Devin McCourty is making his sixth straight trip to the AFC Championship Game while his brother, Titans cornerback Jason McCourty, has never been to the postseason. Here’s how the Patriots’ safety is getting ready
… You write a lot about footballers’ psyche. Were you mentally strong in comparison to the average footballer, do you think?
I learned to be mentally strong. I was very lucky in that my first manager was ruthlessly tough on me. He and an ageing foreign goalkeeper at the same club taught me to win.
They taught me what it means to be a winner. When you buy into the fact that winning is the be all and end all of everything in your life, then it is quite astonishing what can be achieved.
By the time I moved to a bigger club I was ready to drag everybody on my own journey to the top. The other players fed off my enthusiasm for winning and being as professional as possible.
I could be overwhelming with my appetite to win sometimes and many of the players didn’t like me for having no life outside of football and winning. We would argue a lot, but I’ll tell you something — every single one of them respected me and knew that when the shit hit the fan on the pitch, I was somebody that they could rely on.
… Nourishment and health are on Doc’s mind as, outside the walls of his office, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, general manager R.C. Buford and the rest of the Spurs’ staff march into the arena for the night’s marquee matchup. Rivers says the Spurs’ brass have set the bar when it comes to keeping their players fresh and healthy.
The Clippers, however, have been a different story, Rivers admits. Under previous owner Donald Sterling, Rivers believes the Clippers were woefully understaffed to treat and prevent injuries in ways that other teams could.
“We had one trainer, one physical therapist,” Rivers says. “We were just behind. They didn’t spend money before.”
… For his part, when asked whether Joerger’s less aggressive approach works for him, Cousins chuckles at any hint that the coach handles him with kid gloves. “Roll your big ass down in the paint!” Cousins bellows, imitating Joerger. “What I respect about him is it’s always between the lines. Nothing on the outside, nothing about what was said two days ago. There’s no power trips — it’s basketball. That’s it. How can there ever be some type of disagreement when it’s something he loves and I love. How can you disagree? It’s basketball.”
… Both coaches wonder how long he can keep this up. An incorrigible gym rat, Sanchez’s Energizer bunny stories have become legendary. He works out even when coaches have told him specifically to not work out. The number of photos he posts on Instagram of himself training (often without a shirt) is exceeded only by the number of photos of his two dogs.
On a recent foggy morning, while the Arsenal squad eased into practice with a series of short sprints, Sanchez had no time for idle chatter with his teammates. He devoted every spare moment to doing push-ups on his knuckles.
Former Arsenal great and Sky Sports pundit Thierry Henry expressed concern this month that Sanchez looked exhausted and needed a break, “but you never know with him.” The biggest risk of a hectic playing schedule is a catastrophic muscle injury—the product of short recovery times and repeated stress. Sanchez has, so far at Arsenal, avoided anything that cost him more than a few weeks.
You can never judge a relationship from its first moments.
Draymond Green’s and Tom Izzo’s officially started the morning after Green decommitted to Kentucky when he was a junior in high school. At 7 a.m. his phone rang. The Michigan State coach was on the line.
“I don’t even know how I heard it because I was sleeping,” Green said. “It’s Coach Izzo and he says, ‘What the (bleep) happened?’ And I said, ‘You never (bleeping) offered me.’ And he said, ‘What the (bleep)? You’re full of (bleep). All right, now you have a (bleeping) offer.’”
“I might be the only recruit in history who got cussed out before he signed,” Green said. “But that’s the way our relationship started. He could say anything to me and I could say anything to him.”
… This list more or less serves as a heat check, a plunging thermometer into each MLS team’s academy system to gauge the vitality of its lifeblood. It should be taken as an objective measure of each academy’s collective coaching acumen, the technical level of its players and its connection to the first team. Those three facets – player ability, coaching ability and matriculation ability – are the guide posts for any successful academy. And as of the turn of 2017, some are doing a notably better job than others. Of course we’re also missing Minnesota United, which has yet to fire up its academy. Unfortunately.
As background, those three were my lodestones for evaluation. Each academy was put through a grading process that primarily accounts for those three criteria, mashes them together and spits out an aggregate score. It’s about as scientific as an unscientific field gets (which is to say, not particularly scientific at all).
… Speaking to a group of thousands of coaches at the AFCA Convention in Nashville last week, the magnificently mulleted Gundy riffed on how he runs his program at Oklahoma State. “The 20-hour rule isn’t an issue at our place,” Gundy said. Cowboys players never stay on the practice field longer than an hour and 45 minutes. “There’s only so many hits in their bodies, their heads, their necks, their shoulders,” Gundy said, and in turn Oklahoma State doesn’t waste those limited hits on the practice field. As Oklahoma State makes a conscious effort to build up its players bodies, so, too, do coaches treat their players’ psyches. “We don’t cuss our guys,” Gundy said, “we don’t beat them down. We build them up.”
Off the field, Gundy never asks his players to sit through a meeting longer than 40 minutes, which he said was a time frame backed up by lots of offseason reading on the attention spans of 18- to 24-year olds.
… “Maybe the best teacher I’ve ever seen,” said another assistant. “Not just about football but about life.”
Ryan Clark, who played for Tomlin from 2007 to 2013, knows what it’s like to be in a Tomlin locker room, what players think about working for the now-10-year veteran head coach. So I asked if the notion that Tomlin had lost his locker room was wrong—if, as those above indicated, he was possibly doing a far better coaching job than most people know. Clark’s answer was smart and compelling.
“He’s done an excellent job in a tough spot as a black coach,” Clark wrote in a message to B/R. “He wants [to be], and is more than, a coach to these young guys, and they definitely try to take advantage of that level of care and concern. Other than his Super Bowl season, I feel like this year has been his finest.”
MANY parents who want their child to achieve sporting greatness adhere to a mantra popularised by the journalist Malcolm Gladwell: it takes 10,000 hours of training to become an expert in a certain field. They make their child practise one thing from the youngest age possible, and then do so again and again. Tiger Woods (pictured) began playing golf before the age of two. He is far from alone. In 2008, the year Mr Woods won his last major, 12% of Americans aged six or less were playing organised sport, up from 9% in 1997, when he won his first. Yet a growing body of research suggests that specialisation—the intense, year-round practice of a single activity at the expense of others—is dangerous for the youngest athletes, while picking a sport later on is in fact more likely to lead to an elite athletic career.
Focusing on one sport as a youngster greatly increases the risk of injury. A study produced by the University of Wisconsin in November 2016 found that high-school athletes who specialised sustained 60% more new lower-body injuries in a year than did those who played a range of sports. That gap still existed after controlling for gender, age and sport; more than a third of football, softball, volleyball, basketball and tennis players considered themselves specialists.
Schools and teachers across the world have embraced Carol Dweck’s theory of growth mindset in the hope of helping students to fulfil their potential. Popular strategies include tweaking the way teachers give feedback, encouraging self-reflection through questioning and, crucially, praising processes instead of natural ability.
But many educators feel they could be doing more. A recent survey found that 98% of teachers believe that if their students have a growth mindset it will lead to improved student learning, but only 20% of them believe they are good at fostering a growth mindset and 85% want more training and practical strategies.
Thankfully, a growing body of research is giving us better insight into how to best foster a growth mindset – here are some techniques you may not have used yet.
… A sleep cycle app could be your one-way ticket to becoming a morning person. While the jury is out on whether or not a sleep cycle alarm clock really works, one thing is for sure: they can help you understand what your body does during those hours when you’re off in dreamland.
… To skate or not to skate has been a question for several years now, but the Blue Jackets’ success and the condensed schedule caused by the World Cup and bye weeks this season have sparked plenty of debate about whether the morning skate is an unnecessary relic of the past.
“The game’s changed,” Dubinsky said. “The morning skate was to kind of skate the booze out of the players from the night before. We don’t have that anymore. Guys prepare the right way, they take care of their bodies, they eat properly, they get their rest properly — they do all the things the right way. It just keeps you fresher for the games to skip it.”
Today’s top-class football is characterised by more short sprints than in the past. In English Premier League, high-intensity running has increased by 50% in the last 10 years, presenting new challenges to the players in terms of fatigue resistance and ability to recover quickly. The change has also resulted in greater variation in the tempo of matches, and this new pattern calls for revised training routines. This is the conclusion of new research from the University of Gothenburg.
The study in question is based on an extensive amount of data. A research team, consisting of Dan Fransson and Magni Mohr, exercise physiology researchers at the Department of Food and Nutrition, and Sport Science, University of Gothenburg, and Professor Peter Krustrup from the University of Southern Denmark, watched 62 football matches played 2010–2012 and made 1 105 observations of 473 players from 24 different Premier League teams.
The results show that, compared with in the past, modern top-class football is characterised by more high-intensity sprints followed by a substantially lower tempo. Repeated bouts of high-intensity running for 1–5 minutes are followed by a historically low intensity for up to 5 minutes. Thus, a player’s activity level during a match tends to alternate between two extremes, compared with the traditionally more steady match tempo.
… how those sleepless hours affect us depends on a number of factors, including gender, age and the time you spend asleep. Here’s what some of the latest research tells us:
Sleeping too long can kill you, too: Typically, adults sleep anywhere from seven to nine hours. Getting too little certainly isn’t good for your health. But repeated, larger-scale population studies by researchers in Norway and Taiwan found that sleeping more than eight hours was also linked to an increased risk of dying from certain kinds of heart disease.
… LSU head strength coach Tommy Moffitt is back for his 18th year, and he immediately sends a workout plan to recruits right after they sign. It includes a letter, a workout manual and a DVD.
“The moment we get their fax, we’re going to slip a letter, workout manual and DVD into the packet,” Moffitt said on ESPN Radio Baton Rouge. “We FedEx that packet to those young men. It’s our basic program. It’s a three-day program with a simple set and rep scheme. The goal is to try to develop exercise technique and a base of fitness. Once they receive that DVD, they have a week to read the program, to go over the exercises, practice anything they need to work on, and then they start the workout.”
… BfF: You talk a lot about intelligence in football? Is that something innate or can it be coached?
TB: What is innate is the ability and desire to learn. We as human beings all have that. What can be coached is how to tap into that process for the benefit of the learners so that they may realize their full potential. In fact, I would say that our highest priority would be to guide that process effectively and coach the player before us, regardless of their baseline skills.
Every player can get better. Every single one if we do not dismiss them as incapable of doing so.
arXiv, Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction; Tim Althoff, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W. White, Jamie Zeitzer from
Human cognitive performance is critical to productivity, learning, and accident avoidance. Cognitive performance varies throughout each day and is in part driven by intrinsic, near 24-hour circadian rhythms. Prior research on the impact of sleep and circadian rhythms on cognitive performance has typically been restricted to small-scale laboratory-based studies that do not capture the variability of real-world conditions, such as environmental factors, motivation, and sleep patterns in real-world settings. Given these limitations, leading sleep researchers have called for larger in situ monitoring of sleep and performance. We present the largest study to date on the impact of objectively measured real-world sleep on performance enabled through a reframing of everyday interactions with a web search engine as a series of performance tasks. Our analysis includes 3 million nights of sleep and 75 million interaction tasks. We measure cognitive performance through the speed of keystroke and click interactions on a web search engine and correlate them to wearable device-defined sleep measures over time. We demonstrate that real-world performance varies throughout the day and is influenced by both circadian rhythms, chronotype (morning/evening preference), and prior sleep duration and timing. We develop a statistical model that operationalizes a large body of work on sleep and performance and demonstrates that our estimates of circadian rhythms, homeostatic sleep drive, and sleep inertia align with expectations from laboratory-based sleep studies. Further, we quantify the impact of insufficient sleep on real-world performance and show that two consecutive nights with less than six hours of sleep are associated with decreases in performance which last for a period of six days. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using online interactions for large-scale physiological sensing.
A new wave of portable biosensors allows frequent measurement of health-related physiology. We investigated the use of these devices to monitor human physiological changes during various activities and their role in managing health and diagnosing and analyzing disease. By recording over 250,000 daily measurements for up to 43 individuals, we found personalized circadian differences in physiological parameters, replicating previous physiological findings. Interestingly, we found striking changes in particular environments, such as airline flights (decreased peripheral capillary oxygen saturation [SpO2] and increased radiation exposure). These events are associated with physiological macro-phenotypes such as fatigue, providing a strong association between reduced pressure/oxygen and fatigue on high-altitude flights. Importantly, we combined biosensor information with frequent medical measurements and made two important observations: First, wearable devices were useful in identification of early signs of Lyme disease and inflammatory responses; we used this information to develop a personalized, activity-based normalization framework to identify abnormal physiological signals from longitudinal data for facile disease detection. Second, wearables distinguish physiological differences between insulin-sensitive and -resistant individuals. Overall, these results indicate that portable biosensors provide useful information for monitoring personal activities and physiology and are likely to play an important role in managing health and enabling affordable health care access to groups traditionally limited by socioeconomic class or remote geography.
Most fitness trackers are nothing but glorified step counters. They set an arbitrary goal, and when you’ve taken enough steps to meet it, you are proclaimed healthy. This is dumb. Different steps require different amounts of energy, depending on incline and altitude, as well as the height, weight, and age of the person stepping, and many other factors. Heart data is a far better indicator of your health and exercise levels, and there’s finally a wearable—and a metric—that puts it first.
The Mio Slice is the first wearable to use the proprietary Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI) score. Strap the Slice onto your wrist, where it monitors your heart rate during rest and activity, and then applies a proprietary algorithm to generate your PAI score. I’m normally against a company using confusing metrics to evaluate fitness (remember the seemingly pointless NikeFuel?), but PAI is built around some serious science.
2017, however, will mark the first time the technology will be used for scouting at the Senior Bowl, which could have a big impact on the way draft picks are vetted.
Catapult is providing a few bits of tech, but the most significant is a tracker called the OptimEye S5 that sits between each player’s shoulder blades. As well as GPS it tracks speed and distance, while inertial sensors follow more minute movement details.
… With a 100-mile ultra marathon a few months away, I’d class myself as a serious amateur and to put Halo to the test, I paired it with my weekly training plan, which consists of two upper and two lower body strength sessions in the weights section at the gym, one track-based speed interval session and one long, slow run.
Even before I’d put them on, I had a niggling question: While there were plenty of stats and tests which proved they’d worked for people like the US Olympic Ski Team or the Invictus CrossFit competitors, how would I know if Halo was working for me?
… We see more and more devices targeted at health and fitness these days, and that’s all thanks to research that explores how we can make devices interact with natural, biological processes. The world has been forced to keep pace with medical revolution after medical revolution, and the current trends are focusing on smaller and smaller aspects of our biology.
By understanding the way that biological components such as genes or cells communicate, scientists are starting to tap into ways to control their communications, and a recent discovery from the University of Maryland (UMD) may have made a huge step forward for the future of bio-hybrid devices with the use of what they are calling ‘redox biomolecules‘.
The Obama administration has dropped a controversial proposal that would have required all federally funded scientists to get permission from patients before using their cells, blood, tissue or DNA for research.
The proposal was eliminated from the final revision of the Common Rule, which was published in the Federal Register Wednesday. The rule is a complex set of regulations designed to make sure federally funded research on human subjects is conducted ethically. The revision to the regulations, set to go into effect in 2018, marks the first time the rule has been updated in 26 years.
The central tenet of the rehabilitation protocol is a requirement for set criteria (specific physical testing) to be proven prior to allowing progression to the next stage. Daily measurements of subjective pain, pain with palpation, range of movement or flexibility, and strength allows the clinician to adapt the protocol for the player on that particular day depending on the presentation of the individual, as well as identify the response to the previous day’s treatment. Although we suggest specific exercises and progressions within each stage, clinical reasoning is continuously required from the clinician to execute the protocol optimally for each session. In the clinical reasoning process, the clinician will consider factors such as the presumed mechanism (swing phase injury versus stance phase, active versus passive stretch type injury), sport-specific hamstring demands, and presumed individual risk factors such as trunk stability and lumbo-pelvic control.
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation from
Background
The aim of the present study was to explore the views of professional rugby union players during the early rehabilitation, late rehabilitation and return to play stages, following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. Methods
A qualitative dominant, mixed methodological approach was utilized with five players who had suffered an ACL injury requiring reconstructive surgery. A longitudinal approach, concurrent with each player’s rehabilitation, consisting of twice monthly interviews, a self-report diary and three established questionnaires (MOS-Social Support Survey, Sherbourne & Stewart, 1991; Sport Climate Questionnaire, Deci & Ryan, n.d.; Injury Rehabilitation Questionnaire, Deci & Ryan, n.d.) were completed. Results
Theoretical thematic analysis was conducted on three distinct phases (Early Limited Participation phase, 10 higher order themes; Late Limited Rehabilitation phase, 11 higher order themes; and Return to Play phase, 9 higher order themes) and coded relating to autonomy, competence and relatedness. Conclusions
The findings suggest that increased autonomy and control assist emotional and behavioral responses during rehabilitation and return to play, while development of competence increases self-confidence. [full text]
For decades, athletes had only one option if they tore their ulnar collateral ligament; reconstructive surgery, better known as Tommy John surgery.
However, another option is now emerging as a viable alternative: UCL repair with internal brace construction.
Former St. Louis Cardinals reliever Seth Maness is attempting to become the first pitcher to return to the pros after undergoing UCL repair with internal brace construction. George Paletta, MD, of the Orthopedic Center of St. Louis performed Mr. Maness’ procedure.
… there’s an entire organization dedicated to helping athletes deal with the mental and emotional aspects of ACL injuries. Former professional soccer player Jordan Angeli started The ACL CLUB after suffering through three ACL surgeries in just five years while playing at Santa Clara University and then with the Boston Breakers, Washington Sprit and Western New York Flash. Over the course of her surgeries, she discovered that the hardest part of recouping from an ACL tear was battling the mental side of injury. And she began to understand that athletes who tear their ACLs have an unspoken solidarity with those who also have the same knee scar.
The ACL CLUB brings together athletes from different sports who struggle with the “Now what?” question after the dreaded pop. The club then encourages members to share their “scar stories” and uplift one another through mental tips, community functions and support.
… In January, many of us strive to be stronger, lighter, faster versions of ourselves. It is also the busiest time of the year for physiotherapists. We are all so driven by the chronological time stamp of the new year that we forget all too quickly that we are using a body that hasn’t seen a pair of running shoes in months, if not years. Activity guidance does exist, but isn’t common knowledge to most. Inevitably, our enthusiasm out-sprints our physical capabilities and, ouch, we end up injured and back to square one.
Most people’s reaction to reduced exercise when injured will be to immediately reduce their food intake because they aren’t burning the energy exercising. But this can be counterproductive if taken to the extreme. When injured, your daily energy expenditure can increase by as much as 15-50% over normal, particularly if the injury is very bad.
If your injury is so bad you need crutches, your expenditure during walking can be even higher. Consequently, you are still burning calories at a higher rate when injured – and it is important that your eating matches what you burn off. What’s more, the composition of the food you eat can also help to speed up the recovery process.
A common misconception is that a product must either be a food, a dietary supplement, or a drug because there is some intrinsic property or ingredient that makes the product fit into one of those categories. That is not entirely true. To determine whether something is a food, a supplement, or a drug, there are many aspects to take into consideration. These include: the ingredients, how it is made (manufactured/prepared), how it is represented (how it is labeled), and how the company intends for consumers to use the product.
… In its 21st year, the Baltimore-based company says it may never overtake its biggest competition — Nike remains far and away the leader — in numbers of schools signed. Nor does it say it needs to. Rather, the company insists it can succeed with a targeted approach based on identifying the most suitable partners — and geography plays a significant role.
… there’s a new wrinkle in the Rockets’ three-point prowess: the distance from which they shoot them.
The NBA three-point line is 23 feet, nine inches from the basket, yet more than half of Houston’s three-point attempts come from between 25 and 29 feet. They don’t just shoot a lot of threes. They shoot a lot of deep threes.
And that leads to a lot of facepalms from opposing coaches.
“It’s different from reading it on the scouting report and seeing it on the tape [vs.] seeing guys pull from two, three feet behind the line,” Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said after Houston nailed 21 threes in its 137-112 win over Brooklyn Jan. 15. “You know, I see the stats, too. I read the articles. I know that’s kind of what they do. So, [it’s] tough to defend.”
… The average age of first-team squads (in January 2016) can be seen in the following maps below. It seems that the talent-importing leagues tend to have a higher average first team squad compared to talent exporters (such as Netherlands and the Balkan countries).
Russia (27.1) and Turkey (27.1) have the oldest average player age in Europe with the second Dutch league comfortable the youngest (23.1).
… Streich reveals one of the tenets of his philosophy. “Everyone has to decide individually,” he says. “We all have a responsibility to ourselves. The best thing would be if everyone confronted these things themselves and thought about their own individual responsibility.”
That ties in with what he said in November when he spoke of wanting “vocal and constructive players who can debate things with one another”. It formed part of a longer discussion on Streich’s view that social media, and communication in general, should be a subject in school. The video now has nearly one million views on Facebook.
“It should be that during the week for three or four hours, you confront what you’re doing because they [school children] are on their phones constantly. That is the decisive form of communication.”
Matt Patricia is so addicted to football that he once took a 94 percent pay cut — yes, 94 percent — for the chance to be a position coach at the Division III level.
The Patriots’ burly and bearded defensive coordinator has more than made it all back by now, of course, and Patricia can cement his growing reputation as one of the NFL’s most promising assistants next week with a Patriots victory over the Falcons in Super Bowl LI in Houston.
But those who know the 42-year-old Patricia from his days as an aeronautical engineering student at upstate New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute still shake their head at his staggering leap of faith almost 20 years ago.
“I’ve still never heard of anyone doing something like that except Matt,” retired RPI coach Joe King said. “Amazing.”
This book is about artificial intelligence. The term “artificial intelligence” or “AI” has a long and convoluted history (Cohen and Feigenbaum 2014). It has been used by philosophers, statisticians, machine learning experts, mathematicians, and the general public. This historical context means that when people say artificial intelligence the term is loaded with one of many potential different meanings.
Humanoid robots
Before we can demystify artificial intelligence it is helpful to have some context for what the word means. When asked about artificial intelligence, most people’s imagination leaps immediately to images of robots that can act like and interact with humans. Near-human robots have long been a source of fascination by humans have appeared in cartoons like the Jetsons and science fiction like Star Wars. More recently, subtler forms of near-human robots with artificial intelligence have played roles in movies like Her and Ex machina.
… Recently English club Fulham FC posted on social media information about their Pre- Academy Talent Identification day. Children as young as under 5 are invited. The introduction statement informed us that Fulham Football Club were in search of new talent. Also, stating the child’s preferred position was recommended when parents sent in their application.
Naturally this caused a huge debate on Social Media. What really surprised me was the type of questions asked and excuses pawned off in defense. Thankfully, the majority of comments on social media were very critical.
For me one vital element in all this was never discussed. The role of the parent. After all it will more than likely be a parent filling out the application form and transporting their child (under 5!) to this Talent Identification day. How informed are these parents? If we reinvented youth sports, started from scratch and placed the physical and emotional needs of children first, would it look like this?
… “To get the benefit of Guardiola players have to adapt to him. It’s the same for me here at Bayern. The players have to get used to me and it has cost us at times. When I think back to some of the goals we’ve given up on the break… why, it’s enough to drive you insane.”
So much for the conceit that English football is some kind of different animal that requires a long period of adjustment. Ancelotti doesn’t buy this. Numbers back him up. Of the six foreign managers who have won the Premier League, four — including Ancelotti — did so in their first full season in charge.
We’re pleased to announce the finalists for the 2017 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards, which will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year.