As a representation of everything sport can be, American football is as good as it gets.
Every NFL teams is, in fact, 3 teams. Offense. Defense. Special Teams. Each of these has its own strategies. It’s like playing chess on three boards with three sets of different pieces. But unlike chess, where you react after a move has been made, each NFL team is balancing a proactive strategy (like, sack the quarterback) with a reactive one (like, shut down the wide receiver) in real-time. You react as, and not after, things happen.
Balanced against planned strategy, is what happens amidst the chaos. With so many moving pieces, mistakes are made, people slip, balls are fumbled – in which case, the strategy is replaced by instinct. This means that every play has value. There are no lost downs.
Strategically, it’s a little like spin bowling in cricket. You build pressure and tempo through successive overs and successive spin types which often leads to a wicket. But sometimes you also get an unplanned ball landing on the edge of a crack or a taking a top edge for 4. And you have to be equally prepared for both.
What makes a series of downs more interesting than an over of cricket though, is that you know that everything is building to a third down. Much like a full count in baseball, the 3rd down is unmissable, because that’s where games swing.
Which makes for another great thing. The NFL has a predictable rhythm, but highly unpredictable outcomes.
This is enhanced by the tension between the proximity and difficulty of making scoring plays. Much like in soccer, where a team can be cruising and dominant at 2-0 and then a momentary lapse can bring the score back to a tension filled 2-1, NFL games are filled with that same tension.
It’s incredibly difficult to score a touchdown, but one lapse by the defence and a seam can open up for the opposition to score. 7 points. And they’re back in the game.
Each down provides an opportunity for opposing players to do battle. So while the teams are executing an overall strategy, on most plays, two individuals will be competing at maximum capacity and this makes for compelling viewing.
Many sports offer the thrill of one-on-one competition, but generally the intensity of that competition peaks near the ball. The NFL’s one-on-one competitions have a standard intensity across the field, regardless of where the ball lies.
You want to know if Darrelle Revis is going to shut down his opponent. You have to know who’s going to stop Clay Matthews.
In an athletic sense, the NFL allows for incredible diversity – the 325 pound tackle and the 160 pound running back, going head to head. QB’s aside, so long as you have speed, there’s a place for you in an NFL team.
The fact that NFL players wear equipment adds a super human element to the battle, allowing players to test the limits of human physicality with car-like collisions. I don’t know why, but the anticipation of a collision is one of the NFL’s most compelling features.
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Within the intricacy of the broader strategy lies intense personal battles. These are made all the more interesting by character players – TO, Ray Lewis and Ochocinco for example.
Outside of the player to play battles, the city to city battles add a further layer of intrigue. You have to watch the Eagles play the Giants this season because of their epic battle last season. You have to watch the Jets play the Pats. You have to watch the Ravens play the Steelers.
And then finally, amidst this context and complexity and competition and collision, you have the quarterback, the game in his hands for just a few seconds, compressing extraordinary sensory complexity into a single tunnel of vision.
Imagine a free kick in soccer. Now imagine the kicker. That’s the quarterback. His team’s role is to protect him while he kicks. The opposing team’s role is to do whatever they can to physically attack him as he’s attempting to kick. And rather than kicking to a goal, he’s kicking into a series of moving windows that contract and expand to one square meter in surface area roughly every half second. Now imagine the kicker has, on average, 3 seconds to decide which window to kick into. That’s the NFL. Every play.
It makes for unmissable viewing, compelling sporting narratives, incredible competition and athletic excellence, intelligence, strategy, planning and instinctive reaction.
It’s not my favourite sport. But as a sports-fan, I can appreciate that it’s the best.