Football Overtime Proposals

The Bills/Chiefs game, the Patriots/Falcons Super Bowl, and the Patriots/Chiefs AFC Championship Game ended on an anticlimax.

The outcome of the game was preordained by the coin toss: in all cases, if you watched the game, you knew what was going to happen: the team that won the toss was going to win.

Forget "fair" in sports. Sports don't have to be fair; the ruleset is understood before the game, and you should design your gameplan accordingly. You could require that the road team play with 10 players, and provided that both teams knew the rules in advance, it is still "fair." The issue isn't fairness, but predictability. To end such a magnificent game with such a predictable outcome is an utter letdown.

Sure, you can show me the overall overtime stats are not that skewed in favor of the team that wins the toss across a large sample of games. I don't buy it. The playoffs are different. Two high-quality offenses, after a four-quarter back-and-forth, emotionally draining war of playoff football? There's just no way a defense is going to hold up against an offense that merely executes competently.

My first idea to solve this problem is what I called "the 3rd quarter of the second half." The rule is simple: in a game where the score is tied at the end of regulation, play a 5th quarter, but don't start it with a coin toss. Just flip sides, and have the team that currently has the ball continue matriculating the ball down the field.

This would result in significant changes in strategy for teams in the 4th quarter. Let me give an example: the Bills/Buccaneers game from earlier this season.

In that game, the Bucs were up 27-10, and Buffalo mounted a furious comeback to tie it, culminating in a 25 yard field goal on 4th and 2 from the 7 with 25 seconds remaining in regulation. Buffalo kicked off, Tampa took a knee, and the game went into overtime. Buffalo actually won the toss and went three and out, and then Tom Brady did what Tom Brady does, and won the game.

But in a world with this type of overtime, the decision calculus would change for the Bills on 4th and 2 from the 7 with 25 seconds remaining. Instead of getting a near-guarantee of an overtime coin toss, the Bills would have been facing a Tom Brady led offense getting the ball back with 15 seconds to go... for another drive. Regulation would expire, we'd go to a commercial, and Brady would have the ball on the next drive.

If the Bills wanted to avoid that outcome, they'd go for the touchdown instead of the field goal. In essence, the interests of the teams involved would mean that the trailing team would change its late game strategy to avoid tying the game at the buzzer. (Tying the game at the buzzer would mean that the other team was getting the ball next.)

I think this is a vastly superior system to the present. It takes the coin flip out of the equation entirely and allows the overtime "one possession" problem to be a product of what happened during the game, rather than in a referee's hand.

Admittedly, this would be a significant change to the endgame in football. I think it would be only for the best. Playing for field goals late is boring; touchdowns are fun.

But if you refused to tinker with the regulation endgame, I have a solution that is actually more responsive to my initial objections about an anticlimax: the "one play to rule them all" option.

What is that? Well, it's a coin flip. Winner of the flip gets to choose: offense, or defense? But instead of getting a kickoff, they get one play: 4th and 2, from the 2 yard line. If they score, they win. If not, they lose.

Two-point conversions are roughly 50 percent plays (48 percent I think). Moreover, the fatigue issue would be somewhat mitigated: while getting it together for one final drive on defense is an enormous task, stopping just one play should be within the physical capabilities of an exhausted defense. Figure out your best play, call it, and see what happens.

Is this "fair?" No, it's not. But it's exciting, it gives both teams a chance, and it's certainly climactic.

So I waver on these options. But I think they're both vastly superior to the current hash of a system we have.

What I think I know about covid

Filter:

Contention	Confidence Level	Why I Believe This	Updated
mRNA vaccines are highly effective against covid.	High	Vaccines	7/10/2021
mRNA vaccines can produce myocarditis in younger people.	Medium -> High	Treatment	7/10/2021
Dexamethasone is a mildly effective treatment for severe covid cases.	High	This is the standing medical consensus at this point, and I think we've been solidly here for a year. Trump himself got dexamethasone when he was sick.	7/10/2021

In my ideal world...

In my ideal world, the Chinese government would have identified the risks of the virus back in December and instituted the protocols necessary to prevent its spread. But this is not that world. 

In my ideal world, world governments would have understood that the virus warranted more aggressive travel restrictions immediately, rather than being lackadaisical. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, all levels of American government would have explained the risks of a “novel” virus beginning in January and started mobilizing against it. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, the “smart set” would have taken the concerns of the idiosyncratic more seriously, instead of pooh-poohing such concerns as paranoia. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, the bureaucracy of the US government would not have completely botched its surveillance testing in February. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, the addled President of the United States would not have argued and fought for reduced testing because testing increased our case counts. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, once the virus became clear, American society would have tolerated far greater mobility restrictions for a short period of time in an effort to “crush” the virus down to a traceable level. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, the American government would have set super-ambitious rapid testing targets in the order of hundreds of millions a day, to get out in front of the virus and empower individuals with the knowledge to make good choices. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, we would have invested in prophylactic sewage monitoring as an “early warning system,” to identify hotspots and outbreaks before they became uncontrolled. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, levels of American government would have financed more contact tracing to get a handle on how spread actually occurs to determine the risks of in-person schooling, after-school sports, restaurants, and air travel. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, American society would have been obsessed with breaking chains of viral transmission instead of flattening the curve. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, European governments would have discouraged summer vacations and international travel, to limit the opportunities for the virus to spread and mutate. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, we would not have assumed that children are mostly immune, and thus placed them at unknown and unpredictable risk to support our selfishness. But this is not that world.

In my ideal world, we would not have been left with a choice between continued isolation, repeated infections by a deadly virus, and taking an experimental vaccine with no long-term safety record. But this is not that world.

Given that we don’t live in an ideal world, I got the shot. 

I got the shot so I can go back to church and take communion, so I can spend time with friends and family, so I can play and watch music in public, so I can go to Mets games again, so I can take my kids places, so life can have more in-person meetings and fewer video calls, so I don't have to think twice about visiting a dying relative in the hospital, so I can do my small part to get us towards herd immunity and a semblance of normalcy.

I think you should too.

Why I Voted Biden

On Facebook back in September 2016, I wrote the following:

You don't have to convince me that Clinton is deeply flawed. The transfer of classified information over an unsecured email server--and the unconvincing efforts of her allies to downplay it--drives me insane. Her penchant for secrecy is downright destructive. She and her husband have used the halo of the presidency to enrich themselves far beyond what is appropriate; overpaid corporate tycoons run companies that at least add something to society. Clinton made money by giving speeches at $250,000 a pop.

But she's essentially running for Obama's third term, a continuation of what we've seen. If you're happy with Obama, you'll probably be decently happy with Clinton.

And she is not Trump, who knows nothing about anything other than what he watches on cable news; who is utterly self-obsessed; who acts out of personal pique *all the time*; who exploited birtherism to get a political profile; who barely knows the structure of government; who admires governmental exhibits of strength, even when it results in the deaths of thousands of innocent people (see: Tiananmen Square); who represents a genuine risk to global safety and stability; and who, at minimum, tolerates affiliation with this generation's white supremacist movement, and, at maximum, genuinely sympathizes with its evil worldview.

A vote is not an exercise in self-actualization; it's an exercise of genuine political power, however small. Entertaining the idea of voting third party was reasonable through the summer; after all, it was plausible that someone could catch fire, like Perot in 1992, and have a legitimate chance. But that's simply not the case; polls are clear that 80% of people are voting for Clinton or Trump.

Many of my co-partisans tried to stop this nightmare, and we failed. You don't have to do the same. If you wake up on November 9, and Trump won, what are you going to say if you voted for Johnson or Stein?

Back then, I voted McMullin. I did not have any expectation that Trump would be able to use the machinery of government to tilt the race in his favor. I lived in Oregon at the time, so a protest vote seemed safe and worthwhile.

Now Trump is president, and four years in: he is self-obsessed; he spends too much time watching cable news; he doesn't understand how the government works; he sympathizes with authoritarians and white supremacists. His maladministration has made the covid crisis much worse than it would be otherwise, culminating in Trump himself getting felled by the disease.

I do not want Trump to have a bad covid outcome; I want him to live, and thrive, for a long time. But I also want a rebuke. I want the voters of America to say, firmly, "NO," and consign Trump's version of strongman populism to the dustbin of American history. I want Trump to get interviewed and have to answer for the worst defeat in 90 years.

Of course, thanks to the Electoral College, my home state of New Jersey is not in play. I should feel safe to write in a candidate, so that I do not have to throw my support to Joe Biden. Indeed, for most of this year, I was planning to write in a principled conservative public statesman, Mitt Romney. (Who, in a better timeline, would be wrapping up his second term. Alas.)

There were 3 specific incidents in the last month that tipped the scale for me to vote Biden. I'll take them chronologically:

1. The changed CDC recommendations on testing that were promulgated while Dr. Fauci was out of commission for surgery.  This came from pressure from the Trump administration, and is absolutely destructive. We need rapid, ubiquo testing. It is the only way to make the pandemic less painful, short of a vaccine.
2. The threat from a Trump legal advisor to try to overturn the popular will via state legislatures.
3. Eric Trump suggesting that Trump would win New Jersey without voter fraud. 

All of this infuriated me, and makes me think that we genuinely need a popular vote majority for Joe Biden, and not merely a weak plurality like Hillary Clinton got in 2016. So I decided to participate in trying to get there.

The challenge here is my obligation as a Catholic.

Biden is a practicing Catholic, but he also is in favor of a legalized regime of abortion, and now federal funding for abortion (via repeal of the Hyde Amendment). The standard calculation for a Catholic in a race like this would be to vote for the Republican, and if the Republican were unfit, then to vote third-party (as I was planning to do).

Here, Jeannie Gaffigan's article in America magazine was helpful: 

I believe it will be impossible to tackle these other issues with a president who is working overtime to sow division and hatred in this county through insults, intimidation, fear and blatant racism. This venomous “us against them” mentality is trickling down, seeping into our churches and poisoning our pulpits. To a culture of life, vipers are deadly.

Quite so. In the long run, I think Trump is destructive to the entire pro-life project: he makes us look like hypocrites. Ramesh Ponnuru nailed the political dynamic, where Republicans cannot simply take the victories and continue to criticize Trump where he's wrong:

It is logically possible to approve of many things Trump has done, and even to have voted for him and to intend to vote for him again, while being clear-eyed about his grave faults. This is the transactional case for Trump that many conservatives have made. But some who made the transaction did not appreciate the full cost.

It turns out to be psychologically difficult to maintain the transactional stance. The temptation to minimize the flaws of one’s champion is too great. (It is of course also true that a politician’s opponents have the opposite temptation.) The pull of party unity is only stronger now that Trump is president — and has largely stuck with an agenda Republicans favored before he came along, while angering liberals every day.

Because our culture has defined racism as wholly unacceptable, very few people  are willing to step forward and say, “The president keeps making racist comments, but what’s more important is that he is delivering on taxes and judges and regulation.” (Kris Kobach waffled rather than say it.) The evidence of his bigotry has to be ignored, wished away, re-interpreted. If Republicans refuse to fit their standards around the president — if, like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, they occasionally condemn the bigotry — it means they were weaklings all along.

More broadly, if Christians continue to back Trump in waves, we will never make in-roads into communities that are turned off by the grossness of the political commitments. If Christianity gets tied to a political party, it will make it harder to spread the good news. We will be erecting boundaries around a faith that needs to welcome all comers. That's how I read the great commission. It requires that we keep partisan politics at arm's length in a democratic society.

Trump has to lose. I voted Biden. Lord have mercy.

McCain's Point

Why would John McCain have asked Barack Obama and George W. Bush to eulogize him, anyway?

Bush and Obama have a couple of things in common, but one stands out above all: they were the two men who defeated John McCain in presidential campaigns--Bush did it in 2000; Obama did it in 2008.

McCain's most avid supporters would probably cry foul about the way that those campaigns played out--both were hard-hitting campaigns, and McCain was the victim of some tough attacks. But that's the game as it's played--politics is rough-and-tumble in America, and somebody has to lose. In 2000 and 2008, it was McCain.

It would be easy for McCain to have held a grudge--to think that he would have been a better president than his two opponents, to believe that it could have gone differently. Maybe he did hold a grudge, in his heart.

But in the gesture of inviting those two men to deliver eulogies, McCain reminds us of a simple truth: after the campaign, we have to live together.

Campaigns can be tough, feelings can get hurt. Politics matters, after all, and the two parties have very different visions of American society right now. But the American system is finely tuned to be a sort of pendulum--elections are predictable and scheduled, and as such can't be timed by the ruling party in an attempt to hold onto a majority. We are going to disagree, sometimes angrily--and nothing can change that. But we have to live together in spite of our disagreements. In this framework, it's best to limit the scope of our fight: keep the politics in politics, but be civil to one another, and judge people on their personal qualities rather than their political views or group participation. That was McCain, through and through.

This is an interpretation of politics that has become increasingly outmoded--first on the online political Left, and more recently on the new (awful) Right. McCain is seen as a vicious warmonger, an enabler of the imperial state, a collaborator with the evil of Republican economic policy and social spending. In this view, opponents are reduced to their policy preferences, or the people that their policies directly benefit. (Note that second-order effects are utterly ignored.) A disagreement over the responsibilities of government and the effectiveness of specific policy choices becomes a moral failing, rather than an understandable difference of opinion.

The stakes are high, so this perspective is understandable. But McCain believed that this was a dead-end. To McCain, this was a question of shared values: he wrote, "we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement" in his final letter to America. This is a modernized update of an old sentiment, matching McCain's rhetorical style to the substance of the peroration of Lincoln's First Inaugural:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

These sentiments of similarity, whether true or not, are useful. The "crush one's enemies" perspective fails because of the regularity of politics: sometimes we are bound to win, and sometimes we are bound to lose. To the victor goes the spoils, certainly, but we don't have an elected dictatorship in America; we have a republican system with multiple levels of government, constitutional limits, and checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of narrow majorities. Neither side will be permanently vanquished, even in a violent war**. Thus, we have to live together, and we're better off associating with one another to foster empathy, rather than isolating ourselves and developing only contempt.

McCainian magnanimity fits in that system perfectly, and his final wishes reflect that perhaps better than anything he did in politics.

Rest in peace, Senator. You earned it.

**It's reasonable to argue that the Civil War vanquished a gross evil: chattel slavery. This was, in one sense, the triumph of incivility. But unfortunately, the Civil War did not solve racial inequality in America, and it's hard to see how a second violent conflagration would; we still live with the sins of ourselves, our ancestors, and the distant settlers of the American continent, and there is nothing quite as tangible as the ownership of property to vanquish.

Some Secular Thoughts on the Catholic Palm Sunday Liturgy

Palm Sunday is one of the most important days of the Catholic liturgical year for reasons fundamental to the religion: it's about the condemnation and death of the Messiah. As a Catholic, I accept the theology of the whole thing. But for the last few years, I've returned to the same set of thoughts about why the liturgy is so powerful and important to me from a secular standpoint. The Catholic Church's Palm Sunday liturgy teaches us important lessons about how to live, even before we get into the great spiritual, theological, and eschatological questions about Jesus, God, and the universe itself. But if we take a "Jefferson Bible" approach to the divinity of Jesus, the lessons remain quite powerful.

The Catholic service on Palm Sunday starts with a procession and Gospel reading, which is unique in the liturgical year. In Year B, Mark's Gospel serves as the first reading. It includes the following passage, talking about what happened as Jesus entered Jersualem:

Many people spread their cloaks on the road,
and others spread leafy branches
that they had cut from the fields.
Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out:
"Hosanna!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!
Hosanna in the highest!"

So the people hailed this guy as he entered town, waving their palms and offering encomiums (and it's why we get palms at the beginning of mass). That's the groundwork for what's about to come in about 10-15 minutes: the passion narrative.

The passion substitutes for the main gospel reading, and it's handled as a sort of "table read" for a stage play. There are four characters:

- Jesus, read by the priest.
- The narrator, usually read by a deacon or a lay reader.
- The "voice," who fills in where one specific person (like Peter or Pontius Pilate) has a line of dialogue, usually read by a deacon or a lay reader.
- The "crowd," read by the congregation.

This is unique in the Catholic liturgy; normally, the Gospel reading is proclaimed by the priest or deacon, and then a homily follows. For Palm Sunday (and Good Friday), the passion stage play substitutes.

The rough narrative of the passion is as follows:

- Jesus has dinner with his apostles/followers and tells them one of them is going to betray him.
- Judas betrays him and he's arrested.
- Jesus is accused of many things but the testimony conflicts. He is eventually condemned to death for blasphemy and mocked.
- Jesus faces the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who finds no reason to put him to death.
- Pontius Pilate offers "the crowd" a choice between the release of a revolutionary and the release of Jesus, as part of a way to celebrate Passover. The crowd chooses the revolutionary.
- Jesus is mocked as "King of the Jews" and physically abused.
- Jesus is crucified and dies.

The whole stage play takes about 15 or 20 minutes to work through. For the Passion according to Mark (Year B), the crowd has a few pieces of dialogue. Several stand out. (The narrator notes are included, and the required dialogue is in quotes.)

- They all condemned him as deserving to die. Some began to spit on him. They blindfolded him and struck him and said to him, "Prophesy!"
- Pilate again said to them in reply,"Then what do you want me to do
with the man you call the king of the Jews?" They shouted again, "Crucify him."
Pilate said to them, "Why? What evil has he done?" They only shouted the louder, "Crucify him."
- The soldiers led him away inside the palace, that is, the praetorium, and assembled the whole cohort. They clothed him in purple and, weaving a crown of thorns, placed it on him. They began to salute him with, "Hail, King of the Jews!"
- With him they crucified two revolutionaries, one on his right and one on his left.
Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross."

It's a little incongruous with the rest of the Catholic liturgy. The guy we say is God and worthy of "unending hymns of praise," we're mocking and condemning to death here. Sarcasm and spite reign. What gives?

For me at least, the Palm Sunday liturgy forces me to grapple with my humanity.

First, we're fickle. We're holding palms, just like the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as a king, and then just a few minutes later, we're condemning him to death.

Second, we can be mean. The mockery Jesus faces from random people and from soldiers is just callous and cold-blooded; he's a prophet and so we say, "Oh yeah? Prophesy!" They call him a King, so we clothe him in a regal purple, give him a crown of thorns, and laugh in his face. We then nail him to a cross and tell him to come down. It's just profoundly cruel.

Third, we can get caught up in a mob. The story insists that Jesus is innocent of the charges against him, but the mob insists that he be put to death anyway, ferociously advocating for a murderer to be released over the teacher.

That we have to play the part of the mob is a reminder that any of us could have done the same thing in their position. It's why it's always been deeply unfair and silly to "blame" a certain subset of people for Jesus' death: the things that got him were fundamentally human failings. Crying out "Crucify him!" makes us feel uncomfortable, because we know that he's innocent and how the story ends. But how often are we in analogous situations today? How often do we "crucify" a blameless person by acting without compassion and by surrendering to a mobocratic spirit?

There's another part that's important, though: the passion play also tells us that we can be better. Several characters do better: the nameless woman who anoints Jesus' head with oil; Simon the Cyrenian, who helps carry his cross; and Joseph of Arimathea, who prepares Jesus' body for burial. They're the ones to emulate, not the mob.

And so the Palm Sunday liturgy--and the audience participation therein--is an annual reminder for me: any of us can get caught in the mob, and all of us can aspire to do better.

On Football's Thursday Night Problem

This one is straightforward: Thursday Night Football games are by and large trash: lots of penalties, sloppy play, big margins. And this makes sense: if Thursday Night Football games were consistently better, it would refute the need for practice and recovery weeks in general.

So, with a hat tip to @rchatter29 on Twitter, this is the way to handle it:

1. Move to two bye weeks per team. That expands the season to 18 weeks, rather than 17. Bye weeks begin as early as Week 2, and run through Week 16 now.
2. The week 1 game does not "count" for the Thursday night slate; there's no rest issue there.
3. Every team gets a bye week prior to their Thursday night game, in addition to one other bye week somewhere else in the schedule. This ensures 10 days of rest on either side of the game.
4. Every team gets a Thursday night game. The week 1 teams get 2.
5. Start the Thursday night slate in Week 3.

The math works out fine, too, for a 32-team league.

Week 1 - doesn't count for the Thursday Night slate
Week 2 - no game
Week 3 - 1/2
Week 4 - 3/4
Week 5 - 5/6
Week 6 - 7/8
Week 7 - 9/10
Week 8 - 11/12
Week 9 - 13/14
Week 10 - 15/16
Week 11 - 17/18
Week 12 (Thanksgiving) - 19/20, 21/22, 23/24
Week 13 - 25/26
Week 14 - 27/28
Week 15 - 29/30
Week 16 - 31/32
Week 17 - probably Saturday games
Week 18 - everybody on Sunday

This lengthens the season and gives NFL players more rest in general. Who says no?