American Football - great sport or greatest sport?

I genuinely think American Foootball could the greatest sport. Let me explain why: it has a mixture of so many different elements which come together to form an amazing spectacle. It combines sheer athleticism, dexterity, agility, power, speed and tactics in a way no other sport does. It's a game where so many different elements come together to make up more than the sum of their parts, and occasionally you'll great breathtaking plays which make you stand up and go "Wow", even if it's by your opponents: amazing catches, weaving runs, pin-point passes. And of course, tactics are such a crucial element and form such a huge part of an offensive team's strategy, with feigns and dummies, decoys, etc. Furthermore, american football has the glitz and glamour which other sports lack (well, that could just because it's American) where the whole match-day experience is something else, with a pre-match show, with fireworks and fire cannons and cheerleading, people running flags up and down, fight songs, dramatic build-up music, ordinary music during the breaks in play (something you'd unlikely appreciate if watching it on TV).

The two other main team sports I like are football and cricket. Football is good, definitely but often you can get horrible matches and it's not that fun to watch, unless you're a neutral and there's two decent teams going toe to toe. Tactics are fairly limited in football too and basically relate to which part of the pitch your'e going to attack down (wing/centre) and how you're going to (long ball/ short ball, crosses or counter-attacking). Also, glitz and glamour it is not. Don't get me wrong, I like football but I don't think it's as brilliant.

There's also cricket, and cricket can have amazing fielding on occasion (not when England are playing though) but half the enjoyment about cricket is the day out kinda drinking Pimm's and soaking up the sun. It's kinda a quite relaxing game (though sometimes very dramatic), obviously very tactical but it's not so explosive as american football, unless you have someone hitting out.

 

You're post is too long, we need to go to a commercial break. And then another one.

Hope you catch my drift, the games take too long to be honest, 4 hours with 2 hours of advertisements is a bit much. Otherwise I'd agree with you. I liker cycling And F1 a tad bit more so right now it ranks 4th on my list.

Wrote this on my Phone from a sunny beach in Greece, 25 degrees at the moment. Trololooool.

 

Fav cyclist would be Alex Zülle, always coming in second behind Jalabert. Most moving moment, dont have one particularly but every descent with Savoldelli was epic. Samuel Sanchez has nothing on him technique wise.

 

Hope you are having a great time Cove!!

I have to agree with Cove's point - Lots of advertisements and people nowadays are interested in Superbowl ads & Halftime shows than the Superbowl itself !

It is like T20 expanded into a Test match format!

Redzone is the best thing since sliced bread as far as American Football is concerned. Even when there are 9 matches going on - one could see 9 GAME score box too many times - which means all 9 games are in advert break for feck sakes at the same fecking time!!


To avoid these too many breaks - NFL shouldn't have 3 teams but only 1 team playing all 3 sides of the ball (Offense, Defense & Special team).

Also - QB position should be rotated like cricket overs - just to make it little bit more interesting and remove the onesided affairs when any of these (Manning, Brady, Rodgers, Luck, Kaepernick, Wilson et al) play against any of these (Manning, Romo, Foles, Sanchez, Dalton, Ponder, Fitzpatrick, Smith et al)

Until these changes are made NFL would neither be a great sport nor a greatest sport IMHO. It is just another sport to me like Cricket - often predictable, dragging and boring.

 

I agree there are a lot of advert breaks in American footballl, but when you're actually at a game, the stoppages are fun, with music pumping out, cheerleaders performing, mascot dancing (do the Raiders even have a mascot), flag waving and stuff that the breaks become almost as entertaining as the match itself. Of course, you don't get that watching on TV.

Interesting idea and I can see your point, however the QB is clearly the star player, the heart of the team, the one who everybody knows the name of (before I got into the NFL, the one player I knew the name of was Tom Brady), the talisman. But then in soccer you get talismanic players occasionally for certain teams but then, you wouldn't say to Barca, "You have to sub off Lionel Messi" or to Real Madrid "You have to sub off Ronaldo". Obviously they may be for whatever reason, but it wouldn't be an obligation.

 

They recently picked a new one: The Raider Rusher

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That's a bloody scary mascot.

I didn't see him at Wembley though.