The phrase "are playing below" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe an action that is currently happening at a lower level or in a lower position, often in a competitive context.
Example: "The team is struggling this season, as they are playing below their usual standards."
Alternatives: "are performing under" or "are competing beneath".
After three consecutive All-Star seasons for the Colorado Rockies, Holliday, for the first time, is playing below-average baseball with career lows in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage.
Although they are more than 10 stories above the match being played below, in a sense this is the best seat in the house.
"As young people focus on the N.B.A. and what they and their coaches need to do to get here, we will see much more emphasis on those components of the game that are played below the rim: outside shooting, jump shots, passing and what our coaches and general managers are saying are the quote fundamentals," Stern said.
You're playing below your normal threshold.
It's as if we were watching a Wimbledon final in which, quite unlike the sizzler we actually witnessed on Sunday, the two combatants were playing below their reputations and giving us a dull match.
Knight, a preseason all-American, had been playing below expectations through No. 6 Pittsburgh's first 12 games, but a return to his home state and an eagerness to show up a team he does not like stoked his competitive fires.
The first episode – a stroll through the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood with one local resident – can be played below.
As Blair likes to say, this title game was played "below the rim and between the ears" and it was indisputably superior to the men's final showing.
Six stories high, it had thin wooden columns supporting a roof over the elevated terrace, the royal vantage point for watching the polo matches that were played below hundreds of years ago.
The 1699 Stradivarius known as the Lady Tennant (being played, below, by Adela Peña of the Eroica Trio last Friday) will be auctioned at Christie's at Rockefeller Center, in a sale that starts this morning at 10. Also on the block will be a 1701 Gofriller cello, several guitars, a harp and a 1795 flute.
