Football

Arizona shocked Seattle in overtime, Baker Mayfield caught fire after a rough start and the Steelers held on to beat the Titans. More

After the ball hooked right of the upright, the Pittsburgh Steelers jumped and danced and cavorted along their sideline. As it fluttered wide, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s jaw fell. He appeared to mutter, “He missed it,” to no one in particular, before turning, smiling, to his teammates.The Steelers retreated to their locker room at Nissan Stadium in Nashville on Sunday as the only unbeaten team in a rugged A.F.C., but at some point over the next 15 minutes or so, after the initial delight of a 27-24 victory, their moods changed. It was as if they had muddled through a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day instead of their opponents, the Tennessee Titans (5-1); as if they were the ones who had lost when a field-goal attempt in the waning seconds soared untrue.“I don’t take it for granted, but there’s a way that we like to play,” Steelers defensive lineman Cameron Heyward said. “There’s a lot of meat on that bone.”“No one’s really satisfied after today,” outside linebacker T.J. Watt said.“There’s a lot for us to be urgent about,” Coach Mike Tomlin said. “We won’t spend a lot of time celebrating this or appreciating this, because of our work that lies ahead.”The Steelers, who led by 24-7 at halftime, dominated the first half Sunday. They scored on their first four drives. They converted their first seven third-down attempts. They silenced running back Derrick Henry and muffled quarterback Ryan Tannehill, and held the Titans, the A.F.C. team with the highest scoring average, to a single touchdown.The Steelers (6-0) flailed in the second half Sunday. Their offense consisted of a measly field goal. They allowed a 73-yard touchdown. Roethlisberger threw two interceptions. The second, by Amani Hooker in the end zone, gave Tennessee, trailing by 3 points, the ball with 2 minutes 35 seconds remaining.In four of the Titans’ five wins, Tannehill had led them on game-winning drives or in a fourth-quarter comeback, and as he dissected Pittsburgh — 7 yards to Corey Davis on third-and-2, 21 to A.J. Brown on third-and-12 — it seemed altogether possible, if not likely, that he would do so again. The Titans, after having a first-and-10 at the Pittsburgh 25, moved backward on their next three plays — but, apparently, not far enough.Tennessee kicker Stephen Gostkowski is more accurate from far distances. He had made all five field-goal attempts of at least 50 yards this season. But he had missed five of 10 from 49 yards or closer, including two last week against Houston and three in the Titans’ season opener at Denver. The attempt on Sunday, with 19 seconds remaining, was from 45 yards, and the result was predictable.The loss does not remove the sheen from the Titans’ strong start, nor does it dismiss their standing within a demanding A.F.C., where Baltimore, Kansas City and Buffalo also lurk.Over the coming weeks and months, that knot of competitive teams will no doubt untangle, but whether Tennessee contends for the conference’s top seed — and the only first-round bye in the playoffs — and not just an A.F.C. South title depends in part on whether its defense can solve its third-down troubles. The Titans entered the game as the worst third-down defense in the league, allowing conversions on 57.8 percent of chances, yet somehow fared worse Sunday: Pittsburgh was 13 of 18.“We’re not starting fast enough on defense,” Titans safety Kevin Byard said. “It’s kind of like we’re expecting the offense to always dig us out of a hole.”In that sense, the Steelers are the more complete team, with pass-rushing book ends, a stout secondary and an offense that saw 10 players — including Diontae Johnson, who caught nine passes for 80 yards and two touchdowns — touch the ball. That they won despite a minus-3 turnover margin seemed to vex Tomlin, but seven weeks into the season, no other team in the conference had weathered challenges — injuries and attrition and adhering to coronavirus protocols and, on Sunday, a formidable comeback from a formidable team — better than it had.After it was over Sunday, after improving to 6-0 for the first time since 1978, the Steelers, who play at Baltimore next week, received not a shimmering trophy or commemorative apparel or a Gatorade bath, but rather a reward that’s less tangible. They briefly savored the satisfaction that accompanied an accomplishment that would mean far, far more in January or February. More

The N.F.L. has fined the Tennessee Titans $350,000 for their handling of the largest outbreak of coronavirus infections this season that forced the league to reschedule a dizzying array of games.The league, though, did not suspend anyone associated with the Titans, including their coach and general manager, or players who were seen on video participating in an ad hoc practice away from the team’s facility. The fine was imposed for failing to communicate workout protocols and not wearing masks in facilities.Commissioner Roger Goodell said two weeks ago that the team, who at 5-0 are among the league’s most exciting on the field, was cooperating with the league’s investigation. He had signaled that no Titans would be held accountable for the outbreak. “This is not about discipline — this is about keeping our personnel safe,” Goodell said on Oct. 13.The league also stopped far short of issuing much stiffer penalties, including the loss of draft picks and the forfeiting of games.The penalties, which were first reported by NFL.com on Sunday, stem from reports that Titans players continued informal practices away from the team’s facility even after the outbreak — 23 players and team personnel are known to have tested positive for the virus since Sept. 24 — led the league to prohibit the team from holding in-person activities.An investigation by the N.F.L. and the N.F.L. Players Association investigated players who held an off-site workout on Sept. 30, a day after the Titans and the Vikings — their opponent the weekend before — were told to have no in-person activities.The league and union also looked at how the virus entered the Titans’ facility and how it spread. The league’s chief medical officer declined to disclose what they had learned.The league may now be forced to turn its attention to the Las Vegas Raiders, who have had several players test positive for the virus. This week, several members of the offensive line were sent home because they had been in close contact with a teammate, Trent Brown, who has tested positive and, NFL.com reported, has not worn a tracking device consistently to allow the league to do contact tracing. He and his teammates were also reportedly not wearing masks while in close contact with one another.Four players came off the league’s Covid-19 reserve list and were cleared to play after they tested negative for the virus. The Raiders play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Las Vegas on Sunday afternoon.Still, the fine, the largest for a violation of the protocols, came as the league tries to keep its season on track amid a spike in infections that has spread to at least four teams. The decision to penalize the Titans came three weeks after the league announced stronger measures designed to lower the risk of infections, including using video surveillance cameras in team facilities to monitor compliance with protocols that include the wearing of masks.The league also said that teams not in compliance with its rules could be fined, lose draft picks and even forfeit games if their actions affected other teams.The outbreak on the Titans had already led to the postponement by three weeks of their game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, which was originally planned for Oct. 4.With the number of cases on the team continuing to grow, and the team unable to meet in person to practice for nearly two weeks, the league postponed the Titans matchup against the Buffalo Bills, moving it from a Sunday to a Tuesday.The penalties and postponement are not the only scheduling problems the league has been forced to tackle. The league postponed by a day, to Monday, the Week 4 New England-Kansas City game after it was revealed that Cam Newton, the Patriots’ star quarterback, and a Chiefs practice squad quarterback had tested positive for the virus on Oct. 3. On Wednesday, Stephon Gilmore, another Patriots star, tested positive as well, calling into question the league’s decision to allow the teams to play.The league has not yet taken the step of adding an 18th week to the season to accommodate postponed games. Nor is there any serious consideration yet of shortening the season. Instead, the league will continue to rely on juggling the existing schedule, including rescheduling games by a day or two, to a Monday or a Tuesday, for example.The league has also fined coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars for failing to wear their face masks properly during games. The Las Vegas Raiders were also fined $50,000 last week for allowing an unauthorized person in their locker room, potentially exposing members of the team. Ten Raiders were fined as much as $30,000 this week for attending a crowded, indoor charity event and not wearing masks while there, violating local health guidelines.Normally, the competition committee, which includes current coaches, would debate whether teams ought to be penalized for their actions. But because those coaches might have an incentive to come down hard on a rival team, the league created a committee of ex-coaches, general managers and retired players, including former Giants Coach Tom Coughlin and former Colts General Manager Bill Polian, to make recommendations to the commissioner.The commissioner, though, has ultimate authority over penalties.In the league’s century-long history, games have been canceled, postponed or moved because of severe weather or other instances, including when the roof of the Metrodome collapsed. Only one game appears to have been forfeited, though the records are incomplete.In 1921 — the league’s second year — the visiting Rochester Jeffersons refused to take the field against the Washington Senators because of the poor condition of the field. In those days, if there was a dispute over whether the field was unplayable, the manager of the home team would decide whether to cancel the game. The Jeffersons’ manager did not want to risk injuring his players and wanted the game canceled. But with fans already in their seats, the Senators’ manager wanted to play, so the referee ruled that the Jeffersons had forfeited the game, according to a newspaper article at the time.The forfeited game does not appear in any record books, however. Final standings were not published at the time and only reconstructed years later, and often imperfectly. Only teams that played a minimum of six games against other league members were included in those reconstructed standings, and the Washington club failed to meet that threshold that year, according to Bob Carroll, who wrote about the game for the journal, The Coffin Corner. More

Antonio Brown, the former All-Pro wide receiver who is finishing an eight-game suspension after pleading no contest to burglary and battery charges and receiving two years’ probation, will visit the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his first step toward a return to the N.F.L.Brown, who has not played since Week 2 of last season, still faces a league investigation into accusations in a lawsuit that he sexually assaulted his former trainer in 2017 and 2018. Brown has denied the allegations.If Brown, 32, passes a physical and signs with the Buccaneers, he will then need to take a coronavirus test and go through an entry program that involves other precautions against the virus. He would be eligible to play on Nov. 8, when Tampa Bay faces the New Orleans Saints in Week 9.Brown’s re-emergence before the end of his suspension speaks to how teams in need of players tend to look past their off-field behavior, including accusations of domestic abuse, sexual assault and harassment. The league remains under scrutiny for how it has handled such cases in recent years.Brown’s troubles extend further. After sparring with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the team that drafted him and saw him emerge as a star, he was traded to the Raiders for two draft picks in March 2019. Oakland released him that September, after a tumultuous training camp that included fights with his employers and a protracted dispute over the type of helmet he could wear.The New England Patriots picked him up, but after Brown lashed out against another woman who, in a Sports Illustrated article, accused him of a separate incident of sexual misconduct, the Patriots let him go. Brown competed in one game with the Patriots, scoring a touchdown.The quarterback who threw that pass — Tom Brady — is now with the Buccaneers and has reportedly urged the team to sign Brown.Over the past two years, Brown has tried to defend himself on social media, and since being released in 2019, he has said at least twice that he plans to retire from football. Brown also lashed out at the Patriots, after they reportedly reduced his signing bonus.The N.F.L. said that any further violations by Brown of the league’s personal conduct policy “will likely result in more significant discipline.” Brown did not appeal his suspension, which was issued in July, and he hinted that he wanted to get back to football.“I look forward to new beginnings,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I appreciate the N.F.L. giving me the opportunity to work on myself and improve.”Brown was once considered one of the league’s most prolific and popular players — known for his penalty-inducing touchdown celebrations and a season on the reality TV show “Dancing With the Stars” — but his career has been in a tailspin since his disputes with the Steelers in 2018.Still, his talents as a receiver are well known. Brown worked out with Brady this summer and also with Washington quarterback Dwayne Haskins and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson in separate practices. He also worked out with Lamar Jackson, the star quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens, who publicly lobbied for the team to sign the receiver.Buccaneers Coach Bruce Arians, who was the offensive coordinator for the Steelers while Brown was there, said in March that Brown was “not a fit” for his team.But two of the Buccaneers’ wide receivers — Mike Evans and Chris Godwin — have been battling injuries. More

This has been a forgettable season for the Giants. But a victory over Washington’s Football Team last week at least gave the team its first win, and Thursday’s game against the Eagles in Philadelphia produced the kind of electrifying moment that brings hope for reinvigorating a season. Almost, anyway.Trailing the Eagles, 10-7, in the third quarter, and starting a drive at his 12-yard line, Giants quarterback Daniel Jones faked a handoff and rolled right. The fake fooled the Eagles’ defense, and as Jones turned upfield there was nothing but green grass in front of him. So he sprinted into daylight.20, 30, 40, 50, 40 … the yards rolled away with no defender in sight. Jones was on his way to giving the Giants the lead and providing the kind of signature play replayed endlessly on highlight shows and viral clips and in the minds of Giants fans eager for a good memory from this year.And Jones was flying. At his 43 he hit 21.23 miles an hour, according to NextGen stats, the fastest top speed by a quarterback over the last three seasons. By the time Jones got to the 35 it was clear that he was going to score.And then, just like last, it was clear he wasn’t.It was just one bad step, one foot touching down an inch or two away from where it ideally should have landed. But Jones’s next step was a little worse, and after a few more his balance was gone.Jones leaned forward, tried and failed to catch himself and then, just 15 yards from the end zone, tumbled to the ground.Jones rolled forward to the 8 and tried to get up, but a late-arriving Eagle ended the play by touching him. In the end, Jones had gained 80 yards, the longest run by a quarterback since 2015. But he had needed 88 to score, and the way the play ended — a player running free and then falling, untouched and unchallenged — ensured that it would have a long life, not in video compilations of glory, but of ignominy.Within minutes, rival players were weighing in.“I tried to run faster than I was running, and I got caught up,” Jones told reporters after the game.Glass-is-half-full Giants fans will point out that the team scored to take the lead four plays after Jones’s tumble. But few will remember that. (Congratulations, Wayne Gallman: Your 1-yard run is now a great trivia answer.)The bigger problem for the Giants is that they blew an 11-point lead with five minutes left and lost the game, 22-21, to fall to 1-5. Next Monday, Tom Brady and the Buccaneers come to town. Lowlight fans and Twitter quipsters will be waiting. More

Bill Mathis, a versatile running back who was an original member of the New York Jets franchise, died on Tuesday. He was 81.The team announced his death but did not say where he died or specify the cause, although it said that he had been dealing with “physical and cognitive issues” for some time.Mathis played his entire career in New York. He joined the Titans, as the Jets were originally known, in 1960, the year the American Football League began. He was named the franchise’s Most Valuable Player in 1961 and was selected an A.F.L. All-Star in 1961 and 1963. And he helped the Jets beat the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969 in a stunning upset.In his 10-year career, Mathis rushed for 3,589 yards and 37 touchdowns. He also caught 149 passes for 1,775 yards and nine scores.William Hart Mathis was born in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Dec. 10, 1938, and grew up in Manchester, Ga. He was a star at Clemson University in South Carolina and was named a member of the school’s Hall of Fame. He is also in the Georgia and South Carolina sports halls of fame.In 1960 he was drafted by both the Denver Broncos of the newly formed A.F.L. and the San Francisco 49ers of the N.F.L. His draft rights were later held by the A.F.L. Houston Oilers, who traded him to New York shortly before the start of the league’s first season.Mathis earned a reputation as a tough competitor who pushed through injuries. A knee injury kept him out of three games in 1962, but he played in every other one of the team’s 143 games over his 10 seasons with the franchise, including the team’s lone Super Bowl appearance.The star of that game, the flamboyant quarterback Joe Namath, was Mathis’s roommate on the road. According to the Jets, Coach Weeb Ewbank asked Mathis to room with Namath with instructions to “keep Namath out of trouble.”After being one of the team’s primary ball carriers early in his career, Mathis became a lead blocker for Matt Snell and Emerson Boozer. He had three catches for 20 yards in the Super Bowl, with two of them prolonging scoring drives in the Jets’ 16-7 victory.He played one more season after that before retiring.Mathis was one of only 20 players who played in the A.F.L. for the league’s entire 10-year existence., and one of just seven who played all 10 seasons with one A.F.L. franchise. The A.F.L. and N.F.L. merged in 1970.He remained in New York after his playing career and found success on Wall Street.Information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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

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