It’s the Silly Sod Off position that confuses me.
That post is irrelevant to your own which castigated me for criticizing you. I was not addressing you; I was replying to even sven, which is why I quoted her. I was wrong that I hadn’t replied to you within this thread, but as you can see, your original post made such a lasting impression on me that I forgot it within 3 pages of this thread.
If you don’t like soccer, fine. I can’t help your guilty conscience or whatever that makes you rip up at me for replying to some else entirely.
It is certainly true that American Football is more complex than any other sport - and I say that as an aficionado of the game.
Why complexity is a virtue, I am not certain.
I don’t share that view on complexity.
In each and every play in American Football you start with two knowns.
- Which team has the ball
- All play will come from straight in front (or a 180 degree arc)
You compare that with say soccer or Australian Rules, amongst other games, where possession (and hence the primary strategy) can change at any instant and that players on both teams in the full 360deg arc can affect the play. That’s two orders of magnitude more complex.
Now because the NFL starting points are so rigidly specified means you can stop the clock, change personel, reset the starting position and invoke the array of plays and tactics from bus loads of coaches trying to outguess each other.
Watching a quarterback advance their team to a position for the winning score with the clock running down is a military, precision strategy and good to watch. Chess with human pieces. But the real fun parts of NFL come with the spilt ball or a charge down and all of a sudden you get players reacting to what is happening in the instant, not to the pre-prepared coaching instructions.
The ability of players to respond, and take advantage of the chaos of the unscripted is what makes a sport complex.
You knew this was coming: Dio’s in a video about the vuvuzelas. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ln_rqPpPk
Not one of the funniest of those parodies I’ve seen, though.
Your points are valid but soccer is often referred to as “chess on legs” which it most certainly isn’t. American football is much closer to that just like you said. Soccer is live action Foosball. The misrepresentation in the description goes a long way to make people roll their eyes when there are sports like American football that are more similar to chess with moves complete with set offensive and defensive lines and real playbooks.
Yeah. It’s really odd. I don’t expect everyone to love the game, but this sort of negative obsession is bizarre. I don’t care for hockey, but somehow manage not to jump into hockey threads in order to bash the sport.
American football is kind of special in that respect. Really. It’s very much a coach’s sport. I don’t personally find that a virtue (I don’t really find it a negative either).
And the vuvuzelas still suck. Cheap plastic imports from China do not make culture. And don’t Mexican use of cheap plastic horns predate South Africa’s?
I think it stems from a latent fear of inferiority.
You see it in a lot of threads on TV shows too. People will run in and say, “I can’t believe any of you actually LIKE this show!”
ETA: Shagnasty, what gives? I thought you were afraid you’d turn into a “fag” if you kept worrying about soccer anymore? :rolleyes:
My problem with futbol* is that the low scoring makes it unlikely for the best team to win. Gerald Skinner, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland in College Park elucidates:
Overall, the odds that the best team will win the World Cup is about 28%.
It wasn’t always this way. The first set of rules (1863?) had no crossbar on the goal, though that changed a couple of years later. Anyway, the average number of goals has dropped from 4-5+ in the 1950s to about 2.3 in the 2006 World Cup. The rules need more tweaking.
- …because nothing says pretension like foreign spelling and italics!
The Vuvuzela is the greatest troll of 2010. I turned on my T.V. just to see what all the buzz was about. Good lord… EL OH FUCKING EL…
Maybe next year world cup, maybe next year…
Best team? Defined how?
Presumably Skinner thinks FIFA should just hand the cup back to Brazil every four years.
The best team in the world win the final every four years. QED. In their wake they leave several “best in the world on paper” teams to rue the fact they weren’t able to put their best on the field when it actually mattered.
Defined by reference to long term average scoring ability I should think. I suspect that Skinner’s point is that goals are so few that 90 minutes is not actually long enough to give really good odds that the team with the better long term average scoring ability will win. I think that many years ago we had an entire thread on this subject: I am far from certain that our conclusion agreed with Skinner.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re waiting for next year’s World Cup, you’re going to be sitting in a stadium somewhere all by yourself.
I still think Skinner is begging the question. The best soccer team is the team that can win within the rules and inherent limitations of the game.
I hate using statistics to analyze quality in sports teams because it takes out the human elements. I feel this way when it is applied to any sport. There are football sports writers who do this sort of thing every season, and every season they turn up wrong in their predictions. If stats told the whole story then there would be no reason to actually play the games. We could just run the numbers, adjusting for chance, and see the results. Sort of like how people let the computer play itself in Madden (or any computer game) for a season. The human element, which isn’t bound by statistics, is why we watch. Heroic play, stupid mistakes, great coaching, unbridled emotion, the man who comes from out of nowhere to become a superstar, and the superstar who falls into pieces, etc.
I see what you did there.
Even assuming Skinner is correct, that’s not an inherent limitation of the game; that’s a limitation of international competition. If you really wanted to find out who the best team was, you’d have a round robin tournament where all 32 World Cup qualifiers played each other twice.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a whole year for the World Cup, so that’s not going to happen.
Fuck yeah, culture.
What if the NBA was like the World Cup?
It’s a shame that it takes a demoralizing penalty from the South African goalkeeper to get people to (mostly) stop blowing those damn horns. Even sadder is how the residents of the host country were seen streaming out of the stadium with 10 minutes left in the game.
If only South Africa could lose every game. Blessed silence.
And your horn.
They’re probably making an exit soon.