Tag: plot

As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.

Thanks and have a wonderful holiday,
Ezra Fischer

Pittsburgh Steelers at Baltimore Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

The turkey’s been brined, basted, braised, and broiled. The pie has been eaten. The family has been feuded with. Just when you’re ready to sneak back into the kitchen for a turkey sandwich… BOOM! another football game begins.

When the people who create the NFL schedule put this one on the docket for Thanksgiving night, they probably thought they were pretty clever. Baltimore had just won the Super Bowl and Pittsburgh, although it had just missed the playoffs, was a perennial power that had made it to the Super Bowl three times in the past ten years and won it twice. As two of the four teams in the AFC North, Baltimore and Pittsburgh were natural rivals known for playing close and fierce games against one another. Finally, both teams were known for being led by smothering, violent defenses whose aim seemed equally to prevent their opponents from scoring and from finishing the game without broken bones. They were the perfect choice to lure fans back to the television after a long day and to keep them alert through a haze of tryptophan.

In the NFL, the best laid schemes of men and schedulers often go awry. The defending champion Baltimore Ravens started the season by getting blown out by the Denver Broncos, rallied a bit, and have now lost four of their last six games. They’re really struggling and at 5-6 are two games back from the division leading Cincinnati Bengals. The Steelers are in exactly the same position at 5-6 but got there very differently. They started the season with four straight losses and looked like they were doomed to a painful few years of losing a lot while slowly rebuilding the talent on their team. After their second loss the veterans on the team decided to ban the rookies from playing ping-pong or pool in the locker room. After the fourth loss, the coach tried to “unify” the team by banning everyone from playing any games^[1] in the locker room. This seems to have had^[2] the intended effect and from that point on the Steelers have won five of their last seven games.

Based on the team’s identical records and their both being two games behind the division lead with only four games to play, their game on Thanksgiving night will have a big impact on whether or not they will make the playoffs. In every sport, there is a palpable difference in play between a regular season game and a playoff game. The NFL is less different from other sports because its short 16 game season makes every regular season game proportionally more important than one of 82 in the NHL or the NBA or one in 162 in the MLB. Still, the hitting will be harder, the scrambling more desperate, and the decisions even more agonized over in this game.

Enjoy the drama and the leftovers!

As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.

Thanks and have a wonderful holiday,
Ezra Fischer

Oakland Raiders at Dallas Cowboys, 4:30 ET on CBS

This is probably the weakest game of the three on Thanksgiving this year, which is good because, plopped right down in the late afternoon, it’s likely the most disruptive to every single non-football related element of your Thanksgiving celebration. This doesn’t meant that there aren’t compelling stories surrounding the game, nor that the sports fans in your life won’t be compelled to watch it. Here are some of the plot points for this game.

The first thing to understand is that everything about the Dallas Cowboys is a big deal. The Cowboys are the most popular, most profitable team in the NFL. According to Wikipedia, they have an estimated value of $2.1 billion and annual revenue around $269 million. Their nickname is “America’s team” which, beloved as they are by their fan-base, makes virtually every other football fan seethe. They are simultaneously the most loved and the most hated team.

The Raiders are an almost perfect foil for them plot-wise. As hated as the Cowboys are, they think of themselves as wearing the white hat. The Raiders don’t just pride themselves on wearing black hats, they like to think they have black souls. For most of their history, the Raiders took their cues from now deceased owner Al Davis. Davis was famously antagonistic. He sued several cities in California as he moved the team from one to another. He sided with another football league in an anti-trust suit against the NFL. His imprint was seen on the style the Raiders favored which was aggressive on offense and especially on defense. Chuck Klosterman wrote a wonderful obituary of Davis in which he describe him as “a hard man — a genius contrarian who seemed intent on outliving all his enemies in order to irrefutably prove his ideas were right.”

Unfortunately, neither team is that good this year. The Raiders are 4-7 and have almost no hope of a playoff spot. The Cowboys are 6-5 and because the rest of their division hasn’t been very good either, tied for first place in their division. The Cowboys are much more talented than the Raiders and should absolutely win this game but, like the Lions from the first game of the day, are known for being consistently unpredictable. More than that, they are known specifically for losing games in embarrassing ways. The Cowboys quarterback, Tony Romo, takes most of the criticism for this. If it is a close game, listen for the fans in the room to start talking about how Romo “always messes up at the last-minute to lose the game” or how he “just isn’t clutch.”

We’ll see what happens when they play!

As a companion to the recent post on why football is a special part of Thanksgiving for many sports fans, I’m going to explain some of the plot points of the three Thanksgiving day football games this year.

Game 1 — Packers at Lions, 12:30 on Fox
Game 2 — Raiders at Cowboys, 4:30 on CBS
Game 3 — Steelers at Ravens, 8:30 on NBC

I’m thankful to everyone who has read, commented, asked a question, or otherwise supported Dear Sports Fan this year.

Thanks and have a wonderful holiday,
Ezra Fischer

Green Bay Packers at Detroit Lions, 12:30 ET on Fox

The first game of Thanksgiving Day begins early in the day, when the turkey is just starting on its eighteen hour journey to being slightly over-cooked when you serve it. The Detroit Lions are one of the two traditional teams (along with the Dallas Cowboys) that always host games on Thanksgiving. Since 2000 this has often meant that there wasn’t much drama to the game they were involved in. Since that year, the Lions have only had one winning season, and more often than not they were out of the playoff hunt and, frankly, a bit of a joke. This year is different. The Lions are tied for first place in their division and their opponent, the Packers, are only a half game back. We covered what “games back” means in a post recently but in this case the half game is because the Packers tied last week, not because they’ve played fewer games than the Lions.

The Lions are a predictably unreliable team. They are undeniably talented but prone to dumb mistakes and run-away tempers. They score the seventh most points in the league behind an exciting offense featuring quarterback Matthew Stafford, running back Reggie Bush, and wide-receiver Calvin Johnson. Sports writer and media mogul, Bill Simmons, recently wrote an ode to Johnson on his website Grantland that is worth reading. In it, he makes the case that Johnson is not only one of the best wide receivers ever but also, amazingly, almost totally non-controversial. Johnson wears 81 and truly is exciting to watch. Here’s how Simmons describes him:

And other than Randy Moss, I can’t remember being more excited about a receiver during that split second when his quarterback is heaving a football downfield, and the light bulb flickers on, and you say to yourself, “Wait, he’s going deep!”

When Stafford throws the ball deep to Johnson, tear yourself away from the potato chips and sneak a peak of a wide receiver who is a uber-talented physical freak.

The Green Bay Packers have had much more success over the last few decades than the Lions but they are missing their most important player. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers fractured his collarbone a few weeks ago and isn’t going to play tomorrow. That leaves the Packers reliant on rookie running back Eddie Lacy who has been performing excellently and in one of the most curious stories of the year, replacement quarterback Matt Flynn.

Here’s the story with Matt Flynn. He backed-up Aaron Rodgers from 2008 to 2011. In 2011 the Packers were so good that they had their playoff spot clinched before the last game of the season. They chose to hold Rodgers back from playing the game and played Flynn in his place both to prevent Rodgers from injury but also, I’d like to think, to pay back the long-time backup Flynn by giving him a chance to showcase himself to other teams before he became a free-agent at the end of that season. Showcase himself, he did! Flynn passed for 480 yards and 6 touchdowns, both of which set all-time team records. Sure enough, in the offseason he signed a three-year, $20.5 million dollar deal with the Seattle Seahawks. But before he played a game with Seattle, he lost the starting job to rookie Russell Wilson and at the end of the year, was traded to the Oakland Raiders. That brings us to this year when he AGAIN lost his starting job in training camp, this time to a second-year player, Terrelle Pryor. After a few poor performances when Pryor had a concussion, Flynn was cut. A few weeks later, the Buffalo Bills had some quarterback injuries themselves and signed him briefly but only as a last resort and then cut him a week or two later. And that’s when Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone.

Now Flynn is starting on a nationally televised game with first place in the division and the playoff hopes of the team and their fans riding on the outcome. He played the second half of the last Packers game and did quite well, but it will be very interesting to see how he plays now that he’s the starter. Is there some special magic for him on the Packers that will transform him from the player who lost his job twice to unheralded younger players back to the record-setting backup? Or will he fail and go down in history as one of the weirder footnotes?

Sports fans watch sports more like fans of dramas, sitcoms, or soap operas than one might expect. Sure, the sporting contest itself is interesting, but there is a whole lot of interest driven by plot and character. The NFL football game tonight between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is a particularly good example of this. As is most often the case with football, the most visible and compelling characters are the head coaches and the quarterbacks. Here’s a description of who they are and the plot that intertwines them.

Before this year, Andy Reid, head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, had spent the last 13 years as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. During that time, he led the team to five NFC Championship games (basically the semifinals of the NFL) and one Super Bowl but never won the championship. For the NFL, this is a notably long tenure and a very successful one, only partially marred by a sense that he was responsible for some of the failure to win “it all.” His last few years were saddened by the death of his son from a drug overdose. It’s unclear whether his death was intentional or not. The gravity of that situation and the way Reid handled it^[1], his long history with the team, and his close relationship with the owner made his firing at the end of last year surprising despite the flagging success of the Eagles over the last few seasons.

Reid was hired soon after the season as head coach of the Chiefs and has won his first two games this season.

Chip Kelly, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the man who took over for Andy Reid, is a polarizing figure. Before this season, he was head coach at the University of Oregon. While there, he developed an offense that has become known as the “blur” offense because it emphasizes speed in all ways. He likes his players fast, and he has them run plays on offense as frequently as possible. Where most offenses may run a play every 25 or 30 seconds, Kelly’s teams aim for 10 to 15 seconds in an attempt to exhaust the opposing defense. Kelly does this by reducing the amount of thinking his players have to do between plays and increasing it during the play. Instead of calling a play with a voice command, Kelly’s teams use some still unbroken code involving hand gestures and large cardboard cut-outs. During the play, his quarterbacks often choose between handing the ball to the running back, running it themselves, or throwing it to a wide-reciever. Because the quarterback is supposed to make this decision based on what the defense is trying to do, this strategy is called the “read-option.” One of the big stories coming into this NFL season was whether this combination of speed and read would work as well in the pros as it did in college. So far it seems to be working although the Eagles are only 1 and 1.

The plot surrounding the two starting quarterbacks in the game is one of great heights, a great fall, and potential redemption but in very different ways.

The Eagles quarterback, Michael Vick, has prodigious physical talents. I once ran across Vick in an airport and I watched as a man went up to him and said, “Michael Vick??! I love playing with you in [the video game] Madden!” Vick’s talents were rewarded with great fame and fortune until he was charged and convicted for running a dog-fighting ring. He served over a year in prison and returned to the NFL when Andy Reid and the Eagles took a big PR gamble and signed him. His personal redemption has been successful, but he hasn’t reached the playing heights in Philadelphia that he did before his incarceration. Perhaps Chip Kelly can help him get there.

The Chiefs quarterback is Alex Smith. Smith was the first pick in the 2005 draft by the San Fransisco 49ers. Although he showed some promise in San Fransisco, he mostly struggled until last year. Last year it seemed he had finally put it together and was not only playing the best football of his career but also as one of the best quarterbacks, as judged by statistics, in the league through the first half of the season. That’s when Smith got a concussion and had to miss a couple of games. The backup quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, stepped in and played so well that Smith never got back on the field. The 49ers went to the Super Bowl. Alex Smith was sent to Kansas City where he will try, under Andy Reid, to prove that last year’s first eight games were no fluke.

Will the notoriously nasty Philadelphia fans boo Andy Reid when he walks onto the field tonight? Will the new whiz kid Chip Kelly stump the old maestro Andy Reid? Which quarterback will continue on his path to redemption? Tune in tonight at 8:30 to find out. Sports!