… The Steelers were already down one linebacker because Alonzo Jackson was made inactive for the game. Now they were down another, and their leading sacker to boot.
Little did anyone know that Porter’s ejection would be a significant moment in Steelers history.
“What I remember about that is going back to the locker room and coach saying that Joey got thrown out and I had to start,” said James Harrison, a backup linebacker and special-teams standout who had already been cut three times by the Steelers since they signed him as undrafted free agent in 2002.
After a high-profile move, Yedlin has settled into England’s second division. As he told FourFourTwo USA, life under Rafa Benitez is already paying off.
The below are a collection of thoughts and observations acquired through 40 plus years of coaching and interaction with Championship Performers from across the globe. Championship Performance is no easy feat … I hope some of these points may offer clarity on the reality of what it takes:
1. Risk taking is a common trait among champions. Learning to be comfortable taking calculated risks to drive positive change – whether that be in mindset, mechanics, strategies, tactics or training methods is essential. Perpetual residency in the familiarity of comfort zones and associated risk avoidance will consistently blunt your progress. If you want to be a Championship Performer, get comfortable being uncomfortable.
This was supposed to be the year Dagny Knutson became a household name by thrashing the competition in the pool in Rio de Janeiro.
In 2010, Knutson was widely considered the next breakout American swimming star. At the urging of USA Swimming officials, she said, Knutson turned down a college scholarship and entrusted her career to the Olympic national governing body for the sport.
The Ohio State coaches had a 235-pound mass of potential to mold into a football player, but they could not agree on the form. As a freshman, Sam Hubbard was projected as a linebacker, but one member of the Buckeyes staff had designs on making him a tight end to plug a hole in the depth chart.
Luke Fickell, the Buckeyes’ defensive coordinator, was part of the discussion, and he chuckled when he recalled what happened next. Someone asked if Hubbard, a high school lacrosse star, could catch a football. Another coach reminded everybody that Hubbard was accustomed to catching and shooting a small rubber ball traveling 70 miles an hour. “He said, ‘You don’t think he has the hand-eye coordination to catch a football?’” Fickell said.
If you look at the end of the Wisconsin Badgers men’s basketball bench, you will see a man with a shaved head and a look of focus and intensity. He is not wearing a suit or even a jersey, but a Wisconsin Badgers polo. The man is Erik Helland, known as “Dutch” to friends. Helland is the director of strength and conditioning for all of Wisconsin’s athletics and works directly with the basketball program. He is in his fourth season with the Badgers. Helland has been a part of possibly the greatest run in the program’s history the last few years. I was fortunate enough to interview Helland in person as he harvested a doe after hunting at a friend’s house this past week.
… Excelle Sports: If you could give one advice on sports psychology to all athletes, what would it be?
Jim Bauman: First of all, I am not in the business of giving advice—giving advice assumes I know others better than they know themselves and further assumes that my solutions are the best ones for them. Instead, my job is to help athletes create strategies that help them move toward their own aspirations. Finding the way is as important as finding the end result. Remember in elementary math classes when you were told to “show your work?” If you showed your work, your got partial credit, even if you didn’t get the answer right. In other words, from very early on, we are subtly conditioned to be solution-oriented, but to also pay attention to how you get that solution. Math, in those early elementary years, is meant to present a problem and teach students how to solve the problem. Similarly, the best guidance I can give is be solution-oriented rather than problem-oriented and to pay attention to the process by which you solve your problems.
I heard top management ask that question many times during the two years I spent working on new products at The New York Times.
It’s a question that’s raised often at many big companies when a new idea is being discussed. In the case of The New York Times, what management was really asking my colleagues and I was: are the three, soon-to-be launched paid products you’ve been working on going to turn out to be any good, or are we wasting our money?
Big companies obsessively ask that question, because their approach to new ideas is that there are good ones than can be developed into revenue generators, and bad ones that should be abandoned as quickly as possible so as not to waste resources.
As an undergraduate at Auburn University in the early 2000s, Jeremy Day was thinking of becoming an architect. But an opportunity to work on a research project investigating reward learning in rodents changed the course of his career. “It really hooked me,” he says. “It made me immediately wonder what mechanisms were underlying that behavior in the animal’s brain.”
It’s a question Day has pursued ever since. In 2004, he enrolled in a PhD program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and began studying neural reward signaling under the mentorship of neuroscientist Regina Carelli. “He was a stellar student by all accounts,” Carelli recalls. “He was very clear on the type of work he wanted to do, even that early on in his career.” Focusing on the nucleus accumbens, a brain region involved in associative learning, Day measured dopamine levels in rats undergoing stimulus-reward experiments. Although a rat’s brain released dopamine on receipt of a reward early in training, Day found that, as the rodent became accustomed to specific cues predicting those rewards, this dopamine spike shifted to accompany the cues instead, indicating a changing role for the chemical during learning.1
Most wearables come with some form of fitness and health tracking, some make it the primary reason to purchase the device. Fitbit, Jawbone, and Garmin have sold millions of devices to health conscious consumers, but after a few months, a good chunk of these devices can be found gathering dust in cupboards or on eBay for a fraction of the price.
To reduce the chances of dust gathering, a new study suggests wearable suppliers should add automated health tracking to their wearable and make the data available online.
The study, conducted by Walgreens and Scripps Translational Science Institute, found that a user will stick to a health program for four times longer if the wearable automatically tracks data and saves it online.
Employers, which have long been nickel and diming workers to lower their costs, now have a new tactic to combat these growing costs. They call it “wellness.” It involves growing surveillance, including lots of data pouring in from the Internet of Things — the Fitbits, Apple Watches, and other sensors that relay updates on how our bodies are functioning.
The idea, as we’ve seen so many times, springs from good intentions. In fact, it is encouraged by the government. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, invites companies to engage workers in wellness programs, and even to “incentivize” health. By law, employers can now offer rewards and assess penalties reaching as high as 50 percent of the cost of coverage. Now, according to a study by the Rand Corporation, more than half of all organizations employing fifty people or more have wellness programs up and running, and more are joining the trend every week.
There’s plenty of justification for wellness programs. If they work — and that’s a big “if” — the biggest beneficiary is the worker and his or her family. Yet if wellness programs help workers avoid heart disease or diabetes, employers gain as well.
Aitor Karanka, the Middlesbrough manager, spins in his chair and reaches behind him, sifting through the reports and the notes on the desk in his office at the team’s training ground.
The sheaf of papers he is looking for is by his laptop. He spins around again and puts it down in front of him with a thud. It is at least 100 pages thick. Some of the pages are covered in diagrams, others are decorated with portrait photos of players, still more with just text — some in Karanka’s native Spanish, some in English, some in both.
The information goes into the finest detail, not just tactical shapes and set-piece routines, but also breakdowns of individual players’ movements. Only Karanka will see it in full. His coaching staff and his players need only the snippets relevant to their work. “I am the only one who needs to know everything,” Karanka said with a grin.
This is the master copy, the blueprint. It is ready for Karanka, typically, every Tuesday morning, off one weekend’s match and ahead of the next.
A reporter began to ask Bill Belichick about the possibility of the Patriots resting starters in their Week 17 matchup with the Miami Dolphins before New England’s head coach cut him off.
“I don’t really understand that question,” Belichick said. “We have — I don’t know how many starters we have, but we have a lot more than — we can only inactivate seven players, so this isn’t like a preseason game where you have 75 guys on your roster. This is a regular season game, so I don’t really understand that whole line of questioning. I’m not saying I’m a great mathematician or anything, but the numbers just don’t add up for that type of conversation.”
Swansea City’s next manager will have to work closely with an American former economics journalist who has been hired as the club’s ‘Moneyball expert’.
As Swansea’s managerial hunt was thrown into confusion by a tweet from Chris Coleman’s wife that appeared to rule her husband out of the running to succeed Bob Bradley, it emerged that Dan Altman – the founder of North Yard Analytics – is now acting as a transfer consultant for the club.
Over the past couple of weeks, the 2016 State of the Stats survey gathered responses from more than 200 people involved in football analytics, either professionally or as a fan. This is the second year I’ve run the survey, and like last year, it’s about who we are as a community, our hopes and dreams, and the problems we face in our work. My hope is that it provides inspiration, tempers expectations, and exposes issues and opportunities for the coming year. At the very least, it’s got some big-ass pie charts in it, and that’s about as analytics as you can get, as I right?