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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."
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
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.
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.
Here's a distinction that we can all understand:
Rugby is an RTS.
American Football is turn-based.