Some thoughts as I slowly assemble my first "real" miniatures army...on which more soon. It's part of my program of finding small-footprint games to take along on my research trip.
Anyway, I'm a big sports guy. I'll watch darn near anything on TV or in person; it accounts for the vast majority of my TV time. My favorite three sports are baseball (obvious first place) and then hockey and college football (which flip-flop in my mind periodically). Baseball and hockey I know pretty well. I've played them, or games very like them, since I was nine. When I watch games on TV, I know what's happening and what all the terminology means.
Football's different. I never played, really, and while I watch football all day long on fall Saturdays I can only really relate to it aesthetically and tribally. I can't diagram plays, I don't know what a "veer" is, and really a lot of the intricacies of the game are beyond me.
TV doesn't help. There's a lot going on on a football field and there isn't much dead air to fill talking about them seriously. With baseball, there's a lot of time between pitches and at-bats to discuss what's happening, how strategy works, and so on. Sometimes they'll cut away from the action to describe some skill--what a "circle change" looks like; things like that. Football just doesn't have time.
(Neither does hockey, and more so, which is why it's hard to really get into unless you've played, I think. There's a lot going on that just looks like chaos to the uninitiated. Basketball is that way with me; I can only fully enjoy basketball if it's a team I care about (there are three of these) and I'm watching them in person. It's mostly tribal. Key fact: I never played a game of basketball in my life; just HORSE and other messing-around games.)
ANYway, I decided this season to educate myself about football. I'm kind of casting around. My first attempt (I declared myself one step above Football for Dummies) is Pat Kirwan's Take Your Eye off the Ball. It's endorsed by NFL.com, so you figure there's some sort of official Nihil Obstat/Imprimatur involved here. I certainly find it interesting reading; it goes through many of the steps of putting a team, game, and position player together, discussing the various skills involved and going through at least some X's and O's. I could probably stand some more hand-holding for particular plays and what they entail but I'm following along. Of course, the proof comes on the weekends, if I'm getting more out of the games than I was previously.
What's kind of interesting is his attitude towards the college game. The college game, in the NFL's eyes, exists to prepare players for the pros, and he goes into some detail about what the colleges do well and poorly--and wishes that they'd push more running backs out the door so their NFL careers can start a year earlier. I'm still a tiny bit of an idealist when it comes to college football, partly since I'm watching the student-athlete/instructor interaction at close range. The football players I've taught have been pretty good students, honestly--partly because we're lucky to have Joe Paterno who has built a strong organizational culture of taking class seriously. (This is honestly kind of rare, sadly.) So I like to pretend that college football can and should be about the "college" part, and can do so while preserving some pretty good football.
Of course, there's no reason for the NFL to give a damn, other than some sort of weird altruism.
I've begun having fun, though; it'll be good if I can intellectually connect with the third of my top three sports.
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