I want to agree with this^ to some extent. I think marketing and such aside, there is also the ease of playing said sport. For football, you get two bag packs and a cheap rubber ball and people (mostly teenages and kids) can play at any time and any place. With the most popular American sports, there need to be substantial facilities to be able to compete. You need a basketball gym or football helmets or in extreme cases, an ice rink. This could be a hindering factor in the growth of certain sports.
I do kind of share the football bias. I played basketball in college and am a much better basketball player than football player but all else equal, i’d rather have been an EPL player than an NBA or NFL player.
Edit: And yes. More pics and more Larissa stories please.
According to Michael Mauboussin, Basketball is a game where skill counts for more than American Footbal. It comes down to the number of opportunities to score per unit of time. Since you get more baskets per game than touchdowns per game, incremental skill has a better chance of becoming statistically significant, so two teams with small differences in skill are more likely to have a score differential positively correlated with their skill differential. Good for you!
Agreed, the emotional factor is just one of many which made the world fall in love with the game. Ease of play, the fact that you can play the game on roads, concrete courts, grass, mud etc make it so enjoyable.
Ironically in the developing world the most common football pitches are on the bball courts. Small goals, 5 aside. Beautiful.
Don’t know who that guy is, but I think he has a flawed understanding of sports.
In basketball, each possession = one play in football. Every possession in basketball should (hopefully) result in points. But in football, you don’t want to score on every play. You want to march down the field. And after 10-15 plays, you want to score a touchdown.
No, you guys misunderstand what bchad is saying. He just means that the outcome of football is randomized to a greater degree, since scores happen less frequently than in basketball. Talent and height are both reflected in the “skill” measure that bchad uses.
Let’s say we make a game based on coin tosses, but the coin is biased to show heads 60% of the time. If most of the tosses show heads, Team A wins.
If the game involves 1,000,000 tosses, Team A will never lose. That is, the fundamental odds are reflected in the outcome. If the game involves only one toss, Team A will lose sometimes. Apply this same concept to football or basketball - it is obvious that the sport with more discretized (and less continuous) scoring will have more abberations in outcomes of individual games.
Have you guys read Freakonomics volume X, or whatever that book is? One chapter is about why many of the best schools are charter schools. So, charter schools are better than normal schools? However, many of the worst schools are also charter schools. The reason is that charter schools, on average, have fewer students than public schools. So, the outcomes of students in charter schools is tail heavy.
I don’t know if I’m agreeing or disagreeing with what bchad posted, but the biggest difference in outcomes I see in football vs. basketball is that in basketball one or two players can literally take over a game. That can’t happen in football.
I think higgimond’s comment doesn’t necessarily support or contradict what Mauboussin was saying. The explanation there is that the team’s skill level is a function of the player’s skill level, but the way that individual player skill aggregates into team skill may be different in different sports, which makes sense.
I do suspect that the fact that basketball has more opportunities to score in a typical game may be linked to the fact that one or two players can make such a big difference to the outcome in terms of dominating the game.
Well, there are two things to think about with the “dominant player” observation. First, if the same player dominates all games, then that is demonstrative of consistent outcomes. So, a sport with dominant players might illustrate skill based outcomes. In a game where outcomes are highly random, team or player dominance should be rarely observed.
Second, the fact that there are dominant players in the first place further illustrates how a low “scoring” frequency produces volatile outcomes. In a sport with only five players on the court, there is a probability that a randomly good player will skew the expected outcome. If basketball teams played 500 players at once, LeBron can do nothing by himself. Also it would be a shit show.
The cynic in me says coke probably sat and hatched a plan somewhere in Atlanta on how to best capitalize on the sudden surge of interest in labor policies of the middle east and being an American company how best exploit the situation to ‘market’ themselves.