January 2015

There are certain things you can expect from every Super Bowl. Every year, there is a pre-game flyover, nachos, wings, halftime fireworks, more nachos, more wings, followed by a Gatorade bath for the winning coach. Sometime between the flyover and the final nacho, there will be several cringeworthy big hits.

Brandon Browner, a member of the Legion of Boom last year who now plays for the Patriots, made that very clear. He told ESPN that he would tell the Pats’ offense to “go after” Richard Sherman’s elbow. “Hit it, break it if you can,” he said.

The conversation about players going after opponents’ lingering injuries is certainly familiar to Pats tight end Rob Gronkowski. As noted a couple of months ago, Gronk’s surgically-repaired knee has been targeted by opposing linebackers and safeties all year long.

Earlier this season, when Gronk was hit in the knee by T.J. Ward (the player responsible for blowing out his knee in 2013), Gronk called it “a punk making a punk-ass play.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E-QJ4h9q1Q

Ward, like Browner, defended his right to go after an injured body part. He explained that if he tried to hit Gronk in the numbers, Ward, who weighs 60 pounds less, would “bounce off him.”

“I was taught that if you can take a guy’s wheels away from him, he’s no longer mobile, and that’s what you’ve got to do with big guys.”

Sherman jokingly told Browner that his comments would make things a lot harder for Pats’ receivers, but downplayed the exchange when pressed by the media.

“Nobody intentionally hurts anyone in this league that I know of. Guys have respect for one another and I know Brandon does too,” Sherman said.

Still, with everything on the line, the Patriots’ and Seahawks’ relentless defenses wouldn’t be caught making a lazy arm tackle in the Super Bowl.

No matter how much respect Sherman may have for the Pats receiving corps, he will likely have to bring down Gronk in the open field at some point on Sunday. Sherman is an excellent tackler, but he is three inches shorter and 70 pounds lighter. When he gets his chance, he’ll hit low too. If it’s extra painful for Gronk, so be it.

When Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson ascended the Dawn Wall at Yosemite National Park, considered the most challenging climb in the world, they propelled rock-climbing into the national stage. They hoped to inspire a new generation of climbers, and to correct the narrative about rock climbers. They are not adrenaline junkies, they are physical tacticians with their sights on the sky.

Unless they actually come out with an ESPN 8: The Ocho, you will likely not see rock climbing on the national stage again for some time. It is, however, a real sport. And it’s gaining in popularity. Climbers have a very special set of skills that allow them to scale massive walls, and like all other athletes, they have been subject to inquiry by academics in the sports medicine field. About 10 years ago, the British Journal if Sports Medicine published a study on the physiology of rock climbing. They found, unsurprisingly, that rock climbing is one of the most physically idiosyncratic sports there is.

While athletes in most major sports depend on a thrust from the legs and hips, rock climbers’ key physical attribute is forearm strength. Powerful wrist extensors help climbers to not just hang on to a given crack in a rock, but to hoist them up to the next one.

Another physiological oddity of rock climbing is that as the difficulty or intensity of climb goes up, the heart rate rises disproportionately against the rate of oxygen consumption. As we explored in the altitude article, heart rate and grip strength go hand in hand. It takes more pumps of the heart to generate local blood flow to the hands, especially when the hands are positioned above the heart.

On an optimistic note for those considering rock climbing, researchers gave found that the best rock climbers aren’t physiologically predisposed to the sport. The most important variables for a successful climber (grip strength, shoulder and hip flexibility, bent arm hang) are all trainable.

When a team under-performs and falls out of playoff contention, the risk-reward equation for playing though a nagging injury changes drastically for certain players. At that point the coaches, the front office, and the player may decide to “shut it down for the season.”

As we saw with Robert Griffin III this year, the decision to shut a player down stokes a variety of opinions among the hordes of online commenters, who tend to lambast players for not living up to their contracts. “If you can play, play,” they say. Some will even accuse a team of tanking.

Despite the noise from online commenters and dissatisfied season ticket holders, there are a number of benefits to letting a player shut it down.

From the player’s perspective, it might be worth the ice baths, the stretching, the anti-inflammatories, and the persistent pain when the playoffs are in sight. However, when the games don’t matter as much, it makes sense to step aside. A few extra months of healing could potentially extend a career by years. 

For the coach, when the playoffs are out of reach, the team’s strategy usually turns toward developing and evaluating young, unproven talent. With the hobbled veteran out of the lineup, this frees up playing time for  up-and-comers.

From an organizational standpoint, “shutting it down” is a means of maximizing the return on their multi-million dollar investment. If benching a proven veteran can increase the likelihood of a healthy and productive next season, then the team has little to lose by letting him sit.

Every year and in every major sport, there seem to be more and more incidences of teams deciding to shut a player down. While it may make sense for the team, they must not forget that it pits them against their fans, who understandably want to see the best product the team has to offer.