Sex, Lies and Video Games (Mailbag Pt. 3)

Saucy insider secrets, Chargers and Falcons musings, red zone stats, a (brief) foray into politics, Civilization reviews and memories, and more.

Thanks for all of your questions this week! A few housecleaning items before we start the final segment of Mailbag:

• Several of you asked Combine-related questions. I am hard at work on draft and Combine prep. I’m not enough of a year-round draft analyst to provide useful pre-Combine content about who will run how fast next week. I also don’t know much about the inner workings of how prospects are selected for the Combine. Here’s the NFL’s broad gloss on how the process works.

• There was a question about the compensatory pick formula. It’s somewhat mysterious and really dense. Eagles writer Jimmy Kempski has the code mostly cracked but only tracks Eagles picks. At the zoomed-out level, losing more free agents than you sign equals more mid-to-late round picks one year later. The details are really fiddly. I admire folks who focus on that sort of pre-draft minutiae. It’s not my bag.

• Questions about how NIL interacts with current league minimums are also way out of my comfort zone. An expert referred to NIL as the Wild, Wild West two years ago, and we appear to be reaching the OK Corral stage. It’s pretty clear that famous quarterback prospects like Carson Beck or (last year) Sam Hartman have more to gain, on multiple levels, from getting paid to stay in college than from entering the NFL as less-than-first-round picks. But I don’t think anyone can extrapolate that to other positions and circumstances. No one is really tracking how much college athletes are making.

• Finally, folks often suggest that I compare teams or players to beers, Marvel characters and the like. These are always fun ideas, but they are hard to produce on demand. I’ve also written a lot of gags in just the last two weeks, and the jokes can really sound strained if I end up comparing Aaron Rodgers to The Batman Who Laughed. But I always appreciate the questions, and I will pounce on one when it feels organic and I’m not still a little washed from the season.

In summary, thanks for all of the questions, and I am sorry if I did not address yours this week!

Now onto the final batch of questions.

Why does my dad look at me like that? – Greg

Maybe he got a peek at your browser history.

As a long-time sports writer for a variety of outlets, you became privy over the years to what I'll call "dirty little secrets" about players and coaches that, for a variety of reasons, you couldn't publicly recount. With respect to (unnamed) retired or deceased individuals, what were some of the more notable revelations? – Dwight Jon Zimmerman

One problem with many of these dirty little secrets is that I sometimes hear two contradictory versions of the same secret.

There was once a quarterback who did something really awful in college, and two well-connected insiders told me “precisely,” blow-by-blow (so to speak), what went down. Neither tale reflected well on the player, and both were plausible, so neither sounded like a whitewash. Either could have been true. It was very literally like Rashomon.

I’ve heard tales of young quarterbacks ruining their careers via cocaine and wanton living and of young quarterbacks ruining their careers via video games and responding to news that they will spend a year on the bench with “Hooray! I can finally goof off!” I’ve learned to believe the rumor mill about such players, not because everything being said is true, but because everything being said is being believed by coaches and decision makers. The NFL’s self-fulfilling prophecies always fulfill themselves.

My favorite prurient tale comes from a non-football sport via a publicist. A young worker bee was frantically summoned into a famous coach’s hotel room during a team’s road trip. The coach’s wife had planned an unscheduled visit and would be arriving soon.

The hotel room, it turns out, had been transformed into an makeshift Fifty Shades of Grey dungeon to such a degree that no one mere mortal could turn it back into a generic deluxe suite in time for the wife’s arrival. There were swings hanging from the ceiling and such, per the tale. So the intrepid assistant-to-the-assistant donned their hazmat suit and helped tidy things up so the Missus did not know her late-middle-aged hubby hired playmates to indulge his leather-bound, acrobatic fantasies.

Does this story sound implausible to you? It does to me. I don’t think you can safely bolt sex apparatus to the ceiling of a hotel room without the maintenance staff noticing, and anything less elaborate than a sacrificial altar can be swept into a Hefty Bag without need of Harvey Keitel’s Pulp Fiction character. But the story was told to me as gospel. And that’s why much of this is not publicly recounted!

I first asked this on Twitter when you were with FO, then when you were with The Messenger. Now I ask again: what is wrong with the Chargers? Why are they like this? – JS

Sorry I never answered. Or perhaps I answered at The Messenger and you never saw it because it was swallowed by the white whale of managerial incompetence.

The Chargers have reached the playoffs nine times in the 21st century. They’ve had winning records in five other seasons without making the playoffs. That means they are often moderately successful. They’re almost always better than the perpetual doormats like the Jets/Browns/Jaguars but a far cry from the Chiefs/Patriots oligarchy.

The Vikings, Titans and Dolphins leap to mind as franchises sharing a similar fate with the Chargers. The Lions can be lumped into the same broad category, as can the Cowboys once we accept that you must be Gen X or older to remember their Super Bowl glory.

Two franchises have hogged nine of this century’s 25 championships, 10 if you think of the Brady/Gronk 2020 Buccaneers as reskinned Patriots. The Patriots or Chiefs have been AFC champions 15 times in the last 25 seasons, with Payton Manning’s teams nabbing four of the leftovers. So there have not been many opportunities to go around. The Chargers were in the position about 20 years ago that the Bills and Ravens are in now. But they never found a way to squeak into the Super Bowl, even when they went 13-3 or 14-2, due to all manner of twists of fate.

Once thing I have noticed about the Chargers throughout the late Philip Rivers era and into the Justin Herbert era: they never appear to be built to exploit a specific Super Bowl window. There are always two important players who were great two years ago (and are feasting on cap space) and two important players who will be great next year, but not enough players peaking at the same time. Khalil Mack and Joey Bosa were two of the most important players on last year’s defense, for example, while Joe Alt and Ladd McConkey may blossom into legit superstars this year, just in time for Bosa to crumble and Mack to either leave or get overpaid to stay.

Even if the Chargers finally line their ducks up in 2025, can you imagine them building a roster to rival the Bills, Chiefs or Ravens? Playing second-to-fourth fiddle behind dynasties for a quarter of a century is just no fun.

I've always been curious about the statement in the Football Almanac that red zone performance is much less consistent year-to-year than other parts of the game. Why do you think that is? To my eye, some teams do have schematic and talent advantages/disadvantages that show up disproportionately in the red zone and, given that those plays are so high-leverage for scoring points, I don't understand why that edge wouldn't be replicable (even setting aside that we're talking about a small sample size). The Vikings v. Rams wild card game this year comes to mind as one where the red zone play was markedly different from the rest of the game in a way that seems likely to recur if you play that game 10 times. – Substack User

You buried the most important variable – sample size – in the parenthetical aside!

There were 33,812 offensive plays from scrimmage in the 2024 regular season. There were 5,056 offensive plays in the red zone. That’s 15%. Those 15% of plays are some of the highest-leverage plays of the season. The third and fourth-down plays in the red zone – 1,327 of them, or 4% of all plays – typically represent the difference between a result of six, three or zero points. That’s only about 40-ish third/fourth down red-zone plays per team per season.

A 40-play sample is extremely statistically volatile. The difference between a fourth-and-short touchdown and a stuff amounts not just to six-to-eight points but 2.5 percentage points when calculating a team’s red-zone touchdown conversion rate. Two such plays equate to 5.0 percentage points. Five percentage points represents the difference between the 25th-ranked Rams (52.4%) and the 13th-ranked Eagles (57.4%) in red-zone touchdown conversion rate.

Some teams do have tactical advantages in the red zone. The Eagles and the Brotherly Shove spring to mind. Tactical or personnel advantages can matter when performing game-by-game matchup analysis. If the top-ranked red-zone offense is facing the worst red-zone defense, there could be a wagering edge to be gained. But if some team ranks 25th in overall offense but fourth in red-zone offense, it’s usually a safe bet that the red-zone performance is a fluke based on a handful of high-leverage successes.

One other point here: red-zone advantages or deficiencies should be evident elsewhere in a team’s analytical profile, like third/fourth-and-short conversion rate or overall rushing success rate. If the statistical indicators don’t line up, don’t trust the one most likely to provide a massive performance swing.

Although scoring wasn't up much, it seemed like the new kickoff rules affected field position. All the offense needed to do was get one decent first down and they could try a field goal, or would go for it on fourth down. Do statistics bear this out? – Andrew Leonard

The average starting field position this season was the 30.1 yard line. It was the 29.9-yard line in 2023 and the 31.1-yard line in 2022. So no difference there.

The average field position after kickoff returns did increase significantly, however, according to FTN statistics. Teams started drives after kickoff returns at the 28.7 to 31.3-yard lines in 2024. They started drives at the 24.2 to 26.6-yard lines in 2023. My guess is that the kickoff return advantage is being offset by a variety of other factors: higher gross punting distance, drives starting near the goal line after fourth-down stops, and so forth.

So Andrew’s instincts may be correct: after many kickoff returns, offenses are closer to scoring position than they have been in the past. If this is true and sustainable, it has real tactical implications. Kicking a late field goal, for example, becomes a riskier strategy if the likelihood that the opponent can quickly respond after a kickoff is higher.

This is actually a huge data question that’s a little beyond my processing capability on a Thursday morning in February. Perhaps Aaron Schatz is reading, or I will mention it to him, and we can wade in a little deeper.

The Falcons fooled you into thinking they were Super Bowl contenders at one point this season. Any larger lessons to be learned from that particular error? – Substack User

Yes: Don’t work backwards from the headline.

Now I shall level with you, dear readers. When I looked at the Week 9 slate of games on the morning of November 3rd, I didn’t see many compelling matchups. Sunday Night Football would pit Sam Darnold against Joe Flacco that week. The best late-afternoon matchup was Lions-Packers, which would only make for an interesting intro if the Packers won. (They didn’t.) The Eagles were still in wait-and-see mode, so their late-afternoon matchup with the Jaguars did not feel headline worthy.

So when the Falcons beat THE COWBOYS to rise to 6-3, it activated the Bleacher Report cortex of my brain. Write a funny headline. Fluff a topical team that just beat another topical team. Generate engagement. Integrity and credibility are for dweebs who don’t drive late-model Accords.

I couched the “Falcons Super Bowl” thing in as much equivocation and irony as I could muster. But I truly believed they could win the NFC South, earn a home playoff game and beat some NFC Wild Card. It was not far-fetched at the time. Remember that they had beaten the Eagles and were about to sweep the Buccaneers! Only the Super Bowl element of the argument was old-school exaggeration and SEO pandering. In my defense, I could not quite commit to it and ended up citing Night of the Hunter to signal the real internal struggle between my impulses for accuracy and self-promotion.

I would like to say that I learned my lesson about not writing misleading ledes and headlines in a shameless effort to attract subscribers. But I just titled a mailbag segment “Jalen Hurts … Hall of Famer???” So …

Would be interested in hearing your top 3 or 5 owners, and bottom 3-5 (which should generate a lot of snark). Perhaps a good series for the offseason would the top & bottom 3-5 in the Super Bowl era? Adam

My top three owners: Jeffrey Lurie (Eagles), Steve Bisciotti (Ravens) and Stan Kroenke (Rams). I am monitoring the Ravens’ handling of the Justin Tucker situation but saving deep dudgeon for when OTAs start. (My gut tells me Tucker will be released or suspended before anyone speaks at next week’s scouting combine.) Kroenke may sound like an odd choice, but his pockets are deep and he runs so many businesses/teams that he is relatively hands off.

Seahawks owner Jody Allen deserves mention for quietly following in her brother’s footsteps. Josh Harris is obviously a breath of fresh air compared to Dan Snyder, but 76ers fans have seen some wacky stuff.

My bottom three:

• Jimmy and Dee Haslam (Browns), a truckstop-fortune power couple that swears not to meddle and then spends $250 million on a scuzzwaffle who wasn’t even as great at football as advertised. Imagine if Yellowstone were renamed Gas Station Off I-80 and featured homely people in ugly locations instead of gorgeous actors and backgrounds, and you get the freakin’ Haslams.

• Woody Johnson (Jets), who is so stupid that he has joined forces with anti-vaccination/medication political magnates when his family fortune depends on pharmaceutical products. Johnson also lets his sons use the Jets locker room as a kind of petting zoo when they are trying to impress potential paramours. Not good!

• Michael Bidwill (Cardinals). Jerry Jones may be a sundowning egomaniac, but he would never force players to buy their own lunches in the team cafeteria.

An all-time bad owners list would indeed be fascinating. And also depressing. I don’t see myself carving out time to write about the likes of Dan Snyder, Norman Braman or Victor Kiam. When NFL owners are terrible, they are often terrible in a very gnarly way.

A Brief Political Interlude

We try to avoid politics here at Rick's Café Américain, but I will respond to two direct questions from subscribers.

Were there any NFL big tough-guy players that spoke out against the summary purging of the oh so controversial “End Racism” logo in the end zone? I know what wnba players would have done. – Richard Winsten

How do you expect black NFL players to react, if at all, to Trump's racism and despotism? – GS

During Super Bowl Week, I attended a symposium by the Player’s Coalition, the advocacy group formed by Malcolm Jenkins in the late-2010s and now chaired by Kelvin Beachum.

I was expecting some political brimstone. What I got instead was a sober lecture on heirs property reform. Jim Crow laws of the late-19th and early-20th century created lots of legal trapdoors for land inheritance which are still in place today and used to wrest old farmsteads away from black families. The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which has been passed into law in many states and is on the docket in several others, is designed to disable those traps so some bad-faith land developer cannot, say, buy 1% of a plot from a fifth cousin and then legally leverage that claim into a forced sale of the whole property.

I barely know what I am talking about on this topic. You can read more here and here. It’s a rather dry and technical topic: so dry and technical that folks who bristle at terms like “social justice” may not even recognize what they being asked to sign if it lands on their desk.

I’m as guilty as anyone of taking the political cheese, mistaking splashy token gestures for small meaningful ones, and even letting political vehemence curdle into something less-than-intersectional. Whenever I get the urge to hop on my soapbox and condemn NFL players or the league itself for not passing my sociopolitical litmus test, I take a deep breath and consider checking in at a local school board meeting, learning more about gubernatorial primary candidates, or at least lending my voice to something positive like The Trevor Project or the laws/issues mentioned above. I can’t expect any other private citizens to be more politically active than I am.

As you may have heard, former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe was arrested at a protest of a city council meeting in California. It happened after these questions were submitted. Apropos of nothing, Kluwe was wearing a Tecmo Bowl hoodie. If I am ever arrested at a protest, I hope to be repping not just democracy, but Civilization itself.

The Political Segment Has Ended. Let’s Talk Civ

Also, how did your love of Civ come about? I always enjoy reading your bits of Civ experience in your articles. One of my first memories is watching my dad play Civ 2 on the home computer and being fascinated with it. Played it religiously (to a fault) when my dad let me play it when I was 6 or 7 or so. Not as much now, but I will still play Civ 2 or Civ 3 from time to time. Thanks Mike! Love reading your work! – Matt Fernandez

I bought my first computer – the Atari 400 my parents bought me in the early 1980s does not count – in 1993. Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon was one of the first computer games I bought to go with that mighty system. The game came on two or three 3.5-inch floppy discs. One morning, my then-fiancee had to go to work, but I did not for some reason. I loaded up a game of Railroad Tycoon when she left and was still playing when she returned home. I was an unrepentant Railroad Tycoon junkie.

I never played Civilization or Civ II. I jumped onto the series with Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, which I really dug, then hopped onto Civ III. I liked having Civ III and then Civ IV loaded onto the laptop I brought to school during in-service days to while away the long, boring meetings. I wrote an “Ask Askia” bit for Walkthrough waaaayyyy back in 2011 based on Askia of The Songhai, who liked to burn settlements to the ground. Folks dug it. It can still be found in A Good Walkthrough Spoiled.

Civ V was a quiet companion when I left the classroom and my children were school-age, leaving me around the house for long afternoons that could not be entirely filled with writing.

By Civ VI, I had stopped playing most other games; even my sons were so advanced as gamers that I could not put up much of a fight in Smash Bros. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that Civ VI got me through the pandemic. It kept my mind engaged when there were no sports and my family of four was clanging around the house getting into one another’s way. I probably could have played the game competitively/professionally by 2022. I hope that doesn’t sound like bragging, because it’s a doozy of a thing to brag about, but I am GOOD at Civ VI.

I never go back and play past versions of Civ. But seeing that Railroad Tycoon video was like seeing photos from a forgotten vacation 30 years ago. Maybe I can find an emulator somewhere and build the transcontinental railroad again.

Can the offseason include detours like Civ 7 reviews? – Mike Abbott

I don’t try to go all the way with a new version of Civ during the first few dates. I prefer to take things slowly.

So far, all I have done in Civ 7 is play Egypt as Hatshepsut a few times, finally working my way into the Age of Exploration last Saturday morning. Like other gamers, I am frustrated by the user interface that makes it hard to find information I need, and the game needs a Restart button and other basic features, pronto. But as Egypt suddenly turned into the Abbasid Empire at the dawn of the Age of Discovery and my little cog ventured into ocean tiles and discovered uncharted islands filled with goodies, I felt the old thrill come back. The old “rush some settlers across the map” instinct returned, but I also knew that I couldn’t expect the same gameplay (smacking barbarians around, building 100 cities without consequences) to work.

This is not a video game Substack, of course. But I may share more thoughts in the dead of summer, when Civ 7 will be my primary form of recreation.

If you could go back in time 10 years, would you just start a Substack then, or do you think you would still need to take the lumps of the last 10 years and still start it when you did? – Mike Schobazaford

Ten years ago I was early in a six-year run at Bleacher Report. They paid me well, exposed me to a wide audience and taught me a lot about the industry. I became a better writer as a result of my experience there: some of the lessons of “clickbait,” like brevity and writing clean “hooks,” are worth learning. They also pushed me to write reported features now and then, which broadened my palette. I enjoyed my time there and cherish many of the memories.

Five years ago was when all hell broke loose. B/R cut lots of writers loose when the pandemic started as they pivoted toward cartoons and racial tensions. A friend suggested Substack at the time, but I was like, “No, that’s for political weirdos.” And while I was not 100% wrong by any means, I should have started a Substack when I was freelancing at the New York Times and contributing here and there to Football Outsiders in 2020 and 2021. Instead I worked for a click farm, where I wrote nothing of substance, made little money and may have done some damage to my self-esteem. My return to FO full time was a fun opportunity to reconnect with readers and work with some old friends, but … you know how that turned out. And The Messenger barely existed long enough for me to remember it.

I’m happy to be here now. Your support, of course, makes it possible. It’s been encouraging to discover that there’s still an audience for off-beat coverage, longer essays, features that don’t fit within a cookie cutter and so forth. I’m still working to grow that audience, but 2024 was one of the most fulfilling years of my career, teaching included. Thank you for subscribing, and thank you for sticking with me.