Monday, 01/27/03

I don't follow American football to the slightest degree, but even I'd heard the soap-operatic story of Oakland's coach Jon Gruden being hired away for staggering sums by Tampa Bay, less than a year before both teams met in the Super Bowl. Yesterday I learned that the Tampa Bay coach Gruden replaced had taken the team to the playoffs several years running.

The reason I don't follow football is that I don't have the patience to figure out how there's any strategy involved. Based on the number of football video games in existence, however, I'm willing to take it on faith that strategy exists. But even assuming the sport consists of more than a gladitorial mash with a Macguffin and arcane refereeing rules, the fact that there are only sixteen games in a season followed by a single-elimination championship seems to make it less of a sport than a injury-fraught coin toss, with cooler stats.

The league has done a lot of work, I'm given to understand, in service of the "Any Given Sunday" ideal; there's extensive revenue sharing and a baffling playoff-qualification calculus and year after year of tweaks to keep team competitiveness in balance, which seems to have paid off, judging by the lack of football dynasties since the 49ers under Joe Montana.

But in a sport where whole playoffs can turn on a single bad call, how do people get any more excited about the outcome of a Super Bowl than they are about the equally inevitable winner of the rock-paper-scissors tournament? I'm supposed to believe that a coach who gets a team to the playoffs for years on end is doing something wrong?

Apparently so. This is why I like baseball. 11:36AM «

Bits pushed by Movable Type