NFL Conference Championship weekend

I intend to enjoy this. Two games between competitive teams for the chance to go batter each other in the Super Bowl. For all the consumer nonsense, this is my idea of fun.

And just for fun, I'll post this defense of my preferred spectacle from a highbrow-oriented philosophy blog, Crooked Timber.

Why you should watch American Football

...  It’s an extremely intelligent game.

I am not remotely kidding.  Football is probably the most strategically deep game of any major sport.  The rules are designed to encourage it!  Meanwhile, teams are unusually equal in terms of quality of players — see below — so they must rely on cleverness to win.

Football is regularly compared to chess, and that’s fair.  But really it’s more of a high-speed physical game of rock-paper-scissors.  The core of it is correctly guessing the other side’s play.  If you can do that consistently, you’ll win.  If not — and if they guess your plays consistently — you will lose.  And like all guessing games, it immediately becomes recursive (if he knows I know he’ll call a blitz, he won’t call a blitz, except he’ll also know that I know he knows, which means he will) and involves bluffing and deceit.

And not only is it a very smart game, it’s smart on a sliding scale.  That is, once you have a basic familiarity you can grasp the big strategies and understand what’s happening.  But as you learn more, you’ll understand more, and you’ll see the little fractal side-strategies — the operational and tactical levels, if you like.  It rewards attention no matter how much or little you know.  

A big part of the fun of watching it is trying to outguess the guys on the field.  “Armchair quarterback” and “Monday morning quarterback” are American idioms for a reason.  It’s also why football fans are perhaps the most likely to yell at a screen.  “He knew you were going to call a blitz!  Why did you call a blitz?”

The author adds much more if you are interested.

My two cents: these freaks of nature (a true description for all who succeed in any world class sport) are simply incredible athletes. They do things with their bodies and brains which seem impossible. One measure of this is that, since myriad rules changes designed to prevent the worst injuries, they have largely learned how to tackle opponents without depending either on crashing a runner with the crown of their helmets or hitting contorted legs. How do they do that? 

I'm looking forward to a delicious weekend of intelligent mayhem, whoever wins the games.