Why Football
Ever since I was young football stood out to me apart from all the other sports. From my first memory of watching a football game, the Packer’s 2005 loss to the Carolina Panthers, to this year’s college football national championship, I have always loved the sport. Due to the depth and intricate strategies of football, throughout playing all kinds of other sports throughout my youth, football stayed closest with me.
Football’s most defining factor is the depth of the game play. In sports such as hockey and soccer there is a pseudo-separation of offense and defense, but it is never actually defined in the rules or physically separated as it is in football. This separation in football increases the amount of specialization of the players themselves which is key in understanding the game. For every one of the several unique positions in football, there is a player that specializes and trains for that position only. With more specialized training the skill cap, for each position goes up tremendously compared to other sports. In addition to increasing the quality of play of football, this variation and specialization also gives a larger pool of people the ability to play football. Rather than most other sports, in football if you are short you can play running back, if you are relatively slow you can play lineman, if you aren’t extremely coordinated with you hands you can play kicker/punter, and many more.
After nearing 150 years of the game, football has developed intricate strategies like no other sport. The need for an offensive coach, defensive coach, special teams coach, and more to help the head coach is another proof of football’s depth. Almost all sports, even at the highest level, have just one head coach making all the decisions, but football’s strategies are way too intricate for one person organizing it all. In addition to strategy from the managerial positions, during live play players must properly react to the eleven players on the opposing team, all of different positions, all while keeping their own team’s players into consideration which adds up to many calculated thoughts for such small time intervals.
With all the different positions and the structure of the game, football relies on more built teamwork than any other sport. In basketball and soccer, a lone player is able do much better than a lone player in football. A quarterback relies on the blockers in front of him because he cannot evade eleven people at once, he relies on wide receivers because he cannot make it that far up the field by running alone, and he relies on the running back as the extra option to make the defense not be able to fully cover the wide receiver option. Due to football’s high degree of specialization, all the players correctly cover each other's weaknesses on both offense and defense to create a perfectly optimized machine, something not as existent in any other sport. If these examples of depth and intricacies of the sport aren’t enough and you just want to see athletic freaks go at it for 60 minutes, football is also the perfect sport. The average NFL player is over 245 pounds and stands at six feet and two inches, 65 pounds heavier and five inches taller than the average American man.
All of these aspects of depth and specialization of football makes it the unique sport it is today and is had drawn me to the sport and kept me in it. Though I only played organized tackle football myself for 2 years, as a fan I’ve been able to learn more and more about the sport which has help add another level of appreciation to it. Football has been around for decades and will have decades more of play due its depth, and I’m excited to grow up and watch to see how it develops further over time.
Football’s most defining factor is the depth of the game play. In sports such as hockey and soccer there is a pseudo-separation of offense and defense, but it is never actually defined in the rules or physically separated as it is in football. This separation in football increases the amount of specialization of the players themselves which is key in understanding the game. For every one of the several unique positions in football, there is a player that specializes and trains for that position only. With more specialized training the skill cap, for each position goes up tremendously compared to other sports. In addition to increasing the quality of play of football, this variation and specialization also gives a larger pool of people the ability to play football. Rather than most other sports, in football if you are short you can play running back, if you are relatively slow you can play lineman, if you aren’t extremely coordinated with you hands you can play kicker/punter, and many more.
After nearing 150 years of the game, football has developed intricate strategies like no other sport. The need for an offensive coach, defensive coach, special teams coach, and more to help the head coach is another proof of football’s depth. Almost all sports, even at the highest level, have just one head coach making all the decisions, but football’s strategies are way too intricate for one person organizing it all. In addition to strategy from the managerial positions, during live play players must properly react to the eleven players on the opposing team, all of different positions, all while keeping their own team’s players into consideration which adds up to many calculated thoughts for such small time intervals.
With all the different positions and the structure of the game, football relies on more built teamwork than any other sport. In basketball and soccer, a lone player is able do much better than a lone player in football. A quarterback relies on the blockers in front of him because he cannot evade eleven people at once, he relies on wide receivers because he cannot make it that far up the field by running alone, and he relies on the running back as the extra option to make the defense not be able to fully cover the wide receiver option. Due to football’s high degree of specialization, all the players correctly cover each other's weaknesses on both offense and defense to create a perfectly optimized machine, something not as existent in any other sport. If these examples of depth and intricacies of the sport aren’t enough and you just want to see athletic freaks go at it for 60 minutes, football is also the perfect sport. The average NFL player is over 245 pounds and stands at six feet and two inches, 65 pounds heavier and five inches taller than the average American man.
All of these aspects of depth and specialization of football makes it the unique sport it is today and is had drawn me to the sport and kept me in it. Though I only played organized tackle football myself for 2 years, as a fan I’ve been able to learn more and more about the sport which has help add another level of appreciation to it. Football has been around for decades and will have decades more of play due its depth, and I’m excited to grow up and watch to see how it develops further over time.
Nice post! I'm not a big football fan, but this post was still interesting for me as an unfamiliar reader, and I still think it would be for someone who also loves football. I think, though, since I don't follow football I wasn't able to connect with you as much as someone who does. While the essay is very informative (which shows your voice which I think is cool), I would also have liked to see a little more emotion/reflection that the reader can grab onto.
ReplyDeleteI like the first and the last paragraphs, but the middle three are extremely sparse on reflection. I do like how you explain the various aspects of football and you do a good job of making it clear just how complex the sport is without losing the reader, and it's a very valuable skill to be able to distill a complex thing into something anyone can read. However, I don't feel like I get to know you all that well, other than that you like football enough to do some research into the intricacies of the game.
ReplyDeleteI love this topic because I love football. I think that the way this blogpost is written is really awesome but I wish there was more narrative. There was a lot of reflection which I liked but i wish there was a more personal aspect. The essay was very descriptive and I think that there are a lot of things that you can do with it! The intro and conclusion were very good and I think that with some personal factor this essay would be even better!
ReplyDeleteNice post. I don't really watch football and I've never played organized tackle football so this was really interesting to read. Especially since many people I know make fun of football for being kind of a dumb sport it was interesting to hear from someone who knows about it and how much strategy actually goes into it. That said I feel like its kind of impersonal and I feel like telling a story about how you got into football or when you started to get really into the strategy o the game could make it feel more personal. And if you need to remove something to make space to add personal elements and reflection you could take out you could make lists of examples shorter or cut out the part about the size of the average NFL player.
ReplyDeleteNice post! I am not a football fan per say but I do enjoy watching the sport. The thing that interests me about it is how it has turned from tossing around a pig skin into a multi-billion dollar industry but that is besides the point. I really like the intro and the conclusion because they are were very reflective but I lost that throughout the middle paragraphs. If you could add more reflection to these paragraphs that would really help the essay as a whole!
ReplyDelete