There's also a hell of a lot of brain damage, which I suppose also fits our children for the world they're growing into.

For sure. This is why I rarely watch anymore (even all the leg injuries make me cringe; turns out, you feel those later!). But it's so good in so many ways!

I enjoy watching Football every once in a while; while I rarely turn the TV to it, it's easy to get sucked in if it's on.

I suspect that the discrete play structure is part of it -- and while it does chew up time to reset between plays, I don't know that turning it continuous ala soccer or rugby would work. (I did enjoy the rugby game that I watched live; it already felt a bit like football made continuous.)

Rugby League is basically already what you are describing. As it happens, I prefer watching Rugby Union.

I suppose you'd need to add in the forward pass, but the no forward pass rule is a lot of what makes rugby when it really flows such an exciting sport.

I endorse 4 on all counts. League is more stop/start than Union in spite of fewer scrums, which is why I regard Union as the better spectator sport. We need Alex here to tell me why I'm wrong.

Are scrums more idiotic/irritating than "downs"? If so why? What would you put in their place?

The forward pass is a thing of beauty. Must have! I...didn't even realize there were different kinds of rugby. My ignorance: exposed.

And if you want to watch really fast flowing rugby with little in the way of big scrums, you could watch Rugby Sevens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_sevens#Pace_of_the_game

Youtube can furnish you with lots of good "Sevens" highlight vids.

There is a great deal of complaining this season about steps taken to protect players from contact. I love American football, and had expected that before too long, I'd need to quit watching it. But I'm starting to believe that there is a watchable sport that can be fashioned that doesn't place an undue burden on vulnerable brains.

Otherwise, I disagree with the premise of the post. You can tinker around the edges, but football is essentially perfect as-is.

There was a Sevens international championship in San Francisco a few months ago, so it was actually on US television. I caught a bit of a women's match, I think between Spain and Ireland. Much faster and more entertaining than US football.

Football is optimized to be seen on television as it existed approximately 1950-1990. On the production side, you could do fine with a relatively small number of bulky cameras that can't easily move around. The cameras can be set up to point in the correct "box" with every play. The ball is large enough to see, even with a 1950 TV. On the social side, you might watch the game either at a bar, or on the big box in the living room with your family. Either way, you're probably not paying full attention. If you're only half paying attention, you need instant replay. The start/stop structure is perfect for instant replay -- compare to hockey or soccer, where the replay does't show how the team set up to get into position to score. Start/stop also work well with commercials.

Improvements in cameras made basketetball and hockey more tv friendly; improved screen resolution helps Baseball and,hockey. When everyone has their own TV in their own room, the games are way too slow moving. It doesn't help that the commercial breaks keep getting longer. We need a new sport optimized for our current technology and lifestyles

Also there's the brain injury problem. Football will soon be following boxing out of the high schools and colleges. No great loss.

Would much of what ogged praises in football be gone if we moved to a tackle-free format? My guess is not. And in that fight, we're up against inertia, callous indifference, and possibly an active desire for violence.

and possibly an active desire for violence

No, possibly about it. Violence is absolutely an important part of the appeal of American football.

As someone who many years ago played the game, I rate watching it as slightly less tedious than golf, auto racing, or paint drying. More racially diverse than those, but head injuries are a bigger minus so I guided my kids to other sports. Plus the coaches, starting with my fellow WesU alum, are just about all irredeemable assholes. The announcers aren't much better. The league itself is scum. Players kneeling for the anthem is the only good point I can find to say about it.

I think the main advantages of football as a spectator sport are:
1) The discrete nature, unlimited substitution, and variety of play types (especially run vs. pass) make for relatively interesting and complicated tactics/strategy, which the viewer has time to have explained to them by experts.
2) Difficult catches on throws are extremely beautiful.

1 is the one that's really hard to substitute in other sports. Cricket and baseball have a little bit of it, but just not as good.

Lots of sports have similar things to 2, but different. Great goals in soccer (especially taken on the volley) have a similar flavor (though they happen significantly fewer times per game), great catches in baseball or cricket (again rarer), certain kinds of finishes in Basketball (happen similarly frequently), and of course Ultimate where great catches have a very similar aesthetic and happen more frequently than in Football.

11: here's Hunter S. Thompson on American football back in 1974:

pro football's meteoric success in the 1960's was directly attributable to its early marriage with network TV and a huge, coast-to-coast audience of armchair fans who "grew up" -- in terms of their personal relationship to The Game -- with the idea that pro football was something that happened every Sunday on the tube. The notion of driving eight miles along a crowded freeway and then paying $3 to park the car in order to pay another $10 to watch the game from the vantage point of a damp redwood bench 55 rows above the 19-yard line in a crowd of noisy drunks was entirely repugnant to them.

There's not a problem with football that can't be solved with robotic exoskeletons.

Football has been refashioning itself to play to the Fantasy Football players and the bettors. The effort to reduce concussions has been a good idea, but players are still getting their bells rung, as the saying goes, and the defensive players are being driven nuts by the constant rule changes that favor the offense. More offense makes the FF players happier though. I think in the medium term American Football is doomed. In spite of this I agree with ogged.

I watched the full triumphant march of the Red Sox to their title, and I was not thrilled by how much analytics have taken over baseball, and how the already slow pace of most games gets even worse in the playoffs. I am still unsure how I feel about the current vogue for replacing pitchers after a few innings even if they are doing well. I think that cost the Dodgers when they took out Hill, and not doing it to Price in game 5 helped the Red Sox. When the final game was done, one of the announcers remarked that it "only" lasted three hours. I (ancient of days that I am) remember when a baseball game lasted an hour and a half, and over two hours was considered incredibly long. Most of that extra time is of course commercials, which they are now showing during the game when "nothing is going on," with a PIP showing the actual game, but a significant amount is the slowness of pitchers and batters putting off the inevitable. Baseball is also incredibly diverse, much more so than football, which has few Hispanics or Asians. One can even be a baseball player if one is totally out of shape.

Australian rules football is the game you are looking for. Plus oval field and referee gestures that are even better than those used in American football.

Ohged attempts to make objective criteria-based analyses of what makes different sports good or bad, but I suspect that if I mention ice hockey he will say it sucks even though I think the only thing missing from his list quite as wide a range of body types. And I guess huge crowds.

I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.

spectator Drone filmed mountain biking or GTA tournaments. You are welcome, now in wide-screen!

That's improved wide-screen.

Benintendi's diving catch to end game 4 of the ALCS was a thing of beauty. This was an all the marbles play, and unlike football, where the receiver and the producer are on the same team and so the catch is scripted, the guy had to run and then launch into a full on dive in exactly the right spot in the field based on what he saw the ball doing as it left the bat.

I grew up a football fan, and attended an NFL game before really watching much on TV. That game featured Sonny Jurgenson throwing to Charlie Taylor for the visitors, and Dandy Don throwing to Bob Hayes for our guys. I try to get to a college game or two every year; it's a fun spectacle, and TV commercials just aren't that big a deal in the Big Sky Conference. But really, I find baseball much more interesting.

You can solve the football brain injury problem by either:
a) Extending the market to poor countries so that the wretched of the earth take up professional football, regardless of the physical toll, so we can watch them pulp their brains. Like boxing!
or
b) Turn the United States into a poor country and render ourselves wretched, thus resolving to an earlier problem.

25. The powers that be seem to have project (b) well in hand. I hadn't realised why it was so important until you pointed it out.

24. Jurgenson was certainly an exemplar of the fact that even football has slots for the out-of-shape, assuming you are a HOF quarterback. Obviously Tom Brady is trying too hard.

The discrete plays thing is a feature, not a bug--I can't handle the constant nature of soccer or hockey or basketball--it doesn't stop long enough for me to appreciate the beauty of a play design or an amazing feat of athleticism. Baseball is fun to watch at the park, beverage and hot dog in hand--but TV baseball is dreadfully boring.

Basketball is incredibly dull, because while there may be incredible athleticism on display, no individual basket matters until the last 5 minutes of the game. I think they should reformat basketball to a tennis-style format so that the score resets on a regular basis (maybe every 5 minutes, or first to 11), possibly with an amateur wrestling addition where on 1/3 of the games the teams start even and the other two one team is up by 5 points so we can see defensive vs. offensive matchups at work. Define a set number of games to be won in a given match, and then you have excitement throughout.

Of course, NFL ownership and management are scum, and the way the sport chews up and spits out player bodies and minds is reprehensible. But it's literally the only major sport that hits the sweet spot of excitement without constant anxiety. Rugby is OK, but not popular enough in the US to make watching it regularly feasible.

15.1 and 28.1

Is definitely a bug, not a feature.

And you can get much of the same thing out of soccer or rugby if you pay attention and understand the game.

That's basically what they said about baseball when I said it was deathly dull and it turns out they were wrong.

I am fully onboard with baseball being dull.

I don't think Chopper and others were claiming that soccer was dull, though. Just that there were things they would like to be able to do -- savour some lovely move, understand the tactical underpinnings of an event that just happened, etc. -- that they can't, because it doesn't stop.

Fine. I'll try to watch soccer if somebody asks me and I have nothing else to do.

I like the stop-start nature of football. I like it that the offense steps up with a plan to do something in the next five seconds, and the defense has to figure it out and stop them. You know that in that five seconds you will see maximum effort, because the players don't need to save as much energy for later. The main bad things about football (other than the fact that the players are slowly committing suicide for our benefit) are the endless TV time-outs and the penalties. (Nothing is quite as boring as a false start.)

I don't think Chopper and others were claiming that soccer was dull, though. Just that there were things they would like to be able to do -- savour some lovely move, understand the tactical underpinnings of an event that just happened, etc. -- that they can't, because it doesn't stop.

I feel that way about basketball, despite having watched a LOT of basketball, being an American. Some article will have embedded gifs that supposedly demonstrate some beautiful piece of skill and I have to watch it five times to even notice which player they think is doing something impressive, let alone what the impressive thing is. No matter what, no matter how many "plays" and strategy the coaches are coming up with, all I see is that the teams go back and forth for 48 minutes, and either one team is clearly better and inevitably wins, or the outcome is random. But I do see the special moves in soccer. Who knows.

Is American football played in any other country? IF not why not? Baseball and basketball have caught on in some places.

Some article will have embedded gifs that supposedly demonstrate some beautiful piece of skill and I have to watch it five times to even notice which player they think is doing something impressive

It's the one in the gorilla suit.

35: As far as I know, only Canada has a league that plays a version of American football. American football, with its unique combination of committee meetings and violence is the quintessential American sport ( to paraphrase and distort George Will).

Baseball is played in Japan, Central America and a few other places.

Basketball is a truly global sport, second most popular worldwide to un-American football.

American football, with its unique combination of committee meetings and violence is the quintessential American sport

Committee meetings with violence? CHINA!

In Soviet Russia, committee violates you.

Many Japanese and Mexican colleges have American football teams. Those are the other two top contenders at the quadrennial championships of the International Federation of American Football. And the field is then usually filled out by Germany, France and a couple other European teams.

I think one of the things that makes soccer a sport that doesn't require the breaks in play to digest/contextualise what just happened, is that soccer is a sport anyone can play, and in countries where people watch a lot of soccer, most people will have played and often played a lot. I'm a completely terrible football/soccer player, and yet I probably put in something like 5,000 - 10,000 hours playing football/soccer over my life.*

So, watching it, I guess most people who are from soccer playing countries are watching it with the sort of eye** that an armchair American Football fan isn't going to have, unless they played in high school or college, which, because of the specialist nature of the sport, is a very small number of people.

* literally all of every single break time and lunch time at school from about age 5 to about age 11 or 12. Plus, many of the waking hours between school and darkness, almost every day of the year. Even when I was 15 and my friends and I were long-haired effete stoner/rock types, we'd _still_ hang out in the park and play football/soccer at least 6 or 8 hours a week.

** although I think people delude themselves that they are seeing the kinds of detail that professional players and coaches do. Armchair football/soccer managers who think they could do better than professionals are everywhere.

I'm a completely terrible football/soccer player, and yet I probably put in something like 5,000 - 10,000 hours playing football/soccer over my life

Another important point. It's possible for anyone to perpetrate football, but it's hard enough that you can run up 10,000 hours without getting good.

Amefuto!

ttaM above is correct that I am not claiming soccer or hockey is boring, just that I don't enjoy the nonstop play. I want the regular baseline resets and to understand the goals behind a discrete play. 2nd down and short, might be worth a long throw down field. 3rd and short, focus on a run or button route to get the 1st down. Watching the clock? Passes to the sideline. And so on.

I enjoy watching the soccer football but as someone who never played and always watches on tv, I've never felt like I've learned as much about strategy as I have watching other sports, including things like cycling, not just American start-stop sports.

At a fundamental level, I think simply not seeing the whole field most of the time is a large part of it. So much positioning isn't on camera.