After the something-th coolest summer on record in Minneapolis, it seems that now the city is enjoying a September heat wave of sorts. All I can say is it had better drop to 38F at 8am on October 3rd.
But I wouldn't know about that September heat, I'm in the city that persists in believing its sports teams are perennial underdogs, even when its football team has won 2 out of the last 3 Superbowls.
Football for me signals that period of year when I get to ignore large parts of the sports section of the paper. I've been to some games. I even saw the Gophers beat Penn State (is Joe Paterno still coaching? I think he could coach from six foot under, and perhaps he has been doing so for a while). But I just can't get interested in the game itself. I follow the NFL standings since the position of the Vikings and their inevitable failure to convert regular season victories into post-season glory is central to understanding Minnesota society. And I think that the way the college football championship is decided is meaningless, and could so easily be made meaningful (like the basketball final four) that the NCAA should be indicted.
But unless I'm in a bar, and the TV is pointing at me, and the conversation is deathly dull, will I watch the actual game. This is not, I hasten to add, a prejudice against American sports. Baseball. Great sport worthy of more international attention. Worthy of soaking up many summer evenings and afternoons. (I was halfway kidding about making the outfielders take their gloves off). Ice hockey. Great sport, especially at the college level. Worth the ticket prices the Gophers charge. Basketball. Great sport.
But football, I just don't get. At many levels it is the simple fact it takes 3 hours and then some to get through 60 minutes of playing time for a running, contact sport.
Now, other sports, like baseball and cricket have significant breaks in the action. But baseball and cricket are not primarily meant to be sports of continuous interaction (let alone contact) between the players. They are in many ways, the addition of discrete plays, with the strategic drama of the situation building slowly. The breaks between innings, and the breaks between deliveries of the ball to the batter, allow the spectators to reflect on how the situation has evolved with the last play, and what could happen next.
But American football in many ways is closer in spirit to, well, other forms of "football," such as soccer, both codes of rugby, and Gaelic football. The object of football is also similar to basketball, netball, [water]polo, lacrosse, and hockey in its temperate (field) and frigid (ice) climate varieties. Both teams have the same number of players participating on the ground at the same time, and the object of each team is to convey the ball [puck] to the other end of the field, and into some scoring zone past the defence of the opposing team.
But all these other sports have lengthy periods of continuous interaction [and contact] between the opposing teams. The breaks in play are relatively limited (though the fourth quarter of a basketball game can get mighty long), and in soccer and rugby occur largely after an infringement of the rules.
By contrast, in football, there are remarkably short stretches of continuous interaction between the two teams. It is essentially a series of set pieces, with ample time for the coaches to advise players on how to react to the situation on the field, and for players to move on and off the field, depending on the situation.
Now, many of the other sports face the football problem of swapping players into the action, so it's not as if this is a facet of the game unique to football. But in ice hockey (especially), and to some extent in soccer and rugby, the players must swap in and out of the game while play is occuring, and this ability to swap on the move is an additional skill.
WIth the partial exception of basketball, these other codes try to limit in time and frequency the breaks in play. To a large extent the game flows, and can flow for lengthy periods of time, 20 minutes in ice-hockey for example. American football doesn't impose nearly the same restrictions on breaking the action.
Because football allows players to swap in and out of position during frequently occuring breaks in play, it encourages a high degree of specialization in players' skills, and the input of the coaches likely reduces the players' tactical and strategic ability. The excitement of watching a player have to play out of position, of watching a team have to regroup and re-organize several times before there is a break in play is, if not entirely missing, not present in football.
As I noted, breaks in play and the input of coaches and captains in determining the next move, do not make a sport intrinsically less interesting. They are an essential part of the charm of the game in baseball and cricket.
But inserted into a game that in other respects bears more resemblance to continuous, contact sports, it's just odd. It's like listening to a symphony line-by-line, rather than stanza by stanza; or reading one sentence in a novel, taking a 60 second break, and reading the next one, rather than reading whole paragraphs or chapters.
I write this not because I don't like football, but because I like most other sports (tho' maybe beach volleyball got more than its due of Olympic coverage) and my obvious failure to appreciate football cries out for one of my readers to help me out, and tell me what I should see in the game ...
Posted by robe0419 at September 13, 2004 10:37 PM