Determining the best sport of all time
According to very unbiased ranking criteria.
Warning: as I reread this article in 2025, I don't think it's particularly funny. I guess my humor has changed somewhat since I wrote the article. Read at the risk of your own time being wasted.
The Super Bowl is coming up, and I'm really sad that the Lions didn't win against the 49ers. Because now the Super Bowl is just gonna be Taylor Swift fans[1] versus the entirety of California, which will be okay at best. Plus the Chiefs have played in the past 3 out of 4 Super Bowls, so it's very rude of them to beat the Lions, because the Lions have NEVER made it to the Super Bowl.
Soooooooo as you can probably tell, I've actually been watching more sports recently. They're pretty fun! And as I was watching football on Sunday, my dad roasted the NFL with these two statements:
- There's only about 11 minutes of actual action in a typical NFL game, which is surprising given most NFL games take three and a half hours. If you're looking for entertainment density (ie. time with action / total time), you're probably gonna be disappointed by a typical game (unless you really like football).
- Most NFL referees are lawyers. I also found the official NFL rulebook, which for some reason is eighty-five pages. There are so many rules and intricacies that make the game complicated for literally no reason!
It made me think about how football is actually kinda lame. And I got thinking about how sports fans always think that their sport is the coolest. For example, American football fans think soccer is comparatively boring.
So I've decided to make a giant comparison post to see which sport is the BEST SPORT EVER. But no way am I comparing all sports!! Just the normal, best, popular ones. I'm an American, so let's just find out the top 5 sports...
Whatever. I'm choosing football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, and soccer, because those are the first 5 sports I thought of. For each metric, I'll distribute a total of 10 points to the 5 sports, depending on how well each sport does according to the metric. The sport with the most points at the end is the BEST SPORT EVER.
Metric 1: actual playtime
I already mentioned how football has notoriously little action. But baseball is almost as bad, clocking in at ~18 minutes of action per MLB game. Basketball and soccer are much better, because there are fewer game interruptions, fewer commercials, and therefore more action.
But hockey really takes the cake. If you want to swap guys on the playing field in any sport but hockey, you have to pause the game and wait. In hockey, the clock doesn't stop: a player just hurdles off the ice into the bench while another player jumps from the bench onto the ice. Talk about eliminating dead time!
Scoring
- American Football: 1pt(s)
- Baseball: 1pt(s)
- Basketball: 2pt(s)
- Ice Hockey: 4pt(s)
- Soccer: 2pt(s)
Metric 2: ELI5 difficulty
- American Football: "These guys try to get the weird brown ball down the field so they can run it into the rectangle or kick it through the tall golden sticks."
- Baseball: "The person with the bat tries to hit the ball really hard so their teammates can run around the four white boxes before the guys on the field get them out with the ball."
- Basketball: "Everyone wants the orange ball. If you throw up the orange ball in the right place and it goes through the ring with a net, you get points! And you get more points if you throw the orange ball into the ring from a long way."
- Hockey: "OK so these guys have these special sticks and try to hit the black... uh.... ball into the net. The more times they hit it into the net, the better."
- Soccer: "These guys try to get the ball into the net, but they can only use their feet. But one special man on each team can touch the ball with their hands, so they can stop it from going into the wrong net."
I'm surprised: it's pretty easy to simplify each game to a core concept a small child can understand! 2 points for each.
Scoring
- American Football: 2pt(s)
- Baseball: 2pt(s)
- Basketball: 2pt(s)
- Ice Hockey: 2pt(s)
- Soccer: 2pt(s)
Metric 3: Coolest field shape
American football, basketball, and soccer all boast rectangles, which is really boring! Plus, it's not like the goal is in a weird spot: to score, you always have to go to the short sides of the rectangle.
Hockey is a nice little ellipse, which is a fun break from rectangles. It's really great, because the puck can go whooooooooop and glide along the edge! Plus, the goal isn't at the very edge, which adds a lot more fun, because you can go behind the goal in hockey.
Baseball also has a cool shape. It's very specially designed for baseball, but I give it extra points since it's not a boring rectangle.
Scoring
- American Football: 1pt(s)
- Baseball: 3pt(s)
- Basketball: 1pt(s)
- Ice Hockey: 4pt(s)
- Soccer: 1pt(s)
Metric 4: Strategy complexity
- American Football: There's an incredible amount of strategy. What kind of play should a team run? Should a team take a 3-point field goal, or risk a 4th down conversion for a better chance at a touchdown? For all the times I don't like football, I will say that it's very rich in terms of complexity.
- Baseball: I can imagine the hitting team saying: "Let's just hit the ball REALLY hard and hope the other team doesn't get it!!" Seriously, though, I think baseball depends a lot less on strategy and a lot more on the physical abilities of the players.
- Basketball: There's probably a lot of strategy here, too. I think in this regard, it has more strategy than baseball, but less strategy than American football.
- Ice Hockey: Sure, there are lots of plays that a hockey team can dynamically make, but to the casual viewer, ice hockey seems like the teams are just trying to push the puck towards the other team's goal.
- Soccer: You CANNOT convince me that there is strategy in this game. I'm pretty all soccer players are trained on a singular objective: get the ball farther down the field. At least, that's what my teammates and I thought when we played soccer in first grade.
Scoring
- American Football: 4pt(s)
- Baseball: 1pt(s)
- Basketball: 2pt(s)
- Ice Hockey: 2pt(s)
- Soccer: 1pt(s)
Metric 5: Coolest overtime
OK American football overtime (in the NFL) makes NO SENSE. Apparently, if you win the coin toss, and then score a touchdown, you just instantly win, and the other team doesn't even get a chance. Huh??? So I guess football teams should look for team captains that are also psychics, because predicting the result of the coin toss is SO IMPORTANT.
Overtime in baseball and basketball is solid. In baseball, you get extra innings until one team comes out ahead, and in basketball, you just get extra time. It's kinda boring though.
Soccer and hockey have by far the coolest overtime. In both sports, you get some extra time, but if it's still tied after that extra time, you get a nerve-wracking shootout. (I think in soccer, each team gets 5 shots, and in hockey, each team gets 3 shots.) If the score is still tied after the shootout, you get a even more nerve-wracking situation where both teams take a shot until one team makes it and the other team misses. Don't believe me? Watch the shootout at the end of the 2022 World Cup. I almost never watch soccer, but the shootout gave me chills.
Scoring
- American Football: 0pt(s)
- Baseball: 2pt(s)
- Basketball: 2pt(s)
- Ice Hockey: 3pt(s)
- Soccer: 3pt(s)
The Winner
As far as I'm concerned, these 5 metrics completely encapsulate everything necessary to judge a sport. Let's see who the winners are:
Final Scoring
- American Football: 8pt(s)
- Baseball: 9pt(s)
- Basketball: 9pt(s)
- Ice Hockey: 15pt(s)
- Soccer: 9pt(s)
ICE HOCKEY IS THE BEST SPORT EVER!!!!!!! WOOO!!!!!! I am definitely not biased. Nope. What are you talking about?
because of Travis Kelce ↩︎
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