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Super Bowl XLIX: Meet the rest of Seattle's offense

In the week leading up to Super Bowl XLIX, we’re profiling the important characters of the game. We’ve already run posts on Seattle’s coach, Pete Carroll and quarterback, Russell Wilson. Now it’s time to learn a little about the rest of the Seattle offense.

Marshawn Lynch, Running Back

Marshawn Lynch is a powerful running back whose specialty is bouncing off tacklers or hitting them before they hit him. His nickname is Beastmode. He has a penchant for skittles, not talking to the media, and grabbing his own crotch when he scores. Some view his behavior as fun antics, others as serious infringements, still others are concerned about his mental health.

Doug Baldwin, Wide Receiver

Doug Baldwin is the leader of Seattle’s mostly unknown receiving core. He played college football at Stanford, overlapping with Seahawks defensive back Richard Sherman. Baldwin was an unheralded player, and was not even drafted after his college years. Seattle signed him as a free agent in 2011 and Baldwin went on to lead the team in receptions and receiving yardage that year. Perhaps because of his undrafted status, Baldwin loves to play the “No one believes in us” card. Just last week, after the Seahawks amazing comeback win over Green Bay, Baldwin went off on a rant against reporters who “didn’t believe in” the Seahawks. It’s amazing that a member of a defending Super Bowl champion team can twist himself into believing this motivational thought, but Baldwin does. During the Super Bowl, he expects to be covered by Patriots cornerback Darrelle Revis, who is known for shutting receivers out entirely.

Jermaine Kearse, Wide Receiver

Jermaine Kearse is a Washington man, through and through. He grew up in Lakewood Washington, played college football at the University of Washington, and was signed, like his teammate Doug Baldwin, as an undrafted free agent by the Seattle Seahawks, where he’s played his whole career. Kearse had perhaps the weirdest game ever for a wide receiver in the Seahawks win over the Packers. Four of the first five passes that were sent his way ended up as interceptions for the Packers. Two bounced off his hands before being caught by the other team. That’s a devastating day for anyone in any football game, much less a professional in the NFC Championship game. In overtime, Kearse got one more chance when quarterback Russell Wilson threw his way on a long pass down the middle. Kearse converted it into a 35 yard, game-winning touchdown. He’d surely like to be the hero again but I’m guessing he’d be happy with just a more consistent performance in the Super Bowl.

Luke Willson, Tight End

Other than sharing (almost) a last name with quarterback Russell Wilson, Luke Willson is a relatively unknown quantity. He took over as the starting tight end early this year when Zach Miller got knocked out for the season with an ankle injury. Willson is not a remarkable player but he’s certainly proved himself this year. In week 16 against Arizona, he had 139 yards and two touchdowns. That’s pretty good! He played an important role in the Seahawks win over the Packers when he caught the miraculous two-point conversion that put Seattle up by three points. Also, he’s Canadian.

Russell Okung, Left Tackle

With all the unheralded players on the Seattle offense that we’ve profiled so far, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Seahawks don’t have any top draft picks on offense. Not true! As is often the case these days in the NFL, their Left Tackle was drafted very, very high. Russell Okung, 6’5, 310 lbs, was drafted number six overall by Seattle in the 2010 NFL draft. A star in college, at Oklahoma State University, Okung has struggled with injuries in the NFL. He’s missed 21 games over his first five seasons but when he is healthy, he’s one of the best players at his position. He’s healthy now, and although the Patriots have some good pass rushers to go against Okung, I expect him to win most of those battles.

Prepare for the Super Bowl with Dear Sports Fan. We will be running special features all week to help everyone from the die-hard football fan to the most casual observer enjoy the game. So far we’ve profiled Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter or either of our Football 101 or 201 courses, do it today!

Super Bowl XLIX: Who is Seattle's quarterback, Russell Wilson?

Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback, has as clear an image as any public figure I’ve ever read or written about. He never wavers, he never blunders, even when he plays poorly. As much as we can tell about anyone from afar, Wilson seems to be who he seems to be. It’s refreshing, heartening, and a little boring, to be honest.

What is Russell Wilson’s background?

Wilson was born in Ohio and raised in Virginia. His father was a lawyer and his mother had the interesting job of using her expertise as a nurse to consult on medicine related court cases. The Wilsons were and are an athletic family. His grandfather was a college football and basketball player before becoming president of a university. His father played football and baseball at Dartmouth and almost made it into the NFL as a wide-receiver. Wilson’s older brother played college football and baseball and his little sister is one of the top high school basketball players in the country. Harrison Wilson III, father to Harrison IV, Russell, and Anna, died in 2010 of complications from diabetes.

Like his Super Bowl counterpart, Tom Brady, Russell Wilson excelled at multiple sports in high school and college. If anything, Wilson was more distinguished as a baseball player and football player than Brady. In Collegiate high school in Virginia, Wilson won the state championship as a football player and served as class president. He went to college in nearby North Carolina State University. There, he sat out his first year, won the starting job part of the way through his second year and played so well that he became the first ever freshman (players can sit their first year and still be considered freshman) to be named as first-team All-ACC quarterback. His next two years went according to plan, with Wilson starring on the football field and the baseball diamond, as well as graduating a year early and taking graduate level courses.

In 2010, things took a turn when Wilson got into a dispute with NC State’s football coach over whether or not he would be able to continue to pursue baseball in addition to football. Wilson had been drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in 2007 and later by the Colorado Rockies in 2010 (don’t ask me how that works… well, I guess if you’re not going to ask me, who would you ask? Fine, ask me later!) and was determined to keep his options open. The dispute was not to be mended. Wilson decided to leave NC State and transfer to Wisconsin. In his first year at Wisconsin and his last eligible year in college football, he led the Wisconsin Badgers to a Big 10 title and a place in the Rose Bowl. Wisconsin lost but the season had been a success.

Again, similar to Tom Brady, Wilson was not drafted high in the NFL draft. For Brady, the knock was that he was neither experienced, nor athletic enough to succeed in the NFL. The criticism of Wilson seems even stupider in retrospect. Wilson was drafted in the third round of the 2012 NFL draft with the 75th overall pick because teams thought he was too short to succeed. That has obviously not been the case. Wilson won the starting job in his first preseason camp. In three seasons, he has won 36 games and lost only 12 games in the regular season. He has been to the playoffs every year and has so far only lost a single game. Last year, he won the Super Bowl.

What’s he all about?

Russell Wilson is a devout man. According to Wikipedia, he “became a devout Christian at age 14 when he said he saw Jesus in a dream.” His Twitter profile refers to John 3:30 which states, “He must become greater; I must become less.” He also proclaims himself to be “too blessed to be stressed.” When not tweeting bible verses, Wilson is an enthusiastic promoter of his team, his teammates, the companies he endorses, and, most charmingly, his little sister and her basketball career. He caused a slight controversy after the Seahawks game against the Packers, when Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers objected to Wilson’s post-game attribution of the win to god by saying, “I don’t think God cares a lot about the outcome.”

Controversy is one thing that Wilson has pretty much avoided so far in his career. His image is clean and controlled. He has very few friends other than a tight group of people he knew before stardom that help him manage his life and career. The only small to-do that Wilson has been involved with was the insinuation earlier this year from some of his teammates as reported by Mike Freeman, that he may not be “black enough.” That insinuation probably deserves its own essay written by someone more authoritative in sociology than me. It’s worth reporting that shortly after that story, the Seahawks traded wide receiver Percy Harvin, rumored to be one of the players cited by Freeman, to the New York Jets.

On the field, Wilson is a menace to opposing defenses. He is an accurate passer and moves well to avoid being sacked by defenders. When deployed in zone-read plays, where he is given the option of handing the ball to his running back or running with it himself, Wilson is deadly. He led all NFL quarterbacks this year in rushing with 849 yards and six touchdowns. Those stats would put him tied for 16th as a running back, much less as a quarterback. There’s great debate about whether clutch play actually exists but if it does, Wilson has it. He seems to get better as the game goes on and plays with more poise and determination when his team is losing and needs him the most.

What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?

There are only eleven quarterbacks who have won more than one Super Bowl. Russell Wilson joins that group if the Seahawks win this game. He’ll also join an even more elite group of quarterbacks who have won consecutive Super Bowls. Of this group, only his opponent, Tom Brady, isn’t already in the Hall of Fame. It’s tempting to say that Wilson will have more chances, even if he loses, but things change fast in the NFL and nothing is certain. What is likely though, is that Wilson has many years of productive football ahead of him. He should be able to overcome the setback a loss would pose to how he is seen as a quarterback.

Prepare for the Super Bowl with Dear Sports Fan. We will be running special features all week to help everyone from the die-hard football fan to the most casual observer enjoy the game. So far we’ve profiled Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter or either of our Football 101 or 201 courses, do it today!

Super Bowl XLIX: Who is New England's quarterback, Tom Brady?

You rarely hear someone refer to Tom Brady without following his name with the phrase, “the golden boy.” Brady is the prototypical quarterback. He’s tall, handsome, and athletic. He’s an unquestioned leader. He is successful on the field and off the field. He inevitably evokes a strong response from people. Either you want to be him or want to be with him or you can’t stand his smug, arrogant ways and you are annoyed that one person (other than you) could be so lucky.

What is Tom Brady’s background?

Tom Brady was not the star athlete in his family as a child. Nope, that was his three older sisters, Maureen, Julie, and Nancy. Each of them played sports and Tom went along with his parents to cheer them on. Jeff Arnold describes the family in his 2012 article on The Post Game as being extremely close. It certainly sounds like that was true. As a child, Brady loved football and convinced the family to go to San Francisco 49ers home games, just a short drive from their home in San Mateo, but his first sport was always baseball. He was good enough at baseball to be selected by the Montreal Expos in the 1995 Major League Baseball draft. Instead of committing to baseball, Brady chose to go to the University of Michigan as a quarterback.

This turned out to be a great decision but it may not have seemed like one at the time. According to Wikipedia, when Brady first went to Michigan, he was seventh on the quarterback pecking order! For the first two years of his college career, he sat while the incumbent quarterback, Brian Griese led the team. After Griese left, you might have thought the job would go exclusively to Brady, but it did not. Although he started every game, he continuously had to battle another quarterback, Drew Henson, for playing time. Michigan’s coach at the time though it was a good idea to rotate quarterbacks during the game. Despite this, Brady played well and became an acclaimed and successful college quarterback.

Given his success in the NFL, you would be forgiven for assuming that Brady was a high draft pick. He was not. The New England Patriots drafted Brady in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft as the 199th player selected. Why so low? To start with, very few successful NFL quarterbacks have trouble winning the starting job in college. Brady did. On top of that, Brady performed poorly at the annual NFL combine where players are measured on physical attributes and perform drills to measure their athleticism. Brady was relatively slow and weak. It’s actually pretty remarkable. If you watch the videos from back then, Brady looks slow and somewhat awkward not just in the context of football. It almost looks like you or I could beat him in a race.

New England saw through that and selected him anyway, even though they had a starting quarterback in the prime of his career. Brady, familiar with the bench from his college days, went right back there in his first year as a professional. Then, in the second game of his second year, the Patriots starting quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, took a bad hit to the ribs, suffered internal bleeding, and had to be removed from the game. Brady went in and the rest is history. Or… almost. Brady wasn’t an immediate success, but it was close. His first two games as a starter were only so-so. From then on, he’s been very close to great his entire career. He took the Patriots to the playoffs and won the Super Bowl in his first, third, and fourth years as a starter. At that point, in 2004, he was 9-0 as a playoff starter, and already being talked about as one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. He’s been back to the Super Bowl two times since then but lost twice, both times to the New York Giants. He survived an ACL tear in 2008 and now, in 2015, at the age of 37, is still going strong.

What’s he all about?

Tom Brady perfectly epitomizes himself in the way he plays quarterback. When he drops back with the ball in the pocket (protective area his offensive linemen endeavor to create for him) he is more still than any other quarterback. Most quarterbacks bounce around in there, moving up and down, side to side as they look for someone to throw the ball to and prepare to be hit or take evasive action. Brady just stands there. Still, calm, collected, he stands. This behavior expresses what seems to be the core of Brady’s personality. His focus on football and winning is totally relentless. His confidence in his own abilities is limitless.

As evidence of his focus on football, consider how Brady, who is married to Gisele Bundchen, often referred to as the world’s number one model, prioritizes his time with her. In a 2009 profile of Brady in GQ by Adam Rapoport, Brady says “Gisele understands the job requirements. I get some time with her on my day off, Tuesday, and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday nights. Probably after wins I’m more with her. After losses, I don’t think much of anything other than the game. This morning at breakfast, for instance, I was talking to her, but I just wasn’t there.” Brady has crafted his entire life around his devotion to football. He goes to bed at 8:30 every night, (presumably except for evenings with Patriots night games) and has put himself on a strict seasonal diet that is “80 percent alkaline, 20 percent acidic” according to Greg Bishop in Sports Illustrated. In a recent profile of Brady in the New York Times, Mark Leibovitch writes that Brady “used the word ‘grieving’ to characterize the period that follows postseason losses. He described losing as a “quality-of-life issue” for him.” Brady is determined to play for as long as he possibly can, saying only that when he “sucks” he will retire. Along with his diet and schedule, Brady is devoted to his body to the point of obsession (kinda makes sense that he would develop a relationship with a model, no?) His consiglieri in this obsession is Alex Guerrero who Brady describes as his “body coach.” Here is Leibovitch’s wonderfully pithy description of Guerrero: “Guerrero, 49, is a practicing Mormon of Argentine descent with a master’s degree in Chinese medicine from a college in Los Angeles.” Brady believes in Guerrero’s techniques and his own abilities implicitly. He openly talks about playing deep into his forties. His father, when asked, had an even later estimate of Brady’s true desires: “It will end badly,” he said. “It does end badly. And I know that because I know what Tommy wants to do. He wants to play till he’s 70.”

Despite Brady’s very high-profile job and marriage, he has managed to hide his personality fairly well. Either that, or there isn’t actually anything underneath the veneer of competitor, husband, and father. One great moment in Leibovitch’s New York Times profile was when he gives us a glimpse into Brady’s thoughts on religion: He marched me back into the house, through the kitchen and past a shelf that displayed a large glass menorah. “We’re not Jewish,” Brady said when I asked him about this. “But I think we’re into everything. . . . I don’t know what I believe. I think there’s a belief system, I’m just not sure what it is.” I suppose we’ll understand more once we see what Brady does once he finally retires. It seems likely that he and Guerrero will continue their mission to train and prepare bodies for peak performance, just with other people’s bodies. When that time comes, maybe Brady will allow himself the occasional beer or ice cream made of something other than avocado… but I doubt it.

What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?

The result of a single game is a funny thing. On one hand, it shouldn’t mean much for anyone’s legacy, certainly not someone as accomplished as Tom Brady. It does though, and maybe for Brady more than anyone else. If the New England Patriots win this game, Brady joins Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw as the only three quarterbacks with four Super Bowl wins. He puts an end to some of the Deflategate fueled talk that attributes his winning to Belichick’s coaching or the Patriots’ nefarious ways.

If the Patriots lose, Brady will drop to 3-3 in Super Bowls with all his success having come early on in his career. The last ten years of his career will be devalued slightly and the controversy swirling around his football’s pressure will gain steam.

There’s one last note about what a win or a loss might mean to Brady. Earlier this season, Brady restructured his contract with the New England Patriots. On the surface of things, this looked like a routine move by a loyal player to help his loyal organization by freeing up cash to use on surrounding him with even better teammates next year. Some people, Patriots fans in particular, read the small print and realized that what Brady got back in return for his financial largess was flexibility. This has set off a round of speculation that Brady might leave the Patriots after this year. Given Brady’s character, it seems like a loss in the Super Bowl might make him more likely to stay and plot his revenge with coach Bill Belichick. At this point, it is all speculation. We’ll have to wait and see.

Prepare for the Super Bowl with Dear Sports Fan. We will be running special features all week to help everyone from the die-hard football fan to the most casual observer enjoy the game. So far we’ve profiled Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter or either of our Football 101 or 201 courses, do it today!

What do we know about brain injuries or concussions?

The sight of a football player knocked senseless or woozy during a game is common. For years, the culture of football was to celebrate the roughest elements of the game, including those that caused concussion symptoms like these. Of course, the word concussion wasn’t used, players were “dinged up” or “had their bells rung.” Concussed players rarely left the field, and if they did they were back as soon as they could walk straight. Today the way we observe, comment on, and handle brain injuries in football is very different. Now when a player goes down, we gasp, avert our eyes, and talk in hushed voices. We know now that brain injuries have serious short and long-term consequences. They can cause the toughest football players to seize up, be unable to tolerate sunlight, or vomit uncontrollably. In time, they can cause personality changes, aggression, and dementia.

What has changed? Well, we know more about brain injuries and their effects thanks to some powerful investigative reporting and promising scientific work led by the New York Times and Boston University respectively. The twin forces of knowledge and focus shifted public opinion but have not necessarily conveyed the full story in an easily understandable way. If you’ve ever wanted to understand what’s really going on when a brain is injured and how that pertains to football players, here is a summary.

Brain injuries are generally categorized into two groups: concussions and subconcussive events. Both are caused when a person’s head moves rapidly enough for the brain inside to scrape or hit the inside of the skull. In football, this is often the result of a blow to the head from another person’s body or the ground, but it can also happen if the head moves fast enough, even without impact. Of course, every injury is unique but it helps to classify them.

Concussions are injuries that have recognizable short-term symptoms that may not be present immediately after the impact. A concussed player may have a headache, loss of memory, and confusion. They may experience visual symptoms like blurred vision or seeing stars (this actually happens! it’s not just in cartoons). In some cases concussions may cause vomiting or loss of consciousness. Some symptoms of concussions are usually experienced with a short delay of a day to a week. These insidious symptoms include sensitivity to light, trouble sleeping, difficulty with concentration, and depression. Concussion symptoms may dissipate after a few days or may stick with a person for months or even years.
Subconcussive events are simply a description of any head trauma that does not cause a concussion. It’s not a very satisfying definition but subconcussive blows are an important concept because of how frequently they occur in football and their potential impact on the long-term effect of football on its players.

It’s hard to know how many concussions there are in the NFL and in other levels of organized football. Estimates range widely mostly because players and teams both have incentives to not report concussions as they happen. The NFL reported 228 concussions in the 2013-14 season, down slightly from 261 and 252 in the previous two seasons. That means every time a player steps on to a football field, (and 96 do, per game) he has a roughly 1 in a 100 chance of getting a concussion. Just from having watched a lot of football, that frequency feels about right. That would mean there is one reported concussion (too obvious to hide) in almost every game.

Football players certainly suffer concussions at a greater rate than normal people. They also suffer broken bones and torn ligaments at a significantly higher rate than normal people. Broken bones and torn ligaments never have and never will be seen as a pernicious element that could conceivably bring down football. The real problem is that a statistically significantly higher percentage of football players experience another set of physical and psychological symptoms that are almost definitely tied to brain damage. We are now morally certain that these symptoms are the result of a neurological disease called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or C.T.E., and that it has been caused by concussions or other brain injuries suffered while playing football. The New York Times, which did a lot of the earliest and best reporting on C.T.E. thanks to the work of Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist, Alan Schwarz, described C.T.E. as “a degenerative and incurable disease”. Here is the best description of the four stages of the disease from an article by Schwarz’ colleague Ken Belson:

Those categorized as having Stage 1 of the disease had headaches and loss of attention and concentration, while those with Stage 2 also had depression, explosive behavior and short-term memory loss. Those with Stage 3 of C.T.E…. had cognitive impairment and trouble with executive functions like planning and organizing. Those with Stage 4 had dementia, difficulty finding words and aggression.

The popular science author Malcolm Gladwell has also had a big influence on this issue. Gladwell wrote an article about brain injury in football which was published in the New Yorker in 2009. This article was the first one to shift my thinking about the game and it is well worth reading despite its relative age. Here is a quote from the piece which builds on the description of symptoms above:

C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn’t the result of an endogenous disease. It’s the result of injury.

Scientific and medical understanding of C.T.E. has come a long way but it’s still not entirely clear whether concussions or subconcussive events are the main cause of the disease. It’s understandably difficult to figure this out given that almost all football players will experience both types of brain injuries during their careers and that until recently even concussions with fairly dramatic symptoms were largely treated as an unavoidable consequence of playing football which was best ignored.

One of the biggest obstacles to learning more faster about C.T.E. and the brain injuries that cause it is that the disease can only be conclusively diagnosed by examining the brain after death. During a special autopsy, scientists are able to see if the brain shows the degeneration and accumulation of a protein called tau that are characteristic of C.T.E.. As heart-wrenching as it has been to read stories about the handful of football players who have shot themselves in the chest and left instructions for their brains to be studied, they and other players whose families have donated their brains posthumously, have been responsible for virtually everything we know about the disease so far. Luckily, there is some movement on this topic. Researchers at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA have been able to detect evidence of C.T.E. in living brains through the use of a particular dye and a “routine positron emission tomography scan.” In a 2013 Wired article on the topic, Sean Conboy writes that this test “also could help settle the debate over whether CTE is exacerbated by a few major concussions or years of exposure to subconcussive blows. And it could answer the most important question of all: How much tau is too much?

Another facet of testing that is rarely talked about is genetic testing. David Epstein explains in his book, The Sports Gene, that there is a single gene called ApoE that is predictive of Alzheimer’s disease as well as “how well an individual can recover from any type of brain injury.” There are three variants of the gene and everyone has two copies, one from their mother and one from their father. One variant, ApoE4, is particularly bad. People with one copy of ApoE4 are four times more likely than the general population to develop Alzheimer’s, and people with two copies are eight times more likely. Nothing has been proven about any connection between ApoE4 and C.T.E. but, given that people with copies of that gene variant “take longer to recover” from brain injuries and “are at a greater risk of suffering dementia later in life,” it seems likely.

As it stands today, the only sure thing is that C.T.E. is horrible and deadly. Until we know otherwise, I am going to assume that all blows to the head or which cause the brain to hit the skull contribute to the potential development of C.T.E. and that the more violent the impact, the larger its negative consequence. Until the day (and that day may never come) when science can definitively predict which injuries and which players are on the road to C.T.E. and medicine can prevent those players from getting the disease, football has a responsibility to understand how players are injured and to find ways to reduce or eliminate the danger.

This is the first post in a series of posts about brain injuries in football and how to fix the sport. In our next post, we’ll discuss how brain injuries or concussions happen. What kinds of hits cause them? Why do players escape some collisions unscathed and stumble away from others?

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Super Bowl XLIX: Who is New England's coach, Bill Belichick?

In this morning’s post about Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks head coach, I described Carroll as “an oil salesman” and wrote that it was “up to you whether you believe he’s selling snake oil or the best crude out there.” The subject of this post, is the head coach of the New England Patriots, and Carroll’s key opponent in the upcoming Super Bowl. Bill Belichick would be the world’s worst salesman, of oil or anything else. He is a complex, intriguing man whose brilliant talent for football is only matched by his apparent contempt for everything he feels is non-essential to winning football games. Whether you think he is simply a porcupine without the desire or talent to cloak himself in the skin of a cuddlier animal or you think he is a teddy-bear wearing chain-mail probably has a lot to do with whether you root for the New England Patriots and vis-versa. Bill Belichick is the single most powerful man in the New England Patriots organization. Trying to enjoy the Super Bowl without learning a bit about Belichick would be like watching the game on a standard-def, black and white TV.

What is Bill Belichick’s background?

In perhaps the least surprising biographical detail ever, Bill Belichick is the son of a football coach and military man. Bill Belichick was raised in Annapolis Maryland while his father served as assistant coach of the Navy football team. He played football as a young man but it was clear early on (and probably to Belichick as much as to his coaches) that his future would be as a coach, not a player. He went to college at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, a school known more for its music department than its football team. Belichick played as a Center and Tight End but was perhaps more known as a guy-around-campus than an athlete. A college teammate of Belichick’s described his role as president of Wesleyan’s Chi Psi fraternity, a notorious group of drunken pranksters by saying ‘‘It wasn’t that Bill didn’t like to have fun and party,’’ Farrell said. ‘‘He just wasn’t going to be the stupid one.’’ Hold on to that thought. If the NFL today resembles a frat party, Belichick still plays that role to a T.

After college, Belichick went right into NFL coaching, taking minor jobs with the Colts, Lions, and Broncos. Then in 1979, Belichick was hired by the New York Giants and his career took off. The Giants at that time were led by a legendary head coach named Bill Parcells, who was perhaps the opposite of Belichick in terms of outward presentation. Nonetheless, he saw something in Belichick, and by 1985, had promoted him to defensive coordinator. In 1991, Belichick was hired as head coach of the Cleveland Browns. This did not work out well. He spent five years with the Browns during which the team only had a winning record and made the playoffs in one year. Belichick angered fans of the team so severely when he cut quarterback Bernie Kosar from the team, that by the end of his time in Cleveland he was receiving FBI protection. In early 1996, in the midst of moving the team to Baltimore, where they were to become the Ravens, Belichick was fired.

As devastating as that failure must have been, it didn’t take long for Belichick to get swooped up by another team. His old mentor, Bill Parcells, at that time head coach of the New England Patriots, hired Belichick back on as an assistant head coach. The team thrived under their leadership and went to the Super Bowl in 1996. Despite their success, Parcells left shortly afterwards because of a dispute with team owner, Robert Kraft. Parcells felt he should be given authority as a general manager to make decisions about what players to draft or acquire through free agency or trades. Kraft disagreed.

After two hard-to-explain stints as the head coach of the New York Jets, neither of which lasted for longer than a day, Belichick was hired as the head coach and general manager of the New England Patriots in 2000. Almost immediately, the Patriots took off an a streak of winning unprecedented in modern NFL history. In his second year as head coach, the Patriots went 11-5 and won the Super Bowl. In his fourth and fifth years, the Patriots went 14-2 and won the Super Bowl both times. Three Super Bowl wins in four years made Belichick a success. Since then, he has kept the team running at an amazing clip, winning more than 10 games every year and making the playoffs every year except for one. How does he do it? What is his secret?

What’s he all about?

The writer David Halberstam described Bill Belichick as “the ultimate rational man.” Charlie Pierce described him as “the last NFL anarchist, the Lord of Misrule.” It’s very possible that they are both right. I think Belichick is one of the most carefully divided people around. He seems to be able to completely separate his personal life and his professional life; his emotions from his logic. Here’s what is undeniably true about Belichick.

He tries to be smarter than everyone else and often is. For years, Belichick has been “trading down” in the NFL draft. This means he trades the right to choose players earlier for the chance to select more players. He knows that accurately predicting player performance is a fool’s game and refuses to play it.
He has frequently cut or traded players, even well-respected veteran leaders, from his team before any decline in their performance was apparent to teammates, fans, and analysts.
He is unconventional in many ways. I wrote a whole post about this the other day. Belichick is a free-thinker in a league of copycats. He plays offensive players on defense sometimes, he will not hesitate to run the ball 50 times in a row if it is working or throw 60 times in a row. He feels no need to do what everyone else is doing. More than any other coach, he seems to plan his team’s tactics each week based on what his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses are.
He has been punished by the NFL once for cheating, in 2007 when the Patriots were caught filming opponent’s practice sessions, and is currently embroiled in a controversy over whether the Patriots illegally deflated footballs during their game against the Colts.
He seems to distain either the media or the expectations of an NFL coach to be a public figure. He says as little as possible in press conferences and seems to be annoyed most of the time. He wears informal clothing, verging on the sloppy, most of the time, including a cut-off, hooded sweatshirt look that he has become famous for.

Bill Belichick is an uncomfortable reminder of the underlying truths of professional football. Winning is everything, players are commodities, and the narratives surrounding the game are not directly connected to the people who work within the sport, no matter how much we like to think they are. For as lucrative a business as the NFL is, it’s owners, coaches, and GMs are often sloppy and inefficient in the way they think. They fall into following conventions far too often. Belichick is the guy who points out that the emperor is naked, that the company’s revenues will never match its losses, and that you are not seeing things clearly. Coaches matter more in football than in any other sport, so it’s no surprise that Belichick has been so successful. He seems to be the best coach in the NFL.

What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?

Unfortunately, the Belichick narrative right now is caught up in #DEFLATEGATE and #BALLGHAZI. If Belichick wins, it will confirm the age-old wisdom, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” If the Patriots lose, people will see this as them getting their just desserts for having cheated.

With time, the furor over the footballs will die down. Later, a win will be seen as an unneeded but much appreciated confirmation of Belichick’s era as head coach of the New England Patriots. If they die, the Patriots dynasty will be remembered more as “three-super bowl wins in four years” than fifteen years of sustained excellence.

Super Bowl XLIX: Who is Seattle's coach, Pete Carroll?

Pete Carroll is an oil salesman, it’s up to you whether you believe he’s selling snake oil or the best crude out there. Carroll is the head coach and de facto General Manager of the Seattle Seahawks and he’ll be trying to win his second Super Bowl in a row this Sunday. At 63, Carroll is at the top of his profession. His ideas, philosophy, and energetic personality seem to pervade the Seahawks organization. If you’re a Seahawks fan, you probably love Pete Carroll. If you’re a Patriots fan, you probably don’t. If you are in the majority that isn’t a fan of either team, then learning more about Carroll may help you decide who to root for on Sunday. It will certainly help you understand and enjoy the game in greater depth.

What is Pete Carroll’s background?

Carroll is a California guy, through and through. He was born and raised in San Francisco. As a kid, he was a star athlete, but his performance trailed off in high school when his growth couldn’t keep up to his capacity for competitive sports. In college, Carroll played football, first for College of Marin and then University of the Pacific. He played well, mostly as a defensive back, in the relative obscurity of the Pacific Coast Athletic Conference. After graduation, he tried to make it as a professional football player, but could not, not even in the now-defunct World Football League. In 1973, at the age of 22, Carroll took his first job as a coach and (basically) has never done anything else.

Carroll worked in various assistant coach capacities, again mostly on the defensive side of the team, for 20 years, first in college and then in the NFL before getting his first chance as a head coach. In 1994, Carroll was hired as head coach of the New York Jets. He didn’t last long. After starting the year 6-5, his team lost their remaining five games to finish 6-10. Carroll was fired. He returned to California and to defense to lick his wounds. He become defensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers and after two years of that, got another shot at being head coach of an NFL team. The New England Patriots hired him. This time Carroll lasted three years, after which, despite a 33-31 record and having made the playoffs twice, he was fired again. Again he returned to California to heal, becoming head coach of the University of Southern California (USC) football team at the end of 2000.

At USC, Carroll finally found the success he had been hunting during his decades of apprenticeship and false starts as a head coach. After going 6-6 in his first year as head coach, USC went on an almost unprecedented run of success. In the next eight seasons, USC won 77 games, lost only 13, won seven of eight bowl games, and two national championships. Carroll became one of the most feared head coaches in college football.

In 2010, after nine years as head coach of USC, Carroll decided to return to the NFL to become the head coach and de facto general manager of the Seattle Seahawks. It was a risky and somewhat controversial move. It was risky because after two previous failures as a head coach in the NFL, Carroll risked his legacy as a great coach if he were to fail again. It was controversial because people said he was fleeing the college game with the NCAA on his tails. Indeed, after he left, the NCAA imposed severe sanctions on USC for basically paying some of their football players. Carroll refuted these accusations fervently but he did so from the safety of Seattle and a job in an openly professional football league.

Carroll’s time in Seattle has mirrored his time at USC so far. Again it took him a little to turn the team around but once he got it headed in the right direction, it’s been very successful. In his first two years at Seattle, the team went 7-9. After that, 11-5, 13-3, 12-5, with two Super Bowl appearances and one victory. Carroll has again scaled the mountain. How does he do it? What is he all about?

What’s he all about?

Pete Carroll is relentlessly laid back. He is an aggressive play-caller (which got him the moniker as “Big Ball’s Pete” at USC) who relies heavily on his players’ instincts and talent to win games. My lasting image of Pete Carroll will always be a .gif someone created which was featured on Deadspin.com and shows Carroll swaggering on the sideline with a top-hat, monocle, and cane drawn in, completing his characterization as a 19th century robber baron.

If there is a single theme that runs throughout everything Carroll believes in and does as a football coach, it is positive energy. In a wonderful 2009 profile of Carroll written by Mike Sager and published in Esquire, Carroll’s son Brennon, who was working as an assistant coach under his father at the time, said that both he and his Dad have attention deficit disorder. Brennon said, “It probably helps more than it hurts, being a little off the wall.” and that certainly seems to be true. As a new coach in Seattle, Carroll implemented a set of arrangements unusual for the NFL (although some have become standard since then). According to this ESPN article by Alyssa Roenigk, the Seahawks offered optional meditation, required yoga, experimental brain testing programs, and created an entire branch of their staff to “look after the players.” Carroll said of returning to the NFL that he “wanted to find out if we went to the NFL and really took care of guys, really cared about each and every individual, what would happen?” His mantra is “Do your job better than it has ever been done before” which, this year at least, provides a stark contrast with Seattle’s Super Bowl opponents, the New England Patriots, whose rallying cry has been “Do your job.”

Carroll’s demeanor on the sidelines is a rare one for the NFL. He looks happy! He loves his job and he isn’t afraid to show it. Here’s a description of Carroll arriving at work from the Esquire magazine article:

Carroll entered from his office across the hall, McMuffin in hand. His mouth was full, he was chewing, he was wearing the silly/happy expression of a guy who’s just come to work after his morning surf. “What’s happenin’ boys?”

Most head coaches in football act like their job is the hardest and most serious thing in the world. Carroll acts like he’s the luckiest guy in the world. He’s relentlessly positive and so far, with few exceptions, he has been proven correct. There certainly seems to be something infectious about his attitude. During Seattle’s last game, the NFC Championship game against Green Bay, they were down by 12 points with less than three minutes to go. Seattle’s quarterback, Russell Wilson, had had by far his worst game ever, and the game seemed like a lost cause to everyone but the Seahawks themselves. The relentlessly optimistic character of their head coach, which had become a philosophy for their team, instructed them to keep playing and keep believing that they would win. They did.

What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?

If the Seahawks win the Super Bowl, it will vault Pete Carroll into the ranks of true coaching royalty. Already one of just three men who have coached a college team to a national championship and a professional team to the Super Bowl, Carroll will be included in any conversation about the best coaches ever. Repeat champions are rare in the NFL — only seven coaches have ever been able to win two Super Bowls in a row — and that fact will add to Carroll’s legend.

If the Seahawks lose, it won’t diminish Carroll’s legacy to far, but it would change the way he is seen. Without the bright lights of a repeat championship, we may see more articles written about how the Seahawks lead the league in performance enhancing drug suspension or about how Carroll’s task was made so much easier by the part-skillful but also part-lucky choice of Russell Wilson in the draft. Wilson is a wonderful quarterback and he is still paid so little on his rookie contract that it gives the Seahawks an advantage by freeing up money to spend elsewhere. If the Seahawks lose, people are going to be more likely to remember Carroll’s flight from the NCAA sanctions looming over USC. The Seahawks’ comeback victory over the Green Bay Packers will be remembered as an incredible fluke not the righteous confirmation of Carroll’s positive thinking.

What is this football deflation story about?

Dear Sports Fan,

Can you explain the big story that’s going around right now about the New England Patriots intentionally deflating footballs? What the what?

Adam

Dear Adam,

When I was a kid, my Dad taught me a joke about a lawsuit between two Russian neighbors. We’ll call them Laskutin Kvetoslav Konstantinovich and Ungern Zinoviy Georgiy (this random Russian name generation website is insane!) Anyway, Laskutin sues Ungern, claiming that Ungern borrowed a cooking pot from him and returned it with a big hole in the bottom of the pot. The case goes to trial. Ungern, who happens to be a lawyer, represents himself and wins the case after arguing that the hole was in the pot when he borrowed it, the pot was in perfect condition when he returned it, and he never even borrowed the pot!

The joke (did you laugh?) is meant to poke fun at the insanity of a legal system that, by only requiring the creation of doubt about the truth to acquit a defendant, encourages lawyers to use many different arguments, even if they contradict themselves. The biggest story in football today is a scandal being variously called, “deflate-gate” and “ball-ghazi”. Even if you don’t follow football, you’ve probably heard or seen something about this. I’ll give a quick summary of the story and then explain why it reminds me so much of my Dad’s joke.

During the New England Patriots 45-7 win over the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship game, Colts linebacker D’Quell Jackson intercepted a pass from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. After running to his own sidelines with the ball, Jackson handed the ball to a Colts equipment manager who noticed that the ball seemed under-inflated. He mentioned it to someone who mentioned it to someone else until it became a thing. What we now believe to be true, based on a leak from the NFL itself, as reported by Chris Mortensen on ESPN, is that 11 of the 12 balls the Patriots used on offense were significantly under-inflated.

That may not seem like much, but that’s basically the whole story. The NFL is investigating the incident and will surely be heard from sometime before the Super Bowl. In the meantime, sports fans and the sports media are in full-on freak out mode. Some are saying that this is the biggest cheating scandal since the last time the Patriots were punished for cheating in the 2007 Spygate scandal and that the Patriots should be both ashamed of themselves and punished by the league. Others are saying that this is totally normal and not a big deal. Shockingly, part of what’s helping people decide which side to be on is whether they root for the Patriots or not. In any event, partially because it’s an interesting story and partially because the two-week gap before the Super Bowl is hard to fill with stories, this has become the biggest thing in the sports world right now.

How could this happen? What happens to football before and during a game?

A reasonable person might assume that the NFL itself would be in charge of providing footballs for each game and that their officials would be in charge of handling the balls to ensure they are not tampered with. That’s not true. Like many things about football, the rules that govern the football used in a game are Byzantine and bizarre. Even in articles from reputable sources, there are discrepancies about how it’s supposed to work, but as far as I can gather, this is basically what is supposed to happen:

Before the game, each team brings 12 (24 if there is bad weather predicted) balls to the refs. These balls don’t have to be new, they can be handled, scuffed up, or conditioned by the teams.
135 minutes (why? who knows?) before the game, the refs check the balls to make sure they are inflated properly — between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch. This can be done with either a pressure gauge or a scale or both. If the balls are off, the refs inflate them or deflate them themselves. When they are good, the refs initial them with a sharpie before giving them back to the teams’ equipment managers or ball-boys. Read a behind-the-scenes account of this here.
During the game, each team uses their own twelve (or 24) balls when they are on offense.
Since 1999, the league itself has provided special kicking balls to be used by both teams’ kickers and punters. These balls, sometimes called ‘K’ balls, are brand new but each team is given 45 minutes under supervision of a referee to mess with the kicking balls before the game.

As you can tell, the rules seem to be written with the intention of allowing teams (primarily quarterbacks, since they handle the ball the most during the game) to customize the balls they are going to use on offense within reason. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the league simply provide brand new balls for each game and keep them under supervision throughout the game?

Okay, now tell us why this is like that joke

Imagine that instead of two Russians, it’s the Patriots who are in court and need to come up with a defense. So far, the Patriots have not said much about this issue other than that they will cooperate with the league investigation. If they were to defend themselves and they had Ungern as their lawyer, he might argue that tampering with the balls is totally normal and everyone does it, that sure, they deflated the balls but no one really knows whether deflating the balls would provide an advantage, and that you can’t prove they did anything to the balls anyway!

Everyone does it

In most arenas, this is not the best defense against cheating but in sports it seems to fare a little bit better. Sports is a culture where rule-breaking is acceptable up to a certain point. You’ll often hear football announcers say that there is “holding on every play.” It’s true, if referees decided to apply the strict letter of the law, they could call a penalty on every play. What ends up happening is that in every game, there is a level of holding that is accepted and what really gets called is holding more blatant than normal. No one thinks a player that holds is cheating. The same thing might be true about doctoring footballs but until this scandal, it wasn’t widely known. Since this scandal has broken out, we’ve heard reports that quarterback Brad Johnson paid $7,500 before the Super Bowl in 2003 to scuff up the balls to his liking. Deadspin dug up some footage of announcers discussing a conversation they had with Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers who told them that he likes to inflate his teams footballs past the legal limit and hope that the referees don’t catch him. If tampering with footballs is normal (and the NFL has certainly created rules and an enforcement plan with enough wiggle room to allow for this) than the worst we could say about the Patriots is that they tampered more blatantly than normal and got caught.

Deflating the balls didn’t help

Everyone in football seems to have strongly held beliefs about the condition of the football but what’s the truth? Does over-inflating the ball make it fly faster and straighter, easier to hold on to, and better to catch? Aaron Rodgers thinks so. Or is it under-inflating the ball that makes all of those things better? Tom Brady certainly thinks that is true. In 2011 he was quoted as saying he loved when teammate Rob Gronkowski spikes the ball, “because I like the deflated ball. But I feel bad for that football, because he puts everything he can into those spikes.” But what the heck does he know? In a 2006 New York Times article by Judy Battista, a quarterback who played with Brady mentions that Brady likes his balls, “so broken in that it looked as if he had been using them since junior high school” and that Brady insists on rubbing the balls down before using them to rid them of a substance that coats the balls when they are made. Brady was quotes as saying, “The preservative on the football, when you get it off, it’s easier to get a grip.” This is despite the fact that the maker of the balls is quoted as saying in that same article that that substance makes the balls “about as sticky as a Post-it note, and that improves the grip.”

Meanwhile, in the universe of kickers, there seems to be a similar disagreement. A Business Insider article by Tony Manfred reports that “In 1999, the NFL switched to special “K balls” for special teams plays because they were paranoid that players were manipulating regular balls to make them fly higher and straighter” and quotes from a Sports Illustrated article (now lost from posterity because they basically destroyed their online archive) saying that “New footballs are hard, unforgiving, smallish (with a correspondingly small sweet spot) and coated with a film that makes them slippery. They don’t travel as far as game-worn balls, and they can’t be “guided” as accurately as roundish, softer balls. When you see a kicker squeeze a ball, it’s because he wants to soften it and make it rounder.” But wait, but wait, now that the Patriots are accused of being cheaters, Jason La Canfora writes for CBS in this article that sources of his from the Baltimore Ravens are complaining that in their game against the Patriots, “Baltimore’s kicking and punting units were not getting their normal depth and distance, and some believed the balls they were using may have been deflated.”

So, which is it? Is a soft ball better or a hard ball? Is there a scientist in the house?

The league can’t prove anything

It’s going to be difficult for the NFL to prove wrong-doing in this case. Oh, the circumstantial evidence is pretty strong that someone did something to those balls on behalf of the Patriots but how and when, unless they were caught on video doing it, is going to be tough to prove. Were the balls under-inflated to begin with and the refs simply didn’t notice or didn’t care until the Colts complained? Were the balls properly inflated, approved, and then later doctored by a member of the Patriots? If so, who was it? Did any of the key players or coaches ask for this to happen or did a ball-boy or equipment manager do it himself?

At best, the league may be able to prove that someone tampered with the balls but not exactly who. In that case, I think that the NFL should tread somewhat lightly on this issue. It would be tough to come down hard on the Patriots, arguing that the lack of institutional control needed to prevent this type of tampering is itself worthy of serious punishment. After all, it’s still widely thought that the NFL was seriously negligent at best and totally corrupt at worst in its handling of the Ray Rice domestic abuse case in the past year.

Short-term, I can’t imagine that this story will affect the Super Bowl. The game between the Colts and Patriots will not be replayed, nor will the Patriots be barred from playing the Super Bowl. Coach Bill Belichick may be suspended but my guess is that the suspension would start after the Super Bowl is over. There will definitely be fines or draft picks that get taken away, but not organization changing ones. The rules governing balls will almost definitely be changed to prevent this from happening again and football will keep flying along, under, over, or properly inflated.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

p.s. In case you’re looking for humor about deflate-gate that actually makes you laugh, take a look at this or this.

16 days until the Super Bowl: Penalty Flags

One of the visually appealing elements of football is the way that fouls are signaled by the sports many referees. When a referee sees an infraction of the rules, they don’t necessarily blow whistles or make arm gestures like in other sports, instead, they reach to their belts, grab the small yellow flags they have tucked into their pants, and throw them onto the field. The gently arcing yellow flag is such a perfect visual expression of the emotion a foul call can create in players and fans. When you suspect the penalty is on the team you’re rooting for, the fluttering of the flag seems to happen in the slow motion of a horror movie. When you think the penalty is going to save your team’s bacon, the flight of the flag speaks of a desperately desired deliverance. What could be better?

Kirk Goldsberry of Grantland thinks it would be better if you knew right away which team the penalty was on. The problem, as he explains it, is that seeing a yellow flag “leaves a strange interval between the time a flag is thrown and the time that the charges are explained.” Players and fans know that a foul has been called but they don’t know which team the foul is on. Goldsberry things that “In the information age, this “flag lag” is one of the most annoying parts of the whole football experience. And it’s unnecessary.” His solution is an appealingly simple one:

Football needs two different colored penalty flags — one color for offensive infractions and a separate color for defensive ones…. [that way,] spectators, announcers, players, and coaches would all immediately recognize the guilty side, and consequently their emotions wouldn’t be held hostage by some unneeded informational embargo.

I love this idea! The NFL should absolutely do this. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time penalty flags have been tweaked. They were colored white in the NFL until 1965 and red in college football until the 1970s. Following a semi-tragic eye injury suffered by offensive lineman Orlando Brown (nicknamed Zeus, he died in 2011 at the age of 40,) NFL refs stopped weighting the flags down with BBs or ball bearings. Moving to a two color flag system would be a small but positive change that serves fans and players alike.

If you want to learn the basics of football in time for this year’s Super Bowl, sign up for our Football 101 course. It’s the easiest way to learn football, and I promise that by the time you’re through, you’ll be able to impress the football fan in your life with your newfound knowledge.

In this free course, you’ll learn all about why people like football, what down and distance are, how football scoring works, the inside scoop on fantasy football and football betting, how to decipher TV scoreboard graphics, and finally my favorite way to start having fun while watching football. At the end of the course you will get a fully unaccredited diploma of graduation, which you can hang on your wall with pride. If you enjoy the course, (and I hope you do!), I’d be thrilled to have you as a regular subscriber to our daily or weekly digests and for Football 201, coming soon!

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18 days until the Super Bowl

Union Civil War general Phillip Sheridan is credited with saying, “If I owned Texas and hell, I’d rent Texas and live in hell.” A modern day equivalent of that could be, “If I owned an NFL football team and was elected President of the United States, I’d resign immediately and go back to work on my football team.” Football is the biggest sport in America today. The most valuable of the 32 National Football League (NFL) teams has been valued at over $3 billion dollars. 46 of the 50 most watched sporting events on television in 2013 were football games and in recent years, around 75% of all American televisions have been tuned to football for the Super Bowl. It often seems like no matter where you turn, someone is talking about football.

For people who don’t understand or enjoy football, the experience of living in today’s football obsessed world can be, in turns, annoying, frustrating, confusing, or curiously compelling. As a football fan and the founder of Dear Sports Fan, my goal is to make football understandable so that you have an ease in football-laden situations that you didn’t have before. My goal isn’t to convert you into a football fan, but if you find that happening, I’ll be the first to welcome you into the fold.

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Clearing a reporter's name after his death

In today’s soundbite and meme-laced world, it’s easy to empathize with someone whose ten seconds of fame came because of a misunderstanding. It’s easy to feel bad for a reporter whose name, when it was brought up, was invariably used as an example of asking a stupid question. Inspired by his death a few days ago, the true story of sports reporter Butch John is starting to come out. I saw this story reblogged by Barry Petchesky on Deadspin.com but its source is reporter Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinal.

The myth of Butch John is so unbelievable that it’s hard to comprehend it having lasted as gospel truth since 1988. In that year, the Washington Redskins faced the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. Washington’s quarterback was a man named Doug Williams. Williams was the first black man to quarterback his team to the Super Bowl and in the weeks leading up to the big game, that fact became the subject of many stories, television segments, and interviews. During the fateful press conference, Williams was getting a lot of questions about the topic, and he answered them dutifully until Butch John supposedly asked this hum-dinger, “How long have you been a black quarterback?” Now, this is a silly question. As we all learned from Mean Girls, you can’t ask someone why they are (or how long they’ve been) their race.

Of course, this isn’t what John asked. What he actually asked, according to Mike Bianchi, was this, “Doug, it’s obvious you’ve been a black quarterback all your life. When did it start to matter?”

I’m sure that if Williams had heard the question correctly and responded truthfully, he would have said, “it has always mattered and it always will.” I’m sure if we could ask him, Butch John would deny it mattering whether people think he asked a dumb question once upon a time. But I think it matters and so do his former colleagues like Rick Cleveland who writes in an obituary for John:

He wrote well and he wrote often. He was a fine writer and he worked hard. He was versatile in that he handled news, features and columns with equal proficiency.

Better late than never, I suppose, but it’s another lesson to think twice about the stories we read and hear. Things are not always what they seem.