Why football is the best sport... ever
Sport the most popular with greatest display of athleticism
Bryant West
Issue date: 5/12/09 Section: Sports
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the one that includes the best athletes, requires the most skill in choosing plays, and rakes in the most prominent television contract of all. The game that fulfills all these criteria is American football.
Football draws from the largest base of athletes, which means the best players come to the sport. In basketball, if a player is not 6-foot-6, they are immediately discredited. For hockey, a competitor would have to live in a typically cold environment to have exposure to a prevalent number of ice rinks. To succeed in baseball, one needs to be from a certain market, preferably Latin America or the American Southeast in order to be recruited. They also have to be able to afford sufficient training to hurl a 90-mph heater. Football takes any athlete and gives them a specific role on the field to succeed.
Football depends on substantial amounts of speed, strength and intelligence. Lawrence Taylor revolutionized the sport from the defensive end position by ripping past offensive lines with his tenacity. A decade later, the NFL countered by finding the best athletes for left tackle, which is now the second-highest paid position in the sport. These gargantuan men who play on the offensive and defensive lines are superb athletes who would be without work in any other sport besides the ridiculous Strongest Man competitions on late-night ESPN. Every minute of action involves a battle of the titans between these groups of men that is never without intensity or suspense.
Ask any rookie player who has had to transition from the college football world to the NFL and he will tell you the most difficult thing is learning the playbook. Head coaches spend decades attempting to compile playbooks that encompass every perfectly undetectable play for every possible situation in a game. Every football play that is initiated requires exact positioning and precision from every player on the field, which means there is little room for error. This room for error is exemplified in the number of NFL head coaches who are fired after every season. Just last year, fifteen coaching changes were made in the NFL.
The NFL is also important because it is America's sport. Every Sunday, the world stops and tunes into their local team to see them try to demolish hated rivals. CBS, FOX, ESPN, and NBC pay the NFL $20.4 billion to obtain rights to broadcast these football contests, which is the highest of any sport in the world. Because it garners the most lucrative television deal, football is the most watched sport in the sporting Mecca that is America, thereby setting it amongst the best.
When taking into consideration the great number of athletes that flock towards the game of football, the high stress position of calling intricate plays from the head coaching position, and the number of people who enjoy watching the game, it is obvious that American football is the greatest sport in the world.