Watching football

Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece on football made an explicit comparison to dog-fighting, and Migs's post talks about boxing. The distinction that I think will save football is that it's not intentionally dangerous the way the other two sports are. The entire concept of dog-fighting and boxing is to physically damage your opponent. (Dog-fighting has the additional lack-of-free-will issue, but that's peripheral to the point here.) While football has violence built in (you have to tackle the other guy to stop them from scoring), it doesn't contain intent to injure. In fact, intent to injure will get you suspended, fined, etc. Thus, even without any changes to the current ruleset, it is more palatable than boxing.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily take it over the threshold of acceptability, because boxing is really far below the line. Furthermore, with the evidence of the danger of traumatic concussions having gone mainstream, I would hope that the sport could not legitimately continue without making some kinds of changes.

The danger of changes, though, is that they'll respond to the wrong problem. Bill Simmons has mentioned a variety of times that he wants new concussion rules in place involving automatic time-off for concussions, including a full year after a second concussion in a season. But this doesn't come anywhere near addressing the findings Gladwell wrote about: offensive linemen don't report concussions all that often. They just slam and slam and slam and then, after they're retired into obscurity, they get stupid and then they die. It's particularly insidious because the glamour players in the league aren't the ones affected by this. Dan Marino and Deion Sanders are television commentators. Jonathan Ogden is not.

In terms of concrete changes, I'm in favor of mandating the principles of the A-11 offense. I think you could combine this with widening the field (why on football and basketball play on the same dimensions they've always played despite radical increases in the size and athleticism of the players mystifies me) to essentially eliminate trench warfare.

Of course, players would still get hit and concussions would still happen. But I think technology and continued crackdowns on "defenseless receiver" hits could help reduce the risk to the level of acceptability.

I think we can all agree that the following video is a great example of acceptable violence in football:

Football and Boxing

In Wojo's last post, he picked up on something that's been troubling me a lot over the last NFL season - concussions, and whether it makes it not okay to watch football.

Although we've known to an extent about the negative impact of concussions for years, two articles released this fall really drove the point home. First, Jeannie Marie Laskas' piece in GQ, which featured extensive discussion of the initial research on the danger of concussions, as well as the NFL's shockingly dismissive reaction; then Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker, which emphasized the sub-concussive head traumas that players, especially linemen, face even in practice on a daily basis. And so I found myself watching football games this year and cringing especially hard at hits to the head, and not feeling particularly comfortable with how much I enjoyed seeing a hard hit. Basically, I felt how I do when I watch boxing.

Boxing was once a dominant American sport. Boxers were among the famous sports stars, and kids dreamed of being champions. It was their path to glory. But now? Everyone knows the damage boxing can do. We see Muhammad Ali, one of the most eloquent men of the 20th century, barely able to speak. This hurts boxing on two levels. First, it makes it harder for people to watch and feel comfortable with it. Those Mike Tyson knockouts? Awesome to watch. But you can't help but cringe when you see the hapless opponent glassy eyed. [I won't even get into how creepy it can be to watch old wrestling tapes knowing what these guys are doing to their bodies via steroids, painkillers, and blows to the head.]

Second, as an effect, kids don't want to be boxers. No decent parent would let their kid box, and the kids trying to make it big? They play basketball. Far less chance of ending up a vegetable. This impacts the talent level of boxing and makes it way less fun. Bill Simmons contends that if he'd been born in the 1940s, Allen Iverson would have been one of the greatest middleweights ever, but there's no way a guy that smart was going to box nowadays.

So where does that leave football? Even if the NFL cracked down on steroids to mitigate that bigger stronger faster race that makes the game increasingly dangerous, that doesn't solve the problem - the game was always dangerous. In fact, players from the 1970s were the test cases for the first researchers. Even greater safety equipment probably can't solve the problem, experts have said. So now what? The concussion problem has become increasingly mainstream, but it probably won't really take off until we see the effects on a highly visible player or ex-players (although some would argue Terry Bradshaw counts). But when that happens - how many parents will let their kids play football? What will the decrease do to the talent level in the sport? How will that effect the enjoyability of the sport? Its a bit premature to predict a boxing-esque downward spiral, but its not far-fetched.

Sorry for being such a downer - its Super Bowl week! There's going to be parties! Two best teams in football! It's going to be fun.

By the way, this proves a point I've made for a long-time about March Madness and major tennis tournaments - while early upsets are fun, you don't want too many of them. When you get too many, you end up with weird, uncompelling matchups in the later rounds. Its much better for the best teams to advance and give us potentially classic games in the semifinals and finals. Minnesota and New Orleans were the two best teams in the NFC all year - it was great to see them have a showdown we'd been expecting since October. And Colts! Saints! Two of the best offenses in football, led by iconic QBs? How great is that for a Super Bowl? This is a way better outcome than a string of upsets leading to Ravens-Eagles.

McGwire! Merriman! Morals!

I think it's interesting that you bring up the spitball and the bigger-faster-stronger issues in baseball and football in relation to moralistic arguments.

First, a big part of the reason doctoring the ball became illegal was because Ray Chapman got hit in the head by a Carl Mays pitch after Mays covered the ball in dirt, spit, and tobacco juice, turning the ball a color that was very difficult to distinguish to see when it was coming at his head at 85+ miles per hour. (This wasn't unique to Mays, of course. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Chapman was definitely in the wronger place.) There's surely some truth in Ty Cobb's statement that the owners wanted more home runs, too, of course, but there was, at the time, a legit morals-based reason for the banning of the spitball.

I will also add that spitballers, scuffers, etc. get a pass from people compared to juicers. Whitey Ford was apparently a huge doctorer of baseballs, but nobody wants to kick him out of the Hall of Fame. Brian Moehler earned the loving nickname "Scuffy" from the Baseball Prospectus crew after he was caught with sandpaper in his glove. Now, Moehler's not a guy anyone's going to be having Hall of Fame arguments about, but after his suspension was over, he just went right back to mediocre pitching. He moved on with his life in a way that Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire will never be able to do.

Second, steroids in football can have the same moral component now that everyone has read Malcolm Gladwell's piece about head injuries in football. The bigger, faster, and stronger players are, the more force they're putting into hits, and the worse the players are all going to end up. And yet it's not clear anyone cares.

I think that's probably the part about morals arguments that bother me the most. It's not so much that we make them at all in a realm where they just don't apply, it's that we make them in such blatantly inconsistent ways. Mark McGwire played 250 more games than he would have without steroids. Shawne Merriman used steroids to get stronger and faster so he could earn the nickname "Lights Out" for causing serious head trauma to opposing players. Exactly one of these players has earned the public's everlasting enmity.

The NFL and "Morality"

Your point about most bad sports arguments being about morality really struck a chord, because it may be the most frustrating thing about following sports. This is particularly true if you read old sportswriters, the ones that write for newspapers and want to expound on how its grit and toughness that lead to success - as if both the winners and losers about the professional level aren't tough and aren't trying. The fact is, the outcome of most games is about who's better, and the ones that aren't are based on how well players execute in the end-game - but pretty much every study has concluded that there's no such thing as "clutch" players who actually raise their games in these situations. Players play at their level, and if they don't succeed in one game, it doesn't mean they're "chokers."

But if people thought of sports as being just about skill and luck, would as many people care? This gets to your third point. The NFL knows how to appeal to fans. Those classic NFL Films presentations, with that deep, strong voice of John Facenda narrating epic slow-mos? That voice sounded like the voice of God.



That sense of strength, grandeur, of a moral battle being waged on a GRIDIRON (or better yet, a FROZEN TUNDRA) is what puts the NFL above the NBA and definitely above baseball. You know why the NFL fans don't care about steroids? Because the NFL is about being bigger, stronger, gaining any edge you can. Baseball was always less comfortable with players seeking a competitive edge (putting *spit* on a ball is evil).

Overtime in three parts

Three thoughts on NFL overtime. First, a couple of rule suggestions of my own. Second, on the topic of bad arguing in sports. Third, on the NFL and public relations.

Rule Suggestions

Nobody has any unique ideas on overtime anymore, but I'll throw out two that I like.

1. College-rules, but no field goals allowed. What's the play everyone loves way more than a 40-yard field goal? Fourth and four with the game on the line. This format would practically guarantee a couple of those. Of course, the right of response is still infinite, but I'm ok with that, because the touchdown (and like in college, you'd require two-point conversions after the first couple of OT periods) requirement should keep things reasonable.


2. Take the NBA's rule and just play one ten-minute period, regular rules. The danger is that that's just long enough for each team to have one possession and score, so maybe instead of regular rules, you again say "no field goals allowed".

The meta-argument

Ok, now given those eminently reasonable ideas, let's move on to something significantly less reasonable: people arguing about things like this. The classic argument in favor of the current overtime system is "the defense should be able to make a stop". I've never understood why, though, someone finds himself able to make this argument without making the simple maneuver of flipping it around: the team that started with the ball never had to make a stop. If you want to make it such a big deal that you should be able to play defense to win a game, why not make the winning team ... play defense to win the game?

It's not even so much the fact that it's a bad argument that frustrates me. It's that it's a bad argument that itself contains the seeds of its own refutation, if only the person making the argument would take two seconds out of his own head to look at things a different way.

Most bad sports argumentation is, thankfully, not of this form. The more typical problematic debating comes from post hoc attempts to justify opinions formed based on vague moral senses -- think about the kinds of things people say about steroids, or Shoeless Joe Jackson, or Gilbert "Finger Gunz" Arenas.

What's fascinating about the overtime debate is that there's almost no way to impose a moral dimension because, as one Tweeter correctly pointed out, all we're trying to do is find a tiebreaker rule that balances the twin aims of allowing the better team to win while also not just playing the game all over again. I bring this up, because that person's actual tweet didn't go far enough to fully make this point. Instead, he basically pulled an Allen Iverson. "We talkin' 'bout a tiebreaker! Think about it! A tiebreaker! Not a game, a tiebreaker!" The problem is that this is apparently supposed to be an argument for the status quo, and that's just silly. Just because it's a tiebreaker doesn't mean that it's permissible to let it be a patently unfair rule.

Throw overtime to the lions

To point my rhetorical guns at the NFL now: what possible reason could there be for not changing the rule? The NFL is an entertainment product. For all that television shows get turned into watered-down pieces of shit, not truly worth of being called art, by the time they're on TV (hi, FOX! How'd Dollhouse turn out after you fucked with the first half of Season 1? Oh, it blew and didn't get ratings? Gee!), the networks focus-group things to death and do end up putting out product that a lot of people want to see. (Those people just happen to be philistines is all.) But the NFL doesn't have any obligation or desire to be art. It merely needs to please the audience. And guess what? The audience is not pleased! Isn't that all that matters?

NFL overtime

Wojo, if we're going to discuss sports, this was almost bound to come up. NFL overtime sucks. The fact that a team losing the coin flip can lose the game without touching the ball is unfair, even if studies have found that the coin flip winner wins "only" 60% of the time. Plenty of people have hashed out the pluses and minuses of the current system (Brian Burke does a fine job in the post linked above), but I think most people agree the NFL needs to do something different. The question is what.

College overtime, where teams trade drives beginning at the opponents' 25 yard line until one team wins, is fair, but absurd. The games can take forever, as the drives are unclocked and the right of response is endless. 5 hour football games are not fun. Plus, since the drives begin in field goal range, OT + bad offenses = college kickers repeatedly attempting to make 40 yard field goals, which is painful and agonizing viewing. Remember that Penn State-Florida State "classic" in the Orange Bowl? Yikes.

I'm going to swipe an idea that's already being used by af2, the Arena Football League's minor league (although, since the AFL folded, I guess its the major arena football league now). Teams each get one possession, and then its sudden death.

First, you add in basic fairness. Both teams touch the ball, guaranteed.

Second, it wouldn't take all that much longer than current OT. You'd tack on maybe 20 minutes, tops, unless the sudden death aspect took a long time, and that's already an issue in the current format.

Most importantly, that second possession becomes immensely fun. What happens if the first team scores a TD, and the second team responds: do you go for 2 to end the game, or kick the PAT and give the first team the ball back? If the first team scores a FG, do you play for a FG or a TD on 4th and short? Anything that would allow us all to mock Andy Reid and Brad Childress decision-making more often is an excellent addition to the NFL.

On yesterday's OT game: did anyone besides Brad Childress think it was a good idea to put the ball in Favre's hands when they needed a few yards to improve the field goal distance? When the announcers suggested throwing, everyone immediately said "Of course not. Its Brett Favre. He's going to throw an interception." Then, he did. Congrats to Favre on picking the most epic way to throw the sucker punch to Vikes fans' guts that we knew was coming all year. Truly stunning.

Why people hate the Lakers

I don't think the Laker hate is too complicated.

First, there's a general backlash against teams with national followings. This is true of the Yankees, the Cowboys, and any of the Boston teams. Everyone's had to deal with front running or transplant Laker fans. So that's a part of it.

Then, you have to add on that the Lakers are from LA, home of Hollywood and thus of celebrities. In addition to the general dislike of the major cities that I discussed in the LeBron post, the Lakers are particularly egregious because of Hollywood. Not only do celebrities live there - they show up to Laker games all the time. The Lakers come off as the team of the rich and famous, and nobody wants to cheer for the team all the rich people cheer for.

Most of this leads to people projecting hatred onto the players. Players traits can generally be viewed positively or negatively - Jordan either "knew how to take over a game" or "was a massive ballhog" depending on how people felt about him and the team.

Kobe also suffers from the A-Rod problem - neither is a really naturally social person, but they both want to be liked. A-Rod, ironically, improved this by stop trying to get people to like him after the steroid stuff happened. He started dating Kate Hudson, did nothing but hit baseballs, and suddenly people liked him more. Kobe's image is improving too - because a puppet does his ads now.

As far as the game last night goes, there's not much to say. The Lakers looked off, particularly Kobe, for most of the game. The Knicks miraculously didn't turn it over, and kept it close. Larry Hughes was terrible, and the Lakers built a lead. And no Knick could guard Pau, which makes you wonder why it took them so long to pound it inside to him. As a Knicks fan, its at least been heartening this year to not see every visiting superstar light it up, unlike last year when Kobe, LeBron, and D-Wade took turns trying to put up the most riduclous game at the Garden.

Unrelatedly, Rufus Wainwright has the best voice in pop music. That's all.