One of my Brit friends calls American Football the “throwy, runny, sometimes-kickey game”.
Not knowing anything about soccer or the World Cup, I’m a little confused. Why would a game end in a tie? Can’t they keep playing until it’s not a tie?
Yes, but that would make soccer suck less – something they’ve worked very hard to avoid.
Between Friday and Saturday, there were five games played – three of them were ties, and no more than two points were scored in any game. I can’t imagine why anyone would think this is the most boring-shit sport ever invented.
The slightly more serious answer is that you get standing points – moreso for a win than for a tie.
They do once they’re out of the group stage. The group stage is based on points, 3 for a win, 1 for a tie, and 0 for a loss. The two teams with the most points advance. If there’s a tie it goes to goal differential. In the Group stage there’s no need to play the teams into the ground when tiebreakers already exist.
After that there has to be a clear-cut winner, so they play 30 minutes of extra time (no “sudden death”, or “Golden Goal” as they call it) and then they go to penalty kicks if the game is still tied.
Without particularly getting into the fun discussion (that pops up every four years) I, as a man who’s been on the sidelines during a pro football (American) game.
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The games are truly different so the argument is arguing for its own sake.
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Most people non-American simply will NOT believe how truly violent American football is. The video upthread about Australian Rules is good, sure, but those player would, quite honestly, be dead playing with American football players. Bear in mind this is a sport where actual armor is required and still major injuries are a regular part of the sport.
It’s baseball season, for Og’s sake! All other “sports” should be banned for the duration.
Really? It seems once you don armour, you’re inviting more violent challenges. Certainly anybody who leads with the head at rugby is a bit of a moron who is inviting a broken neck.
Anyway, I’ve actually been to a “football” game, and watched matches on TV, and the overwhelming number of challenges seemed to consist of people getting pushed out of bounds or simply rugby tackled. The huge hits that everybody likes to link to just weren’t that common in any of the games I watched, and certainly weren’t noticably more common than the huge hits you get in rugby.
I thought in rugby you were required to wrap up and bring down, rather than try to put your shoulder through his chest at full speed.
In theory, yeah. In practice, the rule is barely enforced, and I’m willing to bet a large minority of players don’t even know that the rule exists.
A lot of the truly viscous hits aren’t on the ball carrier who is expecting contact an can brace himself and often step aside from a runaway train type tackle.
A receiver coming over the middle concentrating on the ball usually took the worst hits. But they have recently really started changing rule to protect a defenseless man catching the ball, because they decided scrambled brains is a bad thing.
Also the most bonecrunching hits are often a crack-back on a tackler by a blocker he never saw coming. Those you miss on TV usually because the camera is focused on the ballcarrier.
Yeah. How’s that any different from receiving a “hospital pass”, and getting completely flattened, though? In both cases, you’re talking about a guy getting smashed who couldn’t prepare himself.
It’s not different in function, it’s just slight different in degree. Rubgy athletes are trained in a a more aerobic endurance type form. Football players are trained for an anaerobic massive burst activity. They are the biggest, strongest, fastest men trained for explosive contact. Over the years of football the physics of F=mv2 for them has simply grown past the structural capacity of bone and muscle to stay whole. And they have been consistently changing rules and equipment to keep people breathing at the end of the game out of necessity.
Fucking egg-chasers
Imagine being hit by someone 6’5", weighing 275 lbs, and just a 10th of a second off world-class sprinter speed.
…not that impressive? 275 pounds is nineteen stone, or a stone and a half heavier than I am, and I’m nowhere near the heaviest player on the field, even at an amateur level, where you’re talking of players getting up to 23-25 stone. You’re talking about the weight of an average prop forward, maybe even under weighted. For comparison, Jonah Lomu was 6 foot 4, nineteen stone and a noted sprinter. He played on the wing, traditionally the position with one of the smallest players on the team.
I think we’re not really communicating here. No one is arguing that ARF or Rugby isn’t a hard sport full of collision and tough, large men playing well. But what’s not being properly conveyed here is that American Football is a blood sport. Does either ARF or Rugby routinely lead to serious brain injuries?
Here’s some bits from wikipedia’s article on football injuries:
Former players surveyed reported 4-6 minor and one major injury per career.
Between 1931 and 2006 there have been 1006 direct (and 683 indirect) fatalities resulting from participating in organized football. That’s from the pro game down to high school and amateur. That’s 75 years or more than 22 deaths per year on average.
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Remember, as well, that these injuries are sustained under controlled conditions with the best padding and armor that can be developed. ** Hell, high school players are protected better now than the pro players in the 1960s were.
And there’s a long-term price to be paid as well. Again from the page referenced above the average pro career is under 4 years but it is common to here about former players requiring extensive surgeries and other therapies simply to move normally.
Maybe I’m wrong…and I’m prepared to be proven so. But I don’t think one sees routine death and debilitating injuries each year at all levels of Australian Rules Football or Rugby.
Yes, there’s always the somewhat machismatic ‘rugby players don’t use pads’ argument. I acknowledge that. But the reason for that is that the sport just isn’t as brutal or violent as American Football. The reason this is clear (to me, at least) is that, if either was as brutal, the players WOULD wear pads or death and paralysis-causing injuries would happen during every single game.
I believe you. Is this a reason I should like American Football?
Err yes? Not just head injuries, but severe spinal injuries. That’s why doctors are always trying to make scrums non-contested. There’s various proposals for registers tracking the number of players receiving brain injuries in rugby.
At least I don’t feel so bad about watching boxing and MMA now.