November 13th, 2006
Figure skating is not a sport. It is athletic and involves amazing displays of skill, but it is not a sport. The winners and losers are decided by the subjective opinion of judges. Often, skaters have to “pay their dues” over a few competitions, even years, before they are given the highest marks by the judges. In other words, it is just like college football’s “championship”.
Who gets to play in the “championship” game is largely decided by the polls, which are nothing more than the badly formed opinions of people who cannot possibly have watched all the teams they are voting on each week. since the polls start in the preseason, position is determined by everything BUT how well the teams perform on the field. This year, Rutgers could go undefeated in the Big East conference, a team with three top ten teams and the second highest rated conference in college football, but has no chance to play in the national title game. Why? Because they hadn’t “paid their dues” — they were not a big time program, and so they were not ranked in the pre-season polls. College football has adopted, for all intents and purposes, the figure skating method of determining a champion. Just more proof that college football isn’t a real sport.
Categories: Olympics, Sports, World Cup |
5 Comments
June 22nd, 2006
Those few of you who are quasi-following the World Cup, as I have been, may be confused as to the “offsides” rule, that seems not to make any sense at all if you’re not familiar with it, and seems to be called anything that resembles “exciting” starts to happen, thus stopping the action. Well, I’ve finally figured it out, and I’m going to try to explain it to you in plain English.
Basically, the rule is this: no attacking player is ever allowed to get between the deepest defender and the goal while anyone else is controlling the ball.
What does that mean? It means that it’s virtually always illegal to get “behind the defense.” You are only allowed to do this if you yourself are controlling the ball, or if the ball is already on its way to you via a pass.
Let’s put this in (American) football terms. In Super Bowl XXXI, in the first quarter, Brett Favre recognized that wide receiver Andre Rison was single-covered, and called an audible out of a running play, sending Rison on a “go” route. Rison juked and faked out the New England corner, and would up running down the field, where Favre hit him in stride for a 54-yard touchdown. It was an exciting play (especially for a Packers fan like me), and part of what NFL fans love about the game.
In soccer, a play such as this would have been illegal. Why? Because Rison got behind the defender before Favre threw the ball. The whole play would be called back as “offsides.”Now I can see what motivates the soccer rule: you don’t want an attacker just “camping out” around the goal, waiting to take a pass and knock it in; but the way the soccer rule is, you could be eighty feet from the goal and still be offsides. Something akin to hockey’s blue line and its offsides rule would solve soccer’s problem, without killing the action, as soccer’s current rule does. And in any case, it’s physiologically impossible to correctly call offsides:
The ability of the eye to change focus on a far object to one located less than 6 yards (meters) away is called eye accommodation. For most people, it takes around 600 milliseconds. Since the players and ball are spread all over the field, a referee almost always performs eye accommodation when making an offside call.
But according to Maruenda, the average running player can move roughly 5 feet (1.5 meters) in the time it takes for the ref’s eyes to refocus, so 600 milliseconds is just too slow.
To make an accurate call, “it is necessary to stop time and to locate all the players who take part in that game in zero milliseconds,” Maruenda told LiveScience. To watch the player making the pass, the player receiving the pass, the defender and the ball at the same time is just too much for our visual systems to handle, especially from the close-up view of the referee.
Now that I’ve finished my rant, here’s someone who explains it better.
UPDATE: Commenter Kevin Newman points out an aspect I neglected to mention: You can’t be offsides if the ball is in front of you. So, for example, if your teammate is charging toward the net and has control of the ball, and you are also charging toward the net, you can get behind the deepest defender without being offsides, as long as the guy with the ball is ahead of you. He can even pass the ball to you, as long as the pass is laterally or backward. But if you get ahead him and he passes to you, you’re offsides.
Categories: Sports, World Cup |
35 Comments
June 21st, 2006
The first round isn’t even over yet, and there have already been five 0-0 draws. Five matches in which nobody scored. In the Argentina-Netherlands match, there were a total of six shots on goal in the match (three a side). For those keeping score at home, that’s one shot on goal every fifteen minutes (and that’s only if you ignore “stoppage time”). There were nineteen total shots taken, if you include the thirteen that weren’t on goal. So barely over one shot every five minutes, on average. When Americans complain that “nothing happens” in a soccer match, this is exactly what we’re talking about.
While I’m on this rant, there were six 1-0 matches, three 1:1 draws (nine total draws), and fourteen other shutouts (twenty total shutouts if you count the 1-0 matches). So out of forty matches played, in 25 of them, at least one team failed to score at all. That’s a staggering 62.5%! (By way of comparison, there were fifteen baseball games today, and two of them were shutouts; in all but 13.3% of the games, fans of either team had at least something to cheer for; and baseball isn’t exactly known for being the most exciting sport in the world…)
Contrary to what you commonly hear, it’s not just scoring that we like. We like things happening. That doesn’t have to mean a score, it can mean a decent attack, a shot, a scoring chance, a big play, whatever. Incessant passing and jockeying for position with neither team truly attacking or defending does not constitute “something happening.” Imagine what basketball would be like if 85% or more of a game was spent at center court, with teams just passing the ball around. And there’s no shot clock. Ugh.
So I think the appropriate question isn’t why the US doesn’t care about soccer, but why the rest of the world does care. What exactly are you watching?
On a side note, I asked a Canadian coworker, and she tells me that Canadians don’t give a shit “aboat” soccer, either.
Categories: Sports, World Cup |
63 Comments
June 20th, 2006
I’ve been wondering: Is it just the US who doesn’t give a shit about soccer (football), or are the Canadians lethargic, too?
Categories: Sports, World Cup |
11 Comments
June 12th, 2006
I am going to be busy this week, so, taking the advice of regular Ted, I am going to do a series of discussion posts. And to start, hopefully someone can answer this burning question for me: why does the entire world except the United States love soccer, or, in honor of the World Cup, football? I have heard the standard explanations and none of them seem to make sense. The notion that Americans want instant gratification doesn’t fly. Baseball and golf are two of our favorite sports. It cannot just be that there are more sports options because that is true of the entire industrialized world. It cannot be because no generation of Americans have grown up with the sport, because soccer was huge among kids even when I was young, and I am in my early thirties.
So why soccer? Why does the entire rest of the world so passionately follow a sport that one of the larger countries on the planet simply ignores?
Categories: Sports, World Cup |
21 Comments
