Halfway down the Danube

Are you ready for some springtime?

Because it wouldn't be Halfway Down the Danube without the occasional incomprehensible post about American football (gridiron) from the guy with the coffee cup icon, now, would it?

It's spring in the US! which also means it's draft season for professional American football! Some explanation might be required for non-US sports enthusiasts.

Unlike professional soccer (futbol, calcio, whatever) US professional gridiron doesn't relegate or promote teams based on rank. In fact, there's an involved structure to keep the level of play between teams as even as possible. Part of this is done monetarily: the National Football League has instituted rules to limit the amount of money each team can spend on players (which the San Francisco 49ers shamefully abused during their years of glory, but I digress). And it works. It turns out that in a cross-country comparison of sports leagues, the NFL has the lowest correlation between money spent and performance, while professional Italian soccer has the highest.

US gridiron also balances team competition via the draft. Based on reverse standings, the worst team in the NFL has first pick of hot eligible players from (usually) university teams. The second worst, the next pick. And so on. (The US uses its university gridiron teams as a 'farm' system for its professional league. The upshot of this has been to democratize the universities, rather than to make gridiron more elite. It's a little peculiar.)

My own home team, the Green Bay Packers, made it to the playoffs last year, and so had a late pick in the draft for the first round. Weirdly enough, one of this year's hottest quarterbacks (roughly analogous to team captain; for two sports with the same roots, gridiron and soccer positions have diverged wildly) hadn't yet been chosen. While Green Bay already has a legendary quarterback named Brett Favre, truly one of the greatest in the game -- [far] better than Beckham is to soccer, in my opinion -- he's slightly older than I am, and will probably retire after this season. And so the Packers snapped up Aaron Rodgers as pick number 24. Not anyone's expected outcome.

Anyway, during the draft, potential players are subjected to all sorts of tests. Some of them are more rigorous than others. Carrie of Bad Mama sent me this link on testing player intelligence. (And you can try the test yourself!) This was my favorite part:

Some teams consider the test results critical. Others say they dismiss the results, except for players who score at the extremes. What's an extreme? Well, former Bengals punter and Harvard grad Pat McInally scored a perfect 50 -- the only NFL player known to do so -- while at least one player, it is rumored, scored a 1.

(Internal link mine.)

Before anyone begins to post about how American football is so incredibly boring (and I retaliate about the whiny, tedious nature of socker, which is an alien, imperialist transplant to most of the world anyway), let us agree that they fill different niches and satisfy different itches. In my opinion, basketball and baseball fill the roles in the US as soccer does elsewhere, while the gridiron is more of a cyborg sport, like NASCAR, Formula One, the Tour de France, mountaineering, weightlifting, and the Russian space program. I mean, what other sport looks for a fast 175-kg man, who will assuredly need corrective surgeries throughout his career?

(In related news, it looks like Monday Night Football is to be no more. And so passes an American TV tradition. Dennis Miller was probably the lethal wound, but then John Madden sat on it. Ah well.)

Posted by coyu at April 24, 2005 07:31 PM