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Notes -
A soccer thought. I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport and us Americans are correct to not play it. However since it’s an inferior sports that’s also why you can have a World Cup.
Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate. You need to be a rich country to compete in American sports. For American football it’s probably only America that is richest enough to play it. It requires a huge amount of resources and technology to play at the highest levels. Even if the European powers played American football at the same rates I have my doubts they could create a team that’s competitive with a NFL team and we have 30 of them.
Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.
And since Soccer is a low event sports it means that inferior teams can actually pull out ties or wins against power house teams with the right luck.
I'll bite: how're you defining "inferior"?
Soccer is inferior because 98% of possessions do not advance the game state.
In American football, every play advances the game state. Even if nothing happens, 2nd and 10 is meaningfully different from 1st and 10. 3rd and 10 from the 20 is a very different game state from 1st and 10 from the 20.
In basketball, about half of all plays end in a score (arguably this is too much).
Let me bend your ear briefly on why modern basketball is the worst of all sports.
First, it is the only major sport with a freakish morphology requirement. The best predictor of success in basketball is your height - the average for pro players is the 99th percentile. The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group. But basketball is the sport for many demographics, and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.
Second, the rules are stupid. Running with the ball in your hands is not allowed, except you can take a few steps I guess? Especially if it leads to a cool dunk! (Pretty sure that's the actual reason, people like dunks so they bend the rules to allow them). On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair. There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about. If the ball goes in great, but if the defender gets in the way it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.
Third, shooting baskets is stupid. It requires kids to spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever. Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets. I should say, there is interaction if the defender is taller and can put their hands over you, in which case you simply can't succeed no matter how good you are (see point one), but most of the time it's just a skill check roll to see if you get the points or not. What, in every similar sport, is a battle of wits between offense and defense, in basketball is often just a roll of the dice. Player XY hits 3 pointers from this distance at 38% chance. What fun! (BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!) The result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game. Everything about basketball is boring.
All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.
Unlike hockey, where the skill of using a shaped stick to throw things will pay dividends over their lifetime lol
I used to play soccer as a kid, and I now kick stuff around my apartment with precision to clean up, so that was good.
An amusing framing, no doubt! But the fundamental skill in kicking a soccer ball is not the propulsion of the ball, it's balance. Specifically, bilateral balance on a single leg under differing conditions and while under stress and perturbation. Ask a PT or OT and they'll likely confirm that this is one of, if not the most important physical skills to learn for lifelong health and injury prevention. It's what we train the elderly on to prevent falls.
Can't speak to hockey as much as I never played, but shooting a puck seems to involve whole body coordination in a similar way, and manipulating a stick with two hands is endlessly generalizable.
I agree with you on all of this. I just think it applies to basketball too via similar mechanisms of action.
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