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Over at The Sports Ethicist, I've posted a guest blog post by Chad Carlson. Chad discusses the nature of fantasy football, its relation to real football, and what value fantasy potentially has.  Here is an excerpt: I have been reminded of all of this most recently throughout the first two weeks of the Fantasy Football, er, NFL, season. I am watching the games very closely and I remember which teams win, but my mood changes based not on which teams win but based on whether my fantasy players have done well or not. As such, I am reminded of how Fantasy Football has the ability to alter how we watch and understand the NFL. However, I have also been reminded of how Fantasy Football can be a very fun and playful way of coming to understand and enjoy professional football. This August, my family decided to start a Fantasy Football league. Most of our league’s members were new to Fantasy Football, and a few in-laws were relatively new American football. Read the full post here .

Interested in being a commentator for the IAPS group meeting at the Central Division APA? The session is focused on Aaron Harper’s paper: “‘You’re the Best Around’: Reconsidering Athletic Excellence in Seasons and Playoffs.” The following is an excerpt from Aaron’s abstract: “My primary argument proceeds in two parts. First, I contend that regular season championships depend on questionable assumptions about their relative success. For example, a season-long system implicitly preferences team depth and consistency. Moreover, the season is of arbitrary length and format, and we routinely identify excellence in part of one season or over the course of many. No single-season format exhausts athletic excellence. Second, I elucidate some excellences captured best by playoff systems. Most importantly, the playoff focus allows a team to develop, to integrate new players, and to peak at the right time, all of which are widely valued in sport. Also, playoffs allow teams to position their be...

A 5 minute interview with Professor Mark Edmundson, author of Why Football Matters , on PBS Newshour: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/every-football-player-read-plato/

[Cross-posted from SportsEthicist.com ] Fantasy Football season is just starting to spin up and millions of football fans are beginning to think about their top draft prospects or clever names for their teams. As big as it is, it is not surprising that it has started to get more and more scholarly attention. Chad Carlson and I discussed philosophical questions arising in fantasy in a podcast back in December (Mike and I also talked fantasy last August). Scott Aikin joins the fray with his relatively recent article in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy entitled “ Responsible Sports Spectatorship and the Problem of Fantasy Leagues ”. Aikin says Fantasy Sports can bring about “a unique form of distortion of proper spectator performance” (195). In sum, his argument is that those who watch sporting events for the purpose of participating in a fantasy league are failing to be what he calls “responsible spectators”. Using several different kinds of cases where a spectator intu...

The University of Gloucestershire Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics website  has several short videos about the Philosophy of Sport with fellow Philosophy of Sport blogger  Dr. Emily Ryall . Dr. Ryall is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire. What is the Philosophy of Sport? A short video interview Should we regard Elite Athletes as Heroes? Is Sport a form of Art? A video interview with Dr Emily Ryall. Sport as form of moral education. Can Sport make us Good? The videos are good introductions to some interesting questions and important issues in Philosophy of Sport.

[Cross-posted from SportsEthicist.com ] In the wake of the devastating shellacking of Brazil at the feet of German side, we saw hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of crying and tearful Brazilians. Many sports fan empathized with these pictures. Part of being a fan is suffering through bad losses. Every true sports fan has been on the losing side at one time or another. We know how those Brazilian fans felt. Others raised the ridiculousness of crying over a game, especially a game one didn’t even participate in. It is one thing if you played in a game, gave your proverbial all, and then were overcome with emotion (such as Columbia’s James Rodriguez). But for fans in the stands or out on street to cry strikes many as silly. Something must be really out of whack. There are really two questions here. One: is crying an appropriate emotional response to a sporting event? Two: is it appropriate to have one’s identity so connected to a sporting event/team? The second question arises becau...