This is one of the reasons that I like football:
More than any other position, playing quarterback requires mastering a farrago of detail, and then sifting through it while staring at eleven large people eager to break your face. The best N.F.L. quarterbacks, like Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Peyton Manning, have reputations as keen, obsessive students of opposing defenses, whose schemes they decode in real time. And yet, what does it say that the great model of lethally consistent play, Peyton, scored a twenty-eight on the Wonderlic while his more erratic brother, Eli, scored a thirty-nine?
One theory some in the N.F.L. hold is that the highest-scoring quarterbacks are too rigidly scholarly, prisoners of research who don’t handle in-game adjustments well, while those whose scores are very low simply can’t handle a high volume of preparation.
Oliver Luck was twice an Academic All-American quarterback at West Virginia University, spent five years in the N.F.L., went on to law school, and is now the athletic director at his alma mater. His son, Andrew, (Stanford Class of 2012, architectural design; Wonderlic, thirty-seven) is the Indianapolis Colts’ excellent second-year quarterback. “Football intelligence to me is situational awareness,” Oliver Luck told me. “The variables in football are so many. Every play is a decision and you do it at full speed. Life involves more thought.” (If there is a dark undercurrent to a discussion of bright football players, it has to do with life after the scrum and the long-term effects that hits to the head can have on the brain.)
That said, Oliver Luck thinks that there have been certain moments post-football when his aptitude for the game has been helpful to him. “I remember distinctly sitting for the Texas bar exam after I finished law school,” he recalled. “There were maybe five hundred people in there. People were sighing and groaning. A guy one table away from me suddenly lost it. I wanted to tell him, ‘Suck it up! You can do it!’ The way I would in the huddle. I was focussed. I knew how to work through that test.”
But the other positions require intelligence as well. It’s not just a brute-force game, despite the heavy contact. It’s much more cerebral than continuous-motion sports (like hockey, basketball, soccer), which I hate. As Camille Paglia has noted, it’s more like battle planning and warfare, and it’s quintessentially American.
I’ve never understood why everyone in the world loves soccer (and hockey). Back and forth, back and forth, nothing ever happens. Twice a game someone gets lucky and scores. It’s as exciting as a dice game where you have to roll boxcars twice in a row for it to count.
Basketball these days is the opposite, they’re too good; they score every time. And of course you just can’t play unless you happen to be 6′ 9”. At least in football I imagine a normal sized person (all right, he needs to be over six feet…) can theoretically work out and build himself up to 250 pounds of solid muscle.
But Rand, I’m sorry – I can’t deal with sports where brain damage is the norm. I guess I’m stuck with cricket. Have some tea?
Why don’t the teams have a rotation of quarterbacks the way baseball teams have a rotation of pitchers? Yeah, you want have your star guy in there all the time, but you will protect your star from career ending injury?
Baseball used to keep playing a pitcher more, but they got wise to the trade of dropping a game but keeping their best guy in reserve?
Isn’t the idea in baseball that throwing too many pitches in a game will mess up the pitcher? I don’t know if there’s a equivalent in football. There’s the chance of injury, of course, but does that go up significantly toward the end of a game, or is it just random chance all through?
There are 32 NFL teams. Each team has a starting QB, a backup QB and possibly another backup. How many of them are really good at the position? Maybe 10. Unless you’re sitting on a big lead, few teams can risk putting in their backup QB unless the starter gets injured.
Football is a great team sport. No QB, no matter how good, can succeed without a good offensive line. No team can win much without a good QB. How many quarterbacks leave Division 1 colleges each year? How many of them actually succeed in the NFL? Very, very few. It’s considered by many to be the toughest position in all sports. That’s why the really good ones make really big bucks. Very few people can do what they do and a lot of people are willing to pay to watch them in action.
Football is a wonderfully American game. It combines strategy, cunning, preparation, and brute force the like of which most of us can barely imagine. I love it.
I second the idea that football is uniquely American.
You have the working class — the offensive line — and the professional class — the quarterback and maybe running backs and receivers. When things go well, the quarterback, gets all the credit. When things go badly, the line guys weren’t doing their jobs to protect the QB.
And when you are two points behind, 30 yards from goal, and 5 seconds left in the game, you call on the services of a talented immigrant, say some South American soccer player, to put you on top with a field goal . .
Baseball used to keep playing a pitcher more, but they got wise to the trade of dropping a game but keeping their best guy in reserve?
This is off-topic, but I have always been more interested in baseball than football. Baseball is also a very cerebral sport, to the point where some people think it’s too cerebral. To a fan, some of the most exciting moments of a game are when nothing is visibly happening, but everybody’s mental wheels are churning furiously. There’s a lot of potential action, which can suddenly burst forth in any of a dozen different directions.
Anyway, the point of my comment is to note the interesting history of pitcher usage in baseball. In the very beginning, a team consisted of nine players, and the pitcher was one of them. There would be a couple of substitutes on the team who would enter the game in any position in case of injury to one of the starters, but for the most part the nine starters would play the whole game. In the very early days, games weren’t played every day so this wasn’t a problem. By the 1880s, as the schedule lengthened, most teams had two pitchers who would alternate starting games. If a starter had a bad day, the other pitcher would relieve him.
Pitchers in that era tended to have short careers, as their arms gave out under the stress. Teams went to three and then four pitchers. By the early 20th century, the four-man rotation became standard. But a starting pitcher was still expected to finish a game that he started. Relief pitchers were those who weren’t good enough to break into the starting rotation. And a starter who couldn’t finish his games would find himself relegated to the bullpen, which was a demotion.
While there were a few exceptions here and there, the idea of a specialized relief pitcher didn’t take hold until the 1950s. That evolved into even more specialized roles, such as middle relievers, setup men, and closers. Frequently nowadays, a particular pitcher will be brought in to face one particular batter, and then taken out. The advance of sophisticated computerized statistics has exacerbated this trend, replacing the “gut feeling” of the manager.
Today it’s rare that a starting pitcher finishes his games. One could say that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. The only thing that keeps baseball from descending into complete chaos is the rule that a player who is removed from a game cannot re-enter it, unlike football, basketball, and hockey, Otherwise there would be pitching changes with every batter throughout the game, as managers attempted to play the percentages.
So, why isn’t this specialization happening with quarterbacks?
Baseball used to keep playing a pitcher more, but they got wise to the trade of dropping a game but keeping their best guy in reserve?
They play 8,892 games in a baseball season (I know, it’s something like 148 but it seems like a lot more). The NFL season is 16 games. The only time a team doesn’t care about winning is if they have such a big lead in their conference right before the playoffs that they want to rest their best players and avoid injury. It can backfire, though. By the end of the season, players are all dealing with various injuries but they’re also at their peak in playing skills. Football players can get rusty very quickly. I’ve seen it happen many times that a team that rested its best players before the playoffs loses their first playoff game. The same can happen with a bye week. Sometimes, the team that barely made it into the playoffs and has to play and win every week goes further (and sometimes wins the Super Bowl) than the teams that coasted at the end of the season. IIRC, the Steelers won the hard way a few years ago and the Ravens last year.
My Fiancé is Danish, and a fan of “soccer”. I’ve tried explaining American football as a violent chess match where the relative power of each position is not fixed, as in chess, but can vary according to the skill of the individual players in each position. Sometimes a highly skilled player can trump the collective team strengths of the opponent, sometimes not. All the individual strengths of players, coaches, etc., are overlaid onto the rules of the game designed to inflict huge amounts of pain and risk to the body. I’ve traveled the world and seen alot. Rugby, football(Euro style), cricket, and all the other motion games mentioned by Rand, and then some. The only thing I have seen with the purity of violence and tactic combined is martial art fighting in Thailand, Hong Kong, and the good old UFC. Nothing comes close as a team sport. The NFL is fretting over the growing risk to the players as they continue the freakish slope of faster, better, stronger. However if they have to tone down the violent nature of the game, it will lose its differentiation from everything else that makes it special to those who love it.
This is from someone who played as a young man around 3 decades ago, but still gets a pit in his stomach when August temperatures hit their peak, smellling warm freshly wattered grass on the field, wanting to puke, and then hunt down that squirrelly little quarterback and murder his face into the mud. (yes, I was a linebacker)
“It’s much more cerebral than continuous-motion sports (like hockey…”
No, it’s not.
Due to the existence of boards, geometry plays a huge factor in where the puck may end up going, and since you are on skates your entire experience of motion, inertia, and the movements you can actually make are completely changed from what you are used to simply being on your feet. It requires extremely high levels of coordination and anticipation by those actually participating, almost nonstop, and while being physically taxed like almost no other sport.
Hockey is the ultimate thinking man’s sport. Ask anyone who’s actually played the game.
“I’ve never understood why everyone in the world loves soccer”
or
“I’ve never understood soccer” ?
Most conversations about the virtues of different sports involve fans that know a lot about their favorite sport but not much about other sports.
The great thing about America is that we are competitive. It doesn’t matter if it is on the sport’s field or in the board room. Competition pushes us to be better. It is great that we don’t have just one sport. We have a multitude of sports and that is fitting for a country with a multitude of individuals. Each person has their own strengths, weaknesses, and desires. Not everyone can (or wants) play football or golf so it is good we have so many outlets for our competitive nature. And regardless of the sport we do compete and people respect us for it, even in soccer.
This World Cup we are in the Group of Death. We are not the top ranked team but the caliber of our team is part of what makes it the Group of Death. It wont be easy for anyone. This is exciting. Then there are the Winter Olympics. There are not many countries that can produce so many top athletes in such a variety of sports. Team America? F ya!
This is why it is so disheartening to see space cadets not wanting to compete with other countries when it comes to progress and achievements in space. They view competition as a negative. That to compete you must view your competition in a derogatory way instead of having respect for their capabilities or that you must fear them in some racist manner.
We are Americans and we compete, it doesn’t matter if it is sports, business, technology, food production, education, space, or who grows the best pot. But competition is human nature, it isn’t restricted to Americans. What sets us apart is our nurturing of the competitive spirit or it used to before the bench warmers took over.
Yup, American football is quintessentially American. Vast amounts of staggeringly expensive equipment required to play, plenty of senseless brutality, only freaks need apply and the media call all the shots. Nominally 90-minute game that takes 4 hours to fit in all the advertising breaks. Yup, American.