any given sunday

You guys might be missing my match reports. Believe me, you're not missing them as much as I am. I recommend the very good work of my deputy, though. For people who miss the match reports, I am debuting what might become a new weekly feature: Any Given Sunday. It's about the NFL, which I am obsessed with, and have been for a year and a half (I know, I know, a new relationship, we're just finding our feet).

Orientation, orientation fans: the NFL regular season runs for seventeen weeks from early September. There are 32 teams, each of which plays 16 games, and has a bye week. There are better and worse teams, although the league's controllers try hard to keep it in 'dynamic equilibrium' by using such excellent tools as a league-wide salary cap and the annual college draft, whereby the worst teams get the first choice of new players coming from the college system (which you basically have to do). **NOTE/UPDATE 'dynamic equilibrium'? What kind of moron writes this stuff. The term they use is 'competitive balance'. Sorry**

This means a useless team from one year can find itself a contender the next year. It can pick up new players, while a dominant team can find that five of its superstars are up for new contracts and become essentially unaffordable. It's not a perfect system, but it is a good one. By the way, this year there are an unusual number of seemingly good and seemingly bad teams, so it looks less like any team can win on any given Sunday, and people are opining about it.

How entertaining is this, so far? In the future, I won't bother with orientation, and focus more on things like cheerleader economics and which football team operates the Zeno's Paradox Offence. But I am finding my feet. Here is a bit from Any Given Sunday, which is an excellent movie.

Boys really do get like this, by the way, when preparing for big games. There isn't usually stirring music, and the script isn't usually very good. But another massive truth about boys and sport is this one, from Ball Four by baseballer Jim Bouton, which is one of the books that might be the best one I've read about playing sport: most games aren't big games, however much you're not supposed to act like it:

Lost a game today, so we had the chance to prove we could be more silent than thou. After a loss the clubhouse has to be quiet, as though losing strikes a baseball player dumb ... The important thing is to let the manager and coaches know you feel bad about losing. I'm sure they believe that if you look like you feel bad about losing then you're the type who wants to win. So you go along with the little game.

On the off-chance you don't know the story of Ball Four, Bouton got into a lot of trouble from his fellow players and baseball authorities for writing about idiot coaches making cowardly decisions because no one ever got fired for following the racing line, about contract negotiations and about being happy when he played well in a loss, because he'd be picked next week. He loved the game, but it was also his job. He looks like this:

and if you want to hire him as a motivational speaker, this is where to go. Anyway, NFL. Here is a selection of notes on this week's games from Mike Tanier on the New York Times' Fifth Down blog:
(Notes: A. The Cincinatti Bengals have won almost all their games, and lost one, in the last seconds of games. B. If all tickets aren't sold, television doesn't broadcast the game within a certain radius of the ground.)

Slow ticket sales led to midweek fears of a television blackout. Bengals fans may just show up at the two-minute warning, when things really get interesting.

The Bills’ offensive line committed nine false starts against the nonthreatening Browns. Against the Jets, the Bills’ line will be like conscripted villagers with pitchforks awaiting a Vandal invasion. Rex Ryan’s hooligans are hungry after netting only one sack on Monday night, so they’ll be eager to face an offense with no Wildcat, max-protect philosophy, or common sense. If the snap count is two, Kris Jenkins will shout “Boo!” on one, just to see who flinches.

The Rams are getting key players like Marc Bulger and Jason Smith back, so they’ll be at their version of full strength.

(Note: the game referred to below will start at 1 p.m. Eastern time)

Tauscher will have to win back his job from Allen Barbre, but that should happen the moment [Barbre] allows his first sack (about 1:03 p.m. Eastern time).

(Note: JaMarcus Russell was the first selection overall in the 2007 draft, which is a big deal. He plays in the glamorous and vital quarterback position. He has been terrible this year, though he is no Ryan Leaf.* The joke about him is that he is fat and lazy.)

JaMarcus Russell will drop back to pass on a Segway ... Linear regression models of the last three Raiders games indicate that the final score this week will be 53-9, but that’s shoddy statistical work: three games are a very small sample, and no one expects the Raiders to score 9 points.

“This week is about us; it is about us fighting our own demons,” Morris told the Bucs this week. The demons are three-and-a-half-point favorites on the road.

(Note: periodically, for merchandising reasons, clubs play in throwback jerseys. I actually quite liked the Broncos' brown kit. Not many people did. I particularly like what the guy on the right here has done with his socks, even though it means they don't quite come up to his knees:

)

The Swiss professor Aemilius Muller developed his Theory of Predictable Color Preferences in the 1950s. According to Muller’s formula, we find colors pleasing when changes in hue follow natural changes in brightness. Had Muller seen the brown Broncos’ A.F.L. jerseys, they would have put him off his Zürcher geschnetzeltes for weeks, but it’s a known fact that Swiss color theorists are rarely consulted when designing throwback jerseys.

(Note: I would really like the job of writing match-up notes for The Fifth Down. Mike Tanier, who writes it, also works on Football Outsiders, which is sort of Freakonomics for NFL fans. Big up Football Outsiders. Their Bill Barnwell was incredibly helpful to me when I was writing this riveting feature about sports injuries for the Financial Times Magazine.)

Player of the Week
Jake Ingram, Long Snapper, New England Patriots

It's not funny. American football is a game played by people who specialise. You have the quarterback throwing the ball, and the offensive line protecting him, and the running backs, and the kicker, and the safety who hangs around making tackles, and cornerback who marks the wide receivers, who catch the ball, and so on. You need guys who are good at all these things.

All the same, though: even though it isn't funny, a long-snapper is funny. The snap is the start of a play, when the guy sticks the ball through his legs. The long snap is what happens when it is snapped back a long way (geddit?) ready to be kicked at the posts or punted.

Of course, if you have someone reliable, then it makes a difference. It's a game of inches, as Al Pacino says. Long-snappers almost never get drafted, but Bill Belichick, the best spotter of draft talent in the coaching world, picked out Hawaiian Jake Ingrams and bought him to Boston. He is big, and he is good at the blocking and running around side, but he is on the team because, as a younger man, he worked out that if he was massively better than his compadres at this one thing that no one else could be arsed to practise for hours, then he would be on the team forever. That team wasn't the Patriots, but now it is and fair play to him.

All pieces about long-snappers says they are good guys, who their team loves. No shit. It sounds like a position for a sort of licensed jester figure. Of course, official websites and interviews all say how great it is to have someone long-snapping effectively, and I am in no doubt of this. But to give a crude sense of Long's place in the order of things, let me just say that the reports all say that he has a tough job replacing Lonie Paxton because the latter was so popular with the New England fans for doing snow angels.

Still, pace the above stuff about having to show how much you care, the Patriots' website says he is popular and his parents passed on a hard-working ethic, and quotes Long himself: 'I feel like, when something goes wrong with a snap, I’m letting my whole team down. So, that’s why I get down on myself.'

He does not add: 'I'm being paid a fortune to do this tiny thing. It's an amazing break for me. I'd really better not screw it up. I'd better make sure everyone likes me! Maybe I could learn to make lattes?'

I would really like to write a New Yorker feature about Jake and longsnapping.
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Brief research break.
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It turns out there is a book about a New England long snapper, called The Long Snapper. A former player who was called back to New England to snap long. I'll read it. I also found the personal website of Chicago Bears longsnapper (no hyphens for him), Patrick Mannelly. You don't want to skip the intro. It's a thrillaminute ride.

There is a blog called blog.longsnap.com, whose strapline says it is 'dedicated exclusively to long snappers and the art of long snapping.'. What's it about, you ask, and a link will tell you:

The longsnap.com blog is dedicated to long snappers and the art of long snapping at the professional, college and high school level. If you have questions or comments, please email me.

No, sorry, still not clear.

(Every single post I have seen, and I have gone back a while, is tagged 'longsnapping'.)

The blog is very keen, as is Pat Mennelly's, to point out how many tackles long-snappers make. I'm not saying they don't. When I say these guys feel like jesters, and that they are an intrinsically comical place professionally, that doesn't mean I think they're a joke. I'm really interested. Does that show? Shall I stop now?

Multimedia bonus feature
Trent Edwards is the quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. He is very, very conservative, and his team doesn't help much by not being that great. This is what one Bills fan thinks:

(My favourite pun is Trentative Edwards.)

* I will explain about Ryan Leaf in The Future.