… The good news is that Ibrahimovic is available after Manchester United cut ties with the forward last week. But here’s where it starts to get complicated. United’s decision had nothing to do with Ibrahimovic’s form last season — he scored 28 goals in 46 appearances — but rather the torn ACL in his right knee that he sustained in a Europa League match against Anderlecht on April 20. Ibrahimovic underwent surgery on May 1 and is expected to be sidelined until January, which just so happens to be when MLS training camps open.
That has left MLS in a bit of a quandary. Numerous reports, including one in Marca, stated that Ibrahimovic was set to join the LA Galaxy. A league source confirmed to ESPN FC that MLS is indeed engaged in talks with the forward but that the nature of the discussions has been along the lines of “general talks” and that there is “a lot up in the air with [Ibrahimovic’s] injury recovery.”
… OK, you get it: These guys who weren’t really ready for the majors were, for arbitrary roster-rules reasons, dropped into the majors and made to play on a national stage against extremely good players. Why am I so interested?
Imagine if you were signed by the Padres today. Call it a paperwork mistake; you were an accident of history, but you’re on the team all the same. They put you on the roster and put you into the lineup. I’d be there for that. We’d all be there for that. We’d cut away from whatever we’re watching and fire up our GIF machines to capture your inevitable, spectacular failure. The floor of human baseball achievement would be reset. You would fail so, so badly. After a century of baseball following a mostly predictable, mostly meritocratic physics, this would be something new.
That isn’t what the Padres are doing, of course. But it is, to a degree, a radical experiment in floor-setting.
… For Mr Nadal to claim a Roland Garros trophy at age 31 is, in some ways, even more impressive than Mr Federer’s surprise run to this year’s Australian Open title at age 35. Compared with Mr Federer’s brand of first-strike tennis, which served him well at this year’s fast-playing courts in Melbourne, the Spaniard’s game—like those of most clay-court specialists—is extremely physically demanding. Mr Borg played his last major final at age 25, and Gustavo Kuerten, a previous three-time champion in Paris, won his last Roland Garros match at age 27. To reach this point, Mr Nadal needed to bounce back from a recent bout of injury troubles, which forced him to miss the second half of the 2014 season and to withdraw from last year’s French Open after the first two rounds.
Mr Nadal could be forgiven if he elects to borrow from Mr Federer’s playbook and sit out a couple of months while the tour moves to his less-preferred surfaces, hard and grass courts. Over the course of his career, his preference for clay has been significantly stronger than Mr Federer’s liking for anything but clay. According to Elo ratings—an algorithm that evaluates players based on their performances and the quality of their opponents, and can be limited to matches played on a single surface—the gap between Mr Nadal’s clay-court and hard-court performances is about twice as large as Mr Federer’s.
Gareth Southgate is determined to help England’s players to ‘express themselves’ on the international stage, after admitting there were periods of his playing career when he felt inhibited to perform at the highest level.
Caltech researchers have identified a neural circuit in the brain that controls wakefulness. The findings have implications for treating insomnia, oversleeping, and sleep disturbances that accompany other neuropsychiatric disorders, such as depression.
The work was done in the laboratory of Viviana Gradinaru (BS ’05), assistant professor of biology and biological engineering, Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. It appears in the June 8 online edition of the journal Neuron.
… Mark Farley, longtime University of Northern Iowa head football coach, always has said he recruits “athletes,” not just position players. In fact, his NCAA signees list often has “athlete” after a recruit’s name, rather than the position that person might play.
“I totally have belief in multisport athletes,” he said. “There’s a noticeable difference when these athletes get to college. A young person hones his skills early and may become great at one sport. However, when they get to college the continued growth of their athletic and mental skills may be slower.”
Farley said multisport athletes “take a quantum leap in growth when they get to college.
… Burgeoning research identifies an array of cognitive biases—those predictable flaws in our thinking—as a root cause of our struggles to understand each other. Now more than ever, scholars have a keen sense of how these biases function.
But why do we have them in the first place? Humans evolved an entire chunk of gray matter dedicated to interacting with others because our survival depended on it. So why would we then evolve biases that undermine this capacity that took us millennia to cultivate?
Looking beyond how biases function, to what function they serve, we see that two basic motives derail our best efforts to read others accurately: self-protection and efficiency. By improving our understanding of these underlying motives, we might better recognize when we are succumbing to these genres of flawed thinking and when we are falling victim to the biases of others.
… “I certainly feel that as time passes you settle into routines which are much harder to change. Part of that is because life becomes busier as I get older, but also my brain seems more fixed.”
Occupational psychologist Carol Rothwell confirmed this: “It is true that as we age we find it more difficult to develop and some people become more stuck in their ways. Some people even stop developing as young as teenagers.”
Psychologists tend to break personality traits down into five categories: openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. These are our core traits which aren’t affected by moods, and various studies suggest they’re genetic.
… In a winning scenario, smiling can decrease your odds of success against the same opponent in subsequent matches, according to new research presented by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
People who smiled during victory increased the odds of their opponent acting aggressively to steal a pot of money rather than share it in future gameplay, according to a paper presented in May at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) by USC ICT research assistant Rens Hoegen, USC ICT research programmer Giota Stratou and Jonathan Gratch, director of virtual humans research at USC ICT and a professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
Conversely, researchers found smiling during a loss tended to help the odds of success in the game going forward.
New US government report: “Report on Improving Cybersecurity in the Health Care Industry.” It’s pretty scathing, but nothing in it will surprise regular readers of this blog.
It’s worth reading the executive summary, and then skimming the recommendations. Recommendations are in six areas.
The Task Force identified six high-level imperatives by which to organize its recommendations and action items. The imperatives are:
1. Define and streamline leadership, governance, and expectations for health care industry cybersecurity.
The BIG EAST Conference, in partnership with the NCAA, is hosting a Mental Health Summit June 15-16 on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the Summit is to help collegiate institutions create an environment on campus that supports and promotes student-athlete mental health.
The Summit will attract a wide range of groups, including BIG EAST senior athletic administrators, campus counselors, athletic trainers, faculty athletic administrators, NCAA representatives and industry mental health experts. The BIG EAST Student-Athletic Advisory Committee, which is comprised of two student-athletes from each league institution, also will attend.
… Pittsburgh has done it by investing heavily in a core group and finding the right complement of players and staff around Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang to make it work.
“I always say, ‘Best organization, amazing team,’” Malkin said. “We have great chance to win every year.”
That is not how it is supposed to work nowadays. Championship windows are supposed to be narrower with the cap in place, not wider. Yes, Chicago has won it three times in six seasons in the cap era, but the Blackhawks were forced to blow up their roster after 2010. The Kings won it all in 2012 and 2014, but they are now in the process of starting over.
As a former lawyer, Garth Lagerwey knows about the value of evidence-based reasoning. Now he’s trying to apply that same line of thinking to the professional soccer club he helps manage.
Lagerwey spoke about this philosophy at the Sounders Sports Science Weekend in Seattle, an event that focuses on the latest innovations in sports science and analytics.
The Sounders have long been pioneers, at least among Major League Soccer teams, in using sports science to help make on-field improvements. The club, which won its first MLS Cup last year, utilizes a variety of gadgets like GPS trackers and heart rate monitors to measure how exactly their players are performing during training and games. The resulting data is used to help make tactical decisions and prevent injury.
… “I see some sidelines where there’s more defensive coordinators standing on the sideline than… are normal,” said Arkansas coach Bret Bielema, searching for the right words.
Bielema didn’t mention Alabama, of course. No one wants to point fingers or name names. Bob Bowlsby, the chairman of the NCAA Oversight Committee, didn’t when he told CBSSports.com that one FBS team reportedly has 97 staff members who work directly for the football program, but anyone who is looking at excess in college football generally looks first toward Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The NCAA is beginning to take an interest in the size and structure of staffs, and the NCAA Council recently commissioned a study that showed Notre Dame had the largest football staff in the country with 45 employees. CBSSports reported, however, that those numbers came from counting the names listed on team websites. Under that methodology, Texas (44), Georgia (42), Auburn (41) and Michigan (40) followed the Irish in the top five of staff size.
In the first of our series examining the future of sport, we look at the major challenges facing the established powers: from doping and corruption to falling viewing figures