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I was having a conversation with a non-sports-fan, woman coworker a while back about football. She noted how complicated all the rules are compared to other sports, and it occurred to me that you almost have to treat "competitions" on a spectrum of "pure athleticism" on one end (e.g., olympic sports) and "purely made up rules" (e.g., board games) on the other end.
We like to pretend that football is closer to the olympics than board games, but there's no question that the rules of football are a lot closer to board games than we'd like to admit. They're made up. They're complicated. It takes a long time to understand what's going on if you aren't already familiar with it. But if you just accept that the game is driven by a series of arbitrary rules designed to just make it fun to watch, it kind of clicks. My coworker actually seemed to "get it" more after explaining it that way.
This seems to be yet another piece that pushes the game toward the "board game" end of the spectrum. It's weird, but there's no question it'll be more entertaining.
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