It's going to be over comparatively in a flash today. PSU-Minnesota is at noon and Bama-LSU at 3:30.
"Scholarly" is an apt nickname for tackle football is the most intellectual of the major team sports. Tackle football is a cumulative discipline, like the law or science. It is built on precedent but it is not hide bound. Current practitioners stand on the shoulders of giants of the game, they are not grounded by them. There is free flow of ideas and innovative thought among coaches, who borrow eagerly from one another. There is "normal science" and there are "revolutionary" breakthroughs in thought.
The late sportswriter Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald once termed tackle football "chess in a meadow" and somebody once said that chess was too serious to be a game and not serious enough to be a vocation. The chess metaphor is apt also for every play in tackle football requires a reset of thought. As in chess each move requires a consideration of position on the play surface and rational prediction of the opponent's counter. There is nothing free-form, as there is in basketball, about tackle football. All eleven players on the offense have a specific role dependent on the play called, each is a moving part as in a complicated machine. Each must perform his task precisely or the play is "busted," or "blown up," mechanical language. It not a beautiful game, not poetry; it is an intellectual discipline, textbook writing rather than poetry.
The game invites the mental participation of the spectator to a degree unprecedented in any other sport. You go to a tackle football game and you're in constant conversation with others. "What do you think they're going to call here?" "Ah! He shouldn't have called that." You watch a game at home with friends and the same thing. You "Monday Morning Quarterback" the day after. It is a sport of democratic thought: the spectator's opinion can be correct, the expert coach's, wrong. It isn't rocket science in the intellectual training required and it is not even chess in the head-hurting concentration--anyone who familiarizes him or herself with the complex rules and who watches a critical mass of games can form a creditable opinion on what play should be called, and what play not. Tackle football is the thinker's game. Let the mental gymnastics begin.
"Scholarly" is an apt nickname for tackle football is the most intellectual of the major team sports. Tackle football is a cumulative discipline, like the law or science. It is built on precedent but it is not hide bound. Current practitioners stand on the shoulders of giants of the game, they are not grounded by them. There is free flow of ideas and innovative thought among coaches, who borrow eagerly from one another. There is "normal science" and there are "revolutionary" breakthroughs in thought.
The late sportswriter Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald once termed tackle football "chess in a meadow" and somebody once said that chess was too serious to be a game and not serious enough to be a vocation. The chess metaphor is apt also for every play in tackle football requires a reset of thought. As in chess each move requires a consideration of position on the play surface and rational prediction of the opponent's counter. There is nothing free-form, as there is in basketball, about tackle football. All eleven players on the offense have a specific role dependent on the play called, each is a moving part as in a complicated machine. Each must perform his task precisely or the play is "busted," or "blown up," mechanical language. It not a beautiful game, not poetry; it is an intellectual discipline, textbook writing rather than poetry.
The game invites the mental participation of the spectator to a degree unprecedented in any other sport. You go to a tackle football game and you're in constant conversation with others. "What do you think they're going to call here?" "Ah! He shouldn't have called that." You watch a game at home with friends and the same thing. You "Monday Morning Quarterback" the day after. It is a sport of democratic thought: the spectator's opinion can be correct, the expert coach's, wrong. It isn't rocket science in the intellectual training required and it is not even chess in the head-hurting concentration--anyone who familiarizes him or herself with the complex rules and who watches a critical mass of games can form a creditable opinion on what play should be called, and what play not. Tackle football is the thinker's game. Let the mental gymnastics begin.
