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Things Nerds Can Appreciate about Football’s Game Design
- paulmd 6y agoThe thing I personally despise about football is that it is basically "made for TV". The constant stoppages for commercials make it terrible. I watched a rugby match the day before an away game and it was just so much more exciting because it didn't stop every ten seconds. Football just stops like every ten seconds, if it had a little faster tempo it would be more exciting, and it feels like the reason it's not is so they can cram in more commercials. > Stadiums and Cities Matter - Even the stadium and climate in a city factor into a football team’s strategy. The air force academy is a fair bit higher than Denver or even Colorado Springs itself (the cadet area is 7258 feet above sea level). I'd have to check but it's probably one of the highest stadium altitudes for any college. Physical exertion at those altitudes is significantly more difficult if you're not acclimated to the altitude, ideally living up there but the first week can be tough if you aren't extremely cardio-fit. So Air Force had a built of an inbuilt home-field advantage, and when they went down to lower altitudes we had a bit of an advantage there too (living at altitude and coming back to sea level was wild, I could rock aerobic activity at sea level, you just didn't get out of breath much at all). The crowd would heckle the away team in the gates, chanting: "the air is rare!" Didn't stop us from sucking though, the football team was terrible.
- Zanni 6y agoIn the spirt of the article, maybe it would help to think of football as a turn-based game, rather than a real-time game. Most gamers have a marked preference for one but can still appreciate the other.
- paulmd 6y agoTurn-based strategy is more fun to play but RTS is much more fun to watch.
- kenneth 6y agoTurn-based strategy is more fun to play when playing with bots, real-time strategy is more fun to play multi-player. Waiting for others sucks.
- dragontamer 6y agoChess is the hot game to stream right now on Twitch. Clearly, there's a bunch of people who want to watch Chess play.
- brightball 6y agoThat’s the ideal parallel. There’s so much math to the game in the coaching and strategy. Clemson’s rise in college football has been entirely driven by it too. About 10 years ago we hired an offensive coordinator named Chad Morris who has a math degree. Stories about the detail in his playbooks was crazy. Player acceleration, top speed, directional changes, probability, specific angles. Almost every play had 3 things developing at once on a clock in the QB’s head based largely on his field of vision. After Morris left, Tony Elliot took over. Elliot has an engineering degree (mechanical I think). He missed our playoff game against Ohio State this year and the offense didn’t look anything close to what it was. Covid. There’s just so much going on with every play it’s crazy. Every detail of every player on the field matters for each play. It’s not a sport where one guy can carry your team.
- grogenaut 6y agoWe played against colorado college in college. This is a bit lower than the AFA field but not too much. We just showed up the day before early and spent the day acclimating. It was like you were on your 2nd or 3rd wind sprint instead of your first. However by that point in football season we were running 80 plays without breaks in practice (the same as a big game but shorter time). It was annoying but not a factor. Really funny thing was, because we played in hotter shittier weather, we were actually in better shape. And the game was in the low 80s. Colorado team melted, we went strong the whole game. Also helped we smoked them. Also did an aussie rules tourney at the AFA about 10 years back. Much more running. We all showed up a day early. Just like skiing, it's not great the first day and you're pretty good the 2nd. Third day and everyone was normal. Sure we rotated players slightly more but unless it's soccer with limited subs it doesn't really matter. Or I'm sure what they're having cadets do, aka just running around with gear on long distance. Most sports are more ATP based (windsprints) than full cardio based, otherwise everyone would just be moving at a constant rate. I actually dislike a lot of non-american sports because there's no chance to do anything else. The best thing to me even at a game is to go, hang out, relax, talk shit with your friends, and watch the game. Not have the game take up all of your attention. I'm not paid to analyze them, so there's nothing so important about sports that I need to pay attention to them as I would for studying for an exam. Unless it's the playoffs, then sure.
- paulmd 6y agohaha, I suppose that is the other side of the story without our legends added. I'd like to think USAFA athletes were more fit than randos but...
- jamienicol 6y ago> The best thing to me even at a game is to go, hang out, relax, talk shit with your friends, and watch the game. Not have the game take up all of your attention. If the sport is actually engaging and doesn't stop every 2 minutes then you'll find it naturally takes up all your attention.
- jacobolus 6y ago
- onethought 6y agoTake a look at Australian Football... there isn’t really any stoppage even when there is a stoppage. It’s an action packed game all around.
- missedthecue 6y agoThis always seemed like an advantage in NFL football to me, not a drawback. Sports like Australian Football and Soccer get boring to watch because there are no breaks. The continous action gets monotonous. Football has the action broken down in breaks. Most times you have a good idea what the next play will be (for instance, 3rd and 10, its going to be a longer pass) producing suspense. The other sports are like watching long distance running with extra rules.
- onethought 6y agoThis feels like it's spoken from a position of not having watched an AFL game. It's not at all like soccer because the number of players and size of field make trying to just keep possession and slow the game down a much more difficult thing to do (it is attempted sometimes). AFL also has 4 breaks (for the quarters), unlikes Soccers 1 for the half. I find all three entertaining to watch, but I don't thing the "breaks" make NFL a "better" experience. :)
- tolbish 6y agoThat's just because of the TV timeouts and greedy network deals. It wasn't always like that. You may have a better experience if you watch a sport like hockey, where there are only 2 or 3 TV timeouts per period, and all of the games are finished within 2.5 hours.
- pfarnsworth 6y agoI love how it's turn-based. Everything is purposeful and strategic with football. Whereas games like hockey and basketball are very fluid, the strategy is more vague. There's a general sense of what you want to do, but it depends on a lot of factors. You could technically have a player deke between every player and score a goal or basket, but that would essentially be impossible in football. With football, it's a reset every down, and everyone is ready, so the strategy is critical.
- gurleen_s 6y agoThis is what the XFL was supposed to fix, but that didn’t end well... But seriously, it’s even worse in person. I’ve only ever gone to one football game in person and it was almost unbearable. At least on TV you have commercials to see.
- philwelch 6y agoGoing to football in person is best done when you are in your early 20's, a college student, drunk, and a student of the university whose college football team is playing at home.
- RobRivera 6y agook - what year and squadron were you? (10/23
- ramraj07 6y agoThings I can never appreciate. People (predominantly African American) are getting their brains curried for the sake of other people (who are stereotypically if not predominantly white). If it weren't for nostalgia or the fact that too many Americans consider it in their bloods to watch this sport, such a cruel game shouldn't exist in this form. The racist undertones don't seem to stop there. I watched a game in A&M and it was surreal - a good fraction of the team is black but almost no one in the stadium was. And the quarterback and coach are white, and are commanding a bunch of black kids to smush their brains permanently. Given that at least roman gladiators were paid professionally, college football sounds far closer to slave-driven thunderdome scenarios than even the Colosseum did.
- onethought 6y agoCounter intuitively: get rid of all the protective gear, specifically the solid helmet. Rugby doesn’t seem to have the problem NFL has here.
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y agoSame issue in boxing: bare knuckle fighting leads to less concussions than boxing with gloves.
- ramraj07 6y agoIndeed. There seem to be fairly obvious ways to make the sport safer but that's not popular; perhaps if the demographics of the affected matched the demographics of the audience there might be more empathy!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 6y agoRugby has had increasing concussion issues also as players have gotten bigger (and possibly play styles have shifted?). In fact, rugby may be worse, especially for younger players. https://www.florugby.com/articles/6745817-rugby-vs-football-which-is-more-dangerous https://www.florugby.com/articles/6745817-rugby-vs-football-...
- lalaithion 6y agoI highly recommend the Chart Party video series (or really anything Jon Bois has ever done) if you want to get into the intersection of nerdiness and sports. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l5C8cGMueY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l5C8cGMueY
- Barrin92 6y agobeing a sucker for games that create complexity out of simple rules I do not enjoy American football at all. Granted I haven't grown up with it so I guess that makes it extra unfamiliar, but it seems so damn complicated. Multiple teams, constant pausing, so many rules, field goals, touchdowns etc. The author compares it to video games which I actually agree with, but I never really could get into league or magic for the same reason. I'm more of a fan of soccer or tennis which both manage to be very simple but are to me much more dynamic
- neolog 6y agomultiple teams?
- qwertay 6y agoFor me almost all sports and esports are painfully boring to observe. I don't feel any attachment to the teams and the gameplay carries out pretty much the same every time. I'd much rather be playing the sport or game. The exception is for this are things that are very novel. I'll happily watch a video of someone mtb riding down some insane trails or someone playing a video game in a crazy way I haven't seen before. But once its no longer new its no longer interesting to me.
- edbob 6y agoThe multiple teams with many different positions means that many different body types are needed, which allows a wide range of people to participate and contribute. Although rugby for instance seems pretty cool, the players are all built like NFL linebackers so it's not something that I could ever play with any ability. Football has a place for small, fast guys and slow, fat guys (and girls) along with the superhumans. The deep and subtle complexity means that at basically any position, intelligence and/or intuition can make up for having less physical ability. It's also great at teaching teamwork and good sportsmanship. If it weren't for the concussions, it would be the perfect sport for building character in school. *Experiences will vary with the size of the school and the program there. I'm sure there are plenty of 5A schools where you have to be a superhuman to play at all, but there are plenty of schools where normal people can make the team with some effort, and not a few 1A/2A schools where anyone that can walk makes the team.
- nitwit005 6y agoThe people who watch sports most are nerds; they're just sports nerds. These days they're often hanging out on the internet like the rest of us, just on a fantasy football site or something similar.
- billfruit 6y agoAbout 'American' football rather.
- umanwizard 6y agoYes. Does it annoy you that we use our own dialect with its own meaning of certain words? If so, why? There’s some irritated comment like this practically every time (American) football is discussed online.
- marton78 6y agoI guess because Americans hijacked the name of this planet's most popular sport for something that is played mostly with the hands with an object that only distantly resembles a ball. It would be better to call it "Armed Rugby" or something.
- umanwizard 6y agoWe didn’t hijack anything. Go read up on the history of the games. Soccer and American football evolved separately from the same family of proto-football games (as did Rugby and Australian football). These were all called “football” well before the modern rules of either current game had crystallized. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football
- vehemenz 6y agoUnfortunately, that's not how language works.
- humanrebar 6y agoIt's played on foot, just like the other footballs.
- philwelch 6y ago“Football” isn’t even the most popular name for the planet’s most popular sport. It’s probably “futbol”. In the English speaking world, there are over 328 million Americans who use the term to refer to American football, 37 million Canadians who typically mean either American or Canadian football, and 25 million Aussies who use the word to refer to Australian Football. Brits are a minority of native English speakers.
- onethought 6y agoI’d love to watch a rugby team go up against an NFL team. The rules seem compatible enough (at least at the core). I’ve always wondered why rugby strategy isn’t incorporated into NFL: long lines of backwards passing is legal and would completely mess up your average NFL defence lineup. But it seems it’s considered a “weird trick play”
- piker 6y agoBecause turnovers are catastrophic in American football, and lateral passes have a high failure rate.
- onethought 6y agoThey are catastrophic in rugby too. They built an entire game around it. They have a high failure rate in NFL because they clearly aren’t practiced.
- piker 6y agoIt’s just a different sport. In American football, the plays are highly orchestrated and many players are travelling near top speed out of pre-arranged formations and in tightly constrained routes. The forward pass is available, has a much higher success rate when thrown at a specialist player and a bigger payoff. Many of the team (the offensive line) aren’t eligible for such passes and therefor have been optimised by body type for blocking. The lateral pass is practiced in high school as part of the “option” offense because the difference between position players in high school is much lower and there may not be huge standout talent at quarterback (the passer) and wide receiver (the specialist recipient). The offense is sometimes run at the college level by schools with a low level of talent, such as those with high academic admissions standards and the military service academy. Running the option also generally involves jeopardising the health of your best player, the quarterback. This matters less in high school and bad programs where the drop off isn’t as significant. At better programs there are just better strategies with lower risks.
- 6y ago
- elchief 6y agoFootball Outsiders' statistical methodology, while we're at it: https://www.footballoutsiders.com/info/methods https://www.footballoutsiders.com/info/methods
- hooande 6y agoOne thing about football is that one play can have a huge impact on the game, but the overwhelming majority of plays do not. This gives you a contest where every new event could be meaningful and is worth watching, but doesn't become chaotic. Compare this to tennis, where missing an individual shot can lose you the game but each failed attempted has roughly the same impact. Football (and soccer and baseball) are more like chess where one catastrophic play can essentially end the game, no matter what plays preceded or follow it. This dynamic is about the difference between focus and consistency. Games like football and chess prioritize the focus not to make a disastrous mistake at any point. Games like basketball and scrabble emphasize performing with a high level of consistency and are more forgiving of rare large errors.
- jfengel 6y agoI think the difference is well characterized by this clip from the Simpsons, of two announcers describing the same soccer game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjp1Zrvn8VQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjp1Zrvn8VQ One sees every instant as an opportunity for something game-altering to happen, creating tremendous tension. The other believes that it's almost certainly not going to, and so is bored instead of tense. This isn't quite the same as what you're pointing out, but the appraoch to focus overlaps. In soccer, constant focus is required for 90 straight minutes. In football, you have bouts of intense action, and even though most of them will result in little gain, you don't have to be constantly on edge for hours because every moment has the same potential as every other. Neither is superior; it's just what the audience chooses to be interested in.
- brundolf 6y agoI wonder if this plays into the entertainment value in a Skinner box/gacha-game type way. Similarly: many of the most popular video games for streaming (including but not limited to Battle Royales) involve some element of chaos or chance. Never knowing how things will go, or when something really exciting will happen, keeps an audience engaged.
- lupire 6y agoFocus and consistency appear to be synonyms here?
- exabrial 6y agoI really was disappointed by the XFL getting nerfed by the pandemic. Some of the new rules for them like an option to score up to three points in a PAT would lead to all sorts of cool game theory analysis.
- mebreuer 6y agoI really liked this post - but a huge part of the game that the author didn't mention is that there are almost two related games being played at the same time - the meta game by the coaches, and the actual game by the players. Before each play is run, the coaches decide the personnel package - which players from their team should go onto the field, based on what they predict the opposing team will do. If the offense runs out a jumbo package with a lot of larger, slower players who are good at blocking and the defense runs out a dime package - smaller, faster players to defend against a pass - the offense will likely win on a running play, but lose on a passing play. That is, if the players execute. Personnel mismatches are often exploited for big gains. Then coaches also typically call the plays, although more experienced players will modify the play on the field based on what they see. NFL playbooks are incredibly complicated with hundreds of plays, which can each be countered with the right defensive play. Coaches are guessing what their opponent will do based on the situation, dynamically adjusting their play calls throughout the game, and setting up deceptions that build throughout - for example, one of the most common deceptions is a "play action" that is fake run passing play, which only works if the team has been consistently calling running plays. Coaches must "invest" in running possibly unsuccessful plays that set up deceptions, and then cash in at the right time. Successful trick plays are often the result of running a play multiple times earlier in the game (or even, earlier in the season!) and then modifying it for a surprise. Great players will look for clues for what play their opponent is running, to exploit it. Some of the greatest quarterbacks - like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady - are more successful because of their ability to decode the defense before the ball is snapped, modify the play at the line of scrimmage, and know in advance which receiver is most likely to be open, than because of their athletic ability itself. I think that "nerds" who don't follow football could appreciate the strategic game that coaches are playing just as much as the physical game the players are playing. For people who dislike football because of how it stops and starts, well - between the plays is when the coaches are playing, and it's just as exciting once you start to follow along.
- wreath 6y agoha! now the "matchup" makes sense to me, thanks for that simple example. I watched soccer all my life until 2020 I started watching NFL games and it felt like I needed a mini-bootcamp to learn about the game before I start appreciating it (still learning!) beyond the athletic display. I get turned off by the stop and start aspect though, especially that they jam in the same ads over and over for 2+ hours, so I guess it's a lot more fun to watch in the stadium or simply watch replays w/ ads stripped off. I'm very much looking forward to watching my first Superbowl today!
- pfarnsworth 6y agoThere is so much beauty in the game of football. It's filled with the best athletes colleges can produce for that particular sport. The worst football player on any NFL team is probably better than the best football players from the college that he attended for the previous few years. One thing people don't realize is that these athletes are running as fast as they possibly can, especially the wide receivers. That means the cornerbacks/defenders are running as fast as they can as well. When there's any sort of separation between the wide receiver and the cornerback, that is extremely dangerous. That separation can't be made up, because they're already running as fast as they can. That means separation is an opportunity to target the wide receiver. When the quarterback throws a football with a window of a few feet to a wide receiver 40 yards away, it's simply beautiful. There is a perfect balance between offense and defense, and there are always trade offs. Both offense and defense are looking for mismatches. Thus, if you have a wide receiver that is faster than cornerback covering him, then you have a mismatch that will be taken advantage of with impunity. So instead, you need to double-cover him with a safety playing up high. But then that leaves one of their offensive players poorly covered. How do you make up for that? You blitz with an oversized number of defenders so that you give the quarterback less time to find an open man. Or, if you have a mismatch on your defensive line, and they outmatch the protection for the quarterback, then that also gives the quarterback less time to make a play. So you can counter that by bringing your running back or tight end to provide extra blocking. But then that limits the number of targets you can have. There's just a long list of pros and cons to this game which makes it utterly fascinating. The players live and breathe all of this stuff.
- orwin 6y agoI learned that Tarek Hill ran the 200m in 20.14s. The french all time record is barely under 20, and the Tareek's score could allow him to reach the French finals every year since 2015. He is not even training for this. This is impressive to me.
- sharker8 6y agoThis whole post reminded me of why I only like abstract strategy games, and the simpler the better.
- currymj 6y agoa fun thing that pedantic nerds can appreciate about football is the obscure, old-fashioned strategies that remain technically legal. in the early 20th century it was common for a player to take the ball and drop-kick it themselves to score a field goal. this isn't really done any more (due to changed shape of the ball), now one player holds the ball upright and the kicker kicks it. but you are still allowed to try!. in 2006 the quarterback Doug Flutie did it right before retiring, just because he could.