Dave’s Football Blog

Y’know, maybe Giants v. Dolphins wasn’t the best NFL matchup to send to England.

The response from Sunday’s sloppy NFL game in Wembley Stadium has garnered exactly the type of response you’d expect. The league is calling it a success, while the English press rejects that notion. Meanwhile, bloggers outside of the U.S. either didn’t get it or tried to apologize for it. Throughout it all, though, the same complaint was echoed throughout blog posts and comments:

NFL is the slowest God damned sport in the world - literally nothing happens.

If you didn’t grow up with the gridiron game like I did and don’t know its history, then yes, it’s going to seem slow compared to soccer or rugby. American football is a stop-and-start game. Every play is a set piece, as Will mentioned in the comments here. You make a move, your opponent counters the move, and men in striped shirts set things up for the next move. It’s much more about strategy and execution than free-flowing play.

That was by design. Back in the 1880s, Walter Camp was the best rugby player at Yale, but he hated the fact that you couldn’t do anything in rugby but line up and go after every tackle. He wanted to incorporate more strategic elements in football, like there were in chess, his other favorite game. Combining elements from chess and rugby created the modern battle chess matches we see every autumn weekend in America.

Of course, nobody in England has the first clue about this. They just look at the pauses in between every play and wonder why it takes so long to set up the next play. They didn’t grow up watching this game and appreciating its nuances, just like we didn’t grow up thinking soccer was anything but that kid’s game played by those suburban hippie commie pinkos. Some Americans still call Association football a communist game, but if they took a long look at European football, they’d find it to be the most capitalist institution on the planet this side of the New York Stock Exchange.

These cultural differences exist because so few people understand where these games came from. What’s more, all the seeds for these different games were sown in the 19th century, which might as well be when dinosaurs roamed the earth to most people. The NFL is all hype and marketing bluster, but it pays little more than lip service to its game’s origins, and that may make it difficult to spread the gridiron gospel outside of North America. If you don’t know the history of someone else’s football, you don’t really know what you’re watching, do you?

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