You may be right but that isn’t the official bio, is it?
According to Frank Miller, it is.
I still don’t think anyone has actually explained throwing a pass for a touchdown: in addition to being scored by holding the ball and moving across the goal line, a touchdown can also be scored if someone throws the ball to another guy already standing on the other side of the goal line (and he catches it, of course). You don’t need to actually move over the line with the ball in your hands; it just has to be over the line in someone’s hands at some point.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
For starters, I think perhaps you’re confusing “line of scrimmage” and “goal line”.
Line of scrimmage = where the play starts
Goal line = where the end zone starts
End zone = the area at the end of the field that you must reach to score
To score a touchdown you have to have the ball in the end zone, and in possession of one of your players. (The player himself doesn’t have to be standing in the end zone. For instance, he can dive towards the goal line and reach out with the hand holding the ball so that the ball crosses the plane defined by the goal line. That counts as a touchdown, even if the player’s body lands just short of the goal.)
Each attempt to score or advance the ball is a “play”. When someone refers to a football “play”, think of it like “one move” in chess. Except that in football, the one team is making their offensive move and the other team making their defensive move at the same time. After a certain number of failed offensive moves, the other team gets a turn to play offense.
There are two basic types of offensive plays: passing plays and running plays. In a passing play, the quarterback (passer) throws the ball to a receiver, who then runs toward the goal line. In a running play, the ball is handed to a runner and carried toward the goal line on foot (sometimes, the quarterback does this himself instead of handing off).
Thus, you can score if a pass is caught in the end zone, or if it’s carried across the goal line by a runner or by a receiver who caught a pass outside the end zone. Both of these count for the same number of points (6, with a chance to go for 1 or 2 additional points on a following play).
Fantasy Football is different. In fantasy football, fans draft a team of players and compete with their friends. How many points your fantasy team gets is based on how well the players on your team performed in their real games that week. However, since you draft your own teams, players who play on the same real team may be on different fantasy teams.
E.g., Fantasy Owner A may have Real Team X’s quarterback, and Fantasy Owner B may have Real Team X’s receiver. Thus, if the quarterback throws a touchdown pass to the receiver, this earns Fantasy points for the quarterback (and thus for Fantasy Owner A) and for the receiver (and thus for Fantasy Owner B). This kind of double counting only happens in Fantasy Football though. In real football, the quarterback and receiver are on the same team, so there’s no need to give separate points to both the quarterback and receiver. Instead, 6 points are assigned to the team as a whole.
I don’t think that’s analogous. In my experience, football teams often score touchdowns, but chess players rarely queen even one pawn, let alone 6. (I think because the advantage of having a[nother] queen is almost always outweighed by the focus on promoting that one piece to the exclusion of developing other material, and the extreme likelihood, given how limited the pawn’s move is, that the effort will fail.)
Well, I might’ve zombified this thread (had I known it existed) but for a completely different reason.
Before the regular season started, yet after the latest and most cringe-worthy Favre dramatics (You football fans know what I’m talking about) I predicted loudly and largely that
- Aaron Rodgers would have a better season than Brett Favre
- The Packers would have a better season than the Jets
This proclamation was based partly on my premier pigskin prognostication prowess, partly on my newly intensified Favre hatred.
As for my prediction, not so much. But in the meanwhiles, something even more incredible happened, something only the NFL bookers could pull off.
Chad Pennington (AKA the guy the Jets cut loose because they now had The Messiah at quarterback) leads the Miami Dolphins (AKA the worst team in the league last year) in to the Meadowlands and stamps a big red official “DENIED” on the Jets’ playoff proposal.
Now THAT’s how schaudenfreude is done.
Well, with some minor disagreement. Pawn promotion rarely comes up in the middlegame not because the advantage of having another queen is outweighed by anything but because it may well not be achievable at that time. It is a major theme in the endgame but may well not actually take place simply because the weaker side resigns once promotion cannot be averted.
No first-class game has ever featured six queens on the board at one time (there have been a couple of instances of three queens versus two, and a reasonable-sized handful of two versus two) as, firstly, no strong player needs to be more than one queen up to win in less time than it would take to promote six pawns and, secondly, no such player would be so ill-mannered as not to resign when a queen down and in a position when he was helpless to prevent an arbitrary number of additional promotions.
At lower level, it’s another story. Only the other week on Gameknot someone insisted on carrying on against me when he was down by nearly a Queen-equivalent and I had a promotion in the offing - even after I’d queened he still played on for a couple of moves before wandering off and letting his time run out. But I guess no-one amasses rating points by resigning, and he could always hope that I would suffer a debilitating aneurism or walk in front of a steamroller. 
Pawn promotion as an implied threat is a huge strategic consideration in chess, though, which is why strong players will run the risk of a quick mate rather than concede a material disadvantage that renders eventual defeat inevitable. Even the SDMB’s resident FIDE Master would not have bothered to play on against me in the game mentioned above. (He’d not have been in that position in the first place, as I know very well, but that’s another story.)
Haven’t been following the Redskins this season, I take it?
Agreed and I am neither a Favre hater or a Jet Hater. I just got such a huge sense of schadenfreude on behalf of Pennington that I thought it reached near epic proportions. (Epic proportions would include at least a trip to the Superbowl for Pennington & Dolphins now.)
Wel, Rodgers did have a considerably better season than Favre.
I’m applauding too. Only on this board do you get people explaining football via supervillains and politics with analogies from Lord of the Rings. It’s possibly the dorkiest thing on the planet, but it’s fun.
Oh, man, YEH! You don’t even have to be a fan of either football or comic book heroes to cheer for that! Frakkin AWESOME.
storyteller0910, your username is quite apt. Good post!
I must have missed that.
Actually, that’s not true. I was watching C-Span this morning and a member of the Obama transition team was making just that analogy, arguing that the Bush admnistration’s black & white view of the world was LotR-like. I also recall a Republican senator–it may have been Bill Frist, as I would have found that especially annoying–saying that Iraq was Mordor.
ETA: actually it was Rick Santorum.
I saw it a bunch of times in GD over the last six months or so.
Here’s one example. Here’s another.
Skald, I was thinking of the combination of the two. But yeah, when a guy like Santorum starts talking about Lord of the Rings, you know the geeks won.
I’m a nerd, not a geek, but even if I were, I wouldn’t want to count Santorum among my brethren.
You were right on the money with prediction 1…
Rodgers threw for more yards (4,038 to 3,472), more touchdowns (28 to 22), fewer picks (13 to 22), more yards per attempt (7.5 to 6.7), and had a much better passer rating (93.8 to 81).
The only statistical categories in which Favre did better are sacks allowed (34 to 30) and completion percentage (65.7 to 63.6). The completion percentage is essentially meaningless considering Rodgers’ higher yards per attempt number anyway. Rodgers also ran for 200+ yards and 4 touchdowns to Favre’s 43/1.
Actually, Rodgers had an unbelievable season; most quarterbacks never throw for 4,000 yards or 25 touchdowns, and Rodgers did both in his first season as a starter- and under a bigger microscope than maybe any quarterback ever! Even more impressive is throwing only 13 picks, despite throwing deep and throwing a lot; all three of the guys who threw for more yards (Brees, Warner, Cutler) threw more picks.
Prediction 2 wasn’t that far off; neither the Jets nor the Packers made the playoffs, although the Jets obviously got closer, and while Rodgers was clearly one of the Packers’ best players, Favre was equally clearly one of the Jets’ worst.
Hopefully, good ol’ [del]stubbly drama queen[/del] Number 4 will hang it up this offseason and go back to cutting down trees or whatever he does in Mississippi when he’s not attention whoring.