Tag: american football

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

 

The Problem With American Sport

There was a basketball epidemic when I was in high school. It was probably a result of two things – we used to play basketball regularly in school, and Star Sports (or was it still Prime Sports?) had started showing live games from the NBA. Everyone in school would talk about basketball. Your knowledge of basketball went beyond the Magic Johnsons and Michael Jordans. You learnt about teams with wonderful names such as “Utah Jazz”. And for reasons completely unknown to me, despite having never watched him play (I still haven’t) Patrick Ewing became my favourite player.

So one morning I decided to see what the fuss about NBA was all about, and watch a game. It made for horrible viewing. There were great plays, of course. It was a great spectator sport in that sense. But what annoyed me endlessly were the time outs and consequent advertising breaks. Just when I would get settled into the rhythm of the game, someone would call a time out and for the mid 90s, two minutes of advertising was a really long time!

I still continued to watch, for “pseud value”, so that I could talk about it in school. However, I could never get the kind of engagement that I could get with cricket (then) or football (now). The game was simply way too discontinuous. A game of basketball is supposed to last 40 minutes, but these things would last three times as long. I don’t think I watched more than 2-3 games.

As everyone on my facebook timeline talks about the Super Bowl, the only thing I can think of is how unwatchable American Sport is. I understand that you need the ads to fund the game, and that greater advertising revenue means greater revenue for players and hence greater quality of sport. What irks me however, is that these ads end up causing much discontinuity in the sport.

So this morning I was thinking about why I get irked so much about ads in American sports (basketball, american football, etc.) while I can still watch cricket, which has a fair share of ads. The answer lies in randomness. I know when a cricket telecast will switch to ads – at the end of every over, at the fall of a wicket, or in an innings break. When an advertisement comes in a cricket broadcast, I’m prepared for it (except of course, when greedy broadcasters cut to ads before the full over is bowled). It is a similar case in tennis, where I expect to switch to advertisements after every two games – there is a rhythm to it.

In American sport, it is not so. That teams can call for a timeout at any point in time, and that can completely put you off. The game cuts to advertisements at moments when you least expect it, and that can be a huge challenge for someone not used to it!

A year or so ago, I had attended this lecture on sports analytics in Bangalore, delivered by a University of Chicago professor. He said that the reason football hasn’t taken off in the US is because it is not television friendly. “Split a game into four quarters, introduce two time outs in each quarter, and you will see Major League Soccer taking off”, he said. The problem, however, is that this would simply ruin the continuity of the game – which is what a lot of people love about football. And looking at the funding of the clubs in the major European leagues, it is clear that football is making sufficient money from television in its current form, without any gimmickry.

An American colleague at my last job offered another perspective. “How can you watch a game continuously for 45 minutes”, he asked. “We are so used to breaks in play every few minutes that we can’t watch continuously for so long”. If I can extrapolate from this one data point and take it with conjunction with what the professor said, you know why football is not popular in the US.

When I woke up this morning I wanted to check if the Super Bowl was being telecast in India. Then I remembered my earlier experiences of trying to watch American football, and decided against it. It is too discrete a game for my liking. There are too many breaks in play. I’d any day watch rugby instead! It is a similar game but so much more elegant and continuous!