Soccer Ties, Oh My Part II

In this three part series I am discussing the controversial notion of Soccer games ending in a tie or draw. If you missed part one, you can check it out here. Tomorrow I will post part three.

Football (American football that is)

Ah football, America's true pastime. What could be more manly in a sporting adventure than strapping on a helmet (that is not a Princess Leia hairdo themed), pads and skin tight spandex pants and then go out and run into each other for a while?

Here's where football really falls apart for me. While I don't doubt the physical prowess of any professional football player, I find it hard to take seriously a sport where the average player is only ACTUALLY playing for about 11 minutes of every 2-3 hour game.

According to a recent study published by the Wall Street Journal, the average game only contains 11 minutes of ACTUAL playing time. Contrast that with 67 minutes of the players standing around doing nothing. 17 Minutes are devoted to replays because, golly you gotta keep viewers interested since NOTHING IS HAPPENING. The typical play in football is only about 4 seconds long. Seriously, what activity out there could a professional athlete NOT do for 4 seconds? Or even 11 minutes.

This is why I always find it so funny to see a player on the sidelines taking oxygen. How could you possibly be out of breath?

This is why I think Football has become the favorite televised sporting event in the US. I mean what other sport celebrates players as lazy as the average american? You can fall asleep on the couch and your pretty sure you've missed nothing when you wake up. If you did don't worry there's 17 minutes of replay to cover the 11 minutes of game time. That's really all you have to see.

So grab that beer or heavily sugared soda, that bag of potato chips, eat yourself silly, fall asleep and know you're working just about as hard as any player on your favorite football team.

Baseball

It cannot be denied, that trying to hit a 90+ mph fastball with a wooden stick is an impressive feat of hand eye coordination.

But much like Football, Baseball is plagued with vast sums of time devoted to players doing nothing. According to yet another study in the Wall Street Journal, over the course of the average three-hour game, fans of baseball only get to watch about 17 minutes and 58 seconds of ACTUAL playing time. So I will grant you one thing:

Nearly 18 minutes is better than Football.

This means the average professional baseball player gets more cardio exercise running in and out of the dugout between innings than he actually does playing the game and plying his trade.

Not to mention the fact that baseball is just about the only professional sport (aside from bowling I guess) where you can actually be fat and still play it.

Check out this link to the top 25 fattest baseball players.

I think John Kruk said it best (who was known for being rather oval shaped himself- all the while he was an ALL-STAR first baseman) when a woman confronted him smoking and asked how he could smoke as a professional athlete. To which he replied:

"I ain't an athlete, lady, I'm a baseball player."

Nuff said.

So you might wonder why, as an American I can devote 90 minutes of my life to a game that might just end in a tie. The short answer is, because those 90 minutes are full of much more action than any other sport out there, less commercials, less standing around, less meaningless shots and points. It is simply the greatest sport ever concocted in the minds of man.

Finally let me ask you this. Has your sport ever been banned by royalty or a church? Mine has. From 1314 to 1667, English royalty banned soccer because people were so interested in it, that it was interfering with their religion.

Bet that never happened with Basketball.

Tomorrow, I will post part three of this series, where I discuss the nuts and bolts of the Soccer tie, and why they are vital to the great game.

CC