This is very exciting, as there's a lot of strategy to American football that isn't plainly visible when the camera just follows the ball as it does on television. It's not going to showcase technique very well, but it'll go a long way towards explaining e.g. why some wide receivers are always open, why some players always seem to be in the right position to interrupt a pass, etc. I'd actually find it very interesting to see something like a Coursera course using film from this to explain different plays, packages, etc.
However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.
> However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.
You'd probably be surprised. I know I was surprised when I got to college and found more football fans amongst my engineer friends than my humanities friends.
It turns out the game is very complex and deep and discussing strategy can be quite interesting.
I wasn't a football fan when I arrived in college, but I was when I left.
I think the biggest difference between "normal" football fans and the football enthusiasts like me and the ones I met in my engineering classes boils down to what reasons you enjoy watching the game and, perhaps with overlap between the groups, what level you're paying attention to the actual plays being called and run.
Most people love football because they identify with a team, and almost exclusively watch games involving their team, and aren't really paying too much attention to the strategy. They know the rules and the different types of plays, but they are really there for the tribal passion that a rough contact sport like football tends to evoke.
On the flip side, I don't actively seek to watch football games for a single team; if I happen to go somewhere that's playing a football game on TV, I love watching it, and don't care who wins, because I just enjoy the strategic and tactical decisions being made on and off the field. Watching a play unfold and seeing the snap decisions being made and the reactions from both teams to the changing field is truly fascinating.
I do still follow the results of my old hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals, but more out of humorous pity at how terrible they are year after year than out of any identification with them or desire to see them win.
But hey, maybe I'm just ascribing what I want to see from the data, and maybe my opinion of "normal" people is skewed from growing up in Ohio compared to somewhere else in the country.
I have enjoyed Football for a while -- good sport, fun to watch.
I REALLY got into Football a few years back when I hopped on the fantasy football bandwagon -- a lot of strategy (projections, history, weekly match up, e.g., do I start Tom Brady against Baltimore or RG3 against StL?), statistics, a random element (injuries, x-factor players breaking out, coaches benching people), etc. There is quite a bit of crossover between that and many other strategy games.
You should try Fantasy Baseball. The stats go so much deeper and there is so much more data to process than with football. The strategy involved for informed players can be quite incredible.
I'm always tempted to try it but Fantasy Baseball always seems like too much of a full time job to me. Do you set your lineups on a weekly basis or is it something that requires daily attention?
Well there are leagues that do both. I prefer daily for the precise reason that it requires my daily attention. I tend to forget about things that only need be dealt with once a week (Ie fantasy football) and often end up with abandoned teams. As such the daily format of baseball works better for me as I am paying attention to it every day.
I understand your concern about the full time job thing, but honestly the point of it all is to have fun. Also don't we always say on here that when you're doing something you love, it doesn't feel like work?
Daily attention. My friend has done it for several years, and often his dedication is a good enough for why he wins.
But I think it's worse than daily attention. The MLB isn't like the NFL in that its schedule is spread out all over the place. It has to be constantly on your mind to make sure you have the right relief pitchers started, etc.
I'm very happy to be mistaken. I was a casual fan in college, but the worm turned for me when I started hanging out with my brother in law who plays at Ball State. Hearing someone accurately predict what's going to happen before the ball is snapped, and then explain why (e.g. "they ran it up the gut because the linebacker had his weight back on his heels") really opened my eyes to the depth. If there's any HN football fans out here in Denver who'd like to get together one weekend to watch a game, I'd love to meet up!
> Hearing someone accurately predict what's going to happen before the ball is snapped, and then explain why (e.g. "they ran it up the gut because the linebacker had his weight back on his heels") really opened my eyes to the depth
I dunno, it feels like having every play predicted might get annoying. :)
But yes, I too was enamored by the depth and strategy that I started picking up using friend's extra tickets and hanging out on "tightwad hill", which is a place above the stadium where you can watch free Cal games.
Additionally, why can't we play Dungeons and Dragons and watch football? I heavily enjoy both. Not to mention Fantasy Football, which is a strategy nerds dream, that they can actually play with their non-nerdy friends. Come to think of it, why don't we have HN Fantasy Football leagues?
Some friends of mine and I talked about doing one where we wrote bots to manage our teams instead of managing them manually. Then that turned into "We should build a platform that supports that for leagues..." and got lost on beer napkins or something. I still think it'd be fun.
It would be loads of fun. Unfortunately, I think the primary reason why there aren't a lot of cool ideas like this already implemented is for legal reasons. From what I've heard, starting your own fantasy league by using NFL data is just pretty much impossible.
I'm also at the intersection of HN and fantasy football, which led me to create http://app.pickemfirst.com
a browser extension to manage your fantasy teams
Hit the nail on the head for me. I don't really give a damn about football, but I found the article interesting, came here to blow smoke about it, found jerf had beaten me to it.
My wife and I love the show "The League," but I wouldn't be able to watch it without her there to explain the football references, which are plentiful. I find myself idly wondering what it would take to write a fantasy football site and what the benefits could be.
I inferred the existence of high quality geeks who care a lot about football from my geologist friend, who told me a few years ago that every year somebody releases a modified ROM of NES Tecmo Superbowl with updates for the current season.
I assume we are not talking Thoroughbred horses here?
I do not want to risk another "oh HN is becoming Reddit" discussion, but could we focus on the reasons why one of the worlds largest sports organisations does not want its fans to see a wideshot of a pitch and how on earth they think wifi enabled phones, 3D cameras and 10billion channels will do to their reasoning in 5 years?
I grew up a Lions fan, but man, that HBO show Hard Knocks got me hooked on your team. Now I find myself wanting to watch Dolphins' games and hoping Joe Philbin gets it together.
This is surprising to me. Hard Knocks has been a good series, but this year's offering was so much worse than any other year that I wonder if it won't get canceled outright (it doesn't help that teams aren't exactly lining up to participate).
I found Joe Philbin to be insufferably boring. Maybe it's just the contrast with Rex Ryan last year.
At any rate. I'm glad there are so many football fans in the HN ranks.
> However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.
I'm sure there are plenty of HN readers who are football fans, you just don't see many sports stories because they're generally considered off-topic. From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This all-22 discussion is probably on-topic for HN because it has more to do with the pros and cons of exerting control over exactly how people consume your product than with the specifics of the sport.
The NFL's policies on footage are an interesting example of information control. People in the audience can clearly see all the players on the field, but people watching at home are not allowed to. And even though the NFL has put tons of money into excellent cameras and awesome post-processing effects, they still hadn't released the most informative camera views!
It's not just live TV though. They take footage from a lot of angles during the game, and make it available to other networks for post-game analysis, etc. But they haven't made the All-22 footage available at all. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3275698
I was commenting specifically on the 3 hour "live game experience" shown on CBS, FOX, etc. I'm not sure most of the market wants the type of analysis that would be required to give coverage to the 22-Man views. They just want to watch the game, not think about strategy.
However, there are certainly people (myself included), who would gladly pay the small fee here to better understand the strategy behind the game.
Seconded. If you want to get started on something that you may have always wondered about, here is some in depth analysis of the peyton manning offense in indy:
You're not alone but the startup community definitely has less than average number of people interested in football and sports in general. I don't have data on this, it's the feeling I get as someone doing a startup in sports and talking to other entrepreneurs in the bay area.
Same here. I hear the announcers throw around a bunch of different terms describing formations or strategies. Now, we will actually be able to see them in action as a whole.
I do biomechanical research and train baseball pitchers. I have a big blog post coming up about machine learning using PITCHf/x data to see if you can predict injuries with publicly available data from MLBAM (hint: future is promising!).
My company is Driveline Baseball / Driveline Biomechanics Research. We also develop wearable computing technology to capture kinematics of the movie arm (you know this as "pitching mechanics").
However, I'm not sure it's of wide interest to HN. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one here who likes NFL football.