freshman wideout Jackson Boyer with a concussion.” Not much to really say about this one. Even if it wasn’t hazing, it sounds like assault. I suppose it’s helpful to also remember that there are around 125 college students on each of the 125 (symmetry not intended) division one college football teams in the country. That’s 15,625 men from age 18 to 22 who, when they get into trouble, are going to be in the news.
  4. Actual Sports • U.S. Open Upsets — Heat and humidity fray the nerves of even the most casual commuter in New York. So it’s no surprise that it works its evil on tennis players sprinting around mid-day for two to five hours. Two big names on the women’s side of the U.S. Open lost yesterday to relative unknowns. Number four ranked Aga Radwanska lost to Peng Shuai and Sloan Stephens lost to Johanna Larsson.

Cue Cards 8-27-14

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

Yesterday — Tuesday, August 26

  1. Almost Perfect — A very rare and exciting thing in Baseball is a “Perfect Game.” This is when a pitcher pitches the entire game without allowing a single person from the other team to get to first base. Not even who! San Francisco Giants’ pitcher Madison Bumgarner had a perfect game through seven innings but allowed a hit in the eighth. No one else got on base though and that runner did not score. It was still an impressive and notable performance by Bumgarner.
  2. Strong Little Fifteen — The U.S. Open’s opening round was enlivened yesterday when fifteen year-old CiCi Bellis from California beat the tenth ranked player in the world, Dominika Cibulkova. When told after the game that she was trending on twitter, Bellis said, “I know some of my friends were doing hashtag like ‘takedowncibulkova,’ something like that,” she said. “I know three of my friends did that.”
  3. Sports as Soap Opera — Two interesting non-game-based sports stories developed further yesterday. One is heartening — Michael Sam, the first openly gay professional football player, made it through the first round of cuts on his team. Still, his team has to go from 75 players to 53 by this Sunday, so we’ll have another week of watching this story before things are settled. The other story is bizarre — a couple days ago, USC football player John Shaw hurtled into the news when he explained to his team that he had sprained both his ankles badly by jumping from a balcony onto concrete to save his nephew from drowning in a pool. As the story became big news, it also became… suspect. Now the story is that USC has started to back away slowly with its hands held up, gesturing to the world that they don’t know what happened and aren’t fully supporting Shaw until they know more.

How to Enjoy a Fantasy Football Draft

This post is about fantasy football. If you don’t play fantasy football or don’t understand it, read this post on how fantasy football works.

If you’re new to fantasy football, you may feel unprepared during your fantasy football draft. The people you’re drafting with and against probably seem like they know a lot more than you do. They are familiar with the players names and nick-names; their reputations and their past performances. There’s likely to be some good-natured trash-talking while the draft is going on. People may disparage a choice you or someone else makes or show congratulatory agreement for what they perceive as a good pick. Towards the end of the draft, some people may start congratulating themselves on how great of a team they’ve put together. Put together, this exhibition of knowledge may be intimidating and could even spoil some of the enjoyment of choosing your own fantasy football team. I’m here to tell you it shouldn’t. There are lots of easy ways to make sure you enjoy a fantasy football draft.

The first thing to remember about fantasy sports is that they work as a form of enjoyment only because people cannot predict the future. No one actually knows which football players are going to produce the best stats this year. Lots of people think they know but they’re really only gambling on which players seem the most likely to produce the best stats. You can feel completely confident in your choices, knowing that they can only be proven to be wrong in hind-sight and by the time that hind is in sight, every other fantasy owner in your league will have at least one decision they are kicking themselves for having made. You won’t be alone. Football, of all the sports, is the least predictable and the most subject to chance. With only 16 games in a season, the margin between a great player and a good player can easily come down to luck.

I think fantasy drafts should be collegial and relaxed. I don’t really think that psyching another owner out, even if you could do it, is worth the effort. Not everyone feels the same way though. Every time someone groans or nods knowingly after a pick, think to yourself — this person may be faking this emotion for their own purposes. If they can make you second guess yourself by making fun of your pick in the fourth round, they might be able to get you to pick badly in the seventh round and because of that get to draft their favorite player who you otherwise might have taken. This type of psychological warfare is silly but it happens all the time. My recommendation is to ignore it but if you want to take part in it, steal a page from my childhood chess-teacher: bring a delicious looking sandwich and break it out half-way through the draft. Don’t share it but make sure everyone knows just how delicious and satisfying it is. A hungry mind is a distracted mind.

The other thing you can do to avoid feeling like you’re drafting from a position of weakness is to have a plan. This was one of my key suggestions in a post last year on tips for your first fantasy draft. I even suggested a few simple plans to follow. This year I came across another very simple way to create a plan. The Fantasy Fix offers this three-part flow chart (say that ten times fast) that you can follow. It tells you which position to take in each round given what you choose to do in the first round. For example, if you start out by taking a running back in the first round, you should then take two wide receivers and then either another wide receiver followed by three running backs, a quarterback, and a tight end, or two running backs, a wide receiver, another running back, and then a quarterback and a tight end. I think these are quite reasonable paths to follow and narrowing your choices by position in each round formulaically will lend you a ton of confidence in your choices.

Hope you enjoy your fantasy drafts. Shoot me an email at dearsportsfan@gmail.com to tell me how they go, what they feel like, and what questions you have.

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards: 8-25-14

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

Yesterday — Sunday, August 24

  1. Sam Bradford’s Knee — St. Louis Rams Quarterback Sam Bradford tore his ACL and will miss the entire upcoming National Football League season. Bradford was the last quarterback drafted under the previous collective bargaining agreement when rookies made way more money than they do now, so, as upsetting as it is to lose your team’s starting quarterback before the season even starts for Rams fans, at least this means the team will definitely move on to a more affordable quarterback option next year.
  2. Angels beat the Athletics — It’s rare that the two best teams in any sport are in the same division. In baseball right now, the two teams with the best records are not only in the same division but in the same state. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (or whatever they’re actually called these days) beat the Oakland Athletics last night 9-4 to move into first place. Of all the major league sports, baseball has the fewest playoff teams, so this jockeying for position really does matter.
  3. Sunderland ties Manchester United — The most famous team in the world, Manchester United, has a new manager this year, the way-out-there Dutch Louis Van Gaal. In two games so far this season, they still haven’t won with him at the helm. Yesterday they drew with the decidedly mediocre Sunderland. Let’s all just wait quietly for the Van Gaalian eruption to happen.

What is a Conference in Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a conference in sports? What makes a conference a conference? And why is it called a conference?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

Dear Erik,

Thanks for your question. A conference is a collection of teams that play more against each other than they do against the other teams in their sport. As you’ll see, conferences have various histories and meanings in different sports. In some sports conferences are defined geographically. In some they are the remnants of history. In some sports the conferences are actually pseudo competitive bodies themselves and in other sports they are cooperating divisions within a single organization. Conferences vary in importance and independence from sport to sport. Before we get into the differences, let’s start with some general truths about conferences that apply across (almost) all sports.

Teams within a conference play more games against each other than against the other teams in their sport. It varies by league and by sport. In the NHL, for example, teams play at least three times per season against every other team in their conference but only twice against teams from the other conference. In Major League Baseball teams only play 20 of 162 games against teams from the other conference.

Conferences crown conference champions in all sports. In many leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, playoff brackets are organized by conference. Teams in the AFC (one of the NFL conferences) only play teams from the AFC in the playoffs until the Super Bowl. So, the conference champion is basically the winner of the semi-final game. In other sports, mostly college sports, the conferences only really have meaning during the regular season, so conferences have different ways of deciding a champion. Depending on the sport and conference, there may be a conference tournament at the end of the regular season or a single championship game between the two teams with the best records in the conference. In some conferences, like Ivy League basketball, the champion is just the team with the best record in games against other teams in the Ivy League.

What Sports Have Geographically Defined Conferences?

A geographic division of teams is perhaps the most sensible way of defining a conference. Since teams within a conference play more games against each other than against teams outside of their conference, organizing geographically saves money, time, and wear and tear on the players by reducing the overall travel time during a season. The NBA and NHL are organized in this way. Both leagues have an Eastern and a Western Conference and both stay reasonably true to geographic accuracy. The NBA has a couple borderline assignments with Memphis and New Orleans in the West and Chicago and Milwaukee in the East. The NHL recently realigned its conferences, in part to fix some long-standing issues with geography like Detroit being in the West. Geographic conferences seem logical because they simplify operations for the teams within them. Many college conferences began geographically but as we’ll see later, that’s no longer their defining characteristic or driving force.

What Sports Have Historically Defined Conferences?

It’s easy to think about the sporting landscape as a set of neat monopolies. The NFL rules football, the NBA, basketball, the MLB, baseball, and the NHL, hockey. It wasn’t always that simple. Most of these professional leagues are the product of intense competition between leagues and only became supreme after either beating or joining their rival. The NFL was formed by the merger between two competitive leagues, the traditional NFC and the upstart AFC. The NBA beat out its biggest rival, the ABA, in 1976 but took many ideas from it, like the three-point line but alas not the famous ABA multi-colored ball. Believe it or not, Major League Baseball was not a single entity until 2000! Before then its two conferences (still called “leagues” because of their history as separate entities but pretty much, they are conferences,) the National League and the American League were independent entities.

Two leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League continue to have conferences defined by their competitive history. In baseball, the American League and National League each have teams across the entire country, often even in the same city like the New York Yankees (AL) and Mets (NL), Chicago with its White Sox (AL) and Cubs (NL) and Los Angeles/Anaheim with the Angels (AL) and Dodgers (NL). The NFL has similarly kept its historic leagues, the AFC or American Football Conference and NFC or National Football Conference. Each NFL Conference is broken up into three geographic divisions, East, Central, and West, but they all play more against the teams in their conference, even far away, than the teams close by but in the other conference. In the NFL the two conferences play under exactly the same rules but in baseball there are still some major historic differences in how the game is played, most significantly that pitchers have to also bat in the National League but are allowed to be replaced by a designated hitter in the American League.

What Sports Have Conferences that are Competitive?

So far we’ve looked at geographic and historically defined conferences. It’s clear that geographic conferences don’t compete against each other — they are part of the same entity. You can imagine that because of their history, the conferences in the NFL and MLB may be a little competitive with each other, like brothers or sisters. There are still some conferences though where competition against other conferences is their key driving force. These conferences are largely found in college sports.

Most college conferences have geographic names — the Big East, the South-Eastern Conference (SEC), the Pacific Athletic Conference (PAC 12), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Sun Belt, and the Mountain West. When they formed, they formed for all the reasons we discussed above in the geographic section but also to take advantage of financial arrangements that could only be made together, most importantly television contracts. As the money has gotten bigger, especially in college football, the competition between conferences for the best teams and the most lucrative contracts has become incredibly intense. In recent years, you’ve seen conferences poach teams from one another in a race to provide television viewers with the most competitive leagues to follow and therefore generate gobs of profit. This scattered the geographic nature of these conferences so that a map showing which teams are in which conferences now looks like a patchwork quilt.

Like it did with the ABA and NBA, the NFC and AFC, and the NL and AL, my guess is that this competition between conferences in college sports will resolve itself into some more stable league form. No one knows when this will happen but my guess is that it will be in the next ten or fifteen years. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Thanks for asking about conferences,
Ezra Fischer

Football is Coming

Football is coming. As inevitable as winter in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, college and NFL football is rapidly approaching and when it does, it’s going to wipe every other topic in sports off the landscape. Already it’s beginning to dominate. The first two stories of my favorite show in the genre of sports guys yelling at each other, Pardon the Interruption, were about NFL football. Four of ESPN’s top eleven stories right now are about football. At si.com it’s seven of fifteen. Fantasy football preview magazines fill the newsstands as passionate owners begin their preparation for the upcoming season. If you don’t believe me, there’s even a website, howmanydaystillfootball.com that just lists how many days till football there are. Football is coming.

Football is coming and I have mixed feelings about it. I love football. It’s not a sport I grew up with but it’s become one of my favorite to watch. I once answered a friend who asked, “Why Do People Like Football?” and I listed a bunch of reasons. Among them were the fascinating tactics, the obscure technicalities that are so much fun to argue about, the crazy athleticism of its players, and even the violence. I also listed “fantasy football” and “sitting on the couch” in the list. Here’s what I had to say about them:

  • Fantasy Football — A subset of gambling, fantasy football has taken off in the last five years in a crazy way. Around twenty million people now play fantasy football, there’s a half hour television show on ESPN dedicated to fantasy football owners and our own blog has already had a fantasy football post!

  • Sitting on the Couch — There’s really nothing better than sitting down on the couch on Sunday knowing that you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything for the rest of the day. The mid-afternoon football induced slumber is also a glorious feature of the sport.

It’s these two factors that I feel the most divided about. It’s not that I don’t love playing fantasy. I do. I’m even messing around with my own idea of an innovative new fantasy game, but more on that another time. And you know I like sitting on the couch. I’m doing it right now! It’s just that I don’t love the extent of the power football has over me. I enjoy watching other sports. The recent World Cup was so much fun and it didn’t dominate my life the way the NFL can. I enjoy reading and seeing friends and family outside of the context of sports. I’ve been enjoying listening to non-sports podcasts on my commute, like This American Life, Risk!, and Ask Me Another. I like traveling on weekends without fighting off the urge (or giving in, more likely) to compulsively check my phone. Most of all, I like having my brain free from thinking about how to win at fantasy football so it can think about what moves to make next in my career or how to be a good friend, partner, brother, son, and grandson.

So this year, when football swarms over the landscape like the zombie populated winter storm in Game of Thrones, I’m going to weather it more gracefully than before. Maybe I’ll plan a few weekends of travel now so I lock myself into not watching every weekend. Maybe I’ll do a better job picking and choosing only the games I think are legitimately interesting each week to watch. Maybe I’ll go out more to watch with friends instead of hiding in my living room. Football is coming and I can’t wait, I just want to find a way to savor it without letting it sabotage me.

The "Gang Ties" Dilemma

desean-jackson-93a4893d71e95192
Desean Jackson escapes a tackle.

People often say sports brings people together, which is true in many ways. Bringing people from all walks of life together also often serves to highlight the gaps and misunderstandings that separate them, which can be a good thing as well.

Recently, a professional football team – my Philadelphia Eagles – released a star wide receiver amid rumors that he had “gang ties.” The cause and effect here is unclear: the Eagles have not, and likely will not, say that is why they released him. In fact, they will likely not ever discuss these “gang ties” at all. (Note: “gang ties” will be in quotes throughout this column, because no one anywhere has published anything remotely conclusive tying the player to actual gang activity).

But this happens from time to time in sports because many athletes come from impoverished backgrounds and grew up in circumstances that seem alien to the fans who follow and root for or against them.

It’s much easier for a kid from the suburbs (New Jersey, in my case) to shake a finger at someone for having “gang ties” – I couldn’t have found a gang to join or gang members to hang out with if I’d wanted to (Note: I did not want to and no gang would’ve had me). But too many kids who grew up in Compton, or Chicago, or Camden couldn’t help brushing shoulders with other kids who were in gangs, whether they wanted to or not. Another athlete with a similar background – Richard Sherman of the Seahawks, who has walked into the cultural buzzsaw a couple of times himself – made this point particularly well in a recent column.

I don’t think commentators and fans usually judge a person’s actions without stopping to consider how different their life experiences or circumstances maliciously; they do it because they’re people, and people view the world through the lens of their own experience. I also don’t subscribe to some notion of absolute moral relativism: I love David Simon more than any living artist not named Allen Iverson, but I don’t agree that I’m incapable of judging someone else’s moral choices simply because their life experiences are drastically different than mine.

But incidents like this highlight the sheer hypocrisy in criticizing people for having “gang ties” without stopping for a second to ask why gangs have taken root in so many of our cities – let alone what we would have done growing up in the same situation.

This reminds me of the cultures-colliding aspect of rap music, which for years was derided as not real music, exploitative, violent, and reflective of society’s moral decay – with the critics somehow managing to miss, or ignore, the fact that those lyrics were frequently a reflection of the world that surrounded the rappers. The fact that rap has been around for thirty years and a portion of the population still doesn’t get it suggests that the Desean Jacksons and Richard Shermans of the sports world will continue to make waves simply by putting their life experiences front and center.

Thanks for reading,
Brendan

On Michael Sam's Coming Out: Why we Should Feel Proud, Ashamed, and Old

This past week, a major college football player, projected to be taken in the third or fourth round of this Spring’s NFL draft came out of the closet to the media. His name is Michael Sam. He’s a defensive end and spent the last few years wreaking havoc on offensive linemen in the SEC. The SEC is widely recognized as the best conference in the country and it’s strength is defense. Sam was named as co-Defensive MVP of the league this past year. If drafted, Sam will become the first openly gay player in the NFL.

This story makes me feel proud. It makes me ashamed. And it makes me feel old. I’ll tell you why.

Sam coming out makes me proud in the same way (but to a lesser extent) as the election of Obama. I’m against any exclusion based on an unchosen personal characteristic not germane to the task at hand. If you want to keep the NFL free of people who can’t do more than five push ups, fine. For most people, that’s a choice (I’d rather write than lift weights) and it’s not hard for them to change that choice if they want. But race, homosexuality, gender, hair color (Andy Dalton, trailblazer,) etc. should not be held against someone. I’m proud to have lived through the election of the first black president and hopefully soon, the drafting of the first openly gay football player.

Then again, it’s about time, isn’t it? This is where the shame comes in. As Jason Whitlock pointed out in his fine on Sam, (http://m.espn.go.com/ncf/story?storyId=10437883&src=desktop) sports is really, really behind the curve on this cultural shift. We’ve had gay congress people for years, gay television stars, favorite gay characters (hell, Obama’s favorite character in the Wire is a gay hold-up artist named Omar.) When Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, he was the head of the arrow of integration. Sam is somewhere amidst the fletching. This is not his fault, but everyone involved in sports should feel at least a little shame that this took so long; that major sports are, (at least on this issue,) woefully behind.

From shame I transition seamlessly to old. Look, it’s a shame that still real weight of being the first is going to fall on a yet-to-be-drafted college senior. Really? With close to 3,000 men on and off NFL rosters each year, that group of grown, professional men is going to let a young-adult bear the burden of this? The truth is though, that the generation ten years younger than me has grown up under different circumstances and with different values. They were eight the last time anyone could reasonably think that America was not only a force for good but that everyone in the world felt that way too. They were fifteen when the State of the Union was first given by a black man. They couldn’t care if Michael Sam was straight, gay, identified as queer, identified as a woman, or was asexual.

When new values line up with mine, as they do here, it’s great, but it makes me feel a little old that my generation couldn’t have achieved this. It makes me think of some talking head’s comment on one of President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speeches that focused a lot on education — even in the “Jobs” section of the speech. What he’s saying, this talking head said, is that there won’t be a solution for the current generation of workers; the future will be the future.

Michael Sam is taking the sports world to the future and I’m proud, I’m ashamed, and I’m feeling just a little old.

Of course… that could have been the roughly 16,000 steps I climbed today on a hike from Vernazza to Corniglia. Thanks for reading,
Ezra

2014 Super Bowl: Omaha Edition

Omaha is the largest city in Nebraska. It’s also become the focus of an incredible amount of attention leading up to the Super Bowl. Why? Because Peyton Manning, quarterback of the Broncos, screams “OMAHA” at least a dozen times a game. It’s become his signature phrase and a trending topic culturally.

Manning uses the word as part of his snap count. In our post a few months back to answer the questions “What is a Snap in Football?” we wrote this about the snap count itself:

The phrase “snap count” is pretty common but has two only tangentially related meanings. One meaning refers to any vocal cue that a quarterback gives to his own team to synchronize their movement with the snapping of the football. Because only one player on the offensive side is allowed to move at a time before the snap, a good snap count provides the offense with an advantage over the defense; it knows when to start moving and can get a head-start on the defensive players. Once in a while defensive players will mimic a quarterback’s snap count in an effort to get the offense to move at the wrong time. This is illegal and a defensive team may be penalized for “simulating the snap count.” Another meaning of the phrase snap count is the number of plays a player is a part of, usually in a single game. In this use, the snap is representative of a play and the count is just the act of counting the number of plays or snaps someone is a part of.

In Manning’s case, we’re concerned with the first meaning — the vocal cue. Manning uses the word “Omaha” as a vocal cue to his team and its meaning is unknown to everyone but them. Deadspin and the Boston Globe wrote articles recently which tried to decipher the meaning of “Omaha.” Neither got very far. The Globe story contained a retelling of Manning having a little fun with reporters at a recent press conference:

Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning went to the podium Wednesday in Englewood, Colo., and humorously explained that “Omaha” is a running play.

“But it could be a pass play,” he said, “or a play-action pass, depending on a couple of things. The wind. Which way we’re going. The quarter. And the jerseys we’re wearing. So it really varies play to play.”

 The truth is, no one except for Manning and his teammates are ever likely to know how they’re using the word “Omaha” but that hasn’t stopped the rest of us from having a ton of fun with it.
The Denver Airport creatively edited their departure board in the spirit of “OMAHA!”

Omaha

The Omaha chamber of commerce found a way to do good while having fun:

As opposed to the Governor and Lt. Governor of Iowa who just tried to start a border war:

A roadtrippers group created a sincere guide to the city including places to eat, drink, and visit.

And of course, an enormous number of people are betting on how many times Manning will say “Omaha” in the Super Bowl itself. According to this Fox Sports post, the over/under on how many times Peyton Manning says “Omaha” has been set at 27.5 and is the second most popular prop bet behind the length of the national anthem. For what it’s worth, I would take the under — what if he does switch to “Cedar Rapids?” If you need a refresher course on Super Bowl betting, check out our guide from last year.

That’s it for the Omaha edition of our Super Bowl preview. If you missed the British edition, you can find it here. Thanks for reading!

2014 Super Bowl: Explaining Football, British Edition

hero-bkg-bridge
Why this computer generated image of what looks like the Manhattan Bridge has a football field super-imposed onto it, I have no idea. And I’m not even British!

In the midst of all of Dear Sports Fan’s Winter Olympics previews we’ve neglected to cover the big football game coming up this Sunday, the Super Bowl! Luckily, the game between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks has received a lot of coverage from other sources. Some of the coverage has been focused on explaining football to the layperson! And for some reason a lot of it has been focused on British people — maybe because they are a group of people who can safely be assumed to be free of knowledge about football without insult. Here’s a few of the most humorous or most helpful highlights.

From Buzzfeed, found on Deadspin, a group of British people making vague guesses and comments about the nature of the Super Bowl and football in general. My favorite is the description of football as being “like the Matrix but in padding.”

There’s also a wonderful and totally fake (and even more hilarious for being so) impression of what a football game would sound like if announced by a British person who has no idea what’s going on. My favorite line in this one is the droll description of a kick return: “A lucky fullback catches it, runs a bit, gets tired, fallls over.”

This video is written from the perspective of an American American Football fan who tries to explain football to “Liberals, Ladies, and Limeys.” “Limeys” is of course a slang term for Brits which derives (apocryphally?) from the British Navy’s practice of adding lime juice to sailor’s ration of rum to prevent scurvy. The tone of this video is a little obnoxious (we on this site don’t think ladies, liberals, or the British are necessarily ignorant about football) but it’s extremely well animated and manages to cover a lot in just a couple minutes. It’s a fine companion piece to our posts about football, most of which you can find here, including positional descriptions and answers to questions like Why Do People Like Football, How do I Begin to Enjoy Football, How Does Scoring Work in Football, and What’s a Down in Football.

Finally, for the design lovers or soccer people out there, there’s this brilliant website, Football as Football, which re-imagines NFL football teams’ logos as European soccer logos. Each team has a logo in the style of a Spanish, English, German, or Italian football club. If the Super Bowl were being played between the German soccer version of the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks, this is what it would look like:

Broncos GermanSeahawks German