Tag: rules

How Do the Shooting Space and Checking Rules Work in Girls Lacrosse?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve played on a U-14 girls lacrosse team for 2 years, but I’ve never really understood rules on shooting space, and checking (un-modified), mind helping me out?

Thanks,
Alana

 

Dear Alana,

Great questions! It’s kind of thrilling to know that the feeling, familiar to many viewers, of watching a sport and being unclear about the rules is even a feeling some of the players have! There’s nothing to be ashamed of — 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.

Anyway, I did some research on the two rules you asked about and there is a theme that runs through both rules. Both rules are about keeping players safe. The shooting space rule is an attempt to avoid having players put themselves in danger and the checking rule is put in place to keep players from endangering each other. Let’s dig into them.

A shooting space foul according to westportpal.org is called when “a defender moves in at a bad angle on the offender while shooting in the 8 meter arc. This is a dangerous play by the defender.” Well okay, what is a bad angle? Let’s go to Wikipedia which clears it up a bit. Wikipedia explains that this bad angle is one that “makes the defender at risk of being hit by the ball if the offender were to shoot.” Basically, it is illegal for a player to put themselves in a situation that makes them very likely to be hurt. Other sports have similar “dangerous play” rules. In most soccer leagues, there is a rule against any play that endangers the person doing it or anyone else on the field. This is most often applied when a player lies on top of the ball which prevents an opponent from “playing the ball [for] fear of injuring the player lying on top of the ball.” Ice hockey seems to be governed by the exact opposite spirit. Players who endanger themselves or their teammates are open to being hit with pucks, sticks, shoulders, fists, etc. in all sorts of completely legal ways. Hockey players who are hurt in these situations are often also subjected to fierce criticism in the media for not protecting themselves.

If lacrosse goes to such a length to prevent players putting themselves at risk for injury, you would imagine they are at least as concerned with players endangering each other. They are! There are a set of rules that control how a player is allowed to check (try to get the ball from) another player. A player can only use the side of their stick, not the flat part of the head. Players can not wind up to check another player, instead checking should be done with “controlled, short, quick taps.” The last bit, and this is probably the hardest to judge and control is that a player “may only check if the check is directed away from the ball carrier’s head.” This all makes sense if the goal is to avoid injury. Allowing players to wind up would surely lead to sticks being swung much harder at one another. Mandating that checks only be directed away from the body of the person being checked means that even if someone were to really swing their stick with a lot of force, that force would carry their stick, their opponents stick, and the ball safely away from the person being checked as opposed to right into them.

Modified checking which you mention in your question, is a rule used usually with younger kids that makes it illegal to attempt a check at head level. This seems moderately wise if you’re going to give 12 year-olds weapons. The advantage that this creates for the offensive player is offset by requiring them to pass or shoot the ball within three seconds if a defender is covering them closely enough that they could check them if it weren’t for the modified checking rule.

Good luck playing! Remember to check with the side of your stick away from your opponent’s head. And don’t try to block a shot within 8 meters of the goal!

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

How Long is an NBA Basketball Game?

Dear Sports Fan,

How long is an NBA basketball game? I thought it was an hour long — made up of four fifteen minute quarters — and that I just kept missing the start of the quarter. Now someone tells me it’s four twelve minute quarters. Is that true? Why would a game be forty eight minutes. Seems arbitrary!

Thanks,
Sandra

Dear Sandra,

Rest easy, you were not missing the game! An NBA basketball game is forty eight minutes long and made up of four twelve minute quarters. I suppose you’re right that this seems a little arbitrary because the duration of most of the other big sporting events in the country do seem to end on a “ten.” Football is sixty minutes, made up of four fifteen minute quarters. Hockey is also sixty minutes, although it is divided into three twenty minute periods. Soccer is ninety minutes long, divided into two forty five minute halves. Baseball is essentially timeless — no clock is used to determine when the game ends. NBA basketball seems to be an outlier. Basketball is also the only main sport that differs in how long it is between college and professional games. A college basketball game is forty minutes, divided not into quarters but into two twenty minute halves.

So what gives? According to the original rules of basketball written by James Naismuth, “The time shall be two fifteen-minute halves, with five minutes rest between.” Not to get too far off topic, but the invention of basketball is pretty funny. Naismuth became a phys-ed teacher at a YMCA in Springfield Mass in 1891 and soon after invented basketball. Here is the Wikipedia explanation of why:

At Springfield YMCA, Naismith struggled with a rowdy class which was confined to indoor games throughout the harsh New England winter and thus was perpetually short-tempered. Under orders from Dr. Luther Gulick, head of Springfield YMCA Physical Education, Naismith was given 14 days to create an indoor game that would provide an “athletic distraction”: Gulick demanded that it would not take up much room, could help its track athletes to keep in shapeand explicitly emphasized to “make it fair for all players and not too rough.”

By the time the NBA (then the Basketball Association of America) came into being, the college game with its twenty minute halves was well established. The first franchise owners decided to lengthen the game for their league from forty minutes “so as to bring an evening’s entertainment up to the two-hour period owners felt the ticket buyers expected.” Today, the average “real-time” length of an NBA game has crept up to right under two hours and twenty minutes according to the blog Weak Side Awareness.

As for whether or not all this is arbitrary, I can’t say, but in thinking about this, I did notice that the NBA shot clock — a team must shoot the ball and at least hit the rim before this time expires or else the ball is given to the other team — is 24 seconds; another product of twelve!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

What Does it Mean to Have a Foul to Give?

Dear Sports Fan,

I’ve been watching some basketball and towards the end of games the announcer will sometimes say that a team has a “foul to give.” What does that mean?

Thanks,
Doug

Dear Doug,

In the NBA each player can commit five fouls before getting kicked out of the game for good on the sixth. A team cannot get kicked out of a gave for fouling too many times (although Chuck Klosterman wrote a great story about a team winning with only three players left at the end of the game) but there are consequences for fouling a lot. We’ll get to what these consequences are in a second, but first we have to quickly define a few different types of fouls.

  1. An offensive foul is when someone whose team has the ball does something against the rules to a player whose team does not have the ball.
  2. A defensive foul is when someone whose team doesn’t have the ball does something illegal to someone whose team does have the ball.
  3. A shooting foul is a type of defensive foul that happens when someone does something illegal to a player who is in the act of shooting the basketball.
  4. A non-shooting foul is… well, you know, all the other defensive fouls that aren’t shooting ones.

Only defensive fouls count towards the team total. The count of team fouls resets to zero at the start of each quarter. On fouls one through five the player who is fouled will shoot two free-throws only if the foul was a shooting foul. After the fifth foul, from foul six until the end of the quarter, the player who is fouled shoots two free-throws for any defensive foul — no matter if they were shooting or not when fouled. This state of being for a team is called “the bonus.”

Okay — we finally have enough background to answer your question. Having a foul to give means that a team has not yet reached the fifth foul of the quarter. In other words — they can still foul the other team at least once before the other team is in the bonus and will shoot free throws when fouled. At the end of a game or quarter, having a foul to give is particularly useful because a defensive team can use it to disrupt the other team’s plans. If the offensive team has fifteen seconds left, they can set up a nice play to run but the team with a foul to give can wait until there are about three or four seconds left and then give that foul (i.e. foul the player with the ball.) Because the other team is not in the bonus, they will not shoot free-throws, they will just get the ball back and have to pass it in from out of bounds and try to run another play but this time with only a few seconds.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

What's the Difference Between the Two Leagues in Baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

Explain baseball to me. I might start paying attention. What do I need to know to do that? I hear there are differences between the leagues. If it matters, I care about the Tigers and the ways in which they play.

Thanks,
Lisa

 

Dear Lisa,

I’ve got to start out by declaring that I’m not a baseball fan. In fact, I think baseball is pretty damn boring. And, although I live less than ten minutes away from the Mets’ home stadium, I don’t have a favorite team. So, I’m going to leave the explaining of baseball and why you should pay attention to my colleagues Dean Russell Bell and John DeFilippis who are Phillies and Yankees fans accordingly and much more passionate about baseball. They probably both hate the Tigers though, so good luck with that.

What I can help you with is the difference between the National League and the American League. Baseball is the only sport that I know of where a single league is split into two divisions that actually play with slightly different rules. Yes, this is really weird. Imagine what it would be like if big institutional investors got to play by different rules when buying stock than us normal people do. Oh wait.

The difference in rules between the National and American leagues is small but it has some interesting consequences. In the National League, the pitcher takes a turn hitting once every nine batters, just like everyone else on the team. In the American League, the pitcher is excused from hitting and his turn hitting is taken by a player who does nothing but hit. This player, called the designated hitter, just sits on the bench while his team is pitching and fielding.

Let us pause for a second to remark upon how completely absurd this is before we continue. Pitchers in the American League are paid millions of dollars a year and are considered top-flight professional athletes and yet they are not expected to take part in an elemental part of the game of baseball? Are they too fragile? Not skilled enough? I really don’t understand this at all? I know I only have one season of little league in my history, but it seemed to me like when we were young, the best athletes played pitcher. When did they forget how to hit? Babe Ruth, the famous slugger whose last World Series hit ever was a home run that he may or may not have called by pointing to the fence before he hit the ball way over it… started his career as a pitcher!

In any event, this little rule difference has some interesting downstream effects on strategy and tactics. Baseball is not an incredibly high scoring game. Combined scores average fewer than ten runs. Adding a very good hitter and subtracting a usually bad one, as the American League Designated Hitter rule does, creates a small but real increase in the average score of American League teams. Mostly what it does is make it less likely for American League teams to win 2-0. So, they tend to build their entire line-ups based on this fact. They concentrate on finding bigger, stronger, slower guys who can hit home-runs. The fact that they can play these guys in a game without needing them to run around and try to catch the ball helps too! The National League teams, on the other hand, feel like they might be able to win with fewer runs, so they tend towards smaller, faster players who can steal bases, bunt, and play excellent defense.

The tactical effect of the DH rule comes into play when switching pitchers in the National League. Most pitchers these days don’t play the whole game. At some point the starting pitcher will come out of the game and a relief pitcher will come in. Often several relief pitchers will finish the game out. The last of these pitchers, a guy who specializes in pitching the last inning of games is called the closer. Sometimes the team will just sub one pitcher in for the next, but more often, the team will take the opportunity of removing their pitcher to sneak a good hitter into the lineup for a single at bat.

It works like this. A pitcher pitches an inning and in the next half of an inning, his turn to hit comes up in the batting order. The manager replaces him with a good hitter. The hitter hits or… more likely fails. When it’s this team’s turn to pitch again, the pitcher is officially this good hitter. Which would not be good… but, they have the opportunity to substitute again and they take out the hitter and replace him with a relief pitcher. Voila! They’ve switched pitchers AND bought themselves an extra good batter in the nine man rotation.

It gets much more complicated but in my opinion not that much less boring 😉 Hopefully one of my colleagues will take on the challenge of explaining to you and me why baseball is really, really, not boring after all.

Until then,
Ezra Fischer 

How are Batting Averages Calculated?

Dear Sports Fan,

Can someone explain to me how batting averages are calculated, and what the .000 etc. means?

Thanks,
Dot Dot Dot

 

Dear Dot Dot Dot,

Batting averages in baseball somehow manage to be deceptively simple and deceptively complicated at the same time. We will start with the simple and then move to the complicated.

Batting averages look weird — they usually range from around .200 to .375 but don’t be fooled, it’s just a percentage expressed with one decimal point. So, the odd looking .200 is 20.0% and .375 is 37.5%.

But!

Things get more complicated when we start reasoning about what exactly the batting average percentage is made up of.

  • Batting average = the number of hits / the number of at bats
  • Hits = when the batter safely reaches first base after hitting the ball into fair territory, without the benefit of an error or a fielder’s choice
  • Fair territory = you know, between the lines from home to first and home to third which extend out to infinity
  • Error = when someone official sitting in the stands decides that a fielder has messed up in such a way that allowed the runner to advance when they normally wouldn’t
  • Fielder’s choice = When the fielder gets to catch the ball either in his glove or his hat![1]
  • At bat = every time a person comes to the plate except when he gets a walk, is hit by a pitch, hits a sacrifice, is awarded first base due to interference or obstruction, the inning ends while he is still trying to get a hit — likely due to a base runner being thrown out, or he is replaced by another hitter.
  • Walk = the opposite of “three strikes and you’re out,” this is “four balls and you’re on”
  • Hit by a pitch = hit by a pitch — you get to advance to first base if this happens
  • Sacrifice = this is by itself complicated, but basically a hit is a sacrifice if you intentionally hit the ball where you’re likely to be out, but it helps one of your teammates who is already on base, advance from first to second, second to third, or third to home.
  • Interference or obstruction = the catcher can’t tickle the batter while he is trying to bat
  • Inning ends probably due to someone getting thrown out = if someone tries to steal a base when their team already has two outs in the inning and they fail, then the inning will be over
  • Replaced by another hitter = when the coach decided this guy is not going to get it done and replaces him in the middle of an at bat[2]

Got that? Right, so this really does seem needlessly complicated. And the problem is that the complication masks something really important. Batting average is a crappy measure! Check this out. According to batting average, these players are all exactly the same over 10 at bats:

  • Player A: two home runs, one triple, seven strike-outs
  • Player B: three singles, seven strike-outs
  • Player C: three singles, three walks, four strike-outs

All three players would have a batting average of .300 but you tell me which you would want on your team! Player B is obviously worse than A or C. It’s a close match between A and C for me — A is certainly a more powerful guy, but C managed to at least get to first base six out of 10 times at the plate. That’s remarkable! Since the 1970s there has been a slow but increasingly accepted revolution against batting average and many of the other traditional statistics led by the guys at SABR — the Society For American Baseball Research. They and their intellectual descendants have sought to replace the old stats with new, more meaningful ones with really silly abbreviations like: BABIP, DIPS, OPS, VORP, WAR, and the always important LIPS.

Those are a story for another time… until then, we’ll leave you with this:

Adios,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. This is not true↵
  2. Or like, if the batter gets injured… possibly from laughing too hard because of the catcher’s tickling.↵

Why Aren't the Rules the Rules? (Part 2)

Dear Sports Fan,

Reading about the bad call in the Pittsburgh/Atlanta game last night reminded me of something I’ve always wondered. Whether it’s because the ref is looking the other way (literally or figuratively), or because of just plain human error, the rules in sports are often either not enforced, or not enforced correctly. But in many cases, it seems like people just consider that an integral part of the game! Especially given the increasing ability of technology to settle disputes, why not just come up with what the real rules ought to be, and then enforce them as thoroughly as possible?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

(This is a continuation of an answer to this question. The first half was posted here.)

It will ruin the game:

There is some concern that adding technology to sports will ruin the game by making it too sterile or too slow. Taking the humanity out of the game could be a concern, but as much as people love discussing disputed calls at the water cooler, they also love talking about great (and terrible) performances, and great (and terrible) decisions on the part of the players and coaches. There will always be something to talk about. As for making the game too slow… uh… it could not possibly slow down the game as much as television time-outs, arguing with refs about calls, or in the case of baseball… adjusting your batting gloves, hat, glove, or cup compulsively over and over and over again.

It’s too expensive:

FIFA, the notoriously frustrating international federation of soccer refuses to add video replay to international competition because it would be too expensive for some of its member nations to implement. This is a curious reason since it seems like knowing ahead of time that you will actually know whether the ball crossed the goal line during the game shouldn’t change any element of tactics or strategy.

What do you mean “right?”

This is the heart of the answer to your question. A rule says, “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent” but does that mean “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent” or “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent if you get caught?” It’s clear from these two sports cliches which way the sports world leans: “it’s not a foul if you don’t get caught” and “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”

Sports, particularly baseball is all about cheating. The last twenty years have been shaped by steroids and HGH. Before that there were amphetamines called greenies. Before that teams regularly intimidated officials or just plain assaulted them when they didn’t like the calls they were getting. It’s well know that the 1919 World Series was fixed by a few players on the White Sox and there have always been unproven rumors that the 1918 one might have been fixed as well. Cyclists are jam-packed full of drugs. They have been for a long time but “tiny electric motors…?” That’s a new one.

Even if a player is clean when he steps onto the court, he or she is rarely clean by the end of the game. Some of the most memorable plays in sports history have been the beneficiaries of some incorrect or missed calls. In soccer there is the “hand of god” goal, in basketball, Michael Jordan’s famous shot to beat the Utah Jazz is an offensive foul. Watch the video and notice Jordan’s left hand on his defender’s hip… he definitely pushes off.

Jordan is not great in spite of pushing off, he’s great partially because he pushed off and didn’t get caught.

Another way to state the question is — do we really want to have the game called “perfectly?” Here’s an example of this in the non-sports world. We certainly have the technology to identify each car and driver and what road they are on. Why shouldn’t we simply fine people whenever they go over the speed limit? Why waste all the time, money, and talent of our police departments lurking around trying to catch people when we could just automate it? I know we’ve started doing this with running some red lights, but I think that if we tried to automate speeding tickets on a large scale there would be riots and political parties would shape up around the issue… and I’m not sure which would be worse! It’s the same with most sports — a totally policed game is a boring one.

Thanks for the fun question,
Ezra Fischer

Why Aren't the Rules the Rules?

Dear Sports Fan,

Reading about the bad call in the Pittsburgh/Atlanta game last night reminded me of something I’ve always wondered. Whether it’s because the ref is looking the other way (literally or figuratively), or because of just plain human error, the rules in sports are often either not enforced, or not enforced correctly. But in many cases, it seems like people just consider that an integral part of the game! Especially given the increasing ability of technology to settle disputes, why not just come up with what the real rules ought to be, and then enforce them as thoroughly as possible?

Thanks,
Erik

 

Dear Erik,

Great question! In fact, this is such an interesting question that I’m going to break my answer into a couple blog posts.

The bad call that you’re referring to is this one:

It won’t work:

Sports rules are complicated and the action happens very, very quickly. Assuming that there is no way that we’re going to be able to rework the rules to change something as integral as “if the catcher has the ball in his glove and touches the runner before he touches home plate, he’s out” then one has to wonder how technology will help. Setting aside video replay for a second, let’s look for another solution. Okay, so — let’s put a chip in the ball. Then, let’s put some material in the catcher’s glove such that the ball knows when it’s in the glove. Great — now we’re cooking with gas! Now we have to have either more material covering the runner’s uniform… and hands, arms, head, neck, etc. Or, I guess we could just monitor whether the glove is making contact by putting some sort of pressure meeter into the ball or glove. Except that won’t work because that glove could hit the ground, the ump, or the catcher’s own body. I’m not sure any of this will work, so let’s go back and examine video replay.

Video replay is the most common form of technology in sports. Football, basketball, hockey, even baseball (believe it or not) have some form of video replay in their rules. In baseball use of video replay is restricted to basically deciding whether a ball was a home run or whether it never left the ball-park, did leave but was subject to fan interference, or left but was foul (too far off to the side to count.) Other sports have more extensive video replay rules. You may have noticed NFL coaches comically struggling to get a little red flag out of their sock, pants, shirt, etc. and throw it onto the field — they are “challenging” the ref’s judgement and calling for a video replay. Every goal in hockey is reviewed by a team of video officials in Toronto. The NBA has been able to replay shots at the end of quarters and games and just recently added video replay for unclear out-of-bounds calls.

Tennis has a system called Hawkeye. This is probably as close as it gets to your suggestion. According to Wikipedia, “all Hawk-Eye systems are based on the principles of triangulation using the visual images and timing data provided by at least four high-speed video cameras located at different locations and angles around the area of play.” In tennis the rules are objective and there is technology which insures the calls are too. Or at least can be. The computer has not totally replaced the line-judges or the referee yet… although I could see a time in the not so distant future where they could.

Most other sports are not as tidy as tennis though. Take the call at home plate that started this discussion: here’s how Jonah Keri described it on Grantland.com

If you want to use replay to make a simple yes or no call, you won’t get unanimity. And no, the fact that Lugo acted as if he were out does not constitute iron-clad proof.

Watch the replay for yourself, with the sound off.

Here’s what I did see: Lugo starts his slide well in front of the plate. Home plate umpire Jerry Meals starts to make his safe sign just as Lugo touches home with his right foot. There’s no way Meals has time to process the play and rule that Lugo had already touched home. He’s also not looking at Lugo’s foot, but rather at the swipe tag. (It should be noted that Lugo did in fact touch home with his right foot the first time — the follow-up tap of home with his left foot was unnecessary.)

Either way, replay wouldn’t have resolved the issue. Not to the point where all parties, including a purple Clint Hurdle, would have been satisfied.

And, as Keri also points out, at the time of this call, the ump had been on the field working in a high-pressure environment for six hours and 39 minutes. Furthermore — even Baseball is a nice tidy game compared to Hockey or Football. No matter how many cameras, sensors, and computers you have, there is no chance in hell you’ll be able to figure out what happened at the bottom of a pile with thousands of pounds of angry football player fighting over the ball.

More tomorrow…
Ezra Fischer 

 

Why Do Soccer Players Dive So Much

Dear Sports Fan,

I hate to take your lofty discussions into the gutter, but I have to know: why do soccer players fake fouls so much?!

Sincerely,
Russ

 

Dear Russ,

Thanks for your question and your concern over the tone of our discussions here. Faking being fouled in Soccer is officially known as “simulation” but commonly referred to as diving. It’s rampant. Players dive in absolutely every sport where there are fouls[1] but you’re right that it seems most frequent and visible in soccer.

Diving is in the news right now because there was a very silly and very obvious dive in the fantastic Women’s World Cup Quarterfinal match between the United States and Brazil. The U.S. women were down a goal and down a man[2] with only a minute left in the overtime period. After almost 45 minutes of playing with one fewer player on the field, the U.S. team was still pressing the Brazilians. Some normal soccer stuff happened and then all of a sudden, like she had been shot by a sniper, number 13 on the Brazilian team, Erika, crumpled to the ground. She lay there for a while and was eventually taken off on a stretcher. As soon as her stretcher reached the sideline, she hopped off it and ran onto the field as soon as she could get the ref’s permission. The ref, offended by her chicanery gave her a yellow card.[3]

There are three things about soccer that contribute to it being the worlds diviest sport. First, the official time is kept only by the referee on his or her watch. The ref can stop the clock at his discretion for things like injuries, etc. but it is at his discretion… so, there’s a chance that you actually will kill some time by pretending to be injured unlike football or basketball where the clock is managed by sideline officials along strict rules and visible to everyone in the stadiums. One of the reasons (at least that I’ve always heard) for soccer working this way is that if the crowd knew exactly when the game was going to end then there would be riots.

As you might imagine from the way the time is managed, the soccer ref has an enormous amount of power over the game. And unlike many other sports, he or she is pretty much alone in that power. There are two refs in hockey, three in basketball, and lots in baseball and football but only one in soccer. With one ref policing 22 players, it’s much easier to fool him.

The last factor that I think encourages diving is the usually very low scores in a soccer game. Most soccer games are decided by a goal or two. This swings the risk/reward factors way in favor of deceit. The ref in the U.S. v. Brazil game, as bad as she was, was unusual and admirable for punishing that dive with a yellow card. The in-game consequences are usually limited to some whistles[4] from the crowd.

Hopefully this helps explain diving in soccer. For your enjoyment, here is a video of some absurd diving in soccer games:

The next game in the U.S. Women’s National team’s attempt to win the world cup is tomorrow, Wednesday July 13 at 11:30 on ESPN. Go USA!

Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Does this exclude competitive diving? If so, does the world turn in on itself and implode?↵
  2. I know what you’re thinking, but the women themselves repeatedly used that phrase in post-game interviews.↵
  3. Two yellow cards get you kicked out of the game.↵
  4. international for “boo”↵

What's a Down in Football? I've Been Pretending to Know but I Don't!

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s a first down? How is it different from a 2nd down? And how many downs can you have? I’ve been pretending to understand football for years but i really have no idea.

Thanks,
Julia

Dear Julia,

Admittance is the first step and we are very proud of you for admitting that you don’t know what a down in football is. You are not alone — many people don’t! If you keep reading, by the end of this short blog post, you should be able to understand and explain the concept of a down!

When you are watching football you will often hear or see the phrase N Down and X.

  • N can be either First, Second, Third, or Fourth.
  • X can be any number from “inches” to 99 although it is normally between 10 and 0.

When a team gets the ball in football, they start out each possession with four chances to do something. Each chance (N) is equivalent to one play.

  • First down = Four chances left
  • Second down = Three chances left
  • Third down = Two chances left
  • Fourth down = Last chance!

If a team is successful in meeting their goal during any one of the downs, they get a brand new set of downs (four chances, not four new ones plus however many remained from their last set) and the pattern starts over.

You may be wondering what the goal is — the goal is to move the ball past an invisible[1] line which starts out 10 yards from where the ball is placed to start out on first down. This goal is expressed (X) as the number of yards between where the ball is now and where your team needs to get it to earn a new set of four downs.

  • First down and 10 = Four chances left to move the ball 10 yards
  • Third down and 2 = Two chances left to move the ball 2 yards
  • Second down and 18 = Three chances left to move the ball 18 yards[2]

The last wrinkle to learn is not about rules, but about strategy. Although it is totally legal to use all four downs to try to matriculate[3] the ball towards the yellow line, usually teams only try for their first three downs. Remember that if the team tries to move the ball past the line on fourth down and fails, the other team gets the ball right there. So, on fourth down teams will either punt the ball (conceding that the other team will get possession of the ball, but attempting to make them start from way on their side of the field) or try to kick a field goal (three points for the good guys) if they are close enough to try. In effect, this means the while First down = Four chances, normally only the first three of these “count.” On rare occasions, a team will chose to use their last chance to actually try to move the ball past the line. This is called “going for it on fourth” and is extremely exciting.

Now you won’t need to pretend anymore![4] Keep the questions coming,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Although it’s not invisible anymore when you watch football on TV. Thanks to some work by Princeton Video Tech (Astle family represent!) the line your team is aiming at now shows up as a yellow line superimposed onto the screen.↵
  2. Also it means that something pretty bad/stupid happened on first down.↵
  3. This is one of those strange words that only seems to exist in higher education and football.↵
  4. Although if you still have questions, please leave a comment on this post and we will try to do some better explaining!↵

Can you Explain the Head Injury Issue?

Dear Sports Fan,

Can some one other than Malcolm Gladwell explain the whole head injury issue? How is Toyota going to fix it and why is no sport but football getting flack?

Thanks,
Sarah

 

Dear Sarah,

The bottom line is, science is getting better – so while we probably always knew that people smashing into other people (or objects) wasn’t good for them, we can now point to a specific brain injury that results, and it ain’t pretty: chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which basically means that, if you studied some athlete’s brains at 50, you’d think they were 85 year olds suffering from dementia.

Why? There’s a lot of talk about concussions, and that’s the simplest, most straightforward explanation. If you’ve ever had a concussion, you know it’s a miserable experience – you also know that after you get the first one, you’re more likely to get a second one, then a third. If you’re a football player, that’s basically an occupational hazard. What we’re learning, though, is that each subsequent concussion has more serious long term impacts – and can lead to early onset of dementia or other emotional/depression issues. It’s slightly easier to deal with the kinds of massive hits that most frequently cause concussions because, at least in football, these are mostly blindside hits on players who don’t know they’re about to get clobbered and can’t defend themselves. These hits can be phased out of the game by changing the rules. They’re trying to do that now.

What also contributes to this is the so-called “sub-concussive” hits – the thousands of times a player will clash with someone and jostle the brain around in the skull just a little bit. This is one of the things that makes football the center of the brain injury story. In football, offensive and defensive linemen clash every single play with the force of a small automobile accident. Turns out these add up too, especially when you consider these guys have been playing football since they were kids. All of those little hits keep accumulating, and the concern now is that this is an issue that’s even bigger than pro football – that college and maybe even high school players may do some long-term brain damage. That issue is much more difficult to address, because you can’t get rid of that type of contact – it happens every play, all over the field.

Which brings us to Toyota. There is no silver bullet to this problem. The solution will involve a combination of rule changes and improved technology – and acknowledgement that the problem will never be truly solved. People will suffer some amount of brain damage, both because we want to see football and there are people who are willing to take the risk to play it. But the technology involves some really cool research that allows scientists to tell exactly how much force is being delivered with each hit, how the impact is distributed across the body – and, theoretically, how to design equipment to ensure the brain is the recipient of less of that impact. Toyota’s part of that effort because 1. They’ve got an image problem,[1] 2. They’ve got lots of engineers and 3. They’re smart enough to know that nothing makes a foreign company feel less foreign than making America’s favorite game safer and

That last point explains why football is taking the brunt of this. It’s the biggest sport, and sports business, in America today. So while other sports have similar issues – hockey, boxing, Mixed Martial Arts – the research hasn’t been as widespread because those sports aren’t as popular and there aren’t as many kids playing them. It’s only a matter of time though. The science is only going to get better, and I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that what we learn is going to make us feel better.

The only question is, is there a point at which Americans – the fans and the players – will say the risk is no longer worth taking?

Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Runaway Priuses and Camries + Ford resurgence = need for image makeover.↵