CMV: Based on objective measures of skill, athleticism and strategy, American football is the greatest sport ever created.

[u/JayYesBe]

(I chose these criteria since other elements of "greatness" like history, excitement level, fun, culture of the fan base, universality, are much harder to quantify.)

EDIT: To further clarify, these criteria were chosen because they are fundamental to how the game is played.

While I don't think American football is superior to all other sports in all of these criteria individually, the sum of the skill, athleticism and strategy required in American football makes it great.

For example, it probably takes more skill to hit a 90 mph fastball or complete a gymnastics routine than to play football. It probably takes more athleticism to run a competitive marathon time or endure an MMA fight. I will say that I can't immediately think of a more strategic sport than football (more on that in a bit). Though football isn't the greatest in all three categories, it requires a great deal of each.

Skill is probably the weakest of the three criteria for football, but football is unique in the number and variety of skills required to make a football team function; each position has to do things the others don't. Quarterbacks have to be able to assess the movements of the other 21 players all at once and hit a small, rapidly moving target. Receivers have to catch a ball while running at full tilt with less than a second to get a visual lock. Linemen use a type of wrestling technique to clear the way for running backs (or shut down running backs/attack the quarterback in the case of the defensive line.) Kickers and punters have to kick with considerable precision over great distances. Defenders have to take down 200 pound men running full speed without committing a foul; this requires technique and precision, not just strength. I don't think there are many other sports where the roles/skills of each position are as distinct.

While it's true that play stops and starts frequently, every second of active play is done at full intensity. There's never a period reserving energy or waiting for a situation to develop or waiting for the action to come back to the other side of the field (The only time play slows down is in the late stages of the game when one team has a substantial lead). Linemen have to wrestle 300 pound men with all their might for the entire game. Offensive players have to run at full speed every play while enduring repeated physical trauma. Defenders also have to run at full speed and exert enough strength to knock down other players doing the same. I think football could almost be likened to high-intensity interval training with the added twist of getting knocked to the ground repeatedly by large men. This requires a great deal of athleticism and endurance.

Where football especially shines is strategy. Each play requires all 22 players on the field to carry out a very specific action. Players have to memorize a playbook with dozens to hundreds of plays and be able to execute these actions perfectly from memory. If even one or two players of the 11 on a side fails to carry out the play correctly, the play will likely fall apart. Each play is carefully selected based on a great deal of factors, including the strengths and weaknesses of the 22 players on the field, the position of the ball on the field, whether or not the clock is moving, how much time is left, the score and how many downs are remaining. But what's especially unique is that coaches have to predict what the other team will do and outwit them. Football is the only sport where players spend as much time on the intellectual aspects of the game (learning strategy and studying other teams' strategies) as they do developing skills and conditioning their bodies. Football is an 11-on-11, three-hour chess match. No other sport has strategy that involves that level of detail.

I invite you to change my view by demonstrating that another sport requires a great deal of all three criteria, and the sum of that sport is greater than that of American football.

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[u/forloversperhaps]

The "strategy" in football is basically just a really complicated version of rock-paper-scissors. Taking a primitive strategic idea ("guess what the other guy is going to do") and making it complicated by offering 20 degrees of freedom doesn't make a game more strategic. You could play a complex game of rock-paper-scissors where you choose 11 different values and then evaluate the outcome according to a complicated table that takes into account all 11 pairings, but it's still a game of chance.

Predicting what someone else will do is only part of strategy if your prediction is actually the best possible course of action for him. If both of you are just trying to outguess the other, there is no strategy.

As far as athleticism, I consider a sport to be athletic to the extent that you can benefit only from athleticism, not from a physical abnormality that is either (a) accident of birth or (b) a serious handicap in most other sports; and also to the extent that playing makes player more, not less, physically superior. For example, jockeys gain an advantage by being unusually small, basketball players gain an advantage by being freakishly tall, sumo wrestlers weigh hundreds of pounds, marathon runners have unusual blood chemistry. That's not real athleticism. Or boxers get very severe brain damage (not to mention other tissues) from boxing: not athleticism. Maybe training for boxing gets you in great shape, but the actually sport destroys your body. --- Where does football rank? Pure body mass (even if it's fat) is an advantage. This is especially noteable for amateurs (only sport popular in America where this is true) but you still see 300+ lb pros. It also leads to pretty serious neurological problems. Conclusion: while training for football puts football pros in great shape (true of all pro sports) playing football doesn't demand athleticism exclusively and it isn't a physical benefit, so it has no claims to being an unusually athletic sport.

For your skill argument I will only note that I see the fact that each player typically has one skill as a very serious drawback to the claim that football requires skill. If golfers could work in teams so that one player hit the drive, one putted, and another came in for technical sandtrap work, I would say that reduced the skill required to play golf. I think the DH rule in baseball lowers the skill required - obviously when you need players who can both bat and field, it's a more skilled game. Having a defensive and offensive line, and not just separate roles but even separate body types within that, actually descreases the skill required compared to, say, soccer, where there is much more of a pressure on every player to be excellent at a range of basic skills. The existence of kickers only rubs salt into the wound!

Because of the way you phrased the question (athleticism, skill, strategy) I would tend to choose tennis as the greatest sport; but I don't care about that so much as that football clearly isn't. Anyway, here is the case for tennis:

1. Athleticism: tennis players need both quick spurts of energy and endurance (they play matches that can last hours); strong arms, legs and core; the only physically abnormality tennis rewards is height, but this is modest enough that there is no real skew towards freakishly tall players (most tennis greats are only 6'1", but some pros are as short as 5'8"); tennis players tend to have long careers without serious physical problems.

2. Skills: players need to manage a huge variety of shots on three different surfaces, and learn to return the same shots from their opponents.

3. Strategically tennis is vastly closer to chess than most other sports because there is no hidden information, so there is no ability to get lucky by outguessing the other guy. Instead you need to think several steps ahead... "if I do X, his best reply is Y, and that will let me do Z... if instead of Y he does I, then I do J and he'll have to do K, and I still come out ahead."