Following the Top 10 Reasons Why Baseball is Better than Football, we turn the tables to see how the gridiron is favored above America’s pastime. Everyone will have their preference, yet these are some ways of favoring the former sport.
10. The Sunday/Monday Night Aura
In direct opposition to the “every day of the week” idea is football’s place on Sunday and Monday (night). After all, besides a worship service – what could be more relevant than watching football on Sunday afternoon? The same certainly bodes for Monday Night Football.
Baseball cannot compare to the event that is present on the typical days of football. Add in Thanksgiving football games and you have quite the argument.
9. Athleticism
As a general rule, football is a more athletic sport. The range and demand of strength, speed, agility, and overall athleticism is more relevant in football than in baseball.
Add in toughness and you have a nod to football for its players. Exceptions are present, but football players are more athletic than baseball players – as the sport demands.
8. The Clock
The clock in football does a number of things that baseball cannot argue with in these comparisons. Sure it speeds up the game and provides a few outlining advantages, but what about what it adds to strategy in football?
This is the most impactful advantage in football with respect to the clock. The two-minute offense, time of possession, and other aspects that only the clock provides allows for a distinct advantage for football.
7. Team as a Cohesive Unit
The team can be seen as more important in the sport of football. After all there is no equivalent of the intentional walk – taking away the most dangerous hitter in baseball.
In football second and third-string players are much more important. A third-string wide receiver will for instance see much more game time than a second baseman in the same depth chart spot. Add in special teams and you have the team arguably playing as a more cohesive unit for football.
6. The Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the quintessential event in sports. It sees the highest number of viewers and advertising. For instance, in the top 45 network primetime telecasts of all time (1964-2010), 20 are given to Super Bowls – the most recent (Super Bowl XLIV – Saints/Colts) being number one at 53.6 million households.
Nothing can compete with the Super Bowl: it remains the biggest playoff/sports event in the United States, blowing away baseball and the World Series.
5. Importance of Schedule
In the other list we saw the length of schedule as being an advantage for baseball. There are two sides to everything, and baseball has the expense of games coming at lesser importance – there are a number of World Series champions who have had seven-game losing streaks, for instance.
Every game matters in the NFL. One loss can make or break a season, which adds to the excitement in football.
4. Football at the High School/College Level
From our previous list we observed how baseball is a better sport for children – to bring them to games and in regard to Little League. However, at the high school and college level there is no discussion.
In high school Friday night football games are the place to be. High school football is much more important – a dynamic seen in college as well. College baseball is easily overpowered by college football (and basketball).
3. Breadth of Strategy
“More” strategy in football is probably not fair, to be precise. However in football, objectively speaking, there is a much wider range of strategy and strategic elements.
In football there are plays and a wide range of offensive and defensive formations/styles (think formations/packages, run/pass dominated offenses and West Coast, etc.). Two-minute and time of possession, as spoken of earlier, adds to the breadth of strategy in football.
Football provides a wide assortment of schemes, plays, and styles that make defensive shifts, small ball, and other strategic elements in baseball seem lesser in variety. Think about it.
2. Action
It may not be a complicated reason, but many people prefer football simply for action. Indeed football is a tough, masculine, hard-hitting sport.
The action in football, while likely attracting a slightly different “kind” of sports fan, is superior to baseball in regards to action. Obviously baseball is not a contact sport, which is a big reason for number one spot in this countdown.
1. America’s #1 Sport
Numbers, including attendance and revenue – but clearly seen in terms of television viewers – do not lie. Football is America’s number one sport, overtaking baseball: America’s pastime.
In the United States football has boomed over the last several years/decades, manifesting on television, in high school and college, and seen as the NFL overcomes the MLB/NBA in popularity.
This final reason is an interesting counter to baseball (America’s pastime), creating a tight race for which sport is truly better. Of course, context and subjectivity will label the best sport between football and baseball.
by Brian Neese
27 Comments
Every single one of you points has the exact same importance and meaning in baseball.
I still prefer Baseball. Why?
In Baseball, usually there’s 1 stop every 10-29 minutes-ish.
In football, it’s “Men run with the ball! Men stop!”
Wait 3 minutes.
“Men run with the ball! Men stop!”
Wait 3 minutes.
etc
1. It just is. The End.
Even more humorous would be top 10 reasons why Football is better than soccer.
It would probably be more than 10 though.
Just off the top of my head:
1) Lack of scoring in games in soccer
2) Faking injuries as strategy in soccer
3) Too many ties in soccer
4) Clock goes forwards and extra time added on for “stoppage?” Soccer scorekeepers are a lazy bunch!
5) Uniforms are not used as advertising billboards in football
6) Soccer hooligans
7) Soccer parents
8. Soccer’s premiere event, the World Cup is only once every 4 years
9) No bribery scandals in the NFL to land the Super Bowl
10) Red cards – could you imagine playing a football game with 10 players vs. 11 because of a subjective penalty?
Football you can survive on athleticism alone and be at the highest level. In baseball you need to be not only athletic but skilled which outside of the QB who actually throws the ball. The combination of athleticism and skill required in baseball is far above and beyond football. Not to mention hitting a baseball is still that hardest thing to do in a professional sport.
The ability to stand in on a pitch that is being thrown at you 90mph+ is not easy in anyway what so ever. Having to stand in there recognize the pitch being thrown at you knowing that if it isn’t a curveball or a slider of some sort will hit you takes balls. Just as it does for a WR to go over the middle for a pass. I would love to see a big ole football player stand in the batters box with bat in and have a guy like Justin Verlander pitch to him. I guarantee the guys knees would be buckled first pitch and made to look like a p***y.
I love football to but biased much in this article are we? You’re trying to compare to sports that are totally different.
Baseball = 5 minutes of action crammed into 3 hours. Nuff said.
football is about that same considering the amount of time between plays, timeouts, tv timeouts, reviews, two minute warning, half time and so on. Nuff said 😀
no
I’ll take issue with most of these but especially the Athleticism part. Hitting a baseball is by far the hardest thing to do in all of sport, imo. The ability that MLB players have to recongize pitches, determine if it is ball or strike and then swing making good contact is insanely difficult and all happens in split seconds.
I would argue, easily I would say that doing that at the major league level is a harder athletic accomplishment than all the “range” of activities football players have to perform combined. And you can see this anytime you put a super athlete at the plate, ala Michael Jordan.
Take a supreme athelete, Lebron James. I promise you he couldn’t touch Halladay but line him up at TE and he will catch passes for sure.
I think you’re confusing athleticism with mental processing. You don’t need to be an athlete to play baseball. You can be an overweight alcoholic and still be phenomenal. What you need to hit a ball is hand-eye coordination.
Hand-eye coordination is mental processing. Being able to spot the ball, recognize the pitch, predict the trajectory and swing in the area where you predict the ball will be is hand-eye coordination and requires fast, complex, and accurate (to be successful) mental processing. Not really athleticism.
Athleticism usually refers to physical ability. Michael Jordan was a great physical athlete, but he lacked the mental processing required for baseball. Michael Jordan is not an idiot, cognitively speaking, but he lacked the hand-eye coordination, or optic-neural process, that would allow him to be a great baseball player.
Every point you listed is entirely your opinion. Even if you would have structured a half-assed explanation behind the points, you might have had some readers agreeing with you. However, you took the direction as to saying baseball doesn’t have strategy, athletic players, a time clock (the umpires will speed a game up if they have to). Importance of a schedule????? who would I want to face if I needed four more wins with 5 games to go, yankees/redsox or seattle. Action – I’ll lay it out for you, bases loaded, 2 out in ANY INNING. Being on a team with someone for 162 games plus spring training and playoffs, you better be good friends.
Folks, there is no need for debate, the late great George Carlin said it best….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRfhbEUkg7o&feature=related
I love football and baseball. However I disagree with half the things you said.
1.The Sunday/Monday aura: After my team plays(Jets!) I have no further interest in any other games on tv. The over saturation of football during Sun/Mon and the following Tue is nauseating.
2.The Clock: DOES NOT SPEED UP FOOTBALL. With all the Ad’s,challenges, and whatnot football games actually drag on MORE than baseball games. (imo)
3.Strategy: You do know that every single pitch is strategically thrown right? Not to mention righty vs lefty, hot hands steal,bunt etc.
4. High School/College: NO.
Attendance? I don’t think so, The worst baseball teams get about 1.5 million attendance the best NFL get 1.5 mil. Nearly the same revenue. For the athlete, baseball is definitely the better as an athlete. More money and longer career.
Have you ever actually been to a football game? Or watched the Superbowl? 56 and a half MILLION households/bars/parties tuned it in last year. Face it, would you watch something if it was on every single night of the week, or if it was on a designated time that was not delayed and was almost ALWAYS on time?
In baseball, you just have to throw and catch. Sometimes you don’t even havce to hit! But on football, you train for months to do your job on a dedicated and in sync machine on the field. On the baseball field, you just have to pay attention and catch the damn ball, no teamwork or team coordination there. I mean, I love baseball and softball, I really do. I used to play it a lot. But you can not compete with the thrill of professional football, that rush of seeing the 750,000-odd people roaring their approval to the players on the field. Even if you have sucky seats it’s fun, because you’re THERE. At a baseball game, you’re like, Oh, I’m here, fun.
Argue with that.
What u basically said is tht pro football players train all the time and pro baseball players just show up and play. Hey baseball players are spending time in the batting cages working on their swings and on the field working on their defense and in the bullpen working on their pitches and in the weight room. Do u realize how much skill it takes to hit a 90 mph fastball and ungodly breaking balls and to throw those pitches. In baseball a player has to excel in hitting and defense. In football the players train for a specific position. A QB only has to throw the ball a wide out only has to catch the ball a guard only has to block. A baseball player has to hit, catch, field, and throw the ball. All baseball players have to possess many skills to be a pro. Not the same in football they only need one skill.
No one ever said the hardest thing to do in sports was to catch a football. The same cannot be said however, about hitting a major league pitcher’s curveball.
This is a really bad argument. There is no room to compare totals, as FB teams have only 8 home games, while baseball teams get 10 times as many. What I’d like you to compare are averages: the MOST attended MLB team right now (Phillies) receive 45K fans per game; the LEAST attended NFL team in 2010 (Raiders) had 46K per game. Busted.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/attendance
http://espn.go.com/nfl/attendance
This site is really low grade, publishing useless subjective opinion lists like this all time.
We also publish really low grade comments/opinions on lists all the time too. And aren’t you glad we do?
nice one!
real reasons at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9SQqpKw8nk&feature=related
Should really be called Hand Egg, because simply the rest of the world call the sport where you hit that round ball with your foot, football, thus american football should be called hand egg, as you handle the egg shaped ball with your hand
No it shouldn’t. The term football applies to various codes of the game played around the world. It is not exclusive to “Association Football”. And why call it “HAnd egg” if its not an actual egg. Why not call ice hockey “IceStickskatePuck”?
Football has more than one meaning. Football also meant sports played not on horseback, but on foot. So stop it with the literal naming of sports. Why not call soccer “Run around 90 minutes and hardly score ball”?
What about the AFL, Gaelic codes and Rugby? Should those be called “foot egg”? Because, well, you advance the “egg shaped” ball with the foot, ergo, foot egg.
It’s funny how people lambaste the United States for our relative dislike for soccer (which is a British term by the way; it’s short for “asSOCiation football”) all the while retaining the hypocrisy of a group of people so intent upon finding flaws in others that they conveniently ignore their own.
I think many of your points are valid ones. Baseball bores the heck out of me. And you just can’t argue with this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om_yq4L3M_I
Well all I have to say is you can watch baseball this season unlike football