How American is American Football?
Cowboys, 49ers and Patriots - can we determine anything about a culture based on the sports it plays?
Things mentioned in this podcast:
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing American football. So unusually I'd like to start off with this one. And so the reason I want to talk about this is recently I've been watching quite a lot of American football, finding out a bit more about it and kind of reacquainting myself with it. And this is just because there's a whole bunch of documentaries on Netflix and Amazon at the moment. And you have just been to the United States of America. Well and that was like the nice icing on the cake, you know, that sort of, you know, filled it all out. And as I was watching, especially the behind the scenes element of the sport, it just got me thinking about, well, why is American football like it is? Now, some of the stuff I'm about to say might sound a bit moany, but actually what I want to say is actually I quite liked it. I found myself sort of really getting into it. And there's elements of it I really like. Okay. And so, yeah, so the things that really struck me about it is, first of all, I found it really legalistic and technical. And so there's just seemed to be so many rules and the tactics in the game are just, it just seems massively tactical more than, or more overtly tactical than in other sports. Okay. It's almost like a board game. Yeah. And there's not much room, there's not much flexibility, it seems to me. Also, it seems to be quite self-obsessed. And this goes back through to the tactics I've talked about. It sort of, it just seems to be endlessly looking in on itself and self-involved. Also, I think it's really, it's quite easily digested or it's, there's lots of quite instant gratification. And so the plays are really short and there's lots of spectacular stuff happening again and again, really quickly. And there's lots of points scored and there's a whole lot going on, let's say. So yeah, for an observer, there's a lot sort of to be satisfied by quite often. Also, it's really loud. Just the players themselves are loud, but also behind the scenes, you know, they strut about a lot, but behind the scenes, there's a lot of rhetoric going on as well. Which I guess leads into, I find the whole thing quite overblown as well. So you've got each match is quite a spectacle, you know, you've got cheerleaders, you've got insane amount of coaches on either side. You've got massive amount of referees. There's something like 15 referees knocking around the place wearing weird, bizarre clothes. And the number of players
Speaker B:as well. It's highly, highly specialised. You know, there's one guy who comes on just to kick
Speaker A:a ball. Exactly. Highly specialised. Also, and the classic stuff we like to moan about in England, all the helmets and the padding, like, do they really need them? Yeah, and the ad breaks. Yeah, well, okay, lots of ad breaks, lots of roof ad breaks. And also even stuff like their draft system, which is a huge thing, which happens once a year. And it's a spectacle. It's a thing in its
Speaker C:own right. There's lots of noise around it. The whole of the US becomes momentarily a communist
Speaker A:nation when it comes to the draft. Exactly, this redistribution of resources. Yeah. And then also just in a more broader sense, culturally, I've talked about like, there's the rhetoric, but also there's a real sort of narrative of self improvement. And it's quite emotional. And also, it's very domestic as well. It's, you know, there are very, very few players who are not American
Speaker C:and playing in the NFL. Now you're, you are just going to go on forever talking. I'm nearly done.
Speaker A:I'm nearly done. So I'm going to interrupt you with the question. Wait, I'm nearly done. I'm all bundled up. And yeah, maybe I've got a question. I don't know what my question is,
Speaker C:but go with your question. Well, no, I mean, I think I think you what you're getting to that what you're displaying is a natural tendency that we have to read into the microcosm of sports to read a lot about a nation or at least to see some nice parallels. And it's very tempting, not just in the actual just thinking about the specifics of the game, but also the exceptionalism. Exceptionalism. America plays sports that only it plays broadly. That's not true, actually, not quite true. I'll get to that in a minute. But and it's tempting to see in that a reflection of the US exceptionalism as a whole. It's very tempting for British people to look at cricket and say, well, isn't this, you know, there's something about the kind of the long termism and the stoicism and the lack of emotion that people display and the sportsmanship behavior. Exactly. And the sort of us against them. And of course, you know, that's the basis for that. And play the game. Yeah. The analogy between the sporting field and the battlefield. And, you know, people are forever looking at the way that, for example, the South Americans play football and seeing in it a kind of the evidence of Latin spontaneity and that sort of thing. Now, is that true? That is what we want to know. Is it true that sports tell you something about the country who plays them? Or is that just a, you know, natural tendency to find patterns where there aren't any? So the answer is yes. Well, let me hold up. I have I want to be more specific. There are at least three questions here. I think three nested questions. One is all the rules that the game, the rules of the games that nations like to play indicative or related to culture. Right. So is it the fact that you actually look at the actual game? Number one, is there something about the actual game of American football, which is somehow more American than, say, rugby? Then is the way it's played. Right. So the the meta game that the how do people, you know, are people sportsmen like? Yeah. Do you know what is how is the game presented? What kinds of the sporting culture? Well, yeah. But then separately, I think how fans behave as well and the fan culture, which, of course, is something different. So you've got the on the pitch and you have the fans, you've got the, you know, the famous played by thugs and watched by gentlemen, you know. So three things. Yeah. So the game itself, the way it's played and the way it's watched. I think there are three things that we I've I've tried to gather. Yeah. About to see whether I can make any sense of this claim that you are going to find out something about culture before I go into that. It might be interesting, given that Chris is about the only person who knows about sports. Yeah. Your feeling is that this makes any sense as a claim. Yeah. My my
Speaker B:sense is that certainly at some point there was, you know, I think of the development of sports. The Victorian era was the golden age of the codification of of sports. Right. It was when lots of the rules for these. Was it when William Webb Ellis picked up the ball? Well, quite so that kind of thing. But a lot of the public schools were the were the place where
Speaker C:the where the sports were codified. Right. And why didn't I still don't understand when I was at school, if I pick the ball up, everyone told me it was a handball and it was a foul. Why didn't
Speaker B:it happen to William Webb Ellis? Well, there's that creation myth. I think there's a lot of a lot of sort of the historical accuracy as though nobody had ever thought to do that before. Well, no, quite. And in fact, if you think about where football comes from, football comes from mob football, medieval mod for which was largely carried, which exactly where the ball was largely carried. And there was no particular rules, lots of fighting and, you know, no boundaries to the pitch. So you'd have to get it to the old mill by lunchtime. So. So, yeah, at some point, sports started to be properly written down. I mean, even, you know, even when you look back to ancient Greece and, you know, sport as a sport, as a virtue and the Olympic movement and so on, there was a lot of irregularity in those in those competitions. You know what javelins were used and how far was run and all of those kinds of things. And it was really only at this this period of, you know, kind of the 19th century where everything was was documented and, you know, specified. So I think from that period onwards, you then you then got, you know, a lot of sports that were created by Britain and spread throughout the British Empire. But then almost like like, you know, the way marsupials evolved in in the Antipodes, you know, you've you've got the same kind of thing going on with American sport, I think. So there was a largely British society, but one which didn't want to be influenced by Britain at that at that time in its in its history and was also cut off by distance and, you know, so on. And so almost like, you know, Australia was was kind of developing its own species of sports. Well, I guess they have Aussie rules football, don't they? Well, the Australian. Yeah, exactly. But that's why I think American
Speaker A:football is particularly interesting because evolving is the way you said. Yeah. But Chris
Speaker C:is also suggesting it's just I mean, you know, it's an accident of history that they were codified
Speaker B:one way and we were codified. I think that was true at the time, you know, whether whether the continuing insistence not because other sports, you know, other other places had their own sporting cultures, but they absorbed and integrated other sports and, you know, made them made them their own, you know, a la, you know, South America and Association Football. But I think there's also worth looking at other, you know, other ways of breaking sports down that aren't just about the culture of it, but are perhaps, you know, like taxonomies for sport and maybe more objective ways of looking at them. So like American football, one of the key striking things about American football is that it is a sort of it's made up of discrete plays. You have a thing and then it breaks like tennis. You have a point. It's quantized. Yes, exactly. Whereas lots of other sports are continuous, you know, and it blurs into it. So you might blow the whistle when it goes out of play, but generally it's one big, massive, constantly evolving. Correct thing. And it gets more and more complex, whereas American football and baseball. Yes. No, exactly. Yeah. So so so there's that element. And I don't know whether that has a cultural aspect to it or not, but it's certainly a distinct feature there. There are things like sports that are skills based, you know, versus something that's predominantly athletic. So if you think on one end of the spectrum like snooker, you know, where it's highly, highly skillful, but not much physical element versus something like, you know, long distance running where clearly it's all, you know,
Speaker C:you can either run or you can't. Have you not seen the physique of those darts players, though?
Speaker B:Striding colossi of men. You then got team versus individual sports, and that maybe is a key cultural component. And then you've got things like, you know, sport being seen as a substitute for war, like invasion games are, you know, field hockey, football, rugby, you know, we'll do that instead of sport versus sports that are actually training for war, like archery, javelin, equestrianism, wrestling, martial arts. Yes, all of these things which are about. So, you know, one of them is a biathlon, the weirdest sport in the world. But one of them is about, you know, not not having to do war because we do this thing instead. The other is about we're going to have war at some point. So let's practice and let's make the practice fun.
Speaker C:Yeah. You also you haven't mentioned the sort of whether the tasks are symmetric or asymmetric. And, you know, although you might have teams, the extent to which you have the whole team operating at once or in turn. So batting versus fielding. Exactly. So, yeah, you've got obviously football and stuff, which is team v team versus tennis, which is a one person versus one person. And then you have, you know, yeah, exactly cricket and baseball where you effectively have one guy versus the rest of the opposing team. And their tasks are totally asymmetric. Batting is nothing
Speaker B:like fielding. So I think there's all sorts of dimensions which you can you can park sports into into boxes. And but but I don't think that that nations at least at least I'm going to posit the hypothesis that nations don't go, oh, well, we're a kind of we just like, you know, we're a sherry kind of country, you know, a communist country. We like team sports and ones that, you know, are highly rule based and where the referee has lots of control or something. I don't think that's the case. So so from that sort of more objective breakdown of sports, I don't think it's easy to say, oh, well, America has all of these kinds of sports because it's
Speaker A:it's got the full the full range. But there is a quick there's a quick way of sort of there is this kind of shorthand. There's no quick way of doing it. No, there's a shorthand where you could get some analysis, which is to look at what is which sport is most popular.
Speaker C:Yeah, I've done that. And then analyze from there. You're saying like it's easy to do that.
Speaker A:It's not easy. No, because you're not having to wade through all these other sports. Yeah.
Speaker B:There's another one which which I miss, which is sports which have a sort of objective way of measuring success versus sports which have a subjective way of measuring sports. So sports that are judged versus sports that are. Is ballroom dancing a sport? Yeah, well, no, but I mean, things like diving and gymnastics and boxing, to some extent, when the person isn't knocked out, they have elements where, you know, a judge has to make. I went to see the
Speaker C:heavyweight boxing during the London Olympics. I had no idea what was going on. Yeah, you get one chap beating the crap out of another chap, but the other chap would win. Yeah, I didn't know what was going on. Yeah, it was baffling. I was expecting it to be like the Rocky film. And, you know, and for someone to land a massive punch and knock someone out. But that's just
Speaker B:it's not because one of the guys was just wheeling around, just kind of hitting the shoulders.
Speaker C:And the other guy was, you know, accurately. Could be. I have to say I wasn't. I still don't. I read a lot about the scoring system afterwards. I still don't understand it. Yeah. But where are we? I mean, you kept you alluded to what someone would have to do to find out if this was true. And I kept trying to tell you, I've done it. I've learned it. Well, enlighten us. Yeah. But what are the most popular sports in the world? That's the first question we're going to ask. And the answer is football. Yeah. Basically, every country. And by football, you mean proper football? Yeah, I'm not I'm not I'm not going to fall into the trap of referring to soccer as football because we sort of football soccer because we all know we all know it's not the. Yeah. So you have essentially all every country likes football with a few exceptions. You have cricket in the British colony. So that's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, New Zealand, American football, only the US, ice hockey, big in Canada and Russia, Russia and America. And yeah, the most this is the most popular sport in each country. I don't know quite how they work this out. But and the interesting thing is baseball. Venezuela, Venezuela. But I would what I would Cuba, what I would categorize as the American colonies, Philippines and Taiwan, Japan. Yeah. Basketball. Now, this this one surprised me. It's big in Europe. Actually, it's the most popular sport in the Philippines and Latvia and Lithuania. Yeah. Then you have now Austria and Estonia. What is their favorite sport? So it's not downhill skiing. It is downhill skiing. But they're the only two countries. And then there's there is actually one country whose top sport is not is not association football, but another kind of football. New Zealand and rugby football. Is it? Yes. New Zealand and rugby. That's true. Yeah. I'll give you a clue. It's quite near to the UK. Oh, Ireland. Yeah. Gaelic football. Yeah. So and then so that's step one is who plays what sport? It's very hard to get data, actually. It's very hard to even think of what data you would want. Then you've got a question about measuring culture now here. We've got to bring in here at Hofstede again because he's the guy I know I'm not signing up necessarily to, you know, 100 percent support of exactly how he's done it. But he's the only guy who has done it. So fair play to him, which attempts to measure the cultural dimensions which describe a country. And they include things like power distance, which is how accepting you are of inequality, individualism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty, avoidance. So the extent to which people are comfortable with ambiguity, long term versus short term orientation and indulgence versus sort of restraint. So it's quite an interesting approach. And he unfortunately when he applies this to sports, he does not. However, I have. I've attempted to do so. Not I'd say using anything other than eyeballing some graphs. But then I got some data on Olympic medals. This was my attempt to work out roughly how sporty a country was. How does a country care about sport altogether? I've tried to look at with, you know, also add in de facto national sports when it's not the same as a national sport. Hooligans. I was interested in that side of things. Who are the particularly bad hooligans? Again, no data, but I've looked at a few articles and noted countries where it's a problem. And having looked at it now, small sample problems abound here. Right. Because basically, if it's not football, hardly anyone plays it. So you're looking at, you know, 10 countries or whatever at the most who play cricket. So I basically, there isn't much correlation between anything, but the total sportiness measured by Olympic medals is correlated with individualism. I found it. What's our question? I've lost sight of our question. What is the connection between culture and sport? I've told you about how to measure sport. I've told you about how to measure culture. What bit of that don't you understand? It's because you're waffling on about all this other stuff. Right. Go for it. The other stuff being about sport and culture. That's what I'm talking about. Right. Go for it. Come on. God, listen, Grandad, if you can't keep up, you know, start making notes. Individualism is slightly correlated with the number of Olympic medals won by countries. So basically, the more individual, now that could just be the Olympics because they're kind of generally more individual sports. But, you know, interesting nonetheless, there is a slight negative trend between individualism and playing football. So football playing countries, on average, are slightly less individualistic than non-football playing countries. And a slight negative trend between long-termism and football. So is there, so those countries that are more individual,
Speaker B:is there a sense that they're more on or in general more economically successful than.
Speaker C:Now, so what I need to say here is we are talking about associations. Yeah. And really, they are almost certainly caused by third variables here. So, you know, looking at the cricket playing countries, for example, that there is higher uncertainty avoidance if you if football is your biggest sport than in countries which play cricket. But the countries which play cricket are South Asian. So that will almost certainly dominate. The one country, for example, that plays American football the most is very high on individuality. Now that doesn't tell you a small sample problem here. The three countries that like basketball the most are very low on individuality, but two of them are Baltic states. So that's telling you more about Baltic states. What I'm saying, I think, is that we can't pull much out of the data. And I don't think I'm going to go much further than that. Well, what I was going to say
Speaker A:is this is where. I'm saying we don't have evidence to support your claim. OK, well, what I would say is you're using the wrong analytical tool, which is you're trying to use an analytical tool. OK, well, we should just use intuition, which, as we all know, is so much more. Look, I'm sorry, but you're really going around the house in order to check
Speaker C:whether your intuition is reliable. Have you subjected it to your test of whether your
Speaker A:intuition agrees with that? Your intuition is marking its own homework. Listen, you're just going around the house on this and you're going and you're going in. This is the Cognitive
Speaker C:Engineering podcast. OK, name a hypothesis, a specific measurable hypothesis, and I will tell
Speaker A:you that I have not found evidence for it. OK, no, but listen, so I'll give you the Fraser hypothesis. And indeed, I already started out with it at the beginning saying, look, you're saying American football is really American. Well, I'm going to tell you why it's not. Let me speak. OK, so all those things that I noted about American football, yeah, lead me to sort of think, OK, well, look, the things that I see in American football, I see in American society. Let me finish. Let me finish. Yeah. So I know what you're saying that I'm projecting this confirmation bias, et cetera, et cetera. But but it isn't there. For example, if we look at the American election system, OK, for a presidential election. Right. And how massively complicated that is and all the all the massive interest in the country that that generates and all these different steps that they're so on. To me, that looks just like American football. It also looks a lot like the draft system, for example, from. So I want to hear from Chris.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, I think just to sort of test that hypothesis, there are a couple of things. The first is, are you are you are you definitely not subject to confirmation bias? So, for example, something which is very un-American about American football, which we talked about earlier, was the draft pick system. Good point. Extremely, you know, redistributive system. Also, the sort of idea that, you know, that it is about your position within the team and so that you, you know, it's a very sort of selfless sport. Some players are there just to protect somebody. Somebody else is almost like an ant community sort of concept. So, you know, there are a few things which spring to mind which which might pick. Yes, but specifically. However, however, when you look at environmental and possibly cultural impact on sport, it's I think you can what what probably would stand up is is if you say things like where there is a culture of a particular sport being popular and where that that sport is part of the culture, it's more likely for that sport to be to continue to to exist and to become more popular. So if you think about Kenyan middle and long distance running right and Ethiopian middle and long distance running and it being very, very associated with particular geographical regions, and that's led to a lot of investigation into the genetic component of of endurance running and so on. But but what is definitely true is that the incidence of running in those areas has gone up since, you know, Kip Kano and so on came to came to prominence. And so you've got a hell of a lot of runners. You know, there's a lot of running going on in those those cultures and it's and it's part of the part of the culture. What they're not doing, you know, is is other endurance sports right where they might be equally genetically predisposed, if indeed that that is the case, like cross-country skiing. Right. There aren't loads of Kenyan cross-country skiers. So there's obviously some interaction between cultural reinforcement, the the societal environment and the physical environment, you know, because if you're not in an alpine nation, you're not going to be skiing. And if you're living at altitude, you might do endurance, you might be better endurance events and so on. And that has a sort of reinforcing event and that sometimes we probably do express our culture through sports. So if you look at, you know, the Munich Olympics, right, you know, there is a nation explicitly, if you look at the Soviet program, if you look at American Olympics, you know, look at the the Olympics of the 80s, which were boycotted and not boycotted. Clearly, there's cultural expression through sports. Right. But whether whether culture defines our sports is a is a more difficult
Speaker A:question. So the answer is, can we tell something about a country from a sport? The answer is yes.
Speaker C:Not well, you can't. I don't I don't think you can tell anything. Dominating dominating any explanation is going to be a combination of history and economics and possibly environment for the in the case of skiing. But I mean, you know, this is why you get people doing you're also not going to find people playing, you know, lacrosse very lacrosse is a bad example, but doing Formula One. Yeah. In a poor country. Yeah. You know,
Speaker A:we need to wrap up there, actually. We're a fair way through. Let's see where we go with this. What sports don't exist but should exist? And actually, there's a kind of precedent for this, where a sport that doesn't officially exist has gone on to become a thing, which is what's it called? They play it in PE classes in America where you throw a ball, dodgeball. That's going to be an Olympic sport. It's on the kind of on the trail to made up a made up. Right. There we go. So a couple of things that spring to mind. And I think I've talked about one of these films before. But
Speaker C:yeah, you're going to mention rollerball. Rollerball. Rollerball. Rollerball. You watch
Speaker A:rollerball. You think, why doesn't this exist? And so the other one I want to mention is rollerball, which I think that could really attract some sort of great following. Nick?
Speaker C:Well, I was just thinking about blending some of these things we were talking about in a way that hasn't been seen before, which is that take the kind of the quantized approach of cricket and remove that to make cricket continuous. Right. So it's basically people just throwing the ball whenever they've got it. They can throw it at the stumps. And that's quick cricket. Is there such
Speaker B:a thing? They teach it in schools. Yeah. Where basically you hit it and you run. And if you're not back again, you get bowled out, provided they hit. Yeah. But there isn't such a thing as
Speaker C:overs and that kind of thing. You're just literally everyone. Everyone is able to get the ball if they can. Yeah. And they can throw at the stumps. And it's 360 degrees. Five days Yeah. And the guy, the batsman is going to be constantly kept on his toes. But yeah, you probably give them more lives or something, you know, but basically a continuous form of cricket. I think, you know, that would be kind of interesting. So, yeah. Yeah. Continuous cricket. We're going to just continuous to make sport continuous for extra fun. Yeah. Chris?
Speaker B:Well, so for me, so obviously now you're getting more and more computer game sports and computer game competitions, you know, people being good at computers. I've got no interest in computer games whatsoever. So that doesn't particularly interest me. But what I like the idea of, it may exist, but what I really like the idea of is augmented reality being combined with sports so that you can sort of, you know, people doing something fantastic. You know, you could have like a dragon riding competition or whatever it might be, you know, that. So you've got some sort of sports, which is where you are doing things, which only you can, you can see, but it still involves human athleticism and so on. Yeah. But yeah, I like that. A bit like that
Speaker C:program Nightmare. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, we haven't touched on eSports. We haven't mentioned them at all, but they are bigger than real sports, I think, these days. So, you know, if you add in sort of people watching streams of people playing games,
Speaker A:computer games and stuff. You're right. That's a whole new direction we haven't. I remember this
Speaker C:friend of mine is very into football. He said it's ridiculous, you know, that people sit there and watch someone playing a computer game. Well, that's exactly how I feel about people watching
Speaker A:football. So, you know. Okay, so great. Let's stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.
