Average NFL game 16 minutes of play?

The Game Room
61

I don’t know. Is poker even widely played in Europe?

Back to athletic competitions, I’m always hesitant to declare some sociological truth when there is some clear institutional antecedent to certain behaviors.

American sports have always been dependent on commercial television, more so than other countries. This may be a bigger reason why there are jersey ads in any european sport, and why we have no jersey ads, but four thirty-second commercials between an extra point and a kickoff, in the NFL.

62

The major American sports predate ubiquitous television by several decades, so I don’t see you how you can make that claim.

63

I get the MLB.tv package to stream MLB games online and allow me to watch them at work. Luckily, due to the pace of the game, this gives me a lot of time to be productive and mostly listen to the announcers and then check back if there is a big play. Dual monitors helps with this too, giving me more of a chance to fit the video somewhere amidst my various work windows.

The condensed games are really cool, especially if you get the iPhone app as well (it was a one-time $10 purchase as an add-on to my existing service). I’ve been able to catch up with games I’ve missed with minimal time commitment, and on the go too. The live stream quality is very good too, surprisingly clear even over 3G. I can’t say the same about the football stream through DirectTV, although football tends to have a wider angle and more action on the screen, so it’s not really a fair comparison.

64

  1. I was lazy in my later post and neglected to include “and radio”.

  2. The NFL certainly reached mass popularity after, and because of, the emergence of television.

65

So if poker’s waned from its heyday, can we reasonably conclude that Americans no longer like strategy as much as they used to? Or does the popularity of poker tell us nothing about the popularity of strategic sports, in Europe or America? What does the popularity of snooker vs. pool in America tell us?

66

The waning of poker’s popularity is a case study in overexposure, much like how putting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on five nights a week killed the game show revival in the early 2000s. As I understand it, the World Series of Poker is still quite popular. And pool is very popular in America.

67

Yes, pool is very popular, but snooker isn’t. Snooker seems to me to be by far a more tactical game than pool is. Regardless, the discussion is academic because poker is shown on TV in the UK, it just isn’t popular, because the image of men sat around a table playing cards with sunglasses on is ridiculous.

68

Tactics and strategy are different things. To use pool as an example, tactics would be putting English on the ball or using/avoiding the bridge, while strategy would be planning out a series of shots at once and leaving the ball in the best place to make each successive followup shot.

So televised poker was hugely popular in the States and though it’s fallen off it’s still pretty darn popular, but it’s not popular in the UK. Seems like a solid datapoint that Americans are more interested in strategy.

69

Eh, that’s a huge extrapolation from a single data point. Highly relevant is the fact that poker was primarily televised on pay TV over here, maximising revenue but severely limiting its audience. It certainly went through a big boom in terms of people actually playing it. And as pointed out, snooker is far more strategic than pool, and snooker, although waning, was hugely, hugely popular in the UK. Cricket’s another hugely strategic game that’s popular over here. There’s no pattern emerging that I can see.

Making generalisations about what entire nations of unrelated people are predisposed to like just seems pointless; what’s popular is largely down to accidents of history.

70

Yes, which pretty much describes 99% of the skill involved in snooker.

71

Incidentally, there’s equivalent encyclopedias of moves for backs in rugby union (and that discounts similar set movements from forwards at the scrum and lineout). Even amateur sides will have dozens of moves memorized in the backs.

72

I’ve never said that European sports have no strategy. Only that American sports have more.

73

Right, and we’re saying that the examples you’ve given seem to be based either on a skewed view of what’s popular in Europe and why, or a lack of understanding of individual sports. You don’t see the strategy in rugby because you’re not familiar with it, just as I don’t always see the strategy in NFL because I’m still trying to remember what a nose tackle is. You ignore examples that don’t bear out your theory (snooker, cricket), but you’re happy to make large logical leaps based on limited information about temporary fads (poker). It’s pretty classic confirmation bias.

ETA: and you said Americans are more interested in strategy, not that their sports have more. The latter, even if true, does not imply the former.

74

The constant action in rugby and soccer have deep and rich strategic elements. All of which are mirrored in NFL football from snap to whistle. I could even claim the snap-to-whistle strategy of NFL football is deeper than soccer and rugby due to the nature of having extremely specialized positions. But I’ll happily stipulate that they’re equivalent.

But that’s where soccer and rugby strategy ends. By contrast, that’s only a drop in the bucket of NFL football strategy due to the extremely complex playbooks and the myriad different down-and-distances. There is no counterpart to that incredible depth in either soccer or rugby.

I see the strategy in soccer and rugby that everyone always assumes I do not. I also see the live-action strategy in NFL football that apparently soccer and rugby fans are not capable of conceding. Do you guys really think that there is this huge amount of strategy during the action in every sport except NFL football?

You guys will have to explain how popular snooker and cricket are in Europe. Do they rival soccer? Because MLB does rival the NFL by some metrics. If they don’t rival soccer’s popularity, well, then that’s yet another datapoint supporting my hypothesis.

75

Once the snap occurs, it’s no longer strategy, it’s tactics.

76

Sez you, (I presume) a lifelong NFL fan and an occasional observer of football and rugby. :slight_smile: And I agree with garygnu; the playbook is tactics. Strategy is deciding what tactic to employ when. NFL is pretty strategic, sure, but having 1000 plays in your pocket is no measure of strategic depth; it’s tactical depth. One could say with equal justification that football has infinite plays, that are frequently invented on the spot. So what if you write something down? That a playbook is possible simply reflects the set-piece nature of NFL. And indeed, football teams have a lot of drilled plays from their (relatively rare) set pieces.

You could view football as jazz improv to NFL’s classical music. I’m not sure where this gets us, and I certainly don’t think it esteems one over the other. And moreover, I don’t think it tells us anything about the innate preferences of the arbitrary sets of people who happen to follow one more than the other. To be honest, my views on this subject have far less to do with an affinity for any particular sport, but rather (and I hope you’ll forgive me) that I think any blanket statement about what millions of arbitrarily grouped people “prefer” is inherently stupid. I think national preferences are accidents of history. We like what we like because it’s what we grew up with and it’s what our parents liked. Here it’s football. There it’s NFL. It just happened that way.

Does a child in the USA really think to himself, “hmm, will I follow soccer or NFL? I know, the NFL, because it’s more strategic.” No. Does a child in the UK really think, “y’know, the NFL is great 'n all, but I’m going to support my local football team because the lack of strategic depth is more appropriate to my national tendencies.” Again, of course not. We follow what we follow because it’s what everyone else follows. And after that we follow it because we always have. I enjoy the NFL, but I didn’t grow up with it, so it’ll never be to me what football is. And the reverse, I’m sure, is true for you. Does this say anything about our respective appreciation for strategy? I don’t think so.

Well, with respect, you’ve kinda said in the past that you do not. I apologise for dredging this up from the last World Cup, but it stuck with me:

I dunno, maybe you’ve watched a lot of football since then, but I can’t help thinking that your appreciation of the game, while undoubtedly better than mine of NFL, is perhaps not all that and a side of fries.

What? Of course not. I think sports obviously vary in tactical and strategic depth, and I think NFL is a bit more strategic than average, while football is slightly less strategic than average (whatever we might take “average” to mean). What I dispute is that this reflects any natural preference of Americans as opposed to Europeans for strategic depth; after all, basketball is tactically deep but strategically shallow, and that’s hugely popular in the States, too.

I can only speak for the UK. Snooker went through a long phase of being hugely popular; at least as big as poker’s recent boom in the States, which you seem happy to take as evidence for the average American’s greater appreciation for strategy. Cricket is as popular as any sport that isn’t football, and is more strategic than any ball game I know of. No, they’re not as popular as football, but so what?

Again, this is a wild leap of logic. You’re assuming that strategy level and local appreciation for strategy are the only variables influencing a sport’s popularity. This seems to me to be an unreasonably narrow view. You assume that a sport’s popularity is a pure function of its attributes and the population’s preferences. As I’ve argued above, it’s far more complicated than that.

77

What’s interesting is that NFL football is more like a war game with the head coach and his staff laying out the battle plan before the game and battlefield instructions before every snap. In soccer and to a lesser extent other sports (hockey, basketball) the coach can’t do nearly as much, so I would say NFL football does have more strategy and/or tactics. In NFL football the battle of wits takes place between coaches while the players follow instructions to their maximum physical capabilities. The QB though has a very tough job of course, making decisions in the seconds while backpedaling and waiting for 300 lb guys trying to kill them, probably the toughest position in team sports, but I wouldn’t call it making tactical decisions. Players in soccer (and hockey and basketball) have more freedom and can make more creative tactical decisions on the fly and improvise more. (like Jazz) I used to be a football fan, now I only follow soccer.

78

I think most people don’t appreciate the tactical depth of every play in the NFL. For a quarterback, the plan isn’t “ok, after 3 seconds, throw to this guy”, it’s more like “Okay, first read - do I have an unblocked blitzer? Okay, slot receiver is going to run a slant and he’s the hot route. Okay, no unblocked blitzer, so slot receiver is going to run a deep curl instead. Okay, no hot route - first read is the X receiver. Is the corner playing him inside or out? If the corner goes out, he’s running a post, if the corner plays in, he’s running a fly. Is the free safety going up or down? Okay, corner on X is playing outside and free safety is up - move on to the Z. Oh crap, blindside DE just beat my LT, better step up. Okay, strong safety dropped into flat so Z is running post, he has seperation, I’ll throw it that way”

And the receivers and quarterback need to make the exact same read of the defense in the quarter or half second. That’s why you’ll sometimes see a quarterback throw to nowhere and the announcers will say “I guess there was a miscommunication there” - maybe the safety started up, but then came down, and the QB and receiver made seperate reads. And that’s just one of the aspects on one type of play - there are battles where the blockers are divvying up responsibility for people based on how the defense aligns, whether or not some players block or release to be a receiver based on the situation, or even on a smaller scale, knowing that you can make a tackle kickstep too deep if you line up a bit outside him, opening him up to be off balance for an inside move…

The plays themselves are designed to exploit the possible actions of the defenders, so every player involved is making decisions every play on who to cover and how to cover them, which route to run based on how the other team is covering them, when to pass off responsibility on a receiver to the next guy up, where to sit in your zone, etc.

And there’s a huge battle of deception. NFL teams spend so much time trying to fool the other team and cover up what they’re actually doing in order to force them into mistakes.

On the surface, the game looks relatively simple. Your big guys beat up their big guys, your QB looks around and finds some guy to throw to, but the more you know about it the more you can appreciate that it’s actually very complex.