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Is football a more complex sport than baseball, basketball, and soccer?


Duluther

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It is.  Explaining football to someone who has no idea what it is takes a very long time, and they never understand it.  Too many moving parts.

If we're just talking about super basic stuff, probably not (i.e. one team has the ball, they either run it or throw it, or kick a field goal).  But yeah, it's easy to forget how much is going on during a football game.

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Anyone can learn baseball, basketball and soccer watching 1 game. They might need some help learning the underlying strategies.

People can grow up watching football their whole life and still not know everything that is going on. 

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It is the greatest TEAM sport.  On plays, they are relying on people doing their jobs correctly.  Neither soccer or baseball or basketball rely on all members of their team to do their job.  If you broke down a single running player by what each player did and was suppose to do on both offense and defense, you would see the complexity that just does not exist in any other sport.

 

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Hell yes. They each have their intricacies, but soccer and basketball are MUCH more easily-accessible, and you can get much farther on raw individual athleticism alone. Baseball is a slightly different beast, and takes a little time to figure out what's going on, but it still doesn't match football.

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Yep. 

Of the major USA sports:

Basketball, hockey, and soccer are the easiest. Action is basically non-stop, put the ball/puck in the goal/net and you're done. Soccer/Hockey have offsides which can get a LITTLE more weird, but that's about it. 

Baseball is fairly simple. 3 Strikes you're out. 4 balls you're on base. Goal is to go from 1st base to home plate for a run.

Football is complex. You've got all the penalties, the 4 downs, touchbacks, multiple ways to score (safety, XP, touchdown, 2 pt. conversion, field goal), the offense/defense consist of different players (none of the other sports has that), there's the whole yardage thing which can dynamically change based on penalties, etc. Then there's different packages based on the play you're running (you often are not substituting players in the other sports unless they need rest, American football strictly has players sub out pending the package you want to run, which is generally dictated by down, etc.).

 

That's the order of the 3 easiest to hardest. Source: Me trying to explain to women. Fine call me sexist, but in most cases that's the measure of ease. My past girlfriends/female relatives have understood easiest to hardest in that order. Also, generally in my experience out of all the sports I hear people cheer the most in NFL when they should NOT be cheering... or screaming at the TV with "WTF!?!? NOOOOO" when they should be happy with the result - i.e, zero clue how the game works. The other sports I rarely hear that. 

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1 hour ago, Vorsutus said:

Anyone can learn baseball, basketball and soccer watching 1 game. They might need some help learning the underlying strategies.

People can grow up watching football their whole life and still not know ANYTHING that is going on. 

FIFY, plus FF is sometimes a good indicator of it

On both sides of the ball its way more complex than baseball and basketball

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14 minutes ago, warrenblue said:

Nah. As a non-american I'd say baseball is way more complex than football.

To me, to explain baseball and all its nuances to a person with zero knowledge to the sport is really hard. It's much easier to explain football. 

The unwritten rules of baseball are the only part that is impossible to explain

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