On the cusp of greatness his entire career, Matt Ryan finally made the leap in 2016 with an MVP season, and he nearly achieved legendary status—until the Patriots overcame a 25-point deficit to win Super Bowl 51. How will the Falcons overcome that psychological hurdle? For starters, Ryan isn’t changing a thing
ESPN Olympic Sports, The Undefeated, Jesse Washington from
Forget all the world records for a moment. Forget, if you can, all the Olympic golds, the excitement he brought to the sport, the sheer presence that for 12 years injected much-needed excitement into track and field. When you break down Usain Bolt’s dominance, examine the details of what he did and how he did it, it becomes clear why we might never see an athlete like him again.
Bolt was literally the biggest thing sprinting has ever seen
At 6-foot-5 and 208 pounds, Bolt is by far the largest man to ever hold the 100-meter world record. The enormous length of Bolt’s strides allowed him to finish races in fewer steps, and his power helped him maintain the stride turnover rate of smaller men.
t when Usain Bolt fell to the track in his final race – because they believe their “crazy” decision to keep everybody in a freezing call room for more than 40 minutes led to Bolt getting cold.
As Britain’s quartet celebrated a shock gold medal, the Jamaican Yohan Blake, who passed the baton to Bolt, said he was furious at what had happened. “They were holding us too long in the call room,” he said. “Usain was really cold. In fact Usain said to me: ‘Yohan, I think this is crazy. Forty minutes and two medal presentations before our run.’
… There’s a quiet revolution going on in the Bay Area, an offshoot of a bigger one that will likely change the way the world’s most popular sport is played by Americans. One that should help the fortunes of the U.S. men’s national soccer team in its goal to become a world power. And one that allows talented players like Valencia — who might have been shut out of previous pathways due to finances — a realistic path to professional soccer.
The San Jose Earthquakes, like other MLS teams, have established a training academy. What was a small-scale, lightly funded operation in 2012 when Chris Leitch took over as the team’s technical director has been built into a deep developmental system, with six age-specific boys teams from U-12 to U-19, that include several players who are playing in the U.S. national youth programs. This year, the Earthquakes became a member of the U.S. Soccer Girls’ Development Academy, with four age-specific girls’ teams, from U-14 to U-19.
“We are looking at how it’s done in the rest of the world,” said Leitch, who became the head coach of the senior Earthquakes team in June, replacing Dominic Kinnear. “We want to get players into the developmental pathway when they’re young and take them to the highest level.”
… It wasn’t easy for the current Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator. The path to the NFL was never clear.
Undaunted, the journey to this point in his career wouldn’t have happened for a lot of people in the same situation.
Nagy had the audacity to gamble-to take calculated and sometimes seemingly illogical risks inspired through advice he received from a diverse group of people: a college teammate, a gym owner, a residential builder, and a high school football father.
… The Texans decamped to this picturesque cranny of southeastern West Virginia, chiseled into the lush Allegheny Mountains, not to lavish players in luxury but to promote productivity. By escaping the energy-sapping heat in Houston, the Texans believe they will train more efficiently, and with less strain on their bodies. The measurements gleaned by the team’s sports science analysts, General Manager Rick Smith said, have already justified the move.
“The objectives and goals of training camp don’t change because the environment changes,” said Smith, sitting on a couch on the second-floor veranda of the team’s base of operations here, a 55,000-square-foot sports performance center across Route 60 from the Greenbrier. “We’ve got to figure out the 53 guys who are going to help us win a championship. That is the primary objective and it stays that way, and our guys know that.”
… When companies like Goldman Sachs start offering free meditation training to employees, and salesforce.com puts a meditation room on each floor of a San Francisco office building, it’s a safe bet that heightened appreciation of Buddhist metaphysics isn’t the goal. In fact, mindfulness meditation is often packaged in frankly therapeutic terms: “mindfulness-based stress reduction.”
This drift from the philosophical to the practical has inspired two kinds of blowback. First, because goals like stress reduction are so clear, attainable, and gratifying, many people now sing the praises of meditation—which deeply annoys some people who don’t. The author and business guru Adam Grant has complained of being “stalked by meditation evangelists.” Which bothers him all the more because the feats they harp on are so pedestrian. “Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities,” Grant says. For example, exercise takes the edge off stress.
The second kind of blowback comes not from Buddhism skeptics but from Buddhism aficionados, who lament that meditation has—in some circles, at least—become so mundane as to invite ridicule from the Adam Grants of the world.
The New England Patriots have become the first NFL team to buy their own plane to fly to games. Make that two planes.
Sources tell ESPN that the reigning Super Bowl champions bought two 767 Boeing wide-body jets in the offseason and retrofitted them with all first-class seats, some of which recline completely. On the outside of at least one of the planes is the team logo and five Lombardi trophies on the tail.
… A team of computer scientists at Stanford have built an editing tool that can help film editors make a rough cut in minutes rather than hours, so they can spend more time on the creative work of designing narratives.
The team, spearheaded by computer science graduate student Mackenzie Leake, has described its autoediting system in a recent scientific paper and will demonstrate the technology at SIGGRAPH, the annual scientific conference on computer graphics.
USA Today News, The Tennessean, Adam Tamburin from
Back pain is an excruciating fixture in millions of lives, but Vanderbilt University engineers are developing something that might be able to prevent it: smart underwear.
They are developing a device, designed to be worn under regular clothing, that would activate elastic bands to relieve stress on back muscles when people are doing physical tasks. The project is supported by funding from Vanderbilt, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, according to a statement from the university.
… We may simply not be evolved for modern life. For most mammals, food does not come regularly. Carnivores, for example, may go days between meals. The three meals a day (plus snacks) that humans in developing countries typically eat do not conform to this pattern. Furthermore, access to light outside of natural daylight allows us to stay up (and eat) later than ever before, running into the glucose metabolism problem.
This suggests that we are evolved to eat at far more intermittent intervals. Shifting meals to allow bigger gaps between meals, either by eating on alternate days or even just skipping a few meals a week, may be better suited to our evolutionary biology. There is evidence that such an eating schedule has health benefits beyond just weight management. Cardiovascular health, age-related decline, and inflammatory disease may all be improved by an altered meal schedule.
… “I’ve bought into it,” Crabtree said. “I’ve made some gains in areas that I needed to. Anything to give me an edge. And anything to give myself an advantage on my opponent.
“It’s been going on for a couple of years now, and I guess now I’ve become honed in a lot more. I’ve become more educated. We have a fantastic nutritionist on strength staff and just having those resources to ask questions has helped a lot.”
Crabtree said he’s taken more personal control of his own diet, beginning with better choices.
His request to the NBA was not unique: Bird wanted the league to eliminate the dreaded stretches of four games in five days. What made Bird’s pitch memorable was that it didn’t just cite the demand of so many games in such a short amount of time, but also pointed out how the anxiousness caused by such tests can hurt a team beforehand and how the fatigue lingers long afterward.
“What he said to me has been ringing in my head ever since,” said Tom Carelli, the NBA’s senior vice president for broadcasting.
The peak of a player’s career can come at any time. We naturally assume players will post their best numbers in their late 20s, and while that is the case for most players, it’s hardly the case for everyone. Wide receiver Anquan Boldin’s most productive seasons were his first and third years in the league, and he’s still plugging away with the Buffalo Bills as he enters his 15th season. “Peaking,” in other words, doesn’t necessarily mean a player will have a disappointing career from that point forward.
In advance of 2017, though, I thought it might be interesting to look at some notable players from around the league and try to gain a sense of whether we’ve already seen their most impressive seasons. This isn’t to suggest that any of them are washed up or that they aren’t at their best; in the cases where history suggested players have peaked, most of the time we’re arguing that the context in which that player topped out will be difficult to reproduce.
The 2017/18 Premier League season has officially kicked off and so, therefore, have the injury statistic leagues. It has long been suggested that injury rates and player availability affect a team’s chance of success. This is not just the speculation of pundits or those down the pub; we have evidence to support this notion. We’ll explore some within this blog.