Football American-Style

I don’t have much of a relationship with football. I played for nine or ten years when I was younger, but I don’t really care about the sport much these days. There are teams I like (the Eagles, mostly because I like Philadelphia and the fans are funny) and teams I don’t (the Steelers, mostly because I’ve been around loud Steelers fans for much of my life – the fact that I’m from Pennsylvania has little to do with the teams I chose as examples). I watch games to be able to converse with friends, but I don’t know all of the players’ names.

I’ve always been a baseball fan (and being a fan of the two sports is not mutually exclusive, by any means). The reason I bring that up here is because baseball has been undergoing a very interesting statistical revolution. Many of the older baseball writers are reluctant to acknowledge the usefulness of these new statistics, but they are slowly taking hold. As someone who is very interested in the new statistical movement, my mind has been altered to think about sports differently in general.

So, to the point. I think I have finally pinpointed the reason that I can’t give myself over to football. Every other major sport has teams play series of games between teams to establish some sort of hierarchy. Of course, baseball, having 162 games a year, has the highest number of divisional games between teams (18). Football, on the other hand, practices “fun with small sample sizes” (a personal favorite phrase of mine). The nature of the game only allows for one or two games to be played between teams and it’s an unbalanced schedule (this goes for college and professional). How can there be any decisiveness in rankings when there is always a 50% chance of a win or a loss (and yes, taken individually, baseball games are also 50/50, but throughout the season, it becomes apparent that one team is better than another and the records show it, skewing the percentage [unless the teams split, then they are evenly matched]).

It should be no surprise that a 9-7 team (Arizona) has sneaked into the playoffs. There are just too many factors that go into a game for it to be a decisive outcome. In theory, the lose of the game could be projected to win 99 out of 100 contests between the teams, but if that one loss is the first game, then that is the only one that matters because it’s the only one that will get played. This problem is magnified in college football, where it’s not structured like the NFL. That one loss could, and usually does, ruin a team’s chance for a championship bid. It’s this sort of ambiguity that puts me off any real rooting interest in the sport. It’s bad enough to get beaten, but to know there isn’t a chance to show that you are the better team is even worse.

I’m willing to acknowledge that the very thing that I don’t like about football is also the thing that many people love. It offers the chance to debate who really deserved to be in the playoffs or should have had a chance at the championship. Since it’s unanswerable, the debate can continue forever. It gets the fans involved in the history of the game. Regardless, I think there is one thing we can all agree on: the 2008-2009 Detroit Lions sucked!