The 11-3 Seattle Seahawks are either one of the luckiest teams in NFL history or one of the most clutch. When asked about the team’s record in close games, head coach Pete Carroll chalked up Seattle’s apparent good fortune to the latter, citing team leadership and poise under pressure. What he’s implicitly telling us and […]
Over the past few weeks, Hot Takedown has covered several cheating scandals, from the Astros’ sign stealing to state-sanctioned Russian doping. Now that the Patriots — a team that’s no stranger to scandal — is facing fresh allegations, we thought it was time to apply more evaluation and rigor to how we think about cheating […]
sara.ziegler (Sara Ziegler, sports editor): Week 15 of the NFL season saw some teams clinch playoff berths while others watched their postseason hopes fall mere yards short. So let’s get into what we learned. There’s a new No. 1 seed in the NFC, with the Seahawks jumping the Niners after San Francisco’s head-scratching loss to […]
Football is a struggle for leverage — a battle for favorable positioning between offensive and defensive players relative to the ball. Each play begins at the line of scrimmage with the possibility of a pass or run. While the NFL has gradually become a passing league due to rule changes and schematic innovations, the primacy […]
Eighteen months after Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer introduced Kirk Cousins to the media as his new quarterback and as the highest-paid player in NFL history, Cousins told the media that he wouldn’t be “playing quarterback here much longer” without significant improvement. At that point, after the second game of the season, Cousins had […]