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    What to Watch in Sports Right Now

    The N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. titles were claimed, the N.H.L.’s Stanley Cup won and the French Open champions crowned — all in the last three weeks. But there’s still a lot for sports fans to look forward to. Here, some of the biggest events of the next week. FootballIn Week 6 of the N.F.L. season, the Cleveland Browns test their fierce rivalry with the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday at 1 p.m. E.T. Sunday, Oct. 18, on CBS; they are followed by Aaron Rodgers’s Green Bay Packers at Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers at 4:25 p.m. on Fox; and the N.F.C. West showdown between the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers at 8:20 p.m. on NBC. On Monday, the reigning Super Bowl champion, the Kansas City Chiefs, take on the Buffalo Bills at 5 p.m. on Fox and the NFL Network. Both teams are coming off their first losses of the season.After a lot of back and forth, the Power Five conferences — the Big Ten , Pac-12, Southeastern, Atlantic Coast and Big 12 — decided to bring college football back this fall (other sports, not so much). But recent outbreaks have postponed several games, including Louisiana State at Florida, Oklahoma State at Baylor and Vanderbilt at Missouri.One of the biggest games will have Coach Nick Saban’s Alabama team facing off against Tennessee at 3:30 p.m. on CBS on Saturday, while Notre Dame takes on Pitt on ABC at the same time. Auburn battles Mississippi on the SEC Network at noon, while Syracuse squares off against Clemson on ESPN also at noon.BaseballThe World Series starts Tuesday on Oct. 20 at Globe Life Field, in Arlington, Texas, times to be determined. A limited number of fans will be permitted to attend, rather than the cardboard cutouts the league has usually been using throughout the pandemic.And for the fans who clung to South Korean baseball while M.L.B. teams were halted, the Korea Baseball Organization’s regular season ends on Oct. 30, after which playoffs start. Watch on ESPN2 at 5:30 a.m. weekdays.SoccerMajor League Soccer is now in its regular season. On Monday, the New England Revolution will play the Philadelphia Union at 7:30 p.m.; Nashville and FC Dallas meet on Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. And the Seattle Sounders take on the Portland Timbers at 10:30 p.m. Thursday. All games are on M.L.S. Live on ESPN+.Abroad, the English Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga are all holding matchdays. Leeds United takes on Wolverhampton Wolves at 3 p.m. Monday. Most Premier League games are on fuboTV or NBC and NBC Sports Network; fuboTV also carries La Liga. Bundesliga and Serie A are on ESPN+.TennisAfter a riveting French Open for women’s and men’s tennis, eyes turn to the Ostrava Open in the Czech Republic starting Monday. Qualification lists are still being decided, but Elina Svitolina, ranked fifth, aims to come out on top after being defeated in the quarterfinals of the French Open. Stream it on DAZN, once finalized.Matteo Berrettini, ranked eighth overall, will vie for the top spot at the European Open in Antwerp, Belgium, after he tanked out of the French Open in the third round. The tournament starts Sunday Oct. 18 and continues through the 25th. Watch it on the event’s official site. More

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    Why a Perfect Spiral Football Pass Doesn’t Break the Laws of Physics

    On Sunday, when Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens or another strong-armed N.F.L. quarterback launches a deep pass, take a moment to admire the forces of physics he’s unleashed.When the ball leaves his hand, it points upward, in the direction of the throw. As it arcs through the air, spinning along the long axis without any visible wobble, the nose of the football dips, following the trajectory of the throw and pointing downward when it lands in the hands of the receiver.To most fans, this looks perfectly natural, the ball slicing efficiently through the air with less drag. To a physicist like Timothy J. Gay, it was befuddling.That is because what physicists see with their eyes seems to conflict with a fundamental property of motion known as the conservation of angular momentum. It states that the axis of a spinning object, such as the tight spiral of well-thrown football, will not change its orientation unless some force acts to twist it. It was not clear what force could be pushing the football’s nose down.Worse, the most simplistic analysis would suggest that the onrush of air from below would nudge the nose of the football up, not down, and flip it backward. If that were true, a long beautiful pass would be an impossibility.“That’s the paradox,” said Dr. Gay, a professor of physics at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, home of the Cornhuskers. “I worked on it for 20 years, and I didn’t make much progress till I brought in two smart people to help me and, and we spent three years yelling at each other about it.”Dr. Gay, whose main research is in a field known as polarized electron physics, has had a long interest in football, playing on the team at the California Institute of Technology when he was an undergraduate in the 1970s. Twenty years ago, he made a series of videos explaining basic physics concepts like inertia and momentum, which were shown during halftime at University of Nebraska games.But the answer to this problem eluded him.So what is pushing the nose of the football down as it flies through the air?The two smart people whom Dr. Gay enlisted were Richard H. Price, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and C. William C. Moss, who creates high-powered computer simulations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.They, too, were intrigued.“I played football in New York City a long time ago,” said Dr. Price; he attended Stuyvesant High School, which, like Caltech, is known for its high-achieving academics and not its athletics. “I aspired to be mediocre. Never quite got there.”Dr. Moss was a classmate and teammate of Dr. Gay’s at Caltech. “I couldn’t play anywhere else,” Dr. Moss said. “The coach gave me a red helmet and told everyone in the team, ‘Don’t kill the kid with the red helmet.’ True story.”Dr. Price said he had not thought about this problem until he and Dr. Gay met at a scientific conference and talked about it.“I went on to apply some pretty simple mathematics and do what physicists do,” Dr. Price said. “Which is to try and throw away all of the irrelevant details and get the heart of something. Throw away the bath water, looking very carefully to make sure there are no babies in it.”The first thought experiment was to eliminate the atmosphere from the equations. But then the only force acting on the football would be gravity, and that would act equally on all parts of the ball and not exert a twisting torque to push the nose down. “It is always going to point in the same direction, because it’s acting as a gyroscope,” Dr. Price said. “The tip of the nose will not fall over and go down.”Clearly, air resistance, along with gravity, was playing a key role — but not the one that the simplistic analysis would suggest. “It’s kind of cool, because you have these two effects, both of which would seem to have nothing to do with what we actually see,” Dr. Price said.The three scientists were not the first to examine this phenomenon, and others showed through wind tunnel experiments and computer simulations that thrown footballs do not violate the laws of physics.But they say their results, published this summer in the American Journal of Physics, are the first to provide a simple understanding of what is going on.The key is that even a star N.F.L. quarterback cannot throw a perfectly wobble-free pass. Also, the interactions between a spinning object and forces such as gravity and air resistance are often counterintuitive.This gets back to the analogy of a spinning football as a gyroscope. In a demonstration often used by physics professors, a gyroscope made of a bicycle wheel on an axle spins at hundreds of revolutions per minute while the axle is held horizontally. One end is placed in the loop of a suspended string. When the other end of the gyroscope is released, it remains almost horizontal, seemingly defying gravity. The unsupported end starts moving in a circle — what physicists call precession.The football also undergoes precession and this motion,creates an aerodynamic twisting that, on average, pushes the nose of the football down, the physicists showed.Dr. Gay said the findings could potentially even offer some tips to quarterbacks — for instance, that if a right-handed quarterback threw the pass with the ball slightly askew to the left initially, that might lower the total air resistance and allow it to travel a bit farther. “But I’m thinking those would be pretty marginal improvements,” he said.Brian Griese, a former quarterback for the Denver Broncos and other N.F.L. teams and now an analyst on ESPN, said that top-tier quarterbacks might be interested in learning more.“I think you’re always looking for information, always looking for an edge,” he said. “I read the paper, believe it or not, and it was very interesting. I actually have a daughter who’s 14 right now and studying trigonometry and so I shared it with her and she was interested in it.”Of course, professional athletes already intuitively know much of this. Dr. Price said he was watching a replay of a pass by Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs where the camera was facing in the direction of the oncoming pass.“I could count the number of wobbles, and they were in good agreement with the numbers in our paper,” Dr. Price said. “I joked to my colleagues, ‘He must have read our paper.’”Ben Shpigel contributed reporting. More

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    Coronavirus Confusion: Colts Report False Positives and Patriots Call Off Practice

    The Indianapolis Colts on Friday briefly joined the growing group of N.F.L. teams dealing with a potential outbreak of coronavirus cases. Hours later, though, the team announced that the “four individuals” who tested positive for the virus had been re-tested and confirmed to be negative.After the Colts said they were closing their practice facility, the New England Patriots — who had just emerged from a virus-inflicted week off — canceled their Friday practice session after recording one new positive. A second New England player initially tested positive as well on Friday, but the follow-up screening yielded a negative result.The confusion in Indianapolis mirrored a similar series of events last Friday involving the Jets, who closed and then quickly reopened their training facility after an initial positive result was not confirmed in a second test. The uncertainty and disruption also cast new doubt on the reliance on rapid testing to spot, and prevent, virus outbreaks as the league plows ahead with its schedule.The rash of false positives echoed several other incidents that have made headlines in recent months. In August, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio tested positive on a rapid test, only to confirm thrice by a laboratory test that he did not have the coronavirus. And on Oct. 2, officials in Nevada issued a statewide directive to nursing homes to halt use of two government-issued rapid tests that had produced a concerning number of false positives that could not be confirmed by more reliable tests. Under pressure from the federal government, the state reversed the order a week later.Although rapid tests for the coronavirus are faster, more convenient and cheaper than typical laboratory tests, they are far less accurate. They more frequently miss cases of the coronavirus, as well as mistakenly label healthy people as infected. More

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    Iker Casillas Remembers Everything

    The former goalkeeper on Real Madrid, managing Clásico rivalries and the “madness” of the toughest three weeks of his career. More

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    Premier League Rejects Reform Plan Pushed by Two of Its Owners

    LONDON — Less than a week after the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool shocked English soccer’s leagues, clubs and fans with reform proposals that would have led to the biggest changes in the sport in a generation, their big idea has been unanimously rejected.For now.At an emergency meeting of the Premier League’s 20 clubs on Wednesday, the ideas for remaking English soccer that were brought forward by United and Liverpool, England’s two most successful clubs — including reducing the size of the Premier League to 18 teams from 20 and handing more power to the country’s richest teams — were quickly shot down.The plans would have required the backing of 14 teams to pass, a figure that looked unlikely almost as soon as details of the project leaked on Sunday. The Premier League said Wednesday that its members had agreed unanimously that the proposal “will not be endorsed or pursued.”Neither United nor Liverpool has spoken publicly about the proposals, which were code-named Operation Big Picture. But they may be able to claim a Pyrrhic — and perhaps face-saving — victory after the Premier League said it would now speed up a more collaborative discussion to address the key points raised in the proposals.The ideas, which also included changes to prize money agreements as well as to the split of the television revenues that have made the Premier League the richest domestic soccer competition in the world, received vocal and widespread backing from owners of cash-strapped teams in the lower divisions, many of them seduced by promises of large cash handouts as they struggle to stay afloat in closed stadiums during the pandemic.But elsewhere, there had been a near-universal rejection of the plan, and accusations of opportunism leveled at United, Liverpool and other members of the so-called Big Six clubs, a group of the richest teams in the league, who would have stood to gain most if the reforms were adopted.Fan groups, the Premier League, England’s Football Association and even the British government, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, quickly aligned against the proposals. Operation Big Picture was the brainchild of the Liverpool owner John W. Henry and his billionaire counterpart at Manchester United, Joel Glazer, and it had the active and vocal support of Rick Parry, the chairman of the English Football League, the organization responsible for the three professional divisions beneath the Premier League, who had been involved in the discussions.“I think it was an acknowledgment in the room that English football’s model is a huge success, but it hasn’t been reviewed or modernized for a long time, and so perhaps there has been some systemic issues built up that need dealing with,” the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, told reporters after presiding over Wednesday’s meeting with club officials.In their totality, the plans would have been beneficial to the biggest clubs as well as to dozens of lower-division teams who have little hope of playing top-division soccer. A middle tier of clubs, aspirants for places in the Premier League and those in the lower reaches of the top division, would almost certainly have seen their fortunes suffer, however. That led to tense exchanges behind the scenes, with groups on all sides accusing one another of “self-interest.”Despite that, Masters insisted the days of tension — which included threats that the richest clubs might break away from the Premier League or even join the E.F.L. should they not get their way — had not damaged relationships between the league’s member clubs.“I don’t think it takes a huge amount to put things back together,” Masters said. “Actually, the sort of solidarity among the collective is incredibly strong. It takes quite a lot to pull it apart.“I don’t think it’s irreparably damaged the Premier League,” he added, “and I think that today’s meeting proved that.”The league now plans, he said, to speed up and expand discussions to reform its structure. The elements under discussion mirror those that the reform plan sought to tackle, including the competition’s structure, governance, financial regulation and the commercial and broadcasting arrangements that have been the engine of the Premier League’s growth since its inception in 1992.The plight of some of the lower divisions teams has become so dire, according to some E.F.L. chairmen, that without aid from richer clubs or the government — which has declined to provide it — a number of them will run out of cash before the end of the year. That had made the promise of an immediate payment of 250 million pounds, about $325 million, more important to them than the prospect of surrendering greater power over the future of English soccer to a handful of top teams.“Is it a concern? 100 percent it is. Do I trust them? No I don’t,” Peter Ridsdale, the chairman of Preston North End, a team in the second-tier Championship, told reporters on Tuesday.“However, today the Football League has got a unique opportunity if this remains on the table to perhaps protect the Football League in the long term, whereas at the moment in the short term there is real danger,” he added.In place of the cash bonanza being promised in Project Big Picture, the Premier League on Wednesday agreed to provide more modest short term support to the two lowest professional tiers. The league said it would provide a mix of interest-free loans and grants totaling 50 million pounds. More