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

[Eagles23]

I watched football for several years before playing organized football when I was younger. It was truly eye opening

[Malik]

4 hours ago, AlexGreen#20 said:

I feel like the fact that baseball can be so neatly broken down into statistics is an argument against it's complexity. 

that's just of function of how little interdependence there is on each given play in a team sport. It's why there's almost always a 1:1 transition when a great player goes from 1 team to another.

[Tetsujin]

5 hours ago, Tugboat said:

Basketball to me, is a sport that i don't even know what to say...it just makes no sense from the start.  Why you gotta bounce the ball and not just bull it to the goal?  It's weird and arbitrary, but not in a complicated way.

The original rule was you couldn't really move while holding the ball. It was all passing. Dribbling was the way around that rule.

[Nex_Gen]

When you have the generally new or inexperienced viewer asking "how come they don't just run to the outside?", you know it's a complex sport...

[Vorsutus]

1 hour ago, Tetsujin said:

The original rule was you couldn't really move while holding the ball. It was all passing. Dribbling was the way around that rule.

Ultimate frisbee with baskets? Sounds more interesting since they don't care about travelling anyway lol.

[Tetsujin]

I'll partly explain what makes baseball the deepest, most complex, strategic sport- specifically no DH baseball:

Remember, once you take a player out, you can't put him back in. That alone makes it complex.

- Your pitcher doing OK, but he's due up in the lineup soon and you're losing in the 6th inning. Do you pull him for a DH?

- Which relief pitcher do you go with? Are they facing the top, middle, or bottom of the order? Can you get away with putting your worst RP out there for awhile? 

- Do you play the numbers or the lefty-righty hitter/pitcher matchup?

- Are you playing a game the next day? In MLB you play all but 3-4 days a month. How do you manage workloads?

- If it's a 3 game series, you shouldn't have RHP's starting every game. You need to throw in a LHP to change the look up.

- Do you try to steal a base? How many outs is there? Who's at bat and who's due up?

- When do you bunt or sacrifice?

- Lefthanders don't/can't play 3B, SS, 2B, and usually catcher. However, they're ideal at 1B.

- Pulling a "double-switch" 

- Do you pitch around a hitter, or go after them? How many outs is there? Who's at bat and who's due up? Who's on base already?

- Do you shift fielders? Do you protect the baselines? Do you hold runners on base?

- What pitches does a pitcher have in his aresenal? What's the hitters strengths and weaknesses?

- What happened the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd times the hitters faced the starting pitcher? Are they getting wise to him?

- Do you throw the obvious 0-2 outpitch, or go for the kill?

That's just some of what I can think of. There's a lot of games within the game.

Edited May 28, 2020 by Tetsujin

[Kip Smithers]

Difficult question to answer unless you are a very vested fan in each sport or have participated on it to some degree.

Now on their surface id say football. But that’s just on its surface. Never watched a baseball game in my life

[RuskieTitan]

On 5/22/2020 at 3:44 PM, BleedTheClock said:

Yeah. By a million. 

No, by a thousand!

[MightyMouse07]

On 5/22/2020 at 2:15 PM, Duluther said:

I’m football-only when it comes to being a sports viewer, and I never played baseball, basketball, or soccer competitively. So I don’t know the intricacies of these other sports.

They are all pretty much the same. Score more and you win (sans golf). 

[animaltested]

On 5/26/2020 at 8:41 PM, diamondbull424 said:

Perhaps I’m underestimating baseball because it’s the sport I played at the lowest level compared to the rest, but I keep seeing how deep it is because of “the game within the game” with no one actually explaining what makes the game so “complex” in comparison to any other sport.

Most simply say “the game within a game” and that’s it.

I’ll try:

A Good example is batter vs pitcher. The higher level you go, the less “see ball hit ball” you can do. Instead it’s all about balancing tendencies, situations, game flow, and prior knowledge. As a batter, you first need to figure out what type of pitch is coming. At high levels you just cannot read and react reliably. This is where prior knowledge and tendencies come in. What is the pitchers out pitch? Where are they most comfortable putting the ball? What is the count? What has the pitcher been doing all game vs what they have been doing all year. Based on this you will lock into a section of the zone. Now where the “game within a game“ comes from is the pitcher KNOWS this. They know the batter is thinking the exact thing they are. They go through the same thought process. The batter KNOWS the pitcher knows they know, and has to consider that as well. As a result you get essentially that scene from The Princess Bride every at bat.

that’s just one example. And some dudes are so locked in or have such electric stuff they don’t NEED to “play the game within the game” all that much. 
And this does happen in football, especially between OC and DCs. 

 

[Tugboat]

6 hours ago, diamondbull424 said:

Everything you broke down about soccer and hockey comes up within basketball. The only difference is the utility of how you move the ball/puck. They each have their own rules/restrictions. One might ask... why can’t you use your hands to touch a soccer ball? Someone else might say “well it IS called futbol”... but it’s all still arbitrary.

But yeah I agree somewhat, I was never particularly a fan of soccer (probably because my HS football team competed with our soccer team for sport supremacy... they won), until I got into college and realized what made it good. Though what makes it good is also what makes Hockey good as well. Those series of plays the ALMOST lead to a score, but don’t... which builds to a crescendo where each score feels far more special than in basketball (outside of a buzzer beater, those are dope in every sport). 

Hockey is like Soccer on roids.  It's the same sort of concepts...but on actual fastforward in real life.  There's really nothing "simple" about either at the top level...but they are pretty accessible sports at the base end.  Soccer particularly.  It costs a bunch to keep a kid outfitted with good hockey gear. 

 

5 hours ago, Tetsujin said:

The original rule was you couldn't really move while holding the ball. It was all passing. Dribbling was the way around that rule.

That's illegal.

[animaltested]

BTW from personal experience, I found running a play in basketball (especially in motion offenses) WAY more complex, and more difficult to remember and run correctly than football plays. 

[animaltested]

5 minutes ago, Tugboat said:

Hockey is like Soccer on roids.  It's the same sort of concepts...but on actual fastforward in real life.  There's really nothing "simple" about either at the top level...but they are pretty accessible sports at the base end.  Soccer particularly.  It costs a bunch to keep a kid outfitted with good hockey gear. 

Hockey is a better version of soccer. 

Icing is WAY better rule than POS offside rule soccer still has. 
 

Im not even a hockey fan and can see this plain as day. 

[Tugboat]

1 minute ago, animaltested said:

Hockey is a better version of soccer. 

Icing is WAY better rule than POS offside rule soccer still has. 
 

Im not even a hockey fan and can see this plain as day. 

I mean not to burst a bubble but, hockey at the NHL level at least...still has a super complicated hybrid icing rule...

[animaltested]

3 minutes ago, Tugboat said:

I mean not to burst a bubble but, hockey at the NHL level at least...still has a super complicated hybrid icing rule...

Wasn’t talking complexity, more so the rules impact on the fun of the game.