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


Duluther

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10 minutes ago, Hunter2_1 said:

No they're just possible positions. 11 to a team, and the field is placed to a strategy. Like, if you placed someone at Leg Gully (see above), you'd have the bowler bowl awkward balls about shoulder height and try and get batsman to nick the ball off to that fielder. 

What's up the with upper left 1/8th? between slip 9 and slip 1, where all the dots are lined up closely together?

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It all depends on which part we add the "complex" stamp.

Living in Denmark where soccer and handball are close to national sports, it was easy to see that soccer was the easiest transition for those who had not played before.

Getting 14 kids to play 7on7 soccer without much previous knowledge and still get a decent game was easy.

Get those 7on7 kids to play handball and it would be difficult to get a decent flowing game going - just too many minor rules that had to be taken into account.

7on7 football would be close to impossible.

As a matter of required skill to play the game, I still think football as the great chess game it is, is vastly superior in complexity compared to the other major sports. Each play is essentially a penalty kick that can be either a miss or a goal if executed right.

The fluidity of the other sports take a bit of that factor away.

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56 minutes ago, DannyB said:

What's up the with upper left 1/8th? between slip 9 and slip 1, where all the dots are lined up closely together?

OK, so the best way of getting a batter out (usually with the equivalent of cutters and sliders) is to get them to nick the ball off to those fielders. This usually happens with overcast weather because under cloud cover the ball swings (slides or cuts) more......yeah, the weather is like a 12th man in cricket. Probably one of the only cool parts of the sport haha.

 

It looks like this...

 

 

The slip that slips away

 

KGRcPL.gif

Edited by Hunter2_1
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On any given NFL football play there are 2-5 checks and adjustments for the offensive line alone.  Add in motions, audibles, hot routes, edge blocking changes, etc...  And that's just the offensive side of the ball where there will be 120-150 plays run per game between the two teams.  There are just as many adjustments made on the defensive side of the ball as well.  In a given game, there are probably 1000+ things modified just from original play calls when the huddle breaks, and that's before you get into play calling strategy.

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6 hours ago, Danand said:

It all depends on which part we add the "complex" stamp.

Living in Denmark where soccer and handball are close to national sports, it was easy to see that soccer was the easiest transition for those who had not played before.

Getting 14 kids to play 7on7 soccer without much previous knowledge and still get a decent game was easy.

Get those 7on7 kids to play handball and it would be difficult to get a decent flowing game going - just too many minor rules that had to be taken into account.

7on7 football would be close to impossible.

As a matter of required skill to play the game, I still think football as the great chess game it is, is vastly superior in complexity compared to the other major sports. Each play is essentially a penalty kick that can be either a miss or a goal if executed right.

The fluidity of the other sports take a bit of that factor away.

Disagree. I think football is easily the lowest tier in terms of needed “skill” to be successful in the sport... with regards to the ones listed anyway. Think players like Antonio Gates, Jimmy Graham, Hayden Hurst... just for example. All tight ends but these are just off the top of my head.

Gates never played a single down of college football and was able to parlay that limited experience into a tryout and making an NFL roster just based off of athleticism alone. Did he become more skilled, sure, but he literally didn’t play the sport for 4 years and within three years was able to rise to prominence as one of the best at his position in the sport. That said he at least was a stud HS football player.

Hayden Hurst took like three years off from football and it wasn’t even his main focus in HS athletics, yet he was able to become a 1st round pick within 3 years. Which the NBA equivalent would be a random 7 footer who took 3 years off from the sport playing for three years and going top 7 in the draft.

Jimmy Graham was perhaps the most insane example of them all, even moreso than Gates... as he never played even HS football. He then played just one season of college football (to get the hang of it) and parlayed that into being a 3rd round draft pick and then in his 2nd season in the league made the pro bowl. This means he played the sport for all of 3 years before rising to the pinnacle of the position.

In modern baseball, basketball, or soccer the above scenarios would be impossible (at least I’ve never heard of a star player with similar trajectories in the last 31 years, since I’ve been alive). In basketball the closest I can come to this are guys like Giannis and Joel Embiid. Took 8 years for Embiid and 10 years for Giannis... both as freakishly athletic 7 footers... and 7 footers don’t grow on trees. Embiid also had a private trainer that was an NBA player since the age of 16.

Perhaps someone more familiar with soccer and baseball can chip in here, but from my loose following of both sports (they’re not my favorites) I’ve never heard of guys taking breaks from a sport or never having played a sport and rising to the pinnacle of the sport, in any capacity, in such advanced periods of time.

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On 5/22/2020 at 5:28 PM, 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 everything that is going on. 

Just ask everyone in my county 

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You can find a random group of people and play any other sport on the fly. You can’t play football on the fly. You have to design plays and be on the same page with everything to avoid catastrophic failure. Plus there’s a timed clock that means you have to signal in the play, relay it in a huddle, and then execute to perfection AFTER making any checks. There is pre and post snap movement on almost every snap that drastically changes the blocking scheme. There are a ton of coverage checks and killed blitzes based on shifts and personnel groupings. 
 

Football is insanely complicated. It’s not even close. 

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8 hours ago, BleedTheClock said:

You can find a random group of people and play any other sport on the fly. You can’t play football on the fly. You have to design plays and be on the same page with everything to avoid catastrophic failure. Plus there’s a timed clock that means you have to signal in the play, relay it in a huddle, and then execute to perfection AFTER making any checks. There is pre and post snap movement on almost every snap that drastically changes the blocking scheme. There are a ton of coverage checks and killed blitzes based on shifts and personnel groupings. 
 

Football is insanely complicated. It’s not even close. 

Yeah, totally agreed.

I got two buddies together not so long ago just for a bit of throw and catch, they'd never watched a game in their lives. Made one be a receiver, one be a DB (I was 'QB')...I got with the WR and said THE most basic coding I could think of (If I say red, go right, blue go left, green straight on). I shouted red, hiked the ball to mysef....he ran straight on. AT it's most basic you can ever make it, football is still more complicated than soccer :D

Edited by Hunter2_1
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Complex from a strategy standpoint, absolutely.

Complex from a "you have to hit a ball with a round object squarely and decide as the ball leaves the pitcher's hand whether or not to swing, at what plane, identify fastball vs. off-speed, strike vs. ball, whether to turn on it/wait back opposite field based upon the inside vs. outside corner, and what the situation is"...not even a little bit.

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14 hours ago, BleedTheClock said:

You can find a random group of people and play any other sport on the fly. You can’t play football on the fly. You have to design plays and be on the same page with everything to avoid catastrophic failure. Plus there’s a timed clock that means you have to signal in the play, relay it in a huddle, and then execute to perfection AFTER making any checks. There is pre and post snap movement on almost every snap that drastically changes the blocking scheme. There are a ton of coverage checks and killed blitzes based on shifts and personnel groupings. 
 

Football is insanely complicated. It’s not even close. 

I guess you could take a random group of guys, put them on skates, and send them out on ice to play a game of hockey, but it would be a complete gong show.

Give a random group of guys 1 year of coaching and I bet the football game would look better than the hockey game. 

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12 minutes ago, Snake Plissken said:

I guess you could take a random group of guys, put them on skates, and send them out on ice to play a game of hockey, but it would be a complete gong show.

Give a random group of guys 1 year of coaching and I bet the football game would look better than the hockey game. 

People do play pickup hockey all the time. You don't need complex strategies to play the full game of hockey.

Sure, you can play street football, but it doesn't work with a full team. You couldn't have an 11-11 football game.

 

You can freelance play in hockey with the full numbers. You can't freelance play football with 22 guys.

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