Tag Archive for: Scott Mincher

THE FATHER TIME EFFECT

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By Scott Mincher

 

During the NFL’s wildcard weekend the young quarterbacks showed flashes of greatness, but it seems that almost every year there are at least one or two all-time greats battling it out in an attempt to add to their championship resume. It was no different this year and despite their best efforts you have to wonder if Brees and Brady’s best shot at another Super Bowl ring is in the rearview mirror. It certainly brings up an interesting topic of discussion and something in sports I’ve always found to be tantalizing. At what age do a player’s skills start to diminish? How old is too old and does hanging on to the game for too long taint a superstar’s legacy?

These questions can’t help but make me think of Michael Jordan my favorite athlete growing up as a kid in Campbell Ohio. It still feels weird picturing MJ in that Washington Wizards jersey and even though I owned a Jordan Wizards jersey as a kid It was the first first time since I could vividly remember in my earliest days of watching sports that I debated whether watching him felt the same as it did when he was king of the Bulls dynasty in the ’90s. Don’t get me wrong like any basketball fan I always was enamored with watching Jordan hoop. But the Washington years just felt different. As a kid when you see something or someone as your favorite or the best It’s hard to not be partial and to admit that that person or thing has weaknesses or flaws just like it can be in some ways as an adult. For the first time in MJ’s career, he looked human. That’s not to say that he still wasn’t a pretty damn good player with the Wizards. Despite an injury-plagued 2001-02 season, he led the team in scoring (22.9 ppg), assists (5.2 APG), and steals (1.42 SPG). However, torn cartilage in his right knee ended Jordan’s season after only 60 games, the fewest he had played in a regular-season since playing 17 games after returning from his first retirement during the 1994–95 season. He averaged 24.3 points, 5.4 assists, and 6.0 rebounds, and shot 41.9% from the field in his 53 starts. A lot of NBA players would do anything for a stat line like that, but because Jordan always wanted to be the best at everything the bar spectators had for him and the bar he set for himself was higher than the sky and at the time because of that it resulted in many fans viewing Jordan’s tenure with Washington as a decent one, that was miles away from the legendary Chicago dynasty leader that so many watched. At that time I think every NBA fan wanted to see if Michael would remain the best player in the world and his time with the Wizards still had great moments that were a must-watch for even casual sports viewers and although he might not have been quite the same Mike, he was still a mega catch and that’s extraordinary!

Another guy that captivated the hearts of the sports world was Brett Favre. Favre was a 9x Pro Bowler and Super Bowl XXXI champion quarterback with the Green Bay Packers but, in his last years played with the New York Jets and Minnesota Vikings. His tenure in Green Bay produced its fair share of iconic moments and with many wondering what the late 30’s QB had left in the tank his season with the Jets in 2008 started well. in Week 4 of the 2008 season, he threw six touchdowns against the Arizona Cardinals, a personal best and one shy of the NFL record. This performance led to him being selected as the FedEx Air Player of the Week. By Week 12, the Jets had compiled an 8–3 record, including a win over the previously undefeated Tennessee Titans. However, the Jets lost four of the last five games of the season, including the final game against AFC East divisional opponent Miami, who had acquired quarterback Chad Pennington after he was released from the Jets to make room for Favre. In those five games, Favre threw eight interceptions and only two touchdown passes, bringing his season total to twenty-two of each. Favre had complained of shoulder pain and had an MRI performed on December 29, 2008, which revealed a torn biceps tendon in his right shoulder. After the 2008 season had ended, in mid-January 2009, Favre told Jets General Manager Mike Tannenbaum, “it may be time to look in a different direction” regarding the quarterback position. On February 11, 2009, Favre informed the Jets that he was retiring after 18 seasons. He remained part of the Jets organization until April 28, 2009, when the Jets released Favre from his contract, thus allowing him to sign anywhere he wanted. By May 2009, he was officially cut from the Jets Reserve/Retired list. After an offseason of speculation, Favre officially signed with the Minnesota Vikings on August 18, 2009. He would go on to have a landmark season in which he surpassed former Vikings defensive end, Jim Marshall, for consecutive starts at one position, with 291, became the first quarterback in NFL history to defeat every one of the league’s 32 franchises since the NFL first expanded to 32 franchises in 2002, surpassed Dan Marino’s previous record for four-touchdown games, and was named to his 11th Pro Bowl. The Vikings finished 12–4 and advanced to the NFC Championship game, ultimately losing in overtime to the eventual Super Bowl XLIV champion New Orleans Saints. Despite the loss, Favre set playoff records for pass completions and passing yards previously held by Joe Montana. The next year during the 2010 season Favre achieved two milestones. He threw for his 500th touchdown and 70,000th yard against the New York Jets. On November 7, 2010, in a game against the Arizona Cardinals, Favre threw for a career-high 446 yards while rallying the Vikings from a 14-point fourth-quarter deficit to win in overtime. On December 13, 2010, due to a sprained shoulder, Favre was marked inactive for the game against the New York Giants ending his consecutive regular-season start streak at 297. Favre started a total of 321 games including post-season appearances. On December 20, 2010, while playing the Chicago Bears outside at TCF Bank Stadium due to the collapse of the roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Favre sustained a concussion after being sacked by Bears defensive end Corey Wootton. As a rattled Favre was helped to his feet by Vikings’ athletic trainer Eric Sugarman, he asked, “Suge, what are the Bears doing here?”. This would be his final appearance in an NFL game. Farve would later have some post-NFL health issues are another effect from playing a contact sport, Not to mention him playing it into his 40’s.

Age will always have an impact on a player’s body and many times a negative one. But at the time many football experts argued that Farve’s first season with the Vikings at age 40 was the best of his career and it makes you wonder if like what Jordan was able to do in more than a few games with Washington when he really shined If some superstars in sports at times do get better with age. No one knows how running back greats Jim Brown and Barry Sanders would have fared if they decided to play another 5 years or so and not retired when they were playing at an elite level, and It seems somebody like Tom Brady in his age 42 season is as savvy as ever, even if some of his physical skills have started to diminish. The bottom line is I believe that some of the brightest stars in sports have shown that even if father time is undefeated you’re only as old as you feel and if an athlete can’t do things quite the same at forty as they did when they were twenty it doesn’t mean that peak level performance is off the table in other aspects of their game. Let’s face it no sane football fan would turn down being able to watch Jim Brown or Barry Sanders in the modern NFL regardless of what their age would be.

Sports icons joining new teams may feel weird and take some time to get used to, especially if they’ve been with one team for most of their career, but Fave will always be a Packer, just like MJ will always be a Bull and weather they or anybody before or after them tried or tries to play for a couple of years or a couple of decades just try to enjoy the show as much as possible because even the best of the best will someday have to deal with the father time effect.

THE GRASS ISN’T ALWAYS GREENER

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By Scotty Mincher

Here at YSN, we take pride in working together as a team. In modern-day sports though, One could certainly make the case that sports have become more about individuals than teams. To use the NFL as an example, It’s pretty easy to look at the Browns trade for Odell Beckham Jr. You can go back to times after Cleveland officially acquired Beckham and the press conference. At which he stated that playing with his best friend wide receiver Jarvis Landry was like a dream come true considering the two are childhood buddies and played at LSU together. If you fast forward to now the Browns, unfortunately, have underachieved at just 6-7 and are on the outside looking in when it comes to the AFC playoff picture and there are reports by Fox Sports’s Jay Glazer that Beckham wants out of Cleveland. We don’t know what Odell’s thinking and how valid those reports are, But it does beg an important question in today’s sports world. Does the modern-day player value the concept of a team or free agency more? It’s become extremely rare now in days that a player stays with one team his or her entire career like Derek Jeter did during a 19-year tenure with the New York Yankees. In sports, a free agent is a player who is not bound by a contract and so is eligible to join any team. There are three different types of free agents in sports, the unrestricted free agent, the restricted free agent, and the undrafted free agent. Even though I believe that free agency can add excitement for sports and sports fans, In many cases it has killed the thirst to root for an entire team of players and increased the thirst to follow and root for players or brands alone. In the NBA a fitting example would be the career of Lebron James who is a once in a lifetime talent that’s called Cleveland home but has played for two other cities and won two titles for Miami and one for his hometown Cavaliers.

Another good example would be Bryce Harper in MLB leaving Washington for Philly in free agency while signing a contract for ungodly money. If you’re a Bryce Harper fan you’re happy that he got his big payday and if you’re a Washington Nationals fan you’re even more elated your team won a World Series without him. I’m not saying that Harper didn’t care about his teammates or the city of Philadelphia and the fans but the free agency just like the name does give players freedom On top of the fact that an enormous payday will always be enticing. In the case of Lebron, someone who’s made way more money just off endorsements than most people make in their lifetime, It seems to be more about the location and the glamour and prestige of Los Angeles along with the increased ability to keep another star to play with him because of it. Lebron probably still has a special place for Cleveland in his heart, but everybody likes having options.

When I break it down I feel free agency is good from an individual perspective but bad from a team perspective and so far, the grass on the other side hasn’t been as green as James and Harper envisioned it would be. Who knows if they’ll eventually be content with everything from an in-game point of view but year one for James and Harper with their new teams didn’t go super smooth, As they both missed the playoffs and Harper’s team won a championship without him, they still have their money, fame, and fans but there’s a lot of work to be done on an individual and team level to get them to where they wanna be. In my opinion, a player that transfers to another school at the college level is partially different. In college, if you transfer to another school you must complete one academic year in residence at the new school before you can play for or receive travel expenses from the new school unless you qualify for a transfer exception or waiver. Because of this even with student-athletes transferring to different schools being common, It’s not as common as a pro athlete leaving for a new team via free agency. In some cases like with Ohio State’s Justin Fields, you may not have as many options like a pro athlete would in free agency because of living expenses and upperclassmen being ahead of you on the depth chart at quarterback, which is the hardest position to start at in football, and arguably the hardest position in all of sports. I think when it comes to Fields it ended up working out well for his former team, That being Georgia and his current team Ohio State. In his true freshman season at Georgia in 2018, Fields served as the backup to starting quarterback Jake Fromm. Following Georgia’s loss to Alabama in the 2018 SEC Championship Game, Fields announced that he intended to transfer schools. On January 4, 2019, Fields announced his intent to transfer to Ohio State. Fields, who would normally be required to sit out for one year due to NCAA transfer rules, sought a waiver to be able to play immediately for Ohio State. Fields enlisted the help of attorney Thomas Mars, who helped secure immediate eligibility for several transfers from Ole Miss in 2018, including quarterback Shea Patterson. Mars and Fields argued that Fields should be granted a waiver for immediate eligibility due to an NCAA guideline that waives the waiting period for athletes with “documented mitigating circumstances that are outside the student-athlete’s control and directly impact the health, safety, and well-being of the student-athlete.” Fields was subject to an incident at Georgia in which a Bulldogs baseball player used a racial slur against Fields. This was believed to be the main incident constituting Fields’ claim of “mitigating circumstances”, although the full contents of the waiver request were never made public. On February 8, 2019, Fields was granted immediate eligibility for the 2019 season by the NCAA. All in all, I think it’s worked out well for both football programs and universities and has helped at least slow the talk of dynasties at Clemson and Alabama. Fields has led the Buckeyes to the college football playoff this year, and Jake Fromm had the Bulldogs in the playoff conversation, So a guy transferring schools in college can be beneficial in numerous ways differing the free agency a lot of times in the pros where the player reaps all the rewards. The last stop we’ll make for this story is on the high school level. High school sports are too affected by the ability of a student-athlete to transfer. According to ohsaa.org If a student transfers at any time after the fifth day of the student’s ninth-grade year or after having established eligibility before the start of school by playing in a contest (scrimmage, preview/jamboree, Foundation game or regular season/tournament contest), the student shall be eligible, insofar as transfer is concerned, ONLY until the first 50% of the maximum allowable varsity regular-season contests (including all scrimmages, preview/jamboree/Foundation games) have been completed in those sports in which the student participated (participation being defined as playing in a contest) during the 12 months immediately preceding this transfer. This transfer consequence shall remain in effect until the one-year anniversary of the date of enrollment in the school to which the student transferred, at which time the student is no longer considered a transfer student.

All of this, along with open enrollment has a major effect on high school athletics because of the scenario where you could have too many players go out for one sport or not enough. I think that the OHSAA regulations in more recent years, have been effective and brought parity to an all-time high on the high school level and while no system is perfect and we still have our issues and hot button topics like open enrollment, smaller schools are making noise like never before. You can take Springfield Tigers football being the state runner up as an example, showing at times the little engine can get the job done and that on the other side the grass isn’t always greener!

JUST PEACHY: THE EVOLUTION OF BASKETBALL

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By Scotty Mincher

 

Here at YSN, I’ve had the pleasure of covering and writing about a lot of football over the last month. It’s a great game But with the upsets, we’ve already seen in college hoops, the almost certain probability you’ll see something special on a nightly basis in the NBA, And the highschool season ready for liftoff we’re more than ready and fired up to dissect the beauty of the origin of yet another grand game. We already covered the history of Ohio high school football playoffs a few weeks ago, so I don’t think it comes as too much a surprise that in this story we’ll focus on Mr. Spalding’s existence or more simply put the history of basketball.

It’s long been a favorite sport of mine going back to my days at Lowellville’s K-12 campus when I did a book report on a transcendent baller “Pistol” Pete Maravich who averaged a whopping 44.2 points per game in college. Like the football playoffs in Ohio, Bball has a long and rich history. In early December 1891, Canadian James Naismith, the inventor of the game and a physical education professor and instructor at the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School (YMCA) (today, Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts, was trying to keep his gym class active on a rainy day. He sought a vigorous indoor game to keep his students occupied and at proper levels of fitness during the long New England winters. After rejecting other ideas as either too rough or poorly suited to walled-in gymnasiums, he wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto a 10-foot (3.0 m) elevated track. In contrast with modern basketball nets, this peach basket retained its bottom, and balls had to be retrieved manually after each “basket” or point scored; this proved inefficient, however, so the bottom of the basket was removed, allowing the balls to be poked out with a long dowel each time. 

Another interesting fact about basketball is that it was originally played with a soccer ball. These round balls from “association football” were made, at the time, with a set of laces to close off the hole needed for inserting the inflatable bladder after the other sewn-together segments of the ball’s cover had been flipped outside-in. These laces could cause bounce passes and dribbling to be unpredictable. Eventually, a lace-free ball construction method was invented, and this change to the game was endorsed by Naismith. (Whereas in American football, the lace construction proved to be advantageous for gripping and remains to this day.) The first balls made specifically for basketball were brown, and it was only in the late 1950s that Tony Hinkle, searching for a ball that would be more visible to players and spectators alike, introduced the orange ball that is now in common use. 

Dribbling was not part of the original game except for the “bounce pass” to teammates. Passing the ball was the primary means of ball movement. Dribbling was eventually introduced but limited by the asymmetric shape of early balls. Dribbling was common by 1896, with a rule against the double dribble by 1898. The peach baskets were used until 1906 when they were finally replaced by metal hoops with backboards. A further change was soon made, so the ball merely passed through. Whenever a person got the ball in the basket, his team would gain a point. Whichever team got the most points won the game. The baskets were originally nailed to the mezzanine balcony of the playing court, but this proved impractical when spectators in the balcony began to interfere with shots. The backboard was introduced to prevent this interference; it had the additional effect of allowing rebound shots. Naismith’s handwritten diaries, discovered by his granddaughter in early 2006, indicate that he was nervous about the new game he had invented, which incorporated rules from a children’s game called duck on a rock, as many had failed before it. Frank Mahan, one of the players from the original first game, approached Naismith after the Christmas break, in early 1892, asking him what he intended to call his new game. Naismith replied that he hadn’t thought of it because he had been focused on just getting the game started. Mahan suggested that it be called “Naismith ball”, at which he laughed, saying that a name like that would kill any game. Mahan then said, “Why not call it basketball?” Naismith replied, “We have a basket and a ball, and it seems to me that would be a good name for it.” 

The first official game was played in the YMCA gymnasium in Albany, New York, on January 20, 1892, with nine players. The game ended at 1–0; the shot was made from 25 feet (7.6 m), on a court just half the size of a present-day Streetball or National Basketball Association (NBA) court. At the time, football was being played with 10 to a team (which was increased to 11). When winter weather got too icy to play football, teams were taken indoors, and it was convenient to have them split in half and play basketball with five on each side. By 1897–1898 teams of five became standard.

As we attempt to put a nice holiday bow on this story, I think it’d be the most fun to talk about the two most revolutionary parts of basketball, the three-point shot, and the dunk. The three-point line was first tested at the collegiate level in 1945, with a 21-foot line, in a game between Columbia and Fordham, but it was not kept as a rule. There was another one-game experiment in 1958, this time with a 23-foot line, in a game between St. Francis (N.Y.) and Siena. In 1961, Boston University and Dartmouth played one game with an experimental rule that counted all field goals as three points. In the direction of Abe Saperstein, the American Basketball League became the first basketball league to institute the rule in 1961. Its three-point line was a radius of 25 feet (7.62 m) from the baskets, except along the sides.[3] The Eastern Professional Basketball League followed in its 1963–64 season. 

The three-point shot later became popularized by the American Basketball Association (ABA), introduced in its inaugural 1967–68 season.ABA Commissioner George Mikan stated the three-pointer “would give the smaller player a chance to score and open up the defense to make the game more enjoyable for the fans”. During the 1970s, the ABA used the three-point shot, along with the slam dunk, as a marketing tool to compete with the NBA; its ninth and final season concluded in the spring of 1976. Three years later in June 1979, the NBA adopted the three-point line for a one-year trial for the 1979–80 season, despite the view of many that it was a gimmick. Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics is widely credited with making the first three-point shot in NBA history on October 12, 1979; In the NBA, three-point field goals became increasingly more frequent along the years, especially by mid-2015 onward. The increase in latter years has been attributed to NBA player Stephen Curry, A guy every Cavs fan hates! Who is credited with revolutionizing the game by inspiring teams to regularly employ the three-point shot as part of their winning strategy. That’s a little bit on the history of the three-point shot, Now it’s time to slam it home (pun intended) The slam dunk is usually the highest percentage shot and a crowd-pleaser. through the 1970s, players like David Thompson, Julius Erving, and Darryl Dawkins popularized the move with more athletically executed dunks (with high-flying jumps and turns). This transformed dunking into the standard fare it is today. If you dig a little deeper you’ll find that dunking was first introduced to all of us in the 1940s and 50’s when 7-foot center and Olympic gold medalist Bob Kurland was dunking regularly during games. There are also many different types of dunks from the Windmill to the Tomahawk to the Alley-oop etc. That’s just a brief taste of one of the most exciting plays in sports and a little bit on the history of the game that classic sports movie Hoosiers glorified for putting a leather ball in an iron hoop. I hope everyone enjoyed the ride and until next time please remember to do like Mr. Cavalier Austin Carr and Throw The Hammer Down!!