In soccer and basketball, you’ll see pre-practiced set plays run every now and then, but for the most part the game consists of freewheeling decide-as-you-go play; you dribble upfield and see what the defense is giving you, and you and all your teammates more or less figure out on the fly what you want to do, sometimes almost with mind-reading cohesion.
But with American football, almost everything is a pre-scripted play on offense.
What other sports are heavily pre-scripted? (spare me the WWE jokes)
Not really, when you consider the optionality that each player has. Offensive and defensive formations can change before the the ball is snapped depending on the look the other team is giving. QB’s often have several options to run or pass, and also have several targets. WR’s can change routes and RB’s can have multiple options to run through a hole, or bounce to the outside. Certain defensive players also can improvise blitzing or dropping back into coverage. That said, I do agree that American football is definitely more scripted than any other team sport.
Sure, but fundamentally a play is called in the huddle, and the rest (save audibles, which are sort of a last-second change of plans) is very low level tactical adjustment meant to make that particular sort of play work. I mean, just because the defensive lineman lines up over the guard instead of the center, and the double-team shifts to where he is, doesn’t mean that the play ceases to be a dive more or less up the middle.
What the OP’s getting at is that sports like hockey, soccer and basketball are fundamentally more free-form- the clock runs and the players try to make something happen, but it’s not set-piece stuff in general. That’s not to say that they don’t have set-piece plays like corner kicks, inbounding the ball, and so on, but they’re special circumstances, not the usual way of playing.
Rugby seems to be a mix of the two sorts of play, which makes sense, since it’s an intermediate step between soccer and American football.
I have heard that frequently a team’s first drive (on offense) is scripted, maybe the first couple of them. After that, you’ve had a chance to see how the defense is reacting and you adjust.
Then again, it depends on what you mean by “scripted”. You can have a script where you know exactly what plays you are going to be doing one after another. You can also have a script where you have plays that are contingent on what you see the defense doing; for example, you see them drop half their guys for pass coverage then you call a screen or run play. If you see them all coming together for a blitz then you have a different one to run. So each play is scripted, but the QB can determine at the line of scrimmage which play to run.
And then of course you have plenty of plays that break down and people improvise. Something goes wrong, like the ball slipping out, or someone does the wrong thing, or your opponent does something you didn’t account for and you have to compensate. You can script all you want but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to stick to it.
Defense has scripts too but I think they are a lot more flexible. To my understanding it’s more a matter of who is responsible for what, whether it’s a person covering a specific player (man-to-man) or covering a part of the field (zone coverage), who is backing up who to provide help, who is trying to get to the QB, maybe someone is tasked with being a “spy” to watch the QB in case he’s known to take off with the ball and run with it, etc. Often times you have a particular player on the defense who is a leader and calls out adjustments based on what he sees (and maybe he even recognizes calls the QB is yelling).
Overall though, I imagine it must be more scripted than any other kind of sport.
Bill Walsh (coach of the San Francisco 49ers in the '80s) was the coach who was most commonly cited as doing this; he was said to have scripted his team’s first 10 to 15 plays for a game, specifically to see how the defense reacted to each of those plays.
That said, I don’t think that even Walsh’s scripts specifically stated the order in which he’d run those plays – if he had, for example, a running play designed for a shorter-yardage situation, he wasn’t going to use that play on third-and-long just because it was the next play on his script.
No that’s a really good point. I’m sure they aren’t going to completely script everything exactly.
I mean, you can’t… You can’t know with certainty how many yards you will get with each play, and that is going to probably be the most important way to determine what play to run next.
If it’s 2nd and 1, you are unlikely to run the same play you’d run on 2nd and 9. Or especially the essential 3rd down where you are likely to have to punt if you can’t convert. It’s one thing to try to plan things out but it’s another to be suicidal about it.
(Pete Carroll reportedly does this for the Seahawks, but that’s not a surprise because he used to be the DC for the 49ers when Bill Walsh was a consultant for them, and Walsh became his mentor at that time.)
Most of those sports are not pre-set scripted plays in the least. Sure, you can hit the serve you want to serve in table tennis or tennis, but after that, it’s completely random and unpredictable as to how the volley will play out from that point on.
Of course, the start of each are scripted, and in NFL there a lot more players on the script but unlike NFL most team sports don’t have that concept of “plays”.
The guy in possession determines biased on game situation their best play and executes it.
But in most sports the play continues and the “other” guy take possession and gets to respond. In NFL if the script does look like it’s not going to work the QB can pull the play, throw it over the sideline or whatever the technical terms are and start again with only some loss of advantage. That is the unusual part of NFL (and CFL).
Not true. I think you and the OP are overestimating how different the sports are. The key difference is that the players stop and start again, each stoppage allowing players to reset to different strategic positions.
Football, much like soccer, allows the offensive players quite a lot of latitude in how they attack the defense. Be it run-play options, option routes, pre-snap motion, audibles, hot routes, inside/outside leverage or simply the QB scrambling there’s a tremendous amount of improvisation and intuitive coordination going on while that play is developing. The difference is less in the scripted nature of the plays but instead in the tightly confined bursts of action. Plus the fact that the same person starts with the ball each play.
Right, but what I mean is that all the things you mention like audibles, hot routes, etc… are just on-the-fly tactical adjustments, not anything that makes them closer to a free flowing sport like soccer, basketball or hockey.
The fundamental difference is that football is subdivided into individual “plays”, where there’s a stoppage of play before and after.
I really don’t agree with this. There are plenty of “plays” in basketball. Those pre-practiced plays come into effect far more often than you seem to realize. The reason that they have" almost mind-reading cohesion" is specifically because they have practiced those plays over and over again.
The point of basketball practice is not to get better at shooting, but to get better at running those very plays.
Sure, sometimes there’s a drive or a free for all, but if you watch for a while, you will see that most points are scored when the offensive team sets up, often the center or power forward will actually give a sign, and everyone will be on the same page as to where they are supposed to go, how they are supposed to move, and the responsibilities of each player.
I would flip what you said on its head, and say, “you’ll see freewheeling decide-as-you-go play every now and then, but for the most part the game consists of pre-practiced set plays.”
I don’t watch soccer, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had an interest in hockey, but I assume that the reason that they spend hours a day at practice is for similar reasons.
You conveniently cherry picked the examples that suit your argument. There a ton of free flowing stuff that goes on after the snap which I listed. The only meaningful difference is that the players starting points are prescribed.
A WR taking an outside release or settling in between zones is not at all different than a striker adjusting his path to make himself available for a centering pass.
A RB cutting back when the DL slants is not different than a forward doing a cut or a Cruyff.
I think people who don’t understand football well believe that the plays work like Tecmo Bowl. Soccer looks a lot more improvisational because the players positions at any instant can seem almost random compared to football, but beating a defender requires a ton of individual creativity in both.
Well yeah, after the ball’s snapped, it’s basically a somewhat scripted free-for-all, not some sort of video-game type of thing where the players are on rails.
For example, a hallmark of a decent running back is the ability to find the hole. Your play may be designed to have the running back run between the right guard and right tackle (the “4” hole), but depending on how the defense lines up, how the offensive line adjusts the blocking, and how they all interact once the ball’s snapped, the actual hole may end up right over the guard or tackle, or even further off of where the 4 hole is.
Good backs should have the vision and agility to see that happening and run into the hole that opens, not just pound into the back of an offensive lineman or straight into the teeth of the defense when the 4 hole isn’t where the hole actually happens.
I remember our coaches reading our backs the riot act in Saturday morning films because we’d call a 4 hole play, and the hole would open up closer to 6, because they had a down lineman over the guard, and we’d adjust to have the tackle and guard double him, and the center would then fire out and swing to the right and just push the linebacker in the direction he was already going - toward the sideline, leaving a nice big hole right about 5.5 or 6 good for 5-6 yards. Our backs were morons and would run straight to 4, and run into the double team.
But yeah as a center knowing when the best play is to actually push a linebacker playside and KEEP pushing him past the play is something they didn’t really teach in high school.
Really, the only thing ‘set’ about a play in football is that it’s supposed to be either a run or a pass. And often the pass play ends up being a running play.