Ben Fry analyzes the data from an intelligence test administered to all incoming NFL players and displays the results by position. Offensive players do better than defensive players on the test, although running backs score the lowest (wide receivers and cornerbacks also don't do well). As Michael Lewis suggested in The Blind Side, offensive tackles are the smartest players on the field, followed by the centers and then the quarterbacks.
On average, suboptimal play-calling decisions cost each team .85 wins over the course of the season.
In particular, the world champion Giants should have won another game had they called the right plays at the right times. ZEUS also analyzed play calling in "hyper-critical" situations (those fourth-down decisions with five or fewer yards needed for the first down) and found that on average, teams made the wrong calls more than 50% of the time. Here's an interview on the results with the guys behind ZEUS.
Dueling Kickoffs: To begin overtimes, each team will kick off to each other on consecutive plays. The team that advances the ball furthest will have possession at the point on the field where the ball was advanced. Sudden death is preserved.
But if they lose -- especially if they lose late -- the New England Patriots will be the most memorable collection of individuals in the history of pro football. They will prove that nothing in this world is guaranteed, that past returns do not guarantee future results, that failure is what ultimately defines us and that Gisele will probably date a bunch of other dudes in her life, because man is eternally fallible.
Jill Lepore would likely agree with Klosterman. In her recent New Yorker article on Benjamin Franklin (the patron saint of bloggers, BTW), she argues that he failed to follow many of his aphoristic writings and in doing so became more interesting.
He carried with him a little book in which he kept track, day by day, of whether he had lived according to thirteen virtues, including Silence, which he hoped to cultivate "to break a Habit I was getting into of Prattling, Punning and Joking." What made Franklin great was how nobly he strived for perfection; what makes him almost impossibly interesting is how far short he fell of it.
It's also worth noting that, per Aristotle and Shakespeare, the hero in a tragedy always has a fatal flaw; it's what makes him a hero and the story worth listening to.
Who wins the Super Bowl of Food: New York City or Boston? Ed Levine says it's no contest: New York all the way.
What has Boston bestowed upon us, foodwise? Brown bread, baked beans, Boston cream pie, and Parker House rolls. Pretty slim pickins', don't you think? How far would you go out of your way for some baked beans or some brown bread? I'd only go a block or two at the most. Now if you expanded the geographic food purview of the Patriots to all of New England, that might be an interesting discussion, because then New England clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams would enter into the fray.
Ed's a bit hard on Boston here...there's some excellent food to be found in the city and its surrounds.
Oher was named to the all-Southeastern Conference first team after the season and is considered one of the top offensive linemen prospects in the country. He has already shown the promise scouts predicted when he was a homeless 16-year-old who didn't know how to play football.
The NFL, in their infinitesimal wisdom and utilizing their stupid scheduling/blackout policy, has ensured that the best game of the weekend (Steelers vs. Patriots) will not be shown on TV in the New York City area. We get the hapless Jets instead...a team that not even Jets fans care about at this point in their 3-9 season. Our cable provider doesn't carry any NFL stations and we don't really want to trek out to a sports bar with the kiddo. Are there any other options? An illicit online broadcast? Anything?
Update: We ended up watching the game online -- poor quality, dropped frames, and all. Better than braving the rain and sports bar. (thx to everyone who wrote in, especially kunal)
There is still some faint resistance to the notion that a kicker could ever really do anything great. Brett Favre can throw 10 more game-ending interceptions and fans will still cherish his moments of glory. Reggie Bush may fumble away a championship and still end up being known for the best things he ever does. Even offensive linemen whose names no one remembers are permitted to end their days basking in the reflected glory of having been on the field. Kickers alone are required to make their own cases.
Maybe soccer goalies can identify with NFL kickers?
Due to problems off the field, defensive tackle Walter Thomas hasn't played a lot of college ball. But his stats -- 6-foot-5, 370 pounds, XXXXXXL jersey, runs the 40 in 4.9, can do backflips and handsprings, benches 475 pounds -- guarantee that he'll be drafted into the NFL this weekend. Shades of Michael Oher, Michael Lewis' subject in The Blind Side. Also, this may be the first NY Times article to use the phrase "dadgum Russian gymnast".
Long audio interview with Michael Lewis by economist Russ Roberts on "the hidden economics of baseball and football". "Michael Lewis talks about the economics of sports -- the financial and decision-making side of baseball and football -- using the insights from his bestselling books on baseball and football: Moneyball and The Blind Side. Along the way he discusses the implications of Moneyball for the movie business and other industries, the peculiar ways that Moneyball influenced the strategies of baseball teams, the corruption of college football, and the challenge and tragedy of kids who live on the streets with little education or prospects for success."
When the Chicago Bears take the field against the Indianapolis Colts in early February for Super Bowl XLI, a former foe of the Bears will be close at hand. A kottke.org reader writes:
The "Super Bowl Shuffle" earned The Chicago Bears a [1987] Grammy nomination for best Best Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance - Duo or Group. They lost to Prince and the Revolution's "Kiss".
I've been asked to eat crow in public on this one: "Rex Grossman, 6/19, 34 yards, 0 TDs, and 3 INTs; or why the Chicago Bears, despite their current 10-2 record and weak NFC, aren't getting anywhere near the Super Bowl this year." Mmmm, that's good crow. Still, the Bears are the worst team ever pickedto go 16-0.
NFL TV distribution maps: where in the US certain football games are broadcast...a visual representation of why you'll almost never see a Vikings game in Maine. (via fakeisthenewreal)
In addition to the race and class aspect that interests me about the book, The Blind Side is, oh, by the way, also about the sport of football, specifically the left tackle position. In the 1980s, the quarterback became increasingly important in the offensive scheme and rushing linebackers, specifically Lawrence Taylor, became a bigger part of the defensive scheme. This created a problem for the offensive line: protect the valuable & fragile quarterback from the huge, fast likes of Lawrence Taylor, whose Joe Theismann-leg-snapping exploits you've seen replayed on a thousand SportsCenters. The solution to this problem was to hire giant-handed men the size of houses who move like ballerinas to protect the blind side of the quarterback. Thus has the left tackle position become the second-highest paid position in the league behind the quarterbacks themselves.
When I read Lewis' profile of Michael Oher in the New York Times, I had a crazy thought: why not cut to the chase and make the men fit to play the left tackle position into quarterbacks instead? Lewis covers this briefly near the end of the book in relating the story of Jonathan Ogden, left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens:
Now the highest paid player on the field, Ogden was doing his job so well and so effortlessly that he had time to wonder how hard it would be for him to do some of the other less highly paid jobs. At the end of that 2000 season, en route to their Super Bowl victory, the Ravens played in the AFC Championship game. Ogden watched the Ravens' tight end, Shannon Sharpe, catch a pass and run 96 yards for a touchdown. Ravens center Jeff Mitchell told The Sporting News that as Sharpe raced into the end zone, Ogden had turned to him and said, "I could have made that play. If they had thrown that ball to me, I would have done the same thing."
Having sized up the star receivers, Ogden looked around and noticed that the quarterbacks he was protecting were...rather ordinary. Here he was, leaving them all the time in the world to throw the ball, and they still weren't doing it very well. They kept getting fired! Even after they'd won the Super Bowl, the Ravens got rid of their quarterback, Trent Dilfer, and gone looking for a better one. What was wrong with these people? Ogden didn't go so far as to suggest that he should play quarterback, but he came as close as any lineman ever had to the heretical thought.
Many of the left tackles that Lewis talks about in the book can run faster than most quarterbacks, they can throw the ball just as far or farther (as a high school sophomore, Michael Oher could stand at the fifty-yard line and toss footballs through the goalposts), possess great athletic touch and finesse, have the intellect to run an offense, move better than most QBs, know the offense and defense as well as the QB, are taller than the average QB (and therefore has better field vision over the line), and presumably, at 320-360 pounds, are harder to tackle and intimidate than a normal QB. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Variety is reporting that the movie rights for Michael Lewis' The Blind Side have been purchased by Fox. Most of the article is behind a paywall, but here's the relevant bit:
After interest from multiple buyers, which included New Line and Mandalay, the "Blind Side" deal closed for $200,000 against $1.5 million and also includes $250,000 in deferred compensation. Gil Netter will produce for Fox, which did not confirm the value of the deal.
Norton released the book yesterday, but Hollywood interest was sparked when the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt in its Sept. 24 issue.
Story, which was titled "The Ballad of Big Mike," centered on Michael Oher, a poor, undereducated 344-pound African-American teenager in Memphis, whose father was murdered and whose mother was a crack addict. Oher had been shuffled through the public school system, despite his 0.6 grade point average and missing weeks of classes each year. But his tremendous size and quickness attracted the interest of a wealthy white couple who took him in and groomed him both athletically and academically to become one of the top high school football prospects in the country.
I'm hoping against hope that if the movie ever gets made, the interesting class and racial issues the book raises aren't completely steamrollered out of the story in favor of pure uplifting entertainment. (thx, jen)
Update on the teams and players involved in The Play. The Play = that college game with all the laterals and he was down and the band streams onto the field and the guy runs over the trombone player in the end zone. You know, The Play. (thx, david)
College football and network theory meet at last. In a recent paper, a pair of researchers have devised a ranking system based on network theory (with teams that didn't directly play each other, the theory determines who's the better team based on games played versus a mutual foe) that is more accurate than the current polling system used to choose a college football national champion. (via cd)
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