How do you decide which sports you like to watch?
Here’s my theory: It’s all about one word -excitement. You are more likely to take an interest in a sport if it gets you riled up, makes your blood boil, makes your spine tingle, or causes your heart to grow wings as if there were a flock of geese (or Ducks) encased within.
People define excitement differently.
To me, watching golf is about as much fun as watching grass grow because there is no action.
None.
You watch a bunch of people try to hit a tiny ball into a tiny hole that might as well be located in a galaxy far, far away. There is no cinematic value whatsoever.
On the other hand, at risk of overly romanticizing the subject, tennis can be likened to a duel much like those between warring knights in the middle ages.
It’s good old mano-a-mano action. Unlike football, where receivers blame quarterbacks for wobbly passes, or entire teams (read: the New York Giants) blame coaches for a bad season, if tennis players screw up, there is no one they can blame other than themselves.
Team dynamics aside, football is still infinitely more fun to watch than basketball or baseball.
Because with the scoring system weighted at a hefty six points a touchdown, and three points a field goal, a single score can make the difference between victory and defeat.
It’s quality over quantity. And this, coupled with the general physicality of the sport, makes for great cinematic value.
In basketball, it’s the other way round. With scoring held to a maximum of three points per serving, the lead usually seesaws between teams multiple times within a game.
This gets boring pretty quickly if you’re watching from the eyes of the uninvested observer, with no particular stake in either of the two teams playing. You could literally fall asleep halfway through the game, miss a smattering of baskets scored at the painfully low rate of two points at a time, and wake up just to watch the end of the game without really having missed anything earth-shattering.
It’s especially monotonous if you’re watching, say, a top-tier team like the Lakers beat up on a perpetual minnow like the Blazers. When Kobe gets going, the game’s usually over within the first fifteen minutes. Everything after that becomes redundant.
A lot of people find hockey and soccer boring because of the typically low scores. But again, like football, I think the entertainment value lies in the fact that each score is worth so much because goals are so few and far between.
It’s basic demand and supply, but backward. A higher value is placed on every goal scored because hey, you only get one goal (if you’re lucky) for every half hour you might invest intently following the puck (or ball) back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, till the action builds to a crescendo and you’re rewarded with, um, a climax.
Like everything else in life, climaxes are much more satisfying if you’re made to work, or wait, for them.
Thus, I propose this hypothesis: The entertainment value of a sport is inversely related to the number of points in the average scoring margin.
Or in layman’s terms: fewer points, more fun, yes?
In my book, the only exception to that rule is baseball. Sure it’s a sport with typically low-score margins. But hey, lots of downtime, slow action, and watching tubby middle-aged men trot around a diamond is not exactly my idea of an adrenaline-inducing three hours.
That’s my opinion, but what makes you tick?
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A simple equation to calculate sports fun
Daily Emerald
January 9, 2007
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