Tag: rules

What is a Snap in Football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a snap in football? I hear it all the time in what sounds like many different contexts. Can you explain them all?

Thanks,
Ollie

— — —

Dear Ollie,

You’re right, there are a lot of different uses of the word snap in football. There’s a snap count, there’s a person on a football team called the “long snapper,” and a snap can refer to the act of snapping or the moment of the snap. In this post, we’ll go through them all and connect them to other elements of football. Finally, we’ll ask why it’s called a snap and what it tells us about football.

The Act of Snapping a Football

When a football play begins, the ball is motionless on the ground, positioned on an imaginary line which stretches from side-line to side-line, called the line of scrimmage. One player grabs the ball with his hand and moves it backwards between his legs to another player. That action is called the snap. The player who performs the act of snapping is the center. There are two main kinds of snaps, referred to by the position of the quarterback. A quarterback is either “under center” to receive the snap or “in the shotgun.” With a quarterback under center (right behind the center, so close that he rests one hand on the under-side of the center’s butt,) the center quickly hands him the ball through his legs. When a quarterback is in the shotgun formation, he is a between five and seven yards behind the quarterback. Snapping the football in this formation is a more challenging task — it requires spinning the football while throwing it backwards between his legs so that it flies in a straight, easy to catch spiral. You may also hear that there was a “direct snap.” This is a totally normal snap — either under center or shotgun but instead of a quarterback receiving the ball, it is a running back.

The act of snapping the football connects football to its past when, like rugby, throwing the ball forwards was not allowed. Although the majority of plays in most football games today involve throwing the ball forward, all of them begin with a backwards pass in the form of a snap. In case you’d like to learn how to snap a football, wikihow.com has a great tutorial.

Snap Count

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.

The Snap as a Moment

As described in the first paragraph, before a play begins, the football is motionless on the ground. The act of snapping the football begins the play and, confusingly, the moment that this happens is also called a snap. This is important because the exact moment a play begins is vital for a couple of important rules in football. Aside from the one offensive player who is allowed to move before the snap (said to be “in motion”) if any other player moves before the snap, they are offside. If a defensive player moves across the line of scrimmage and is not able to get back to his side of that line before the snap, he has encroached and will be called for a penalty. Dear Sports Fan covered both of these rules in our post on offside rules in various sports. Football, similar to basketball, has a play clock that counts down and requires a team to make an offensive play. In the NFL, the play clock is forty seconds long. If the clock runs out before the snap, there is a delay of game penalty.

The Snapping Specialist

While most snapping is done by someone playing the center position, there are some snaps that are so critical and so technically difficult that teams pay someone to perform them, even if that is almost all they can do on a football field. This player is the long snapper. He snaps the ball for punts and field goal attempts. For a punt, the long snapper needs to spiral the ball backwards to someone standing closer to 15 yards behind him than the five yards of a shotgun snap. The mechanics of a field goal snap are even more exacting because the snapper has to snap the ball in such a way that it spins exactly the right number of turns. This way the field goal holder has an easy job of placing the ball with the laces facing away from the kicker’s foot so that the kick flies true. The New York Times produced an amazing multi-media feature on this a few weeks ago.

Why is it called a snap? And what can we learn about football from it?

There doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus about why the snap is called this snap. This delights me because making up derivations runs deep in my family. Google defines snap as “a sudden, sharp cracking sound or movement” and as a secondary meaning, “in football: a quick backward movement of the ball from the ground that begins a play.” Football can be inaccessible or less pleasing to fans of other sports because it lacks the fluid motion and continuous play present in sports like soccer, basketball, and hockey. Instead of fluid play, football is characterized by quick bursts of action beginning from a standstill and creating havoc in a matter of seconds before coming to a halt. It’s no wonder then that we call the act that initiates these sudden, sharp bursts of movement a “snap.”

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

 

Why do Sports Teams Report Injuries?

Dear Sports Fan,

One thing I’ve never understood about sports fans is why they seemed to be obsessed with injuries? Why do sports teams even report injuries?

Thanks,
Rhea

injury
This player is likely to get a Probable (neck) designation on next week’s injury report.

— — —

Dear Rhea,

Like many artifacts of sports culture, the reporting of injuries has historically been driven by gambling. Sports and gambling have a long and curious symbiotic relationship and even omnipresent elements of sports like the injury report often have gambling origins. An injury can affect a player’s performance and therefore the outcome of the game. Information about which players are injured therefore is helpful if you are predicting what will happen in a game, which is essentially what sports gambling is. In the major American professional sports leagues, teams are required to give information about their players’ injuries to the press. I always believed that this was evidence of the hypocrisy of the leagues. How can you claim to be anti-gambling when you require teams to publish information that is only really useful to sports gamblers? In fact, this is only partially true. The requirement of reporting injuries began in the late 1940s as a response to a plot to fix the 1946 championship game. Then NFL commissioner, Bert Bell, figured that publishing who might not play in a game or who was likely to play at less than 100% effectiveness was a good way to prevent gamblers or bookies from profiting from inside information.

Fantasy football is a form of sports gambling and is similarly, if not more, obsessed with injury reports. Fantasy owners pay very close attention to the injuries of their players. Because of how fantasy football works, owners get a chance each week to choose from among the players on their team those who they think are going to perform the best. Injuries to their players or to players who affect their players, like the quarterback who throws the ball to one of their wide-receivers or the linebacker whose job it is to hit their running back go a long way to helping decide whose stats to have count each weekend.

Injury reports have their own peculiar vocabulary. Here’s some of the common words and phrases and what they mean:

  • Probable — if a player is probable, he’s almost definitely playing. The team is either following the requirements and reporting that the player did not practice because they are suffering from some minor ailment or the team is trolling the system by obscuring real injuries with fake injuries to avoid giving their opponents the advantage of knowing who is actually hurt. This is a classic move of Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots who once listed quarterback Tom Brady as probable for a few years despite him not missing a game.
  • Questionable — this designation is the only one that’s legitimate. A player listed as questionable might play or might not.
  • Doubtful — a player who is doubtful for a game is almost definitely not playing, the team just isn’t willing to admit it yet. According to this article about how bookmakers should use injury reports, only 3% of NFL football players listed as doubtful, play.
  • Out — nothing to see here, a player listed as out is definitely not playing in the upcoming game.
  • Upper/Lower Body Injury — Searching for a way to avoid exposing injured players from being targeted by their opponents, hockey teams are now only required to release whether an injury is an “upper body” or a “lower body” injury. This is silly in an era when players can watch replays of plays that happened five seconds ago or five months ago equally easily on team ipads.
  • (body part) — In sports that do give a little more specific information about where the injury is located than hockey does, you’ll often see this: Player Name, Probable (knee). This has led to the convention of announcers saying that a player is “out with a knee.” Sports columnist Bill Simmons has been poking fun at this convention for years.
  • (neck) — In the past few years there has been an increasing understanding of the seriousness of head injuries, particularly concussions. As a result, I believe that teams have started defaulting to the neck when reporting any head injury when they are not absolutely sure it is a concussion. Calling an injury a neck injury instead of a concussion allows the team more freedom in how and when the player returns to play. Crooked and dangerous but true.

One last thing to think about when it comes to injury reports is that they are evidence of how cooperative sports truly are. Sports has the reputation of being a refuge for the extremely competitive but the sharing of injury reports belies that to some extent. If the Jets were really trying to put the Dolphins out of business, they wouldn’t tell them about their injuries on their offensive line before playing them. Sports teams are at least as much collaborating with one another to make a communal profit within agreed-upon guidelines of behavior as they are competing to win at all costs. 

Hope this has answered your question,
Ezra Fischer

How do the Major League Baseball Playoffs Work?

I went to a Mets game this year and took this photo. They did not make the playoffs.

The Major League Baseball playoffs are among the most confusing playoffs for me because they have the most variety of format of all of the major sports’ playoffs. The MLB playoffs consist of four rounds and three different formats. It’s also confusing to me because it’s the sport I follow the least but since it started yesterday I’ve done some reading, some watching, and some listening and I am ready to report back to you what I’ve learned and then comment on what makes sense about it and what doesn’t. Let’s travel backwards through the playoffs starting with the most famous and familiar element, the World Series.

The World Series

The World Series determines the championship of the MLB. It is a best of seven series where the first team to win four games wins the series. This format is the one the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League use throughout their playoffs. Instead of dividing the league into East and West as the NBA and NHL have done for years, baseball (like football) uses history to divide their league in two. The National League was formed in 1876 and the American League in 1901. Teams from the two leagues have been facing each other in the World Series since 1903.[1] The first two games are played at one team’s home stadium, the next three at the other’s, and the last two, if necessary, at the first team’s stadium. Instead of using regular season record to decide who gets four potential games at home and who three, since 2003, this advantage was granted to the team representing whichever league won in the mid-season all-star game, an otherwise meaningless exhibition.

The Championship Series

To make it to the World Series, a team has to make it through the semi-final round, confusingly called either the American or National League Championship Series, again for historic reasons. This series follows the same seven game format as the World Series. Another oddity of baseball that stems from its history as two separate leagues is that each league plays under slightly different rules. The biggest difference is that in the National League, pitchers are required to bat whereas in the American League teams have the option[2] to replace the pitcher in the batting order with a player who only has to hit, never field. That “position” is called the designated hitter. These rules have all sorts of tactical consequences which deserve their own post but which become even more interesting in the World Series when both teams must play by the home team’s rules.

The Divisional Series

The four teams that make it to the ALCS or the NLCS have won the previous round, the Divisional Series. The divisional series’ are the quarterfinals and consist of eight teams. The format is a five game series where the first team to win three games wins the series. Each League is made up of three five-team divisions. The team in each division with the best regular season record is a division winner and automatically gets a place in the divisional series. The other two teams that make it to this round are called wild-cards and until 2012 were the two teams, one from each league, with the highest win total among non-division winning teams.

The Wild Card Playoff

Since 2012 the two extra teams to make it into the Divisional series have been the winners of the Wild Card Playoff. The Wild Card Playoff (surprise, surprise) follows a third format. It is a single elimination game. One game, the winner of which advances to the next round of the playoffs. The four teams that make it to to the Wild Card Playoff, two from each league, are the teams with the highest and second highest win total in the regular season among non-division winning teams. In 2013, the Wild Card Playoff games were between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in the National League and Tampa Bay and Cleveland in the American League.

What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t

There are elements of this complicated setup that make sense and some that don’t. Increasing the number of games in a series as the playoffs go on makes sense because the longer a series is, the more likely it is that the better[3] team will win, and it feels more important to get the championship right than it does the quarterfinals. Varying the length of the series’ also makes sense because it maximizes the number of teams involved while answering critics who say that the playoffs are too long to sustain interest. Maximizing the number of teams involved is great for fans who may wait years for their team to even make the playoffs and great for owners who might earn more money from one playoff game than a dozen regular season games.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the Wild Card Playoff. Reducing a series from seven games to five as a trade-off between getting it right and making it worth watching seems reasonable to me but going all the way down to one game sacrifices too much. Any one game between professional teams, especially ones that are good enough to make it to the playoffs, approaches a coin-toss. The coin may be weighted in one direction or another but at most it’s probably a 40-60 proposition. One game is simply not statistically significant enough to be a reliable indication of who is better. This is particularly unsatisfying in a sport that takes statistical significance so seriously that it plays 162 games in its regular season as opposed to 82 in professional hockey and basketball and 16 in football. On an emotional level, I can’t imagine following a team for 162 games over six months only to have it end with one bad game.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Believe it or not, the two leagues only merged as corporate entities in 2000!!↵
  2. Which they basically always take.↵
  3. It’s easy to twist yourself into knots about this one. If the worse team wins then aren’t they the better team? It can be an endless argument or an unspoken agreement.↵

Why do Some Sports Play Through Bad Weather and Others Don't?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do I always hear about baseball games being delayed or rescheduled due to a light rain and yet soccer games continue around the world in a downpour?

Thanks,
Jesse

Sport, baseball. Hardest material, a wooden bat. Plays through rain? No.

— — —

Dear Jesse,

Thanks for the question! It’s true that sports react differently to the elements. I’m tempted to try to explain this culturally. I’m not the biggest fan of baseball, so it would be fun to bash them for not playing in the rain. A more fair explanation would probably explain that weather affects the trajectory of balls and that this is much more dangerous with a small, hard ball traveling at 95 miles per hour than a big soft ball flying at 35 miles per hour. What is most interesting to me is trying to explain the general phenomenon of why some sports play through bad weather and others don’t and if possible, coming up with a rubric that explains why.

There seem to be two or three simple rules that we can abstract to to explain how each sport deals with weather.

  1. If the sport is played inside, there should almost never be a weather related delay.
  2. The harder the hardest substance used in normal game-play is, the less likely the sport will be to play through bad weather.

Let’s see how these work in practice.

Pro or College Basketball, Volleyball, Boxing, Hockey, Ping Pong — all played inside and all safe from weather delays.

Soccer, Football, Rugby, Cross Country Running — all played outdoors and the hardest material involved is no harder than a soft, inflated leather ball. Their surfaces are all grass or dirt. The only weather that will stop these games is a lightning storm in the direct area of the game.

Golf, Baseball, Tennis, Cricket — all played outdoors and the hardest material is significantly harder than leather. Golf has metal clubs and hard resin balls, baseball has wooden bats and hard leather balls, tennis is played on concrete with fiberglass rackets, and cricket has wooden bats and a hard leather ball.

These rules work pretty well to predict whether a sport will play through bad weather or not with only a few exceptions. You may have noticed that football is in the play through the weather category despite its helmets being much harder than an inflated leather ball. Two possible explanations for this are that historically the helmets were made of soft leather or that because the helmet is attached to the body, its danger is not modified by the weather. Of course if we allow the historic state of sports to enter into the equation, we’d have to admit that tennis used to be played only on grass and clay and that the rackets used to be made of wood. Then again, women’s tennis attire once “included a bustle and sometimes a fur” according to one history of tennis. Basketball’s treatment of weather is modified by its setting. If you are in an outside basketball league, played on concrete, games will be canceled if it is raining. Cycling admittedly breaks this rule entirely. They ride in the rain even though their bikes are made of fiberglass and the roads are made of road. I can only explain this by saying that cyclists are a little crazy and that no rule is perfect.

These rules should help you if you ever need to know whether your tickets to a sport are in danger of being rained out or if you decide to invent a new sport and want to set reasonable weather expectations.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

An Introduction to Football for the Curious

Football is America’s favorite sport. The season is anticipated, watched, obsessed over, and celebrated to an incredible extent. From the first week of September to the first week of February, football is almost unavoidable. Football is one of the least accessible sports for new viewers but we believe that with a little care and effort put into explaining it, it can be quite rewarding for a new or beginner viewer. Here is a collection of posts that may spark an interest or explain a long harbored question.

General Questions About Football

Why Do People Like Football
How do I Begin to Enjoy Football
How Should I Feel About the NFL Concussion Settlement
What is a Good Football Book

Rules, Terms, and Other Important Minutiae

How Does Scoring Work in Football
What’s a Down in Football
What is a Fumble in Football

Football Positions

What is a Quarterback in Football
What is a Running Back in Football
What is a Wide Receiver in Football
What is a Tight End in Football
What is an Offensive Lineman in Football
What is a Defensive Lineman in Football
What is a Linebacker in Football
What is a Defensive Back in Football

Fantasy Football

How Does Fantasy Football Work
What are Some Tips for Your First Fantasy Draft
Why Are People Obsessing About Fantasy Football Now

Happy watching! And please submit questions as you think of them. Getting questions is by far my favorite part of this blog and all the best posts come from your questions!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

How Does Scoring Work in Football?

Very little about football is intuitive and that includes how its scoring works. Luckily, unintuitive is not the same as difficult to understand. There are really only three ways to score points in a football game.

A Touchdown

A touchdown happens when a player in the end-zone catches a pass or when a player who is running with the ball pushes the tip of the ball across the goal-line. On its own, a touchdown is worth six points, but it also gives the team that scored it a bonus chance with the ball from the two yard line. A team with this extra point attempt has two ways to attempt to score — they can kick the ball through the goal posts for one point or they can score two points by running a single play which results in what looks like a second touch-down but which is only worth two additional points. In either case, if the team fails to convert their attempt, they get zero points. In this way a touchdown can result in six points (a missed extra point kick or failed two point conversion attempt,) seven points (a made extra point kick,) or eight points (a successful two point conversion.)

By far the most common choice following a touchdown is an extra point attempt. And almost all of them are successful. According to the Washington Post in an article recommending the eradication of the extra point, in the past 12 seasons, NFL teams have succeeded on 99.3% of the extra point kicks they’ve attempted. The high success rate of the extra point is the source of much of the confusion about football scoring. People will commonly refer to a touchdown as being worth seven points, not six because they assume the extra point will be successful. This makes the “two point conversion” much harder to understand because it nets the team eight, not nine points. According to wikipedia, two point conversion attempts are successful around 40% of the time. Most teams have “cheat sheets” with mathematic models that take into account how far the team is winning or more likely losing by and how much time is left to guide the coach to a decision about whether to go for one or two points following a touchdown.

A Field Goal

The team with the ball can choose to attempt to kick the ball to score from any position on the field on any down. If they are successful at kicking the ball between the two uprights and above the cross-bar, their team gets three points. Teams usually attempt this when they are at most forty to forty five yards away from the end zone they are trying to score on. You’ll hear distances quoted that are longer than this because the ball is snapped back about seven yards from the line of scrimmage and the goal-posts are at the back of a ten yard end-zone. Field goal kickers have steadily gotten increasingly strong and reliable from less than 20% successful before 1970 to over 50% since 2000. That said, football fans seem to expect field goals to be successful 100% of the time and are liable to scream at the television when one is missed.

A Safety

A safety is not the only way a defensive player can score (because he can score a touchdown after intercepting a pass or recovering a fumble) but it’s the only way points can be scored by a player who never even touches the ball! A safety happens when an offensive player is tackled with the ball in his own end-zone or when he steps out of bounds from the end-zone. Once in a while a team will intentionally give up a safety[1] but most of the time it’s the result of an exciting, fast moving play where the best plans of the offense are not just thwarted by the defense but laughably imploded like the shark at the end of Jaws.

So, a team can score two points (a safety,) three points (a field goal,) six points (a touchdown,) seven, (a touchdown in conjunction with an extra point,) or eight points (a touchdown in conjunction with a two-point conversion.)

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. There are lots of complicated reasons for why a team would do this but they all boil down to feeling like the certainty of giving up two points is better than the risk of giving up seven if there is an interception, a fumble, or a punt that leaves the other team with the ball really close to scoring a touchdown.↵

What Does Deuce Mean in Tennis?

Dear Sports Fan,

The scoring at Wimbledon is confusing enough with the weird way they count points but it gets very weird when all of a sudden the score is “deuce.” What does deuce mean in tennis?

Thanks,
Aaron

wimbledon_centre_court_roof_p300609_aeltc1
As nice as this looks, the fans wouldn’t want to be here forever.

— — —

Dear Aaron,

You’re right! The scoring in tennis is a little unconventional. We explained the basic tennis scoring a couple years ago during Wimbledon in another post:

To win a a game you have to be the first person to 5 points… Just to be confusing instead of counting 0-1-2-3-4-5, games are scored love-15-30-40-game.

The trick is that, like a lot of games we used to play as kids when we didn’t want to go in for dinner, you have to win by two points to win the game. This means that if both players get to 40, the game cannot be won by winning just one more point. Instead of counting up and up (50, 60, 70, 80, etc.) until one player won two points in a row and was therefore 20 points ahead in scoring, tennis switches over to a relative count instead of an absolute count of the score.

So 40-40 is called deuce. Deuce literally means “two” so it’s easy to remember that the score is even between the two players (or teams if you are watching doubles tennis.) At the French open, it’s even easier to remember because instead of saying “deuce” they say “egalite” or equality. From there, the score is relative. When a player scores one point, the score changes to “advantage [that player’s name]. If that player scores again, they will be up by two points and will win the game. If the other player scores, the players will be tied again and the score returns to deuce or egalite and the pattern repeats itself.

Repetition is key because this is one of the few parts of a sports game that could, theoretically, go on FOREVER. A tennis game, once it reaches deuce, could become an infinite loop if the players alternate winning points. Lots of sports have theoretically infinite elements but they usually involve overtime or extra-innings. The only other “normal” element of a sport that I can think of which has the same capacity for going on forever is in baseball. A fouled ball (one hit backwards or sideways out of the field of play) counts against the batter as a strike but cannot create the third and final strike against the batter. Therefore, once a batter has two strikes against him or her, the at bat will continue as long as each pitch is fouled off.

Not to worry though, infinity is a long time and both scenarios are about as unlikely as monkeys randomly composing Hamlet.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

How Well Does Anyone Know the Rules?

lou-pinella
Of course, if no one knows the rules, what are they arguing about?

From ESPN.com today we bring you a story that asks the question, “How well do we know baseball’s rules?”

One of the objections I hear most from my friends who are not sports fans is that the rules of sports seem to be completely arbitrary and incredibly fickle. Why so many whistles, they wonder? How can one not particularly violent act be a penalty while a figurative mugging goes unpunished? There are two sides to responding to this sentiment and we try to represent both of them on this site: the rules will seem less arbitrary the more you know about them; and of course they are arbitrary — let’s have some fun about it!

On the educational side, we’ve had posts explaining some basic concepts like What is a Down in Football, What is Being Offside in a number of sports, What Does it Mean to Have a Foul to Give, and How Do the Shooting Space and Checking Rules Work in Girls Lacrosse? We even addressed the issue directly when asked “Are Basketball Fouls Really Arbitrary? We’ve also had some fun with the issue. In the post about Girls Lacrosse we reminded you that:

even professional athletes are sometimes confused about the rules, like Donovan McNabb, a quarterback in the NFL who famously did not try very hard at the end of overtime because he thought that if the game was tied at the end of one overtime, they would just play another instead of the game ending in a tie… which it does.

This is exactly the conclusion the ESPN.com piece comes to: “We had 20 of the most astute players in the game take the quiz. Their average score: 5.5 out of 10.” The author Jayson Stark has some fun with the subject and collects a few gems about the rules of baseball:

Sam Fuld has to be one of the brightest human beings in baseball. He got better than 1400 on his SAT. He understands stuff like matrix methodology. But even he has a hard time understanding the rationale behind the rules of baseball. And can you blame him?

“Most of these rules are just illogical,” he said. “I tried to base my answers on logic and reason. … But baseball and logic don’t mix very well, in many respects.”

If you’d like to take the test yourself, here’s the link, post your results in the comments section!

How Does Overtime Work in Different Sports?

Dear Sports Fan,
How does overtime work in different sports? I’ve been watching more hockey this year and I know that overtime in the playoffs is different from overtime in the regular season. Are other sports like that too?
Thanks,
Sonja

Dear Sonja,

To quote the great Kanye West in honor of his latest album, “like old folks pissing, it all Depends.” Each sport has its own approach to how to proceed with competition if the score is tied after regulation time has expired. Like you say about hockey, even within each sport it can differ depending on whether the game takes place during the regular season or the playoffs. So while it may seem like I’m getting paid by the number of times I write “sometimes” in this post, that’s just the way overtime works.[1]
In general, extra time formats in sports (overtime)  fall into a few buckets:
  • Sudden Death: the most exciting two words in sports. This format is so dramatically named because the first team to allow their opponent to score loses the game immediately. This adds a heightened layer of tension that’s pretty much unparalleled. Sudden death doesn’t necessarily mean
    Sports: hockey, soccer (sometimes), football (sometimes), baseball (kind of), golf (sometimes).
  • Extra Period: This is essentially when an extra period of time is added and whoever is leading at the end of that extra period wins. It still involves added tension but doesn’t quite have the audience on a knife’s edge, since a single score doesn’t necessarily dictate the outcome.
    Sports: basketball (always), baseball (again kind of. In baseball they play a full inning, so essentially the team that has its turn to hit first in the inning is playing Extra Period but the team that hits second can be in a Sudden Death type situation.)
  • Shootouts: The ultimate Mano a Mano sports showdown. Each team picks its best payers (five in soccer, three in hockey) and each one gets a chance to score on the opposing team’s goalie. Some dismiss it as a gimmick but – for the viewer – there are few things more dramatic than seeing an athlete alone on the field or rink with the weight of the entire game on their shoulders. Of course if the shootout is tied after the allotted players have shot, you get a sudden death shootout, where the first player to miss costs his or her team the game.
    Sports: Hockey, soccer (in both cases this assumes you make it through the extra periods with neither team scoring and in the case of hockey that the game is during the regular season)
  • None: Although increasingly rare, there are some situations in sport where if a game is tied at the end of regular time the two teams shake hands, walk off the field, and neither team wins. It’s a tie! In the old days in soccer two teams that ended the game in a tie would go home, rest up, and play again in a few days in order to get a result.
You may have noticed that we haven’t covered football at all in this post. That’s because football is so absurdly complicated in its overtime rules that it is deserving of its own post. The college football rules are different than the professional ones… which differ from the regular season to the playoffs.
Thanks for your question and look out for a football overtime post soon,
Dean Russell Bell
Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Editor’s note. Mister Bell is not being paid at all for this post.↵

Hockey Culture and Ken Dryden's 'After the Hit'

On May 8 we answered a question about the rules of lacrosse from Alana. In it the subject of how different sports deal with players who put themselves in dangerous situations came up. In women’s lacrosse there are rules against endangering oneself. In ice hockey, we noted, the rules and the ethos of the sport are the opposite. If you put yourself in a dangerous position in hockey you are likely to get hurt by a player acting within the rules and hockey culture will tell you that you have no one to blame but yourself.

On the same day Grantland.com published an article by Ken Dryden about the same topic. The first sentence of Dryden’s Wikipedia page describes him as “a Canadian politician, lawyer, businessman, author, and former NHL goaltender.” He was a Stanley cup winning goaltender for the Montreal Canadians in the 1970s and later wrote a book about his experiences called The Game which is widely thought of as one of the best books about hockey ever written. He’s definitely got the credentials to be well respected and closely listened to about hockey.

In the article, “After the Hit,” Dryden comments on a violent collision and the resulting injury and suspension from a recent game between the Ottawa Senators and the Montreal Canadians[1] and he wonders if hockey’s ethic on responsibility as it pertains to endangering oneself has gone too far:

It’s this aftermath to the hit that I’ve found most remarkable. There is an ethic in sports that wasn’t always there. It goes, As a player, I can do what I want to do. I will do what I must do. I will face the consequences of my actions and of the rules. Other players will and must do the same. It is my responsibility to protect myself; it is no one else’s. It is their responsibility to protect themselves; it is not mine. If, out of this, things happen, they happen. I may feel sadness as a human being toward another human being, but sadness is not the point. I will feel no regret. I expect none from others. That’s hockey. That’s life.

There is another ethic in sports that has also always been there, and still is. It is worn as a badge of honor, particularly by the “tough guys.” It goes: I will not hit someone when he is down. I will not hit someone when he is defenseless. There is no courage in that. There is dishonor in the doing. The question in this case: What makes a Gryba hit clean and good on a defenseless Eller when a punch to the face of someone lying on the ice, equally defenseless, is not?

I encourage you to spend a few minutes with his article!

Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. There are some graphically violent videos in the post so watch out — but you don’t need to click on them if you don’t want.↵