After watching Lagaan, I think cricket must win out over all of these.
The dictionary definition of strategy: an elaborate and systematic plan of action
By this definition, no sport even approaches football. Hell, no other sport approaches the strategic depth of the West Coast Offense, which is merely one of many overall strategies on only one side of the ball.
Compare and contrast a blitzing team versus a Cover 2. (Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay, for examples.)
How many different basic strategies are there for the main sports? Help me out with baseball; the only general strategy I’ve ever heard named is “small ball”. In soccer I’m sure there’s some, but I don’t know soccer that well. Hockey’s got a few, I’m sure, though I couldn’t name any. I’ve heard of the “triangle” in basketball.
In football, I’ve heard of the “West Coast” system, the “East Coast” system, a “ball control” gameplan, a “rolling pocket” or “mobile quarterback” paradigm, the “Run & Shoot”, Spurrier’s laughably ineffective “Fun & Gun”, the fabled Billies’ “K-Gun”, etc…
Enumerate some of the “elaborate and systematic plans of action” in these other sports so that we can compare.
OK, let’s use this definition and apply it to other sports
For baseball, the strategy is constructing the roster and acquiring. A team will set out to find players that they believe have the best skills to accomplish what they see their team needing to do to win. A team that plays in a stadium that is conducive to scoring will try to acquire a lot of guys who can hit home runs and get on base. They will discount defensive deficiencies. Teams like this when they are getting pitchers will try to get pitchers who don’t walk many batters and don’t give up many home runs in an attempt to mitigate the opponent’s ability to take advantage of the high run-scoring environment.
If the team plays in a park where runs are scarce, the opposite will be true. Teams will opt for good defenders and offensive players who may be more adept at scoring runs in manners other than hitting home runs.
The baseball manager’s job is to figure out how to squeeze out the most from the personnel given to him. Not every player is healthy. Sometimes, the tactics that work the most often for one team (e.g., hitting home runs) may not work well in certain situations. So the manager will have to hope his players have the ability to use other tactics.
But for the most part in baseball, once the manager chooses his pitcher and sets his lineup, the game is out of his hands. It is very rare that a baseball manager wins or loses a game because of an in-game decision (despite what people on sports radio think). The players play the game out.
However in football, the coaches have a lot of influence. They are doing the preparation. They are calling the plays.
Basketball has many different offensive strategies. The triangle is the most notable one now because Phil Jackson used it in Chicago and L.A. to win several NBA championships. But there are many others. Basketball coaches have to decide if they want an offense to be run through the point guard or perhaps a post man.
I’m not as familiar with soccer to speak knowingly, but there are different formations and plans of attack that teams use depending upon what they think will work best. It’s harder to pick out the offense in sports like soccer, hockey, and basketball because of the play being continuous and the players going back and forth between offense and defense.
Football and baseball have the advantage of the game unfolding in discrete segments so it’s easier to analyze.
The NFL’s salary cap alone is more involved than any of that. Add in the constraints of the specific philosophy of the General Manager and Head Coach, plus the larger roster of a football team, and football is the clear winner in the “Strategic Depth of Roster Management” department.
But roster management is only a minor subplot of the strategy involved in football. Every down and distance combined with field position has its own unique a set of plays. These elaborate sets of plays are triggered in a systematic fashion during the game.
Hell, the typical NFL playbook is 300 plays, and the coach will choose half of those to put into the active playbook each week. Think back to the playoffs last year, when the Patriots shut down the super offense of the Collts, and then blew the doors off the super defense of the Steelers. The Pats looked like two completely different teams in those two games.
How many other sports involve a team radically overhauling its strategy on a game by game basis? The Yankees are as the Yankees do. But a football team gameplans each and every opponent differently, even if they’re the same team! (More often than not, playing the same team a few weeks later involves a whole new strategy.)
I won’t even mention weather conditions.
NFL players have to be chosen for very specific purposes that are much more specialized than baseball players. There aren’t many utilitymen in football. A guy who will play offense and defense and say fill in at linebacker one week and then the next week play running back.
But baseball teams change their strategy from game to game playing the same opponent. Each pitcher has his own plan on how to approach each hitter in that game and that particular situation. Each pitch count has its own approach for the hitter and pitcher and fielders.
However in baseball, it’s easier to just reuse your same strategic approach because you play 10 times as many games as an NFL team does.
Agreed.
In baseball, I calculate twelve different pitch counts, with nine or ten different hitters in a game, multiplied by the eight possible on-base configurations, and you get roughly 900 scenarios.
Compared to the down & distance plus field position situational breakdown in football, I find the situational depth a bit more involved in football. A primitive gameplan might make distinctions like:
Down & short (2nd or 3rd)
Down & 3-5 (1st, 2nd, or 3rd)
Down & 6-9 (2nd or 3rd)
Down & 10+ (1st, 2nd, or 3rd)
multiplied by
minus goal line
minus goal line to minus 20
minus 20 to midfield
midfield to field goal range
field goal range to redzone
redzone to goal line
plus goal line
Those 70 situations map to the 100 or so different pitch count / on-base combinations, though there are actually more than those basic 7 situations in football. (A two point conversion from the plus 2 is a notably different situation after an offsides brings it to the plus 1, but everything inside the fives is “goal line” in this basic breakdown.) The same cannot be said for pitch counts and on-base scenarios, where there are only 12 and 8 possibilities respectively.
As for each unique pitcher against each unqiue batter, that’s a pool of 5 against a pool of 9 or 10. One could map the pool of a half dozen packages both ways (3WR, Big, 4-3, Nickel etc…) against that.
And finally you end up with individual pitches. Heat, sinker, curve, and I’m sure there’s a dozen more at least, right? But that’s where baseball comes up short. Every other aspect has already been accounted for, and the actual pitch types are left to contrast with the extensive playbook all by itself.
A dozen pitches is no match for 100 plays. Really, it’s more like 300 plays, where 150 are activated each week. Imagine having 300 different pitches to choose from, and the pitcher only brings half of them to each game.
That’s actually not really fair. Football guys inflate their egos with all those “plays”, when in reality a single play “counts” as a dozen “different” plays when you apply it to all the permuations of all the formations. (The same damn play can easily appear in every formation. How many ways can you run a screen?)
So, of those 150 plays, I’d say there are maybe 40 unique plays. Hell, you only run 65 plays a game, and of those 65 plays, 30 of them are likely to be duplicates.
So let’s say a dozen pitches against 30 unique plays. It ended up being much close than I would have guessed, but even with a simplified gameplan, strategy in the NFL gameplan is a “bit” more involved, and the reality is probably closer to “notably”.
Although, after further review, the on-base scenarios are more involved than the binary I presented. With men on the corners, whether or not the guy on first is a roid-head slugger or a speedy base stealer makes a world of difference. I’m not convinced this added layer of complexity is enough to bring baseball up to the level of football, but I concede that it is possible.
Soccer and hockey? You’ll need to bring a hard sell to convince me they even belong in this conversation. I doubt they have the strategic depth of basketball, which is easily a full tier below baseball and football. (For one thing, basketball only has like 12 guys on the whole team, whereas football has 11 guys in the field of play.)
While it is true that there are countless on-the-fly tactics in hockey and soccer that are dynamically used during the flow of the game, there is a comparable amount of post-snap tactics in football that map to these pretty well. Double moves, pump fakes, option routes, hot routes, chip blocks, double teams, press coverage, looking off the receiver, etc…
Football seems like a no-brainer here to me.
I wonder if the pattern of how the offense and defense react in baseball and football makes a difference.
Baseball: Defense initiates action, offense reacts, defense reacts to offense’s actions, offense can then further react.
Football: Offense initiates action, defense reacts, offense reacts to that, defense reacts again.
The offense in baseball is much less complex than the defense. In football the offense is more complex than the defense, but both are more complex than baseball’s defense.
For informational purposes, here is how basketball’s “Princeton offense” is supposed to work.
http://www.bbhighway.com/Talk/Coaching_Box/Clinics/Five-Star/kpigott.asp
It uses Shockwave.
It’s probably the most disciplined and regimented offense used in basketball today. But in basketball, the important thing is for all the players to be able to react instantly to rapidly changing situations. In basketball, this is even more paramount than other sports. The direction of play changes much more frequently. But basketball, like football, teams can keep running the same offense until the defense shows an ability to stop it. A football team can hand off to its top running back all the time, until the defense finds a way to stop that guy. In basketball, a team could keep dumping the ball down into the low post to the center that can’t be stopped (which doesn’t happen as much anymore). In baseball, a team will rely on its best hitters to produce runs, but also has to hope that the lesser hitters can provide some offense at times.
Football is very much like a war and each coach is trying to constantly build up his forces and change his tactics to gain that very small advantage that he needs to win the game. If Team A outgainst Team B by a yard or two per play, it’s likely to win the game (barring turnovers or special teams mistakes).
In baseball, the basic strategies and tactics are set. The rules don’t allow a lot of leeway for managers to think of new ideas. It’s more of a battle of survival. Somehow trying to get all of your good players to perform their best until the season is over. And I do think that in baseball, there is a greater element of luck. In baseball, you can hit the ball poorly, yet still get on base because of odd bounces or poor fiedling. In football, if your play call is bad, you’re not likely to get any yardage and you can make a turnover (sometimes teams get good plays out of broken plays, but not often.)
In basketball, you need to have the best players. Preferably you need a guy who is very good. Someone who can shoot, who has good court vision, can handle the ball, can play good defense. You want that all in one package. If you’ve got a player like that, most strategies in basketball will work well.
Perhaps one way to judge the overall strategy involved is to look at how teams strategize for specific players/teams.
In basketball, one player can, and often is, the whole team. By expending additional defense on this one player, one hopes to limit his/her contribution and that your tried-and-true offensive plan (or big named player) scores enough points to win. A basketball team has evolved to become less a true team than a vehicle for the “star” player.
In baseball, one player can completely dominate far less than in basketball, but a single player has several opportunities per game to make a big difference. A base stealer can change a game with a well timed steal as easily as a slugger at the plate with 2 on or a reliable singler at bat with a man on third, etc. Baseball teams make it a point to know the other player’s tendencies and habits (he always swings at inside pitches; he’s too slow for your fastball; etc.), and try to pitch accordingly, or, if advisable, walk him.
In football, however, every team has at least one game breaker in any of a number of positions, sometimes on the field at the same time. Everyone knows the names of the QB’s and WR’s and RB’s that put up the numbers every week, but sometimes it’s the unknown T or OL or G that does the things to change the game. Every game is a different set of guys (unlike basketball), at the same time (unlike baseball) that one must plan against.
Also, I think that the actual countermeasures in football are more complex. For example: Double covering in basketball leaves a guy open, but he’s either on the outside of the triangle, or he’s under the basket with everyone else. Doubling a receiver in football is far riskier because you’re leaving a man open with a lot more space to run. Plus, a 2 or 3 point basket in a game that routinely scores 40 or more isn’t as much a momentum-swinger or back-breaker as giving up a TD, or even a 40 yard play (ask the Cowboys). So double covering in football requires different placement of the safeties and/or LB’s to minimize soft spots in the defense.
My experience with soccer is limited, but from what experiences I have had with it, I judge it to be about on par with basketball.
So, my call is:
- football
- baseball
- soccer and basketball
This is a great debate so far.
I think that football is by far the most strategic sport. While much of the planning happens before the game, there are many adjustments which can be made during the game both by coaches and the players themselves.
I think that because soccer, basketball, hockey and rugby are all free flowing games with less down-time, there is less strategy involved. There are fewer set plays (although there are some) but the game is more about reacting and athletic ability.
It is a testament to how much strategy is involved in football that a team with relatively few star players like New England can win three of the last 4 Superbowls. You could make a similar case for the Detroit Pistons in basketball these last couple of years, but I think that in basketball star players are more important than strategy. This point could be proved or disproved this season depending on how well the Lakers do.
I totally agree with Ellis Dee’s summaries above about the complexity of football. There are so many different variations in personnel, formations, route combinations etc that there must be a plan otherwise everything just becomes a chaotic mess.
I think it has to be football by far. It’s not just the play calling, but the fact that each player has to be able to read the other side and make adjutsments and counter-adjustments at the line of scrimage and during the play.
Soccer is just about kicking a ball back and forth as far as I can see. It doesn’t seem to have any strategy at all. It seems like whenever somebody scores a goal (about once every other month), it’s a product of random luck as much as anything else (Disclaimer: I don’t know much about soccer. I watch a few World Cup games every few years and that’s about it. Maybe there’s more to the game than I see, but that’s how it looks to an American).
basketball is about using short term tactics to try to get the ball to a player with an open look or underneath the net. You often see the same tactic used over and over again throughout the game (how many years did Utah use that pick and roll with Stockton and Malone?) basketball also relies heavily on individual talent- more so than on scheming or X’s and O’s.
Baseball is all about pitchers vs. hitters. The strategy is mostly about personel- putting the right pitcher or hitter in the game at the right time. most of the fielding and baserunning tactics are not exactly chess moves. They’re standard, by-the book, situational moves that everyone on the other team and in the stands is familar with.
I would think any knowledgeable soccer fan would tell you that teams score goals because of certain plans and not luck. A lot of goals in soccer come off set plays, i.e, corner kicks and free kicks (not counting penalty kicks here which are different). Teams try to get a specialist who can kick the ball into a particular space to an offensive player to head or kick in to the goal. Or even better, they have guys (like the famed David Beckham) who are skilled enough to kick the ball with enough spin on it that it will bend around the defenders and into the goal. But a good team has a plan for all of these set plays.
There are different formations teams use in soccer depending upon whether their goal is to score or to defend. 4-4-2, 5-3-2, 2-4-4. In soccer, if you’re new to the game, you spend a lot of time watching the guy with the ball, but you really need to see the whole field to see who is running into space.
I think the strategy/tactics involved in basketball has been underestimated in this thread. There have been teams here in the Australian league that have been completely struggling until a change in coach has completely reversed their fortunes. Likewise there are currently teams that have amazing players individually, but their coaching/strategy is so poor that the team does terribly.
But I suppose in American basketball, strategy is probably less important, as the NBA seems to often be more about players going one-on-one than any noticeable level of teamwork. Perhaps thats why the US got whipped in the last Olympics. 
My hockey-loving friend (he’s Canadian and all that) voted for football and said it wasn’t close. He thought I could actually stand behind the bench of an NHL game and I would have an idea of what to do. I would have an idea which lines to put in, which defensemen.
He didn’t think I could make one play call in a college or pro football game.
While I maintain that football is most complex, don’t sell soccer too short. There is quite a bit of strategy involved, actually. I couldn’t go into detail about it, but if someone who could is staying away for fear of a dogpile of snide Americans, you won’t get such dismissal from me.
In previous threads I used the number of hours of game film watched to prepare for each game as a datapoint. Everyone knows that football coaches and players spend countless hours reviewing game films each week. Hockey? C’mon, maybe an hour for each game. I have no idea about basketball.
But I was assured by some of the more soccer-knowledgable posters that some soccer coaches do actually put in those same countless hours on watching film to gameplan the next opponent. And soccer has the exact same personnel strategy layer as football, with just as many permutations of what 11 guys to put in the game. Though, to be fair, football can change that personnel 65 times in a game. They don’t, but the freedom is there, whereas in soccer I think you have to wait for a stoppage.
If soccer stopped and started 130 times in a game, I think it would rival football for strategic depth. But because it doesn’t, much of the strategic layer gets pushed down into the realm of tactics. I’d love to see an exhaustive comparison of the tactics in soccer and football; my gut says they’re about equal, but my gut is hardly a compelling cite.
I forgot baseball, which has limited extensive game film prep. Some pitchers analyze so much gamefilm that they could rival an NFL head coach in hours per week logged in the film room. (Well, with their laptop, at least.) But that is only pitchers.
Everyone except the kicker and punter watches gamefilm in football. Some of the stuff they watch for is so minute as to make your head spin, and they all watch different film for different purposes.
I originally got into this debate a year or so ago when trying to figure out why soccer isn’t popular in America. My position is that Americans like strategy, which I became convinced of when I saw the explosion in poker ratings on ESPN.
Everyone likes team sports the best; team sports are the most popular form of entertainment across the globe. But Americans seem to clearly favor football, and actively dislike soccer. My theory is that it’s because of the strategic depth of football.
Interesting discussion. Ultimately, these clearly popular sports all have sufficient strategy to keep them interesting and keep the outcomes up in the air enough to have people watching.
Strategy - and as a Strategy Consultant for business for over a decade, I guess I am expected to know about this - is about high-altitude decisions you make before the game has really started.
Baseball: whether to play small ball and focus on pitching and defense or try to home-run your way to a pennant
Football: What your basic offensive (e.g., West Coast, etc.) and defensive (e.g., 4/3 or 3/4 up in the box, etc.) positions are going to be, and so on.
Same with basketball, and although I know nothing about them, soccer and hockey.
Everything else - adjustments mid-game based on what you are seeing as play unfolds - is tactics. Changing calls at the line, shifting the infield to double-play depth, etc. - those are tactics.
Most hitters in baseball watch a lot of video. They are usually analyzing their swings and checking to see how various pitchers worked them. It’s more like a golfer looking at video of his/her swing.
If strategy doesn’t matter in NBA basketball, you’ll have a lot of difficulty explaining why the last TEN championships have been won by, my count, exactly three coaches.
Strategy matters a lot in the NBA, as it does in all sports. People who suggest “soccer doesn’t have strategy” or “the NBA doesn’t have strategy” just don’t understand the sport.
BobT, with all due respect, if you were behind the bench at an NHL game you’d be so lost than two minutes into the first period the players would either just kill you or appoint a coach from among themselves. Hockey is not a stupid game by any stretch of the imagination, and coaches do in fact watch a HUGE amount of tape. No amount of speed and strength will help you if you can’t play positional hockey and don’t have a plan.
I wouldn’t put anything even close to Football, it has major tactics in all areas.
1.Overarching view: what coaches, which style, what players.
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Weekly: What injuries, what kind of opponent, expected weather.
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In game: Sitatutional, down/distance, score status, what has been working what hasn’t.
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In play: Offensive/defensive shifts, which reciever to react to in zone coverage.
Football: uses all four heavily.
Baseball: focuses on 1 and 3. with only a little 2 and 4.
Basketball, mostly 1, a tiny bit of 2, decent ammount of 3 at the end, and 4 gets halfway replaced with personal athletic ability
Soccer, 1 with a shitload of 4.
I never said it didn’t matter in the NBA :rolleyes: - my entire post was about how it mattered more in basketball (in general) that people here are giving the sport credit for. I was just suggesting that international basketball places a higher emphasis on strategy than the NBA, due to the NBA’s focus on individual athleticism.