Jahleel Addae grew tired of writing checks to the NFL. The hard-hitting safety for the Los Angeles Chargers had accumulated nearly $50,000 in fines over five seasons for dangerous hits to the neck and head area of receivers.
Those hits also caused him to miss time because of injuries. So what’s Addae’s solution? Aim low.
That’s the mindset of defensive players in the league with rules established for hits near the neck and head area on defenseless players resulting in personal foul penalties, hefty fines and suspensions that could cost their teams wins in the long run.
“Early in my career I was going high,” Addae said. “And I learned from my fines and a lot of plays I did that wasn’t necessary, and I’ve lowered my target.”
Of all the things Richard Sherman felt when his Achilles tendon ruptured Thursday night, surprise wasn’t one of them.
The Seattle Seahawks cornerback had been playing through what he described as a “pretty rough” injury to that part of his body for most of the season. He had been listed on the team’s injury report with an Achilles issue before four of Seattle’s first nine games, starting in Week 3.
So when asked if playing two games in five days was partly to blame for it rupturing in the third quarter of the team’s victory Thursday night over the Arizona Cardinals, Sherman said that outcome might have been inevitable.
“I don’t know,” the 29-year-old said. “It was a lot of stress on it, but I think it would have gone eventually anyways. It definitely didn’t help. It’s part of the game. Unfortunately, we had to play. We had to go out there and do everything I could to help my team try to win the game.”
Few players in recent history have been as helpful to the next generation as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. The all-time greats have continuously gone out of their way to extend invitations, whether for an exhibition or training, to their younger contemporaries. It’s priceless insight into the minds of champions.
Still, despite the assists, these up-and-comers have by and large struggled to truly break through. In June, after his Wimbledon championship, Federer suggested the players who were expected to knock them from the top — the likes of Grigor Dimitrov, Milos Raonic and Marin Cilic — needed to be more aggressive and more imaginative on the court.
Body temperature regulation is a topic often discussed in science classrooms, but it is not often discussed from the football stands or field. Regulation actually turns out to be very influential when it comes to athletic performance in varying weather conditions.
“In cold or hot temperatures, your body is trying to maintain homeostasis,” said Brendon McDermott, associate professor of the Graduate Athletic Training Program at the University of Arkansas.
A normal body temperature is around 98.6 F, according to the Mayo Clinic. In lower temperatures like those we see near the end of football season, the body will adopt certain mechanisms, such as shivering, in order to keep warm.
James Carter, director of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, describes what happens to the body in the cold as “a fight over blood supply.” The active muscles need an increased blood supply, but in the cold, the blood flows away from the skin in order to protect the body’s core.
The New York Times, Sunday Review, Lindsay Crouse from
… “Shalane has pioneered a new brand of ‘team mom’ to these young up-and-comers, with the confidence not to tear others down to protect her place in the hierarchy,” said Lauren Fleshman, who became a professional runner in the early 2000s, around the same time Flanagan did. “Shalane’s legacy is in her role modeling, which women in every industry would like to see more of.”
Here’s how it worked until Flanagan burst onto the scene. After college, promising female distance athletes would generally embark on aggressive training until they broke down. Few of them developed the staying power required to dominate the global stage. And they didn’t have much of a community to support them; domestic women’s distance running was fractious and atrophied. In 2000, for example, only one American woman qualified for the Olympic marathon, after training alone in her Anchorage home on a treadmill.
… a cohort of young Icelandic men reached the under-21 European Championships for the first time in 2011, came within a game of qualifying for the last World Cup in 2014 and finally made it to a major senior competition at last year’s European Championship, when they reached the quarter-finals and knocked out England. The women’s team has also qualified for the last three editions. Today the Elo system ranks the men 19th in the world. That makes them good enough to warrant their place in Russia, but by no means a shoo-in. The Netherlands, who are ranked 11th and have reached the semi-finals in the last two World Cups, will watch next year’s tournament from the sidelines. To secure automatic qualification Iceland had to beat Croatia, Ukraine and Turkey, each of whom has been a World Cup quarter-finalist in the last 20 years. How did a country with such a tiny player pool and barely four hours of daylight in its brutally long winters produce a team of world-beaters?
In the late 1990s, the Iceland Football Association (KSI) began to recognise that hostile weather was holding back its 50 or so clubs. So in 2000 it opened the country’s first indoor football facility, complete with a full-sized pitch and a dome; today there are seven such outfits. In 2003 UEFA, European football’s governing body, launched HatTrick, a funding programme for grass-roots development, which helped Iceland to build more than 100 all-weather artificial surfaces for schools. Though these are outdoors, most have floodlights and all have under-floor heating.
But footballers cannot thrive on pitches alone. Fortunately, this construction work was accompanied by a coaching revolution.
The best thing about Thaler, what really makes him special, is that he is lazy.” So said Daniel Kahneman, winner in 2002 of the Nobel memorial prize in economics. Prof Kahneman was talking about Richard Thaler, who has emulated that achievement 15 years later. Prof Thaler’s thesis adviser, the economist Sherwin Rosen, put it differently: “We didn’t expect much of him.”
The story of how a lazy and unpromising man won a Nobel memorial prize is perhaps just as important as what he won the prize for. The Nobel announcement recognised Prof Thaler “for his contributions to behavioural economics”. But there’s another way to describe the way he reshaped economics: he persuaded a large group of successful people with a strongly held view of the world to change their minds.
What was that view? To oversimplify, it was that all of us are Spock-like rational optimisers, able to instantly trade off risk and reward, rebalance a spending plan in the face of a price change, and resist temptations such as chocolate brownies or payday loans.
Aaron Hernandez suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever discovered in a person his age, damage that would have significantly affected his decision-making, judgment and cognition, researchers at Boston University revealed at a medical conference Thursday.
Ann McKee, the head of BU’s CTE Center, which has studied the disease caused by repetitive brain trauma for more than a decade, called Hernandez’s brain “one of the most significant contributions to our work” because of the brain’s pristine condition and the rare opportunity to study the disease in a 27-year-old.
A video review of 459 reported concussions sustained during the past two NFL seasons has found far more occurred on passing plays than any other plays.
Yet quarterbacks ranked at the bottom of the list, ahead of only kickers, having suffered 5 percent of those concussions.
… It was just a brain, not large or small, not deformed or extraordinary in appearance, an oblong and gelatinous coil weighing 1,573 grams, or about three and a half pounds, just carved from the skull of a 27-year-old man. The coroner took special care, and it arrived hours later in near-perfect condition.
“They handled everything beautifully,” the neuropathologist said.
The laboratory was a 30-minute drive from the prison where the man hanged himself a night or two earlier. His name was familiar to the scientists, just as he was to people throughout New England and many around the country. Now his brain was about 30 miles north of where the man had most recently worked, in Foxborough, Mass.
… Let’s take a closer look at some of Brady’s claims in The TB12 Method.
1) What Brady says: “These days, even if I get an adequate amount of sun, I won’t get a sunburn, which I credit to the amount of water I drink.”
What the doctor says: Though Brady refrains from giving specific advice about sun exposure, the passage suggests that hydration is a replacement for sun protection. Dr Sarah Arron, a dermatologist and leader of UCSF’s high risk skin cancer program, believes that the young Brady could very well have experienced more sunburns than the 40-year old Brady, but not for the reason he contends.
… Erin Keebaugh, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in associate professor William Ja’s Laboratory at TSRI, suspected that the systems responsible for caffeine’s impact on fly (and maybe human) sleep patterns are more complex than a single caffeine and receptor interaction.
In her study, published in the journal Sleep on October 3, 2017, her team gave groups of flies varying levels of dietary caffeine. They then measured how much the flies slept in the following 24 hours while on those diets. They also studied whether varying levels of caffeine impacted the insects’ feeding behavior by measuring how much they ate over the same 24-hour period.
Interestingly, the team found that sleep loss couldn’t be explained by caffeine intake alone. Instead, they believe that the sleep loss was mediated by changes in the animal’s feeding behavior. “There could still be a pharmacological effect, but there’s definitely dietary inputs to that,” says Keebaugh in a release.
College level student-athletes have the epitome of untimely eating schedules. There are 5:00 a.m. practices that you can’t eat breakfast before or you’ll get queasy. There’s the 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.class that runs right into any time the dining hall offers a reasonable dinner. Sometimes there are early afternoon practices, taking place 15 minutes after class, interrupting lunchtime routines. In a sport where nutrition plays such a vital role, it is important for student-athletes to clear out time for meaningful fueling—even when their schedule doesn’t allow for it.
… “The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains,” he said Tuesday night.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion at the University of Maryland, Costas, who hosted Football Night in America on NBC for more than a decade, said the sport could collapse over time, barring a development in technology to make it reasonably safe. He said the decline of football, which was once “a cash machine,” is the most significant story in American sports.
“The cracks in the foundation are there,” Costas said. “The day-to-day issues, as serious as they may be, they may come and go. But you cannot change the nature of the game. I certainly would not let, if I had an athletically gifted 12- or 13-year-old son, I would not let him play football.”
… Then he turned and walked to the back, one supposes to kneel down at a shrine to Auston Matthews’s aching back (if that indeed is the “upper-body injury” aggravating him) and say a few prayers.
Despite uninspiring play of late, a couple of fortunate wins have kept things light. Even Matthews’s absence is being treated more like an inconvenience than a crisis. The less said about it, the better.
When Mike Babcock was asked about Matthews’s scratch from Thursday’s practice, the sophomore centre’s third day off in a row, the coach referred to it as a “maintenance day.”