The Rams just handed their new receiver a five-year, $80 million deal. It speaks volumes about how L.A. prizes Cooks—and it’s the latest example of Cooks’s career reflecting the NFL’s value structure at large.
Your car’s airbags are programmed to deploy when you slam into a fixed object at speeds between 8 and 14 mph. Bicycles have no air bags. And professional cyclist Alison Tetrick was flying triple-airbag-deployment fast in 2010 when, while ripping down a descent during the Cascade Cycling Classic, a crashing rider took out her front wheel sending her straight into the pavement, smashing her pelvis and rendering her unconscious for three minutes. Fifteen months later, another fluke accident took her out for the count with concussion number two.
Suffice it to say that recovery was (and continues to be) anything but easy. But this scrappy racer, born on a California cattle ranch, has learned how to pull herself up by the bootstraps, heal her wounds (including the ones you can’t always see), and get back in the saddle stronger than ever.
“The biggest thing is to accept that no matter what happens, you’re never going to be the same from day to day or moment to moment.,” Tetrick says. “We age; we get hurt; things happen in sports and life. Each day is a new day and we’re always evolving. In recovery you have to learn to push forward from where you are in that moment and strive to be the best version of yourself. Accept who you are each morning and then look to where you want to be in the future and what you have to do to get there.”
… [Jabari] Parker insisted he can play at the level he did prior to his second ACL tear, saying he “pretty much” showed it last season, and that the setbacks he has experienced will make him a better player.
He also said he plans to reach out to former Bulls star and fellow Simeon product Derrick Rose about suiting up for the hometown team. He jumped to the defense of his fellow South Sider, who went from No. 1 pick to Rookie of the Year to All-Star to MVP before knee injuries derailed his run in Chicago.
“Derrick had no lows,” Parker said. “He didn’t. Because he still maintained. Derrick is a legend, no matter what. I don’t like how you explained that. No rise and falls. Injuries are a part of life. Everybody has an injury, either athletics or normal life. Derrick is one of the best players to ever play the game and one of the best icons of Chicago. He accomplished his duty already.”
Giuseppe Rossi has been injured for a quarter of his 14-year career as a footballer.
Now 31, the former Manchester United striker is rehabilitating from his fifth major knee injury, and third involving his anterior cruciate ligaments (ACL).
It has taken its toll on the Italy international, but his determination to play is as strong as ever.
“When I sit back and think about it, I get annoyed and you start going around in circles in your head,” he told BBC Sport.
“Every injury has its own story – it took something away, if it’s a World Cup, the European Cup, or a big transfer.
Henrich R. Greve, Organizational Musings blog from
In many areas of life, we enjoy competition. Right now, there is lots of excitement in Wimbledon. There is even more in the World Cup, where entire nations seem to believe that they are in matches with each other – not 22 selected players, most of whom play professional football outside their home country. The excitement extends to management practices too, where various prizes and rewards are distributed along with pay adjustments, all as a function of how well each employee is thought to perform compared with others. “Competition cures laziness,” is the belief.
What could possibly go wrong? The answer is found in a paper by Henning Piezunka, Wonjae Lee, Richard Haynes, and Matthew Bothner in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They look at Formula 1 racing, which is a place where one can find drivers who enjoy competing and are used to competing. After all, who would drive a car at such crazy speeds very close to other cars if they didn’t think competition was a great thing to do? But even in Formula 1, there are costs to competing.
The cost is a simple and important one: close competitors collide more often.
Jurgen Klopp has warned the increasing demands of international football are putting too much strain on players, saying “we have to collect their bones”.
The Liverpool boss is having to plan for the new season without a number of key men who are resting following their World Cup exploits.
The Premier League kicks off again on August 10 while UEFA’s new Nations League, which replaces the usual rounds of international friendlies, begins on September 6.
Klopp said: “I don’t want to get too football political but if they don’t stop with these games – they are now making it the Nations Cup to make it more important – then all these players who played at the World Cup have to go there again.
… The researchers found that mice, rats, and humans all fell prey to the sunk cost effect. The more time that rodents spent in the wait area awaiting the food pellet, the more likely they were to persist till the end. Similarly, the longer that humans waited for the video to download, the more likely they were to stay till it finished downloading to watch it.
Weirdly, it turned out that the time rodents and humans took to decide on the offer had no impact on how much they then persisted in waiting for it. Only when they had committed to a particular flavor food pellet or video did their probability of persisting till the very end increase. These experiments show that we keep track of effort invested in waiting, not deciding.
Also, the longer they waited for their chosen reward, the more likely they were to persist till the end. In short, the more resources (time/money/energy) you commit to a particular task, the stronger your resolve to stay the course even if it is to your own detriment!
London School of Economics, Impact of Social Sciences blog, Suzi Spitzer from
Teamwork makes the dream work, and for interdisciplinary collaborations there are many lessons to be learned from the science of team science. Suzi Spitzer shares ten such lessons here: start by assembling participants with a variety of social skills, such as negotiation and social perceptiveness; avoid jargon and make sure shared words have shared meaning; and accept that conflict, while inevitable, can be healthy!
How can we improve interdisciplinary collaborations? There are many lessons to be learned from the science of team science. The following ten lessons summarise many of the ideas that were shared at the International Science of Team Science Conference in Galveston, Texas, in May 2018.
The NFL knows it needs to make its game safer and find ways to reduce the number of concussions.
And the NFL knows that means going beyond just changing the rules each offseason. Over the last half-decade, the NFL has undertaken an annual search for safer equipment and new technologies to better protect players from head and other injuries.
But the NFL doesn’t have its own research and development department, a team of scientists cooking up the newest technology. The league instead has become a patron of the equipment industry, holding science fair-type contests to award grants to universities and companies large and small to develop new technologies and safer equipment.
On Thursday, the NFL announced the three winners of its latest contest, the HeadHealthTECH Challenge. The three companies were chosen out of 85 applicants and awarded a total of $383,504 to further test and develop their various products.
Last week, researchers at IBM Research-Zurich in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, and the Universities of Basel and Zurich announced in a letter published in Nature a new method for creating electrical contacts to individual molecules on a silicon chip. The advance could open up a promising new way to develop sensors and possibly other electronic or photonic applications of manipulating single molecules.
Football coaches constitute the only subset of the population that describes injuries geographically — as in, a player with an ACL tear is “out with a knee,” or worse yet, “has a knee.” Well, don’t we all?
When pressed for details, the same group will provide an injury prognosis in the terms of minutes and hours, as if recoveries can be measured with an egg timer. If you are not currently in uniform for many major programs — whether it’s with a head cold, an ankle sprain or an amputation — you’re labeled “day to day.” Yeah, but aren’t we all?
Spend a few years reporting on this sport and you’ll find that for every coach sent down from the heavens to fill notepads with dazzling quotes and information, there are five coaches who’d rather hand out their PIN code than divulge details about the status of their roster.
Consider that for every Northwestern, which under Pat Fitzgerald issues injury reports before every game, there’s a Michigan, which doesn’t even create a depth chart. It’s incredible that Jim Harbaugh can’t win a rivalry game despite holding the element of surprise.
… When it comes to age, the verdict from the hacks is clear: things ain’t what they used to be. In the past five years, just 17% of the players who have made it into the annual top 20 were younger than 24 at the start of the calendar year. By contrast, between 2004 and 2008 32% of nominations went to such players, including Messrs Messi and Ronaldo. Today the average Ballon d’Or nominee is 27 years and four months old at the start of the calendar year, compared with 26 years and three months a decade ago.
… France has had the most native players and coaches in the last 4 World Cups… and their dominance has been on the rise. Players like Kylian Mbappe and Paul Pogba are the children of immigrants and the product of the French soccer academy system. French- born players have played for Togo, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Argentina, Portugal, and many more.
The New York Times, Kevin Quealy and Josh Katz from
If a running shoe made you 25 percent faster, would it be fair to wear it in a race? What about 10 percent? Or 2 percent? The Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4% — a bouncy, expensive shoe released to the public one year ago — raises these questions like no shoe in recent distance running history.
Nike says the shoes are about 4 percent better than some of its best racing shoes, as measured by how much energy runners spend when running in them. That is an astonishing claim, an efficiency improvement worth almost six minutes to a three-hour marathoner, or about eight minutes to a four-hour marathoner.
And it may be an accurate one, according to a new analysis by The New York Times of race data from about 500,000 marathon and half marathon running times since 2014.
… “You have a gap between preparation and competition level,” [Bill Belichick] told the Associated Press. “And I think that’s where you see a lot of injuries occurring. We get a lot of breakdowns. We get a lot of situations that players just aren’t as prepared [for] as they were in previous years, in my experience anyway.”
Zachary Binney had devoted his entire Ph.D. dissertation to analyzing injuries in the NFL. A “sports nut” (his father had been the statistician for the Atlanta Braves), Binney accidentally got into sports injuries after beginning freelance analytics work for the Jacksonville Jaguars. “They saw I was an epidemiologist and assumed I’d know all about sports injuries; I didn’t at the time, frankly, but I found the topic fascinating.” He’s now been studying the field for five years, earned his Ph.D. this year and presently consults for a number of sports teams.
Belichick’s claim simply begged for statistical analysis.
“He was proposing a classic case of unintended consequences, where if you don’t practice enough—if you’re undertraining—you’re not getting those muscles and tendons and ligaments strong enough to survive the rigors of an NFL season,” says Binney. “I wanted to take a look at what actually happened over time in the NFL. Did injuries go up after those practice restrictions came about?”