Week 4

The sport I’ve chosen to analyze for this weeks post is Football. I’ve chosen Football for a couple of reason. One being is that is my favorite sport to watch and second favorite to play. I also have a great understanding of it so that it is easier for me to see and talk about some of the things that are discussed by Macklin and Sharp’s “tools” from chapter 2. One of the first things that came to mind for me when they are discussing constraints is Football. A constraint is something that limits the way you interact in a game but by doing so it should in some way enhance the game or make it better. A great example of this in Football is how wide receivers stand at the line of scrimmage until the ball is snapped then they are allowed to start running with the intention of getting open. A more effective way for them to do this would be to have them running towards the line of scrimmage already and then snap the ball right when they are fixing to cross it that way the would have a running start which would allow them to get open more easily. That being said they don’t do this in Football and I think the reason being is that its to easy for the offense if they did that so they put a constraint on it to make the game better. The only football that they do this in is arena football which the least popular by far. Another thing I took away from the readings by Macklin and Sharp is the about the skill involved and Football compared to the chance that is involved. For Football I would say there is almost zero chance involved besides maybe weather. I say this because almost everything that happens in the game is based on the skill of one of the 22 players. For example if a quarterback throws an interception then there are only a few reasons on why this happened and there all skill based not chance based. He could have been pressured by the defense which means that they either schemed a good way to get to the quarterback or an individual player beat they guy in front of him to cause a bad pass which lead to an interception. Another reason could be that the defender just makes a better play on the pass then the wide receiver or maybe it was just a bad throw because the quarterback is not as skilled as he needed to be to make the throw. This is just a couple of examples of the hundreds that you could make about the skill required to play Football. The only thing that’s makes Football really interesting is that there are 22 players which means you have so many different matchups going on that the game can be effected in so many ways. I think this might give the illusion of chance in a way when watching without actually paying close attention to the smaller details.