What's the Best Sport to Watch at Each Level? Depends on Why You Watch.
Back in the days before Twitter and the online 24/7 sports-news cycle, when sportswriters had time to sit around and have a beer, we would have interesting philosophical discussions.
Such as. . . What Are the Best Sports to Watch?
The late Bill Jauss, who was the consummate Chicago scribe, had an interesting ranking of The Best Sports to Watch at Each Level.
Which, as a consummate scribe, he had acquired over many sessions that involved beer.
It went like this: Basketball was best-watched at the high-school level. For football, definitely college football. And of course, major-league baseball.
You don’t have to agree. In many ways, I don’t.
But it is an interesting breakdown.
With baseball, it’s kind of a no-brainer. All baseball roads lead to the major leagues. For me, the question is whether to care about baseball at all in its world of four-hour games, outlandish prices and stars who either are either over-paid or deficient in character. Or both.
High-school basketball ranked high because of the unfiltered excitement and emotion. Jauss, who played football briefly at Northwestern around 1950, was of an older generation.
When he started gathering his list, high-school basketball tournaments were legendary. Think of the movie Hoosiers.
Over the years, the NCAA tournament has taken some of the best elements of that. The NBA playoffs, in a gritty and grinding way, take the back-and-forth suspense of a game and elongate it into a multi-game series. And by going to multiple tournaments instead of One State Tournament, high-school basketball has lost a key part of its charm.
The other big problem with high school basketball is, most of us don’t get off our fannies/couches and go watch it—especially with COVID. We have the sports world in our TV remotes.
But yeah, I would be interested in watching high-school basketball.
As for football, I have been on both sides of the NFL/NCAA debate. At this point, I much prefer college football. Because there are fewer games, each game has an element of drama. For the best teams, each game has huge implications for their seasons. And for lesser teams, good performances matter. Teams either go backward or forward each Saturday in the most significant of ways. I like the bands, too.
There is no question, though, that the NFL rules spectator sports. It has a continuity and a community spirit—especially among fans from big cities. People are imprinted with their pro-football team from birth the way they are born into a religion.
I know only one exception to this rule. I have a friend who was a Bears fan by birth, but has morphed into a Packer fan because he lives in Wisconsin. All I will say is, keep a close watch on your wallet if you’re ever around a person like this.
The biggest reason that the NFL is Numero Uno among the games we watch, though, is. . . Wagering.
The pro-football point spread is the Ultimate Statistic. Point spreads in other sports are merely mimicking the NFL, where they ring truest.
The NFL also seems to have the best version of Fantasy Sports. I say ``seems to have’’ because I am not a Fantasy Sports person. As a long-ago college basketball coach once answered when asked if he ever imagined winning some big game in his wildest dreams, ``My wildest dreams do not have sporting goods in them.’’
When I was young, I preferred the NFL. It had great rivalries and personalities—and it had continuity. You saw some of the same players for years on end, playing against the same players. Unlike college football, its schedules were reasonably balanced. Wins and losses, and performance statistics, made more sense.
Oh, and the Bears were frustrating but not nearly as determined to fail as they have been for the last decade.
In the 1980s, when I covered the NFL, I could not get enough of it. Pro football had a symmetry and a rhythm. It still does, to a large degree.
The problem is, I have changed. I don’t crave symmetry. I don’t want to see who runs the same play better. I want to see who can come up with some ridiculous deception that allows a team of lesser talent to shock the world.
I don’t want to see dedicated workmanship. I want to see unbridled emotion.
I want the anarchy of college football, not the tight-lipped precision of the NFL.
You know how, when NFL teams celebrate a good play, it looks clunky and contrived? Rehearsed? Because it is?
I would much rather see the emotions spill over from youthful hearts.
One troubling aspect of college football is that it is moving away from anarchy. The predictability of the SEC winning and the Pac-12 losing, of the rich getting richer and the poor becoming invisible, is threatening to rob college football of its unpredictability.
If that trend keeps going, I’ll revise my version of the list that Bill Jauss started long ago
So here’s my list: College basketball, because it has elevated the best elements of high school basketball. College football, because its greatest appeal is drama rather than a point spread. And major league baseball—although it had better watch out for the Little League World Series.