The NFL Documentary

As you might have figured out from my earlier post, I’m no great fan of American Football. I find it too “discontinuous”, I find that the play has too many breaks, and the game is a lot less “elegant” than rugby. However, there is one thing that the National Football League excels at – to make great videos.

Somehow I’m unable to embed the video here so you’ll have to go to the NFL website to watch it. It’s easily the best sports highlights package I’ve ever seen. Extremely well produced and put together, and puts any other highlights package to shame.

The key is that it’s been set out as a kind of documentary – there isn’t much from the commentators, most of the voice is that captured from the bench, from the players and the coaches. And you can see the levels of motivation in either team through the game. You see the players talking to each other, the interactions between opponents, and the chatter from the benches. It shows the game in a whole new perspective!

That however doesn’t mean that I’m a fan of the game now. The forward pass rule makes it extremely inelegant and clunky. I’m reminded of the “football” we would play with a tennis ball back in school – there was no off-side rule, a bunch of us would go stand in front of the opponent’s goal and our goalie would throw the ball to us. And one of us would try and “head it in” (as much as you can head a tennis ball). Then the ball would turn over and action would shift to the same, but at the other end.

Watching a couple of “touchdowns” made me lose whatever little enthusiasm I had for the game. There was none of the elegance that is there in rugby. The ball would move forward great distances in short amounts of time. There was no passing and moving – in fact, I didn’t see a single back pass in the entire highlights package. The moves were really short. I can go on.

Yet, despite the game itself being atrocious, that doesn’t take away from the totally awesome highlights package. Watch it, even if you (like me) hate American football.

Related: Why American sports are hard to watch. TL;DR – their ad breaks are unpredictable

 

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