I cannot abide football, for it’s brutal and the action occupies just a few minutes of a one hour-game (which often lasts 2.5 hours or more with time-outs, half-time, and commercials.
Reader Diane G. called my attention to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, which, although four years old, surely applies today. It shows that—get this—there are eleven minutes of action in an NFL (National Football League) game in the U.S.:
According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.
In other words, if you tally up everything that happens between the time the ball is snapped and the play is whistled dead by the officials, there’s barely enough time to prepare a hard-boiled egg. In fact, the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays.
So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps. In the four broadcasts The Journal studied, injured players got six more seconds of camera time than celebrating players. While the network announcers showed up on screen for just 30 seconds, shots of the head coaches and referees took up about 7% of the average show.
If you watch a professional football game, you’ll be occupied watching commercials five times longer than you’ll be watching action on the field.
Yes, I know that football is a big deal in the U.S., especially in universities and colleges (no time was provided for action in those games, but if they’re televised, which the important ones are, I’d guess the ratio of action to total time would be about the same.
I don’t understand the love for football, especially given this. Yes, a good run or pass play is satisfying or even thrilling, but you wait long and hard for one of those. Now you might object that soccer has even less action in terms of scoring goals, but that’s bogus. In soccer there are always 90 minutes of pure action, and even when a goal isn’t being scored, the play is often beautiful, and emotions can run high.
~
I agree with you 100% on American football. Now soccer is another kettle of fish…
American football. Steven Weinberg and I sit comfortably together on this issue: get it out of academia.
I wish it were possible.
I confess to sometimes enjoying football, but my enjoyment is fading fast. I’m not a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell (I don’t hold his support of dogs against him), but this article is good and has strongly contributed to my current ambivalence about the “sport”.
Plus ça change…
Good article.
U of C reinstated football couple of decades ago, which, as Prof. Coyne knows, diminished its prestige in the eyes of many alumni, but at the same time attracting a new flow of full-pay male students.
Sigh. So it goes…
I was surprised to read find out that the article was five years old when I read the dateline. You have to give Malcolm Gladwell some credit for being ahead of the curve with that piece. Thanks for posting the link.
American Football is one of the greatest games ever invented. It has the most strategy of any sport and if you are not a fan then you are missing 1/2 the game by not understanding the nuances involved in every play that’s executed. Soccer is checkers. American Football is chess, played with superhuman athletes at 100 mph.
Not to mention the strategies for covering up brain injuries and domestic abuse! These are what ruined the game for me. Can’t watch those people knowing what’s going on off the field and in their boardrooms, and what’s happening to the players’ brains with every “good hit.”
There is zero evidence that football players engage in domestic abuse at higher rates than other males of similar age and socio-economic background.
But I’m pretty sure the rates of persecution (arrest, whatever legal term) are much lower, because the Powers That Be are protecting the sport’s heroes.
I vaguely recall similar stories about rape (cheerleaders IIRC), too.
Probably want to steer clear of the NBA as well then. It is a shame that some people who have the world on a string make horrible choices in their lives. Happens all over.
You are missing the point. Basketball is not causing a lot brain damage, but there is quite a bit of evidence now that football does – much like boxing. The “bad choices” of which you speak are being influenced by the damage done by the sport. Basketball may leave you with bad knees or hips, but is unlikely to leave you as a basket case.
I can’t tell if you’re sarcastic or not.
Do you mean THESE superhuman athletes, 3 of whom, all teenagers, just died in one week from sports-related injuries?
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/oct/03/american-football-third-us-teen
Yeah great sport 😐
I’m being straightforward. It’s the best sport ever created. Is it violent? Yes. So is boxing and MMA.. I’m guessing you’re on the side that would rather abolish those sports as well. I’m no racing fan but it’s not because someone dies every once in a while.. it’s more that I can’t get interested in cars going around in a circle.
Everyone is going to die at some point. If people want to do things they enjoy but are more dangerous than sitting at home in front of the couch, I don’t see a problem with that.
Just a quick search on google has informed me “Records indicate that there has been a total of 3,551,332 motor vehicle deaths in the United States from 1899 to 2012.” Somehow most people accept the risk and would prefer to continue to drive cars.
Back to the subject, however.. my point is American Football is extremely entertaining. You just have to understand the game. If you’re only focused on how much action there is in the 3 hour broadcast, you might miss what’s great about it.
“You just have to understand the game.”
Is this the sophisticated football argument?
Agreed. There is a degree of emotional tension in a close, down to the last seconds American football game that I’ve never experienced in any other team sport, except for basketball, which I don’t care for. The amount of action over the course of the game is irrelevant, to me at least. With a dvr you can skip the dead time and the commercials. I like the replays.
Regarding the risks, they are freely taken. (I’m not addressing the issue of free will here.) They can play without helmets as far as I’m concerned.
Perhaps you could program the dvr to select just the plays. You’d be able to enjoy the violence compressed into 11 minutes. Only enough time for one beer and a hand full of pretzels.
I guess you missed it that I like the replays, especially the slow-motion ones where a game-deciding play is challenged in the end zone. Nothing like it in sports.
Professional American football is a made-for-tv sport, literally. The NFL rules have changed over time to make the game congenial for tv. Examples abound, the two-minute warning being the most obvious. To their credit, the NFL has been flexible and adept at adapting to their commercial and technological niche, as their success attests.
BTW, I’m no longer a football fan, though I used to be. GO NINERS!
Football sucks Strategy. First and 10 run the ball. 3rd and 7 throw, 3rd and 1 run 4th and 2 punt ,, boring , get the lead and kill the clock .predictable, scum bag players and scum bag fans drunk at 8 in the morning in the parking lot. what a waste of a Sunday afternoon, get off the couch and do something
Chess isn’t much of a spectator sport though, in fairness. Then again, neither is checkers, nor are defensive nil all draws on wet winter afternoons in northern Europe.
I don’t think so. That’s how they sell it, but that’s not really what’s going on. In the end it’s the same as all sport – it revolves around who gets to space quickest and most consistently. Doing so often enough leads to points scored. Doing so the most often, or preventing the opponent from doing so often enough, leads to victory. Within that comes execution as well. He who executes more proficiently will be more successful. It’s the same for basketball, rugby, and soccer.
The coaches are WAY too involved in gridiron football, while in soccer the players have to rely upon themselves much more, and upon the training they’ve received up to the point of the game.
There is another difference between soccer and gridiron football, the chess match on the soccer pitch happens on the fly, while in gridiron it happens at a standstill.
Other aspects of the 11 minutes being played in a game of gridiron – that’s only 5:00 minutes for two squads. The 2 offensive squads get 5 minutes, and the 2 defensive squads get 5 minutes, while special teams get all of 30 seconds or so. Whoo-Hoo! Add to that, only 5 or 6 players typically get to touch the ball. In soccer all 22 players get to touch the ball. All 22 players play offense. All 22 players play defense. And at least 16 of those players, professionally, will have to play practically non-stop for 90 minutes.
Gridiron football was tolerable until instant replay came along. It went from tolerable to intolerable in a hurry.
Excellent point about coaches’ over-involvement. Perhaps they think they’re military generals, both on the sidelines and high up in the skyboxes like artillery or air-target spotters. Whenever the completely gratuitous war metaphor is trotted out and the players called ‘warriors’ I think of that poor dude who quit pro-footbal to join the army and fight in Iraq (I believe it was) only to be killed by his own men (‘friendly fire’). Now that was a real warrior, a real tragedy and a real irony of war.
Pat Tillman. He was also an outspoken atheist.
You beat me to it. Also politically liberal and very intelligent. His story is well worth reading. The Wikipedia article contains links to a couple of books and many articles about the case, as well as a summary of it, of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman
And includes this gem:
And his brother’s famous comment regarding Pat’s funeral:
Sorry for the tl,dr response, way OT to boot; but everyone should be aware of the perfidy of this event.
You didn’t play, did you? I’ve played a whole lot of football and I’ve coached football, basketball and have very recently started volunteering as a soccer coach at a local high school. It’s actually much more strategically challenging to run plays in a sport like soccer or basketball when the clock keeps running and the game keeps moving. You’re way off about soccer being chess. At the height of the Pep Guardiola/Lionel Messi Barcelona squads, that team would toy with defenses with seemingly aimless passes around the midfield for minutes at a time, but the instant that there was one sliver of daylight, BOOM, goal.
Most football coaches I’ve ever dealt with, as both a player and a member of the media, were flat-out too stupid to ever master chess. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, but a lot of those men are tyrannical neanderthals and are responsible for a frightening amount of abuse. When I think about all the times coaches denied me and my teammates a water break during August 2-a-days, they’re lucky they didn’t get any of us killed. If you tell a teenaged kid wearing full pads and a helmet that he needs to “toughen up” and not take a water break when it’s 95 degrees and the humidity is 85%, it’s not leadership, it’s reckless endangerment.
Most football coaches . . . a lot of those men are tyrannical . . . and are responsible for a frightening amount of abuse . . . .”
Yet fans (parents, school administrators, school boards, politicos and corporatistas) don’t seem to have much of a problem with it.
Why do American middle- and high-school students submit to that abuse, yet take great offense if a classroom teacher mildly admonishes them for talking and interrupting in class, not paying attention, not doing their work? (Just let a teacher indulge in such a coachesque modus operandi and see what happens.)
For many students, the main carrot for meeting a minimally satisfactory academic standard is being allowed to continue playing on the team.
That’s very true. I’ve put this way in several conversations in the past, football coaches are frequently abusive tyrants for the exact same reason the so many pop musicians abuse drugs, because in that world, it’s tolerated. The sad fact is that at a lot of institutions the priority really is the playing field over the classroom. I have male relatives that would tolerate a football coach putting theirs sins through damn near anything, but they’d probably call a lawyer if a classroom teacher ever gave one of their sons a detention. Ultimately they think it’s WAY more important for their son to play football than it is for him to get an education. When a teenager thinks this way, it’s immaturity. When the community at large thinks this way, it is a cultural malignancy. Kevin got it right wit his comment in which he quoted Steven Weinberg way at the top of the thread. They need to get this sport out of academic institutions.
sons, not sins
Which of course leads to the classic response to the question of why it is so difficult to find a really great football coach – because it is so rare to find someone brilliant enough to understand all the nuances of the game, who is also so stupid as to think it matters.
And the anticipation of the ball being snapped and a great run or pass play or a trick play occurring at any given time is also a big part of the enjoyment of the game.
The only thing I anticipate while watching soccer is my next nap.
You should get yourself an action packed, thrill a minute, edge of the seat national sport.
Like cricket.
If you know what to look out for, cricket is actually thrill a minute — or at least every time a ball is bowled, which is usually more often than once a minute. It helps, as in any sport, if you’ve played the game.
There’s also a short form of cricket called Twenty20 which is much more biff-bang. Quite often you can watch Twenty20 (and other) matches on cricinfo.com.
It looks interesting, but I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in those games. They dress really nice though, I like that.
Love the 20-20s! And for me the run up of the bowler builds tension to an almost intolerably high level, followed by catharsis when the batsman dribbles a single off to one side or the other (or the back!) of the wicket. And, on the defensive side, the ‘out’ of a batsman after, say a half-century’s runs,is one of the most exciting plays in any sport I know of.
“Like cricket.”
Amen brother. Or baseball.
Frankly, everything pales beside basketball.
Basketball players are true athletes, this cannot be said of most football players.
There’s a saying among swimmers: If it were easy they would have called it football.
I find pro basketball to be completely tiresome. The game can be saved, however, by a few minor tweaks. Raise the basket to 12 feet – better yet – 4 meters. Call traveling infractions. And apply 50,000 volts to the hoop.
Otherwise – the game belongs in the driveway.
Forget Adam Silver . . . I want YOU to be the new commissioner of the NBA! LOL!
“Raise the basket to 12 feet – better yet – 4 meters.”
I agree with you. I would also like to see the court expanded, although I don’t know how practical that would be.
Changes to gridiron football that would improve it greatly:
– no more 1 point conversions. 2 point conversion attempts only. It would greatly increase the game’s excitement factor.
– no more field goals. Punt or play. It would lead to more touchdowns.
– no more 2 platoon teams. (This one is a bit radical perhaps) Change substitution rules so that no one comes out without a penalty of some sort (2 series played before being eligible to sub on, etc)
– and for pasta’s sake, no more replays. Live with the call on the field. They tend to even out.
– forward passes allowed at any time. Dropping a pass is a fumble.
– all players are eligible to catch passes
Basketball is okay.. but usually only the last 2 minutes of a game =)
I always recommend friends to try to find Rugby Union being broadcast. It’s a fairly closely related game, but in a good match the action is incessant, the play’s far more flowing, and the players aren’t dressed like RoboCop.
Yeah rugby is way better to watch than football and the players, aside from not wearing all that gear, appear more fit than football players where some of the players appear as just big fat guys there to block the opposing team.
I can’t stand Rugby Union – probably mostly because it claims to be the New Zealand National sport. I certainly didn’t get to vote on it. But in recent years it’s got infinitely worse due to the influence of TV and the associated hype, all we ever hear are ‘news’ (?!) stories about the All Blacks and how great they are or scandals about how one of them spent the night partying when he should have been getting ready for the Big Game. I’m not sure whether to despise them or feel sorry for them. IOW the same overblown hype that has (apparently) ruined American football is ruining New Zealand rugby.
I only ever watch the haka for the All Blacks and then that’s all I want to see.
I myself can’t abide that quasi-religious spectacle, Amuricun football.
What’s the bodily injury rate of rugby? And soccer, another sport bereft of protective gear?
Yes, there are injuries in rugby, as there are in all contact sports, and very occasionally there’s a fatality. But serious injuries are, I believe, few and far between.
I’ve no idea about serious soccer injuries, but obviously there are some. Likewise in field hockey, cricket, skiing, fives, bowling . . . hard to think of any physical sport in which there aren’t at least a few injuries, isn’t it?
My thesis (i.e., guess) is that the RoboCop outfits worn in American futbol probably increase the rate of serious injury in that players assume at a sort of reflexive level that they can withstand far higher levels of violence.
Hey, a means of drastically reducing football injuries – make it touch or flag.
But that will not satisfy the recliner-ensconced fan’s need for violence.
Tragically, a schoolboy at my school in England was killed in a rugby match. But I think that is incredibly rare; in fact, I am constantly surprised that there are not more serious injuries in rugby.
That said, I believe that there were more injuries when the rules were changed to allow for some limited padding to be worn, probably because the tackles started to go in harder and higher.
Rugby League is possibly even more closely related, and also heavy on the incessant action.
Rugby is awesome! And the teams have the best names.
Go Springboks!
Rugby doesn’t do it for me because I don’t understand it. The best sports to watch are, in my opinion, in order: NHL hockey, NFL football, MMA, boxing, baseball.
March Madness is the only time I watch basketball (I always root for Kentucky). I generally like lots of violence in the sports I watch. The more the better.
I tried getting into football when I was younger because it was so popular, but no matter how hard I tried I could never understand why people found it exciting.
I guess one person’s “pure action” (as you say there is in soccer) is the next person’s “excruciatingly boring parts where nothing happens.” Just like in baseball, and tennis, and golf, and many other sports (some of which I like and some I don’t), there is time between action, giving people a time to relax the tension somewhat, and then build to it again as the next part of the (quite real) action starts.
Just like you find the .01% of your 90 min game exhilarating (and I am coming to agree), we find the percentage of action in our game, however small, equally exhilarating.
This is purely a matter of taste, and (to some degree) conditioning, as to what different one’s of us enjoy. Neither is superior, I think you’ll agree.
If you watch the “highlights” of a soccer game they only show the goals, and from this one could argue that the entire game can be captured in less than a minute, even less in the case of a 0-0 draw!
Baseball, I myself find the most boring of sports where nothing happens except for a few seconds of action once in a while. Baseball games are also among the longest sporting events overall. I hate it when they switch pitchers and gobble up 5 minutes just warming up.
I don’t think showing the goals represents the true excitement of a football – okay, soccer – match – otherwise fans would be satisfied with a match settled on penalties.
I don’t know any soccer fans who judge a match on the number of goals scored – so long as their team scores most of them.
Personally, I prefer rugby league. It’s not as fluid as rugby union but I’m from a league town and preferences between league and union tend to correlate with class in England (less so in Wales).
“Baseball, I myself find the most boring of sports . . . .”
More boring than golf? (Or is that a sport?)
You’re right, golf is even worse …
…like watching flies fuck. (George Carlin’s take on speeding up American sports (NSFW)
Is that link broken or is it me?
Not sure what happened. I meant to link to this NSFW clip.
There’s also his classic Baseball vs. Football diatribe.
“Neither is superior, I think you’ll agree.”
I wouldn’t agree. Any sport (and football is a game, not a sport) that is explicitly about hurting people is an inferior relic.
I guess I need to go to school. What is the difference between “game” and “sport”?
I believe a sport requires a greater level of conditioning and endurance – and therefore commitment – in addition to just talent and skill.
Totally my bias, of course. But I just don’t see how one can consider standing around for 3 hours, with short spurts of activity, a sport.
“Hunting,shooting and fishing -some might add amorous dalliance- are sports,everything else is a game.” Unfortunately,I can’t remember who said it.
“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
― Ernest Hemingway
He was full of shit, of course — left out trout fishing.
Not to mention marlin fishing. Old Ernest even wrote about it while doing his part to remove those beautiful giants from Florida’s and Cuba’s waters.
I wonder if there are any marlin/other big game fishermen who are content to simply video their triumph, then let the fish go.
Catch and release is very common in big game fishing, even the rule in many places. It’s the commercial long-line fishing that’s a problem.
Oh man, do I ever love college football. I kind of hate the NFL, though. Some of it for me, though, is simply the social element. Rarely do I watch a game alone.
I would have considered myself a big American football fan from the ages of 5-16 or so. After that my interest dropped off precipitously to the point where I am almost completely indifferent to it. Part of that has to do with what this article mentions about the lack of actual play during the game. However, more of it has to do with the ability to stomach the injuries that these players are subjected to. A big hit used to make me cheer. Now it makes me cringe. Particularly with the increasing amount of studies on the deleterious effects that multiple concussions have on the brain.
On the other hand, I can’t share our host’s enthusiasm for soccer. I find it to be, in general, an incredibly dull game to watch. I’ve tried watching Premiere League, Bundesliga, MLS, and World Cup matches, and apart from little bursts of excitement here and there I generally found myself fighting to pay attention.
The only sport that consistently holds my attention is Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby. Of course, I’m biased in that regard, as I volunteer with my local roller derby league!
From what I’ve seen, soccer provides the best opportunity to develop one thespian talents. To do so in U.S. football gets one fined.
So far this year, at least three high school students have died due to football.
One of the 8th graders my wife tutors spent 4 days in the hospital and may have permanent brain damage from football (a 13 year-old).
Football, in the small school I used to teach at, took 80% of high school students (OK, there were only 60 students in high school) out of class every Friday for 3 months. That cost over 12 days of instruction time and put a serious crimp in lab time.
Three years ago Austin ISD laid off 1300 teachers… and cut the atheletics budget from $12 million to $11.5 million.
I loathe football… especially in schools.
Hand-egg has about 30 years left. The marginalization has already begun. We’re fortunate to now witness this – the beginning of the end. With more stories about the injuries, the brutality, more people will ask themselves “why am I watching this?”, and more importantly “why would I let my child play this game?”
It’s going to go the way of boxing – a marginalized joke “sport”. Good riddance.
Hand-egg! I’ve loved this term since the first time I heard it. I hope it starts catching on in the US.
“Oblate spheroid.”
“Prolate spheroid”, I think.
Cycling accounts for almost as many injuries in children as football – are you going to ban that too?
In fact, baseball, a ‘non-contact’ sport has more child fatalities.
I didn’t say anything about banning football.
My problem with football is that causing injury is part of the sport. The same can’t be said of cycling.
Of course injuries occur – I’m a cyclist myself and have the collar-bone plate to prove it – the key is to mitigate injuries by wearing the appropriate gear.
“Cycling accounts for almost as many injuries in children as football”
Yes that’s true, but in cycling those injuries are accidents*. In football, injuries are kind of the point.
Neither should be banned.
*actually I’ll bet cycling has far more injuries associated with it than football, simply because far more children ride bicycles than play football.
“*actually I’ll bet cycling has far more injuries associated with it than football, simply because far more children ride bicycles than play football.”
I agree with that. Fortunately I see almost all kids wearing helmets, which I never wore as a kid.
Boxing’s popularity seems to have been displaced by the even more brutal MMA. I wouldn’t celebrate just yet.
I’ve always wondered why we ‘mericans consider football players great athletes when, at best, they manage to run maybe 50 or 75 meters total in a game. Real football (soccer, to us) players can run for 90 minutes and must total at least several kilometers per game (well, except the goalies). Tennis players typically run several kilometers, even in the amateur games I play. The beer commercials are kind of entertaining in pro football on TV, however.
You haven’t actually watched American football, have you? I agree they don’t actually play much, especially when compared to (real) football, but only someone who hasn’t seen the game would think the players don’t have great athletic ability.
FTR – I agree with Jerry. I can’t abide American football for the same reasons. But it is very exciting for maybe two or three minutes out of three hours of “game time”.
I’ve heard the claim that one of the fittest people on the field must be the referee, since s/he is running practically non-stop, at least while the ball’s in play.
I can get a lot of work done during American football games. Not so with soccer.
For a watchable sport, there is nothing like a well played ice hockey game between two evenly matched teams.
JMO, YMMV
Yes! Especially Olympic hockey where there is no fighting.
Yeah, good clean hockey is fun to watch but the NHL and the constant fights is crazy and kids suffering injuries from checking is just ridiculous not to mention the high cost of playing the sport.
I for one am annoyed with Canada’s obsession with hockey. As a young figure skater, it was hard to get ice time because arenas were so obsessed with hockey teams.
I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.
LOL!
All true, but 11 minutes is nowhere near enough time to drink beer and eat chicken wings and nachos on the couch with your buddies.
I stopped watching in 1976.
For a while, a few years ago, I used to tape the Super Bowl (VHS tape, yep, dating myself), and then fast-forward through all the non-action, commercials, halftime, etc.
I could watch the entire game in less than 30 minutes, no problem. Very efficient. But i stopped doing that more than 10 years ago. I haven’t watched a regular-season game since 1976.
I happen to like football (I grew up on it and was a, well, rather incompetent high school player).
Part of what goes on between plays is the “prediction” part (e. g. what sort of play? what sort of defense?); that is a lot of it.
Me too. I agree with your between plays assessment. I think that’s it’s main selling point for viewers that it is organized into plays and so you, as a viewer, can try to predict what the next play is going to be. The variety of things one might do adds interest too. Throw short, throw long, run, fake, blitz, etc. I know coaches are strategizing in all sports, but there are few sports where the strategizing is so obvious and available to the viewer.
And so much of the action is concentrated on a small part of the field. When the play begins, you can see all 22 players in one screenshot. The alignment of the players, position between players on opposing sides, it all figures in to the play about to commence. The replays help a lot in understanding the movements of the players. I think it is really quite beautiful.
I loathe football.
I have a searing memory from my high school freshmen year, watching a senior football player being carried off the field with a snapped femur.
I myself tore knee cartilage as a sophomore playing basketball. What pain-induced rough language issuing from that good Southern Baptist boy. Not worth it.
I taught high school and saw a student walk off the field, get in an ambulance and dead the next morning. Many kids clearly had head problems, even in high school. Mix in congenital issues and there is always a possibility of death on the field. This is true of hockey, real football (soccer), and most contact sports.
Men in tights… That is all.
[http://www.hulu.com/watch/12907]
It’s great that an American actually gets football (sorry soccer – a game where foot and ball actually make contact for most of the game). The attraction of association football is that there is a chance for anyone – no matter what their size – to participate and smaller, agile players can compete on equal terms with their taller team-mates.
I like soccer better than US football. but I hardly follow any sport at all. Cycling, tennis, that’s about it. And them none too closely.
I’d just rather be out there myself, riding my bike, snow shoeing, hiking, etc.
I hike or snow shoe at least once a week. Much more fun than watching sports!
Indeed!
I can hear pens sharpening
“Those goddamn commie athiests hate football”
That should be: commie, atheist, socialist baby-eating fascists who like unAmerican soccer.
LOL!
The NFL and American sports media have done a marvelous job of creating an image of football that goes far beyond the game itself. I see it as a manufactured cultural institution where being a football fan (and throwing your money at it) is part of being a “good American”. Even the attachment to religion (pre-game prayers, the attention to Tim Tebow, etc.) is part of the football aura. Baseball used to be America’s pasttime, but football has overtaken it.
Here in Canada, the same thing has happened with hockey over the last dozen years or so. The sports media spouts jingo like “Its OUR game” to tug at the patriot as if you must love hockey to be a “true Canadian”. I find it all rather offensive.
The reality is the NFL and other major sports thrive on those of us who want to spend our weekends and evenings watching sports on TV, buying paraphernalia, instead of doing something useful with our loves. And, yes, I consider myself guilty despite it all.
“lives” not “loves”.
Freudian Slip ?
All “organized” sports, especially those most amenable to extensive media coverage, have always seemed to me to be on a par with organized religion. “A MANUFACTURED cultural institution” is definitely the proper term: under the guise of “entertainment”, they suck billions of dollars and billions of hours of time from a gullible populace that could be better spent on improving this world, and depend, as religion does, on each generation raising a new generation of “fans” (which comes from the word, “fanatic”) who swear that THEIR team is the only “right” one (many people have been physically harmed, or even killed, over the “dissing” of a chosen team).
We just saw the video of the “Christian baby”- there’s hundreds of them showing children being “programmed” to mimic their parents’ frenzy about sports without having any more chance of making a rational choice about it than the Xtian baby did.
Football just happens to take a while to get through a game. Generally 2.5 – 3 hrs. While there is a lot of commercial time, I always thought they were structured around the game, not otherwise.
I admit to enjoying the sport, and as others have mentioned there is a lot of strategy to appreciate, if you understand the game.
Yes,there are risks, yes they are grossly overpaid, yes college culture is biased towards the game, and yes education is more important…but I still appreciate and enjoy the sport. Is it Sunday yet?
Whoever wrote that article about football doesn’t understand (or chooses not to) the sport. The action does not commence with the hiking of the ball. As with most sports or games, much of the time is involved in setting up strategy. How much “action” takes place in chess (where action is taking the other player’s pieces)? Not much. The game involves moving your pieces (or sometimes just thinking of moves) and countering opponents’ moves. For a thinking person, this is the best part of the game.
In football, the strategy begins days before the match, sometimes months for particular teams. What players to play? What schemes to run? Etc. After the game begins, tactical moves are being made (in order to thwart an opponent or to employ your own strategy) while the ball is not in play. When the huddle breaks, how is the offense lining up? Run or pass? Two tight end set? Shotgun or under the Center? How does the defense react? 4-3 or 3-4? Crowd the receivers or play off? Play the run? Blitz? All this stuff happens before the snap and anyone who only considers the action that commences after the snap, doesn’t understand the sport.
The same happens in soccer, but the players are constantly moving while the tactical moves are being applied. They have to run down the field to set up their strategy, but all-in-all, the same thing is going on. Positioning of players to increase the chances of a score.
Very well said! One of my favorite games as a child was a board game called NFL Strategy. A two player game where each player calls plays and based on the 2 plays (and which hash the ball was positioned) would get a randomized result. It was a terrific game that really simulated the outcomes accurately. (i.e. screen pass vs an all-out blitz had an extremely good chance to work for a big gain).
There’s a lot going on each play. If you don’t know what to look for it will be hard to appreciate American Football for the awesome game for which it is.
I didn’t appreciate football until I watched games with people who really knew the sport. I’m never shy asking questions. I remember asking what special teams were. lol! Most people who love the sport are patient teachers to those who want to learn, and after watching many games and asking many questions, I grew to love the sport. I only watch my favorite teams or highly competitive games, but I’m always happy when football season is upon us.
As far as the time of “action”, that doesn’t mean anything to me. As noted, half the fun is seeing what plays are developing, and I also love the replays. Watching the best quarterbacks throwing to premiere wide receivers is especially thrilling. It sucks about Adrian Peterson, and I lost much respect for the man, but I loved watching him run the ball.(Someone above said they aren’t true athletes. Obviously hasn’t watched the game, or has a strange definition of what an athlete is.) I also have a DVR, so I can zip through commercials (I really would have a hard time watching football if I had to slog through all the commercials).
Go Hawks!
I agree entirely. I enjoy watching many sports – gridiron football, association football, hockey, tennis, rugby union, etc. (and in fact, have played all those I just listed at some level).
Personally, when I was watching the World Cup this year, I broke down to watching the 30 minute recaps on Univision for most of the games. Just because the ball is in play in soccer nearly constantly doesn’t mean it’s nearly constant action.
I’ll also add that nearly every sport I’ve watched is better enjoyed in person. Even baseball and golf are fun to watch when you’re there.
Now, all the other issues with football are big problems, especially the injuries. I wonder if cutting down on certain pads would help to reduce injuries, since the pads seem to ‘weaponize’ the players.
For non-stop action with great athleticism the best sports are Aussie rules and netball, the former a mixture of football and basketball (loosely speaking) and the latter basketball without the dribbling and incessant timeouts.
Yes, I’d almost agree about netball. It’s de facto the New Zealand women’s national game. It has rules about which parts of the field players can occupy (which stops them bunching up but leads to fairly frequent offsides) so the ref is kept very busy whistling, but that doesn’t interrupt play for more than a few seconds at a time. And they’re not allowed to hit each other. If I had to watch a ball game that’d be my number two choice. Volleyball would be number one (it’s actually more like team tennis).
As football goes, I’d be inclined to agree with you about Aussie rules, too.
I like watching football, and it was my favorite sport to play in high school.
It’s a great combination of strength, speed, skill, danger, and brains. Not a lot of other sports have all this in the mix at once.
On Wed mornings, (former?) Sports Illustrated writer Frank DeFord casts pearls of wisdom on U.S. National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” This week he reflected on the $40,000,000 salary of the NFL commissioner (the NFL being a bloody “NON-PROFIT”) comparing it with the NFL’s seeking 10,000 VOLUNTEERS to stand duty during the next Super Bowl, should you care to lend an ear.
He also held forth on the concessions the NFL extracted from Minneapolis, if I correctly understand the site of the 2016 Super Bowl game, including $500,000,000 of taxpayer money being spent on a new stadium.
I know of two university football coaches being paid $1,200,000 and $3,200,000, respectively, three and eight times the salary of the President of The United States.
What is the responsibility of any coach (or the head of a professional sports organization or a Fortune 500 private corporate tyrant) compared to that of the POTUS?
Infographic: Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably)
http://deadsp.in/1kQsYg8
These obscenities strike me as features of American culture, not of football in particular. You can, for example, make $7.2 million coaching basketball at Duke university, for example. The article that gave me this figure notes that “only” seven other college basketball coaches make more than $3 million a year!
It doesn’t matter what the sport is, if a sport is sufficiently popular in the US it’s going to be bathed in obscene money.
I once mentioned this salary difference between a university sports coach and the POTUS to an acquaintance. He responded that the President has so much more “prestige,” as if that were somehow a legitimate compensating factor. I didn’t press the issue as we were travelling in the same vehicle, with me about a thousand miles from home.
It got me to thinking about how far down the public employee “food chain” one would have to go to find a level of “prestige” roughly equivalent to that of a university sports coach making $3.2M/yr. An Army major general? A GS-18 civil service senior official? A U.S. federal district judge? The U.S. Poet Laureate? A state lieutenant governor? A state-level secretary of state? An “Amuricun Idle” winner?
I wonder where a member of the National Academy of Sciences falls in the scale of prestige?
It’s a funhouse world, that’s for sure.
This page provides a lot of info on the salaries of college football coaches. The data are far more disgusting than you realize.
watching people trying to give each other brain damage while chasing a ball. i never saw the allure.
And (until perhaps recently) one also has seen little if any team owner or fan concern for that damage.
Hockey is the only team game left that the players are not constantly thanking that invisible man in the sky. That being said: Go Giants.
This is a bit of a daft complaint. It’s like whining that chess players only spend 3% of the time actually moving pieces.
I played through high school. Great fun to play. BORING to watch …
Same is true of music. Playing Hendrix or Pink Floyd or most jazz and classical is immensely gratifying…but can be boring to listen to or watch.
Same is true of music. Playing Hendrix or Pink Floyd or most jazz and classical is immensely gratifying…but can be boring to listen to or watch.
WHAT!!!???!!!
I listen to classical music all the time (sometimes jazz), especially while working, and don’t find it boring in the slightest. In the car it tends to be rock, and that’s not boring either. Watching Pink Floyd is no great thrill, but listening to them is OK; contrariwise, just listening to Hendrix is, I’ll admit, a far less exciting experience than watching him.
But, overall, to say that listening to music is boring . . . well, pshaw, and I can’t say fairer nor that.
Yes, I’m afraid Kevin would become an endangered species if he said that around this house. Admittedly, if you’re not a Pink Floyd fan you wouldn’t bother to go to one of their concerts – but the same could be said of [insert your favourite band/group here]. If you do like them their concerts are spectacular.
Ridiculous to say that any successful performer whose income depends on people paying to see them / buy their records is ‘boring to watch’!
Admittedly, if you’re not a Pink Floyd fan you wouldn’t bother to go to one of their concerts
I do quite like the Floyd. I’ve watched some of their gigs on screen (and at least one solo Waters gig), plus Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972), and though I’ve enjoyed the music I’ve thought the visual aspects were just so-so. I take your general point, though: there are some artists I’ll make a big effort to see even if it’s only them at a piano or sitting on a stool with a guitar.
I just read today that Dave Mason, once of Traffic, recently appeared as a fawning guest on Hannity: apparently he’s gone all batshit-frightwing when we weren’t watching. Saddest thing I heard in a while, it was.
Phew! Dave Mason. I thought for a moment you said Nick Mason – my world was teetering on its foundations. 🙂
I don’t have any numbers to support this, but I’m sure that a college football game has an equally or even more paltry action to inaction ration. The college game has slightly different timing rules, specifically the clock is stopped when a first down is achieved, it is not in the NFL.
Sadly I think the problem may be getting even worse in terms of football corrupting academia. Over the last 20-25 years cable TV has greatly increased the TV exposure and thus the profitability of college football. In the last 5-10 years, they have begun nationally televising High school football games. Add that to things like the ESPN top 150 or 300, which ranks the top recruits in the country and voila, you have a recipe for HS football factories. They’re already making stars out of these teenagers before they even arrive on campus, which isn’t good for anyone except the jackals in the sporting press.
It’s not a secret to the readers here that we don’t necessarily have our priorities in order when it comes to education here in the bible-belt. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens Florida, Hoover High school in Hoover Alabama, Carroll High School in Southlake Texas are all on national television multiple times a season and they’re just three of many. These aren’t your typical catholic school powerhouses that have been recruiting the best local athletes for decades either, the examples I gave are public high schools. I had occasion to tour the (then) new football facilities at Hoover when I worked for ESPN radio. It’s a multi-million dollar complex that was way nicer than what the University of Miami, a national powerhouse program, had at the time. The commitment to academics at Hoover was sadly, and predictably, less enthusiastic.
I grew up, along with most of the men in my family, sweating out August two-a-days in the Florida sun. That sport meant the world to me when I was a kid. If I ever have a son, I’d rather he take up almost any other hobby than playing football.
I confess that I once was a football addict, like as a youth I bought into the fundamentalist BS of the religion I was brought up in, until I fortunately outgrew both of them in college. They have a lot in common – both are utterly pointless activities that countless millions of Americans are addicted to.
I like National Football League games. Especially when my team is winning. (Go Cowboys!)
Of course, the game could be safer or less damaging anyway. Accumulating the amount of acceleration a helmet undergoes over the course of a game or a season could cut down on the amount of brain injuries. A team would be required to withdraw a player from the game when his amount of acceleration goes beyond some limit. A player might be withdrawing from a season if some limit is reached.
I don’t know how they would protect players legs and ankles.
Speaking of the NCAA or the NFL it is all one large syndicate where a bunch of fat white guys make tons of money off kids. In America it is all about the money and nothing else matters. So-called student athlete hardly graduates from high school and gets four years free waste of time. Yeah, it’s a great game.
I can’t abide it either, nor the commentary, which consists of stuff like, “He throws the football.” “He’s left the football field.”
Really? What in the hell other kind of ball/field would bhey Are viewers so brain-dead that they have to be reminded what kind of ballgame they’re watching??
…would they be watching? (technical issues interrupted that post).
Commentators, oh yes.
One of the big disadvantages of watching cricket on cricinfo (I mentioned cricinfo in another comment) is that, because the site — these days a part of ESPN — insists on sticking effing ads in everywhere it can, and quite often where it can’t, you lose a lot of the expert commentary. Most of the commentators are retired international cricketers, usually very distinguished ones, so, while they can waste airtime as much as anybody, a lot of their commentary is extraordinarily revealing.
There’s nothing worse than hearing someone like Michael Holding (perhaps the sport’s greatest fast bowler) say, to a slow-motion tight-zoom replay, something like, “You can see by the way he wrapped his fingers over the seam that what he was trying to do was . . .” and then face two minutes of Burger King ads knowing you’ll never find out what Holding said.
Reminds me of the famous and possibly apocryphal story of BBC commentator Brian Johnston, when describing the action involving Michael Holding bowling to Peter Willey, said, “The bowler’s Holding the batsman’s Willey”!
I wonder if the umpire in that game was Dicky Bird. 🙂
🙂 🙂
You think that’s bad, try being over at a relative’s house when they’re watching televised poker tournaments.
Poker is truly the king of “why the hell are we sitting around watching other people play?”
11 minutes of action; that’s a helluva indictment.
For the past 2 years of so, I keep telling my brothers, “Football doesn’t have much more than 10 years left as the top sport in the nation, in terms of popularity”.
The NBA will take over (and I’m really happy about it – basketball is a beautiful sport, and like soccer, can have teams be dominant in many different ways – for instance, Memphis playing bruiser basketball, Phoenix doing run&gun, Spurs and their elite-team-work flow, Lob-City in LA, the offensive juggernaut that is Cleveland…etc, etc…and then you have the up and coming purely raw and athletic T-Wolves and 76rs who will be ready for prime time 3-5 years from now…and for whatever reason it helps that the NBA is centered around 400 elite players, compared to something like 1600 in the NFL (many of which appear cog-like and easily replaceable with every draft – another indicator to me that the sport of football is mostly about athletic ability and a robot-like mentality – other than the QB and coach and the occasional flair of runners).
The NBA has got the right idea and leadership in place to “soccerfy” the sport – both in the way they present the sport, the subtle rule changes, and their merchandising. You can expect soccer-like jerseys eventually being the norm for basketball(much better selling potential than the current jersey-types).
But the biggest nail-in-the-coffin for football is the undeniable fact that it is a stupidly dangerous sport to enroll your kids in. Even parents that like watching football and grew up playing it aren’t enrolling their kids in the sport – the possible long term consequences are too obvious to overlook these days.
NFL isn’t going anywhere…at least not in 10 years. It’s like oil…everyone knows it’s unhealthy and we need to get off it, but won’t happen until the money is no longer there (I like football btw). The most recent Harris poll on sports popularity in the US puts football at 35% (highest) and basketball at 6% (3rd lowest). Not trying to be confrontational- just wanted to site the facts.
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/10354114/harris-poll-nfl-most-popular-mlb-2nd
facts be damned…
No, but in seriousness, I know it’s not the most mainstream idea, but taking all factors into account, I still don’t see the NFL being the dominant sport in the US 8 years from now.
The NBA just doubled their TV deal, so that 6% is going to grow (meanwhile the NFL popularity will diminish). Basketball is making leaps and bounds overseas, which will further spur its growth. The NFL is embroiled in controversy after controversy, with leadership in the NBA being miles beyond the NFL(actually taking action against Sterling, the Hawks owner selling his team after a borderline racist email, NOT having a team named Redskins (and an owner that refuses to change the name), NOT having 3 highschool players dying in a span of a week probably at least in part due to the sport’s inherent violent nature, etc, etc…
Perhaps your oil analogy is somewhat apt. But in the case of football, the effects and aftermath are immediately felt by parents. With oil – (and the effects it has on climate change, the mess in the middle east, the contamination of our water supplies(with regards to natural gas), etc, etc) – the effects are long term and people can keep brushing them aside (plus all the mis-information leading them to believe its all bogus anyway).
But yeah, no worries, I don’t take your opinion on the matter as confrontational. Maybe you’re right in the end. But those are just some of the reasons why I think the NFL won’t be such a juggernaut 8 years from now.
Well played. We’ll see. 🙂
People always used to tell me baseball is boring compared to football because baseball lacks action. That seems pretty laughable in light of this data.
Ah Jerry, you mean *American* ‘football’, as played on Astroturf by astronaut wannabes. (Or at least, they’re dressed as such).
Now in real English football you’re guaranteed 90 minutes of continuous running about during the game, usually on real mud. Admittedly at the end of that both sides might yet to score a goal, but still…
(In that respect it resembles that other great English game, cricket, where both sides can play for five days and end up with a draw…)
My favourite spectator team sport is volleyball, where you know that when the ball is launched a point will be scored soon and one team or other will win.
(In that respect it resembles that other great English game, cricket, where both sides can play for five days and end up with a draw…)
Yes, but the paradoxical thing — and cricket’s the only sport I can think of where this is true — is that sometimes the draws can be the most exciting games of all, real white-knuckle edge-of-your-seaters for the last hour or three.
I was being a little facetious.
Actually, it’s occurred to me that the biggest problem (as I see it) in soccer, which is the great infrequency of goals and the consequent fact that a game can be decided by luck on whether one goal went in or bounced off the post, could easily be fixed just by making the goals a yard wider and a foot higher. This would increase the typical score per game from maybe 2 goals to maybe 10. Enough to liven up the game (IMO) and for the chance/luck factor of one goal ‘going in’ or not, to be diluted by the greater number of goals scored. That is, one goal might be just pure luck, half a dozen are much less likely to be.
That’s actually not at all a bad idea.
Sad about Dave Mason. Loved his old stuff.
Same here.
Concur about the goal-widening and heightening.
I don’t think increasing the likelihood of scoring would reduce the crowd’s euphoria and ecstasy upon scoring a goal.
The American ‘football’ question was answered long ago by John Cleese. Now here we have an actor with brains (and an active atheist -cf. Life of Brian- long before the present-day ‘atheist movement’), not an empty windbag like this Affleck guy…
I’m sure he’d like ‘hand-egg’ (see comment 13) over ‘foot-ball’, would just have been like him to have coined the term…
Sorry, just typed the address, don’t know how that happened.
Well, in this case it was nicely on-topic. 🙂
WordPress automatically embeds the video when you post the entire link. To prevent embedding, cut off the “http://” from the link and post the rest of it. WordPress will automatically replace the missing part (so you have a hotlink) but not embed the vid. 🙂
The RedZone channel solves many of those problems. It jumps from game to game always showing the most interesting action. You get to see all the action of all the games being played at one and four o’clock every Sunday. Also I love football, but I can spend hours reading books or articles about intricate strategy and advanced football analytics. As with everything, the better you understand it, the more you appreciate it. Well, I guess not everything, but certainly most sports.
This is one reason why Aussie Rules is great. When there’s a break in play, the clock stops. So there’s always 20 minutes of action each quarter, with the a single ad during the transition between a goal being kicked and the game being restarted.
I wonder if there has ever been drawn an ‘evolutionary tree’ of sports.
I mean, American ‘Football’ (hand egg) and the different rugby games are clearly closely related (species of the same genus?), a bit further back soccer and rugby/Am-Foot are also related (‘soccer’ stands for ‘society football’, as opposed to rugby), and even further down we have hockey , ice-hockey and the like (and gurling and lacrosse?)
Further down we have some possible common ancestry with basketball, netball and the old dutch-flemish ‘korfbal’ (literally: ‘basket ball’), the latter being the only team-sport I know which is systematically plead by mixed male/female teams, btw.
Then there is the order of the tennis, badminton and volleyball, over a net, here the relationship with the previously mentioned sports becomes tedious to establish, methinks.
Not to forget sports like ‘pelote’ and other hand kicking ball games. I would consider squash as a hybrid of ‘pelote’ and tennis.
And then there is a close relationship between cricket, baseball and softball , not to mention the ‘three cans’, popular with children in the townships here in South Africa.
What is the relation between bowling, petanque (jeux de boules) and marbles?
I think there could be a whole new branch of history here: The Evolution of Sports.
I tape the game and watch it later. That way I skip all of the commercials.*
* Offer void during the Super Bowl, one of the few times my wife watches with me.
Oh, and I was entertained by the World Cup, but the flopping shenanigans are even worse than the ones I see in the NBA. Some of those guys acted like they had been hit by *real* football players.
I shall recommend hurley (perhaps the most exciting team game I’ve ever seen, though I only saw it once, hundreds of years ago), sumo & kendo…
I think sport is like religion: most people are fans of the sport they grew up with.
That conjecture makes a lot of sense to me.
I thought I was the only man in the United States who doesn’t enjoy football. Actually, I usually just find competitive sports of any kind boring. I’d far rather spend my time reading a good science book like Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, or Isaac Asimov’s Only a Trillion.
I am one of the very few Americans who can boast of never having seen a football game. I don’t even know the rules. When people say words like “running back”, “down”, and “punt”, I don’t know what they mean.
So, I have no opinion on this subject, and I intend to die without ever having the opportunity to form an opinion.
An excellent ambition. I can (almost) equal it with regard to the New Zealand sacred cow, rugby – I’ve only ever watched one game. It was at the wife’s family’s place, usually when we go over there for a party, all the guys crowd round the TV in the lounge watching ‘the game’ while I sit in the garage and drink with the girls. On this occasion, it was a couple of Rugby World Cups ago, France had knocked out the New Zealand ‘All Blacks’ in the semi-finals (another reason I’m growing to like the French), so all the guys sat sour-grapes in the garage leaving the lounge empty. So I sat in comfort in the lounge and watched the final, England vs Australia, and it was a cliff-hanger. Johnny Wilkinson kept kicking field goals (i.e. while the ball was in play halfway down the field he’d just send one sailing between the goalposts – all the kiwis I know grump “that isn’t proper rugby!”) and the English just managed to win in extra time.
I love the irony, and if circumstances ever repeat I might watch another game, but it’s low probability.
So, to clarify, you’ve decided rugby is crap on the basis of having watched just one game?
I didn’t get the impression from his comment that he thought the sport was crap, only that under normal circumstances he doesn’t really care to watch it, and would instead prefer to drink with known-female company if given those two options.
And from the way he described his one-game-watching experience, I would even guess that he enjoyed it.
I’m confused as to how you got such a different impression from reading the same comment.
You’re absolutely correct! How stupid of me to have completely misread the comment!
Rugby, which I used to play (even captaining a college team in Wales), has grown progressively more boring and brutal, and I don’t care to watch it. It was ruined by everyone adoptong the New Zealand game. I’ll be an old fart and stick with my memories of Barry John & Gareth Edwards: Wales and France were always the most exciting teams – they could come alight in a way nobody else could. As to rugby’s dangers, I remember even in those days seeing a good English centre-three-quarter, whose name I forget, break his neck or back in a tackle at Twickenham. He was carried off the field, and, so far as I know, was – or has been, if he is still alive – paralysed from wherever down for the rest of his life.
Tim, I agree. As practiced in New Zealand rugby is indeed over-hyped, over-commercialised, and as such I have no interest in it. It has suffered the same fate as American football, though possibly not to the same extreme.
Rugby would not be my initial choice to watch, and the assumption (in New Zealand) that ‘everyone’ watches it would put me off – the hype just reinforces that.
In fact hype of all sorts turns me right off, particularly jingoistic hype. If anyone recalls the last America’s Cup, where Oracle came back from near-death to beat Team New Zealand, it was at the point when Oracle was 8-1 down that I decided out of sheer perversity and distaste at the NZ supporters’ cockiness, to support Oracle. Who then won 8 races in a row. I was rapt (teams I support rarely win) but I had to mute my support for fear of getting (verbally) lynched. And you wouldn’t believe the sour grapes and conspiracy theories.
Anyway, if I watch any sport, it’d most likely be volleyball or tennis. Or car rallying (I’m a car nut).
Hi swences, thanks, you’ve read it accurately. I did enjoy the one game I watched right through, if all games were that good I might watch more.
Living in NZ one is constantly bombarded with bits of rugby in the sports news, so I can conclude that rugby – as reported on the sports news – generally does not appeal to me.
Everybody is ignoring the greatest professional sport of all: professional ice hockey. It combines the improvisational beauty and non-stop action of soccer, the physicality of rugby or football, and the speed of . . . Well, of nothing else, really; play is fast and furious.
For those who avoided it because of its “goon” reputation (which really only encompassed a few years of the sport several decades ago), the time of the enforcer/goon is effectively over, with most teams not even employing a designated fighter (and also because the league, cognizant of both reputation and the problem of head injuries, has drafted new rules which have led to the near disappearance of fights). The emphasis now is on skill and athletic prowess, to the chagrin of some old-timers who pine for the fisticuffs. There is no shortage of highly physical, hard-hitting play now, though.
It’s an amazing game, if you can keep up with the extraordinary speed of the action. These guys skate at very nearly the speed of Olympic speed-skaters– 20-30 mph, often backwards! — while controlling and passing the puck like soccer players on fast-forward, trying to either execute or avoid physical body-checks while attempting to squeeze the puck past a goaltender who fills nearly the entire net, requiring pinpoint precision. Man, I love watching the sport.
And, as a bonus, Charles Darwin loved playing ice hockey as a boy, and wrote to his son, then age 14 and away at school: “Georgy has learnt to slide & enjoys it very much, & goes down by himself to the village-pond: but this day’s heavy snow will stop sliding & your skating. Have you got a pretty good pond to skate on? I used to be very fond of playing at Hocky on the ice in skates.”
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/editors-blog/2014/05/30/hockey-night-in-shrewsbury/
Yes, I have family members who watch this as well as horse racing and talk about “being due.” I try to explain that they have no influence whatsoever over the outcome and that there is no such thing as a number being due, but it is to no avail…
I would enjoy (American or Canadian) football a bit more if it was played by teams of robots. (Due to the safety reasons discussed elsewhere.)
Someone may have already mentioned this, but if you’d like a more entertaining brand of football Jerry, there will be a rugby game between the All Blacks and the USA in Chicago on November 1.