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The Sports Footage You Won't See Today On TV
Hugh Pickens writes "As sports nerds settle in today after Thanksgiving dinner for NFL and college football Reed Albergotti writes that there is some footage you will never see as he argues that the most-watched game in the US is probably the least understood. During every NFL game there are cameras hovering over the field, lashed to the goalposts and pointed at the coaches, but you will never see a shot of the entire field and what all 22 players do on every play which is considered proprietary information available only to teams and coaches. For decades, NFL TV broadcasts have relied most heavily on one view: the shot from a sideline camera that follows the progress of the ball. Anyone who wants to analyze the game, however, prefers to see the pulled-back camera angle known as the "All 22." While this shot makes the players look like stick figures, it allows students of the game to see things that are invisible to TV watchers: like what routes the receivers ran, how the defense aligned itself and who made blocks past the line of scrimmage and gives fans a 'bird's eye view' of the game to dissect team strategies, performances, and keys to success. Without the expanded frame, fans often have no idea why many plays turn out the way they do, or if the TV analysts are giving them correct information."
John Madden said once that the TV people wanted their coverage to look more like his video game, and the video game people wanted the game to look more like TV coverage. This led to the use of the wire-suspended camera for most kicking plays.
ESPN's daytime SportsCenter block has a system they call ESPN Axis which is based on a 3D composite taken by multiple cameras that the TV crew that does the game doesn't have time to compute, these things show up on Monday and Tuesday based on when the computers finish the rendering.
When broadcasting a chess match, the camera should only zoom in on the piece the player is actually touching at the moment. Allowing a bird's eye view of the board will expose the various strategies the player uses and is considered proprietary information by the player and his or her team.
Well, it is Thanksgiving, so I guess it's forgivable. And I heard the Packers scored lots of home runs today.
I'm Canadian, Thanksgiving was last month!
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.
Don't leave us in suspense, any grand slams?
Learn to love Alaska
More generally, how do they keep somebody from livestreaming it -- or, at the very least, recording it and streaming it later.
We have cameras that are the size of a pack of cards that record very blurry 1080p video, after all.
You can put as many megapixels as you want into a camera, but the 1/4" lens is still going to make it look like it was taken by a disposable camera and digitized at the local 7-11.
Well, one big difference is that video gamers don't generally get millions of dollars in tax money to build enormous facilities to play video games in.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Just to piss you off.
You know what you should do? You should give it a clever name like "handegg" and then pat yourself on the back for being so amazingly observant.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
They lost them in the wickets during a power-play caused by a penalty kick, if only they had done a better job protecting the blern.
a writer for the WSJ is giving opinions on viewing NFL games??
OK. here's the deal for those of you, including Reed Albergotti, who don't *really* watch NFL or NCAA football.
As the players line up for a play, the camera typically shows all 22 players. As the ball is snapped, the camera begins to zoom in slowly (allowing for some lead room by putting the ball in the rear third of the frame, as it relates to the direction of play) and as the play progresses it may or may not zoom in closer depending on how the play develops. The players can become so spread out during the course of action that to watch it all on a screen would not show much detail, including who has the fucking ball, or the path the ball takes through the air during a pass play. Some quarterbacks can throw the pill for 70 yards, for fucks sake. Pull the camera back to show the entire field and see how easy the game is too watch. You will lose sight of the ball, and won't be able to tell if the reciever caught the ball for a completion, or was nabbed by the defensive back for an interception. The camera operators even lose sight of the ball every once in awhile as it is.
As for being a "student" of the game, there is plenty of opportunity for those who care. Every network that broadcasts football has a staff of former coaches and players who's job it is to teach fans about how the different teams operate on the field, and how effective they are against opponents. There are hours of shows dedicated to this. The film used to dissect play often shows all 22, but it sometimes isn't necessary as some on field play isn't relevent. Sure, downfield blocking by wide receivers on run plays is important, but on a 3rd and 1 attempt, they are sometimes just going through the motions; it's basically a scrum in trying to move the ball forward a yard.
Ok, I'm done being pissed, back to the games!
I don't understand why the NFL isn't selling access to video libraries containing all these streams. With all the football fans, fantasy football and otherwise, obsessively analyzing the game, don't you think they could sell subscriptions? I'd buy. Give me a searchable archive. Let me find all targets at a receiver in a given year, or all fumbles of a players, or all INTs, etc.
The problem of delivering video on demand is already solved. They've got the content. It's just money in the street, waiting for them to pick up.
If you just want to watch people get career ending broken bones and possibly fatal concussions..
Aussie rules and Rugby have less injuries than American Football because you don't have padding. You learn to wrap and tackle properly.
don't they use hands to carry whatever that thing they call 'ball' around? Why is it called 'football'?
Because it's the only major professional sport in the USA where the ball is *ever* allowed to touch the foot. That's how American sports are named: they go with what unique thing the ball does only a tiny fraction of the time.
Basketball gets its name because it is the only sport where the ball sometimes goes in a basket, even though 99.9% of the time it's being bounced around the court with the hands. Likewise, baseball is named after the bases, even though the ball is only very rarely actually on a base.
And they don't hit as hard because they don't use padding. In American Football you have idiots running into each other full tilt because they're wearing so much padding. But in that 1/20 chance that you hit wrong you get a serious injury.
If I told you to run into a wall as hard as you could and I'd give you $10. You'd do it at a certain velocity wearing no padding. If you strapped on a helmet and shoulder pads you wouldn't hit just as hard as you had been hitting, you'd start hitting it harder. And most of the time you'd be fine, but occasionally you'd hit it wrong or have your hemet at the wrong angle and hurt yourself. Or in Football you'd hurt the other person because you were hitting that much harder.
In addition there are rules to how to tackle in Rugby (Not sure about Aussie Rules). You HAVE to wrap in a tackle. You can't just body check someone out of bounds. You also have to do something the entire game. American Football you burst for 10 seconds then rest for 60. You don't have people hitting as hard because you have to get up and ruck. You have to be there for the next play because play hasn't stopped.
I'd say almost none of these tackles are legal. You have someone picking up and dumping, body checking, leading with the head, etc. They have fewer injuries because of the laws of the game AND because they don't use padding. If they started using more padding they'd hit harder.
Actually having read through these comments and actually spent more time thinking about it today than probably ever in my life, I think Aussies just generally like a tougher game of football than most other nations. It's not about hurting the other players, it's simply about playing with all your heart. It's a cultural thing, I had a quick look around and found a few insightful comments that might make more sense.
The Australian national character has been forged by the difficulty of subduing the land. Unlike other cultures based on a nurturing landscape that they seek to protect from others, Australian settlers experienced great hardship and had to support each other in order to survive. The battle against the elements led to the nickname of a member of Australia's working class being the 'Aussie battler'.
The need to laugh in the face of danger while battling the landscape has provoked a strange view of the world, with a distinctive upside-down sense of humour. Times of hardship or even disaster are ridiculed, and this extends to the Australian delight in dubbing a tall man "Shorty," a quiet one "Rowdy," a bald man "Curly" and a redhead "Bluey".
As well as the prevalence of the tall poppy syndrome bringing back to Earth the high fliers, the egalitarian Australian society has a traditional Australian support for the "underdog". Australians will show support for those who appear to be at a disadvantage even when the underdog is competing against fellow Australians.
This underdog attitude is most evident in sport, as sport is also a large part of Australian culture. Should an Australian be asked to choose between two unknown competitors, very often they will choose the one least likely to win, such as swimmer Eric the Eel during the 2000 Olympics. The success of Steven Bradbury in the 2002 Winter Olympics who won a skating gold medal after all his competitors crashed has coined the expression 'doing a Bradbury' which underpins the spirit of the underdog, positive thinking and never giving up.
During the 2003 Rugby World Cup, the Georgian rugby team arrived in Perth with a crowd of Perth residents welcoming them with colourful support, and a similar occurrence was noted in Townsville, Queensland where the Japanese rugby team was preferred to that of the French.
And lastly, this little gem from Wikipedia:
Australian rules football culture - Injuries, Health Issues and Prevention
Australian rules football is known for its high level of physical body contact compared to other sports such as soccer and basketball. High impact collisions can occur from any direction. Unlike gridiron, padding is not mandatory and is rarely worn. Combined with the range of activity including jumping, running, kicking, twisting and turning this means that injury rates are relatively high in comparison to other sports.
Australian rules football does not have the range or severity of health issues of American football however players have been known to die whilst playing Aussie Rules, though the most common cause is heart failure. The Victorian State Coroner reported five sudden deaths in that state among Australian rules footballers aged under 38 years between 1990-1997. Three of these deaths were attributed to Ischaemic heart disease (mean age, 31.7 years), and the other two to physical trauma.
(Emphasis mine)
Aussies have a "Harden Up" attitude when it comes to adversity. There are some hilarious comedy sketches that aussies love becuase they are so on the mark for aussie culture. A person who is seen to overcome difficult odds is generally championed. A tough guy (good or bad) can end up being an Australian Icon such as Ned Kelly who we even depicted during the opening of the Sydney Olympics in 2000!
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Here's a distinction that we can all understand:
Rugby is an RTS.
American Football is turn-based.