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It’s difficult to say definitively whether significant injuries over all are on the rise, and it doesn’t matter. They’re too prevalent, period. And the N.F.L. needs to go far beyond its efforts thus far to assess and reconsider anything that might be affecting player safety: what kind of equipment, head to toe, they wear; the give of the turf on which they play; the way they train in the off-season. Maybe there should be weight limits. There should certainly be more rest between games and there should probably be fewer of them, though there’s been talk of the league’s moving in the opposite direction.

The status quo won’t do. It’s untenable. It’s arguably unconscionable. On Saturday, the sight of a crumpled Chief with distraught teammates hovering over him became so common that the announcer remarked, in a voice too glib, on the “injury bug” that was “contagious for Kansas City at the wrong time now.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/opinion/bruni-footballs-devastating-harvest.html?ref=todayspaper

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“This might not be the ideal way to approach it, and Dennis Rodman would never be anybody’s first choice of diplomat,” said Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean studies at Columbia University. “But if you pardon the expression, this is the only game in town.”

The 12-member team, which includes such former N.B.A. players as Kenny Anderson, Vin Baker, Craig Hodges and Charles D. Smith, was hastily assembled by Rodman despite the misgivings of human rights activists, American officials and the league itself.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/sports/basketball/rodman-leading-team-of-improbable-emissaries.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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But sports, perhaps better than any endeavor except politics, has become adept at a type of cleansing more commonly associated with authoritarian governments. With surprising regularity and ease, once-popular figures who have run afoul of the rules or the law have been erased like disgraced leaders from an old Soviet photo album, whitewashed from history to preserve an institution’s image or to abide by a governing body’s sanctions.

Awards are returned. Banners are pulled down. Names are stripped from buildings. Wins, individual feats, even entire seasons can be eradicated as if they never happened.

Didn’t Reggie Bush win the Heisman Trophy? Didn’t Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France seven times? Didn’t that stadium used to have a statue out front?

“No one says Nixon didn’t go to China or sign Title IX into law because he was forced to resign because of Watergate,” said Bob Costas, an NBC commentator. “It seems to me you can’t strike from the historical record what occurred. The Fab Five played in the N.C.A.A. tournament, and Reggie Bush was a great and impactful player who won the Heisman Trophy.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/sports/ncaafootball/oj-who-rogues-vanish-from-annals-of-sport.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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I had been sober for five years when I had a slip and started drinking again last August. I had just finished the manuscript of my book, my one-man show was about to air on HBO, and we had a reality series in the can for Fox Sports. I was not accustomed to all that success in an arena other than boxing.

I have such a negative self-image that I just expect bad things to happen to me. And even though I hadn’t been using for five years, all that time I just didn’t feel comfortable in my skin. I was holding secrets from my loved ones, things that I had to get off my chest because I was dying inside. That’s the worst feeling in the world, keeping things to yourself. When I resolved those issues, through therapy and by talking honestly with my family, I felt like a new man. When I relapsed in the past, I would keep getting high until I was in a car accident or got arrested. But this time, after drinking for two or three days, I came back. I didn’t wait for an intervention. I just got right back on the wagon. After years of therapy, I had learned not to beat up on myself. I remembered that relapse is a part of recovery.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/opinion/mike-tyson-fighting-to-kick-the-habit.html?ref=todayspaper

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Cal professor David Romer concluded that teams should not punt when facing fourth-and-4 or less; NFL stats analyst Brian Burke has detailed the need to rethink fourth-down decision-making; Football Outsiders has conflated punts with turnovers. You’ve even read about it on this site. Most fans and analysts who are willing to accept that change is a fundamental part of life have embraced the idea that automatically punting on fourth down doesn’t make sense.

So why do teams at all levels remain so rote? Chris Kluwe may have turned the Internet into his personal pulpit, but he can’t be that persuasive. Romer got it right way back in 2005: Coaches are afraid. No one wants to be the guy who gets fired because he stopped punting. And the same fans and analysts who clamor for innovation are actually fueling that fear.

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– http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9970245/grantland-channel-coach-never-punts

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Umpires are already more closely acquainted with pitch-tracking technology than is often assumed. “We currently use technology for both evaluation purposes and training purposes,” says MLB spokesman Mike Teevan. “All umpires receive a computerized breakdown of their plate performances, including calls they got right and calls they missed.”

The Zone Evaluation system, as the league’s PITCHf/x-based balls-and-strikes review heuristic has been dubbed, is one component of a comprehensive umpire assessment program. The league claims an average ZE umpire accuracy rate of 95 percent or higher, although certain pitches on which the umpire — but not PITCHf/x — is blocked by the catcher are excluded from the count. Even so, with an average of 156 called pitches per game (between both teams), a 95 percent success rate suggests that eight incorrect calls still slip through, too many not to notice. The explanation, contrary to what you may have heard from hecklers, isn’t that umpires are incompetent. It’s that their job is impossible for human beings to do perfectly.

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– http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9940495/ben-lindbergh-possibility-machines-replacing-umpires

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AS the N.B.A. season gets under way, there is no doubt that the league’s best player is 6-foot-8 LeBron James, of the Miami Heat. Mr. James was born poor to a 16-year-old single mother in Akron, Ohio. The conventional wisdom is that his background is typical for an N.B.A. player. A majority of Americans, Google consumer survey data show, think that the N.B.A. is composed mostly of men like Mr. James. But it isn’t.

I recently calculated the probability of reaching the N.B.A., by race, in every county in the United States. I got data on births from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; data on basketball players from basketball-reference.com; and per capita income from the census. The results? Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-the-nba-zip-code-matters.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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The irony of the business of baseball is that the business has a seriousness that the game lacks: the fortune of a billion-dollar company rests on the shoulders of the twenty-five players competing to hold their spots on the roster, and an enormous pride comes with being one of those players. Now that I’ve quit, I will never again find myself in a position where the stakes are so high and I’m held accountable. I miss that the most. But quitting, for me, was still the right move.

A few days into the start of this season, my friend Anthony Rizzo, who plays first base for the Cubs, called me to say that he had told A. J. Burnett that the rookie who broke up his no-hitter had retired. Burnett replied, half joking, “I wish the kid had retired one year earlier.”

Sometimes I wish the same thing. For whatever reason, I was never the sort of player who could enjoy a game, a play, or a hit before moving on to prepare for the next one. It was only after I quit that I wished I hadn’t always kept my head down, relentlessly climbing to reach the top of the game, to fulfill an American dream. I wish I had looked up more often, even at the cost of some of my success. The American dream didn’t tell me that an experience only matters if I acknowledge it, that losing yourself in the game is a good way to lose what makes life meaningful. When you’re standing at the plate and you hit a sharp foul ball to the backstop, the spot on the bat that made contact gets hot; the American dream forgot to tell me to step back and enjoy the smell of burnt wood.

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– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2013/10/why-i-quit-major-league-baseball.html

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On Thursday, a new company, Fantex, announced the first-ever athlete I.P.O., selling shares tied to the earnings of Mr. Foster, a star running back for the Houston Texans.

Three days later, on Sunday, Mr. Foster had one of the worst outings in his five years in the National Football League. He carried the ball just four times for 11 yards before leaving the Texans game in the first half with a pulled hamstring.

The chance of injury was one of the many risks Fantex disclosed in the Foster I.P.O. Fantex is selling about $10 million worth of stock to pay Mr. Foster for a 20 percent interest in his future income, which includes the value of his playing contracts, corporate endorsements and appearance fees. Shareholders will own interests in a tracking stock whose performance is intended to be linked to Mr. Foster’s future economic success.

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– http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/for-star-athlete-i-p-o-a-stumble-on-the-field/?ref=todayspaper

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