I was watching Sportscenter with a couple of my friends last semester when a football highlight came on and one of them said, "Man, I don't know how so many people like football, it requires no skill at all."
Naturally, as an avid football enthusiast, I got offended and promptly responded "Yeah? Then why aren't you in the NFL making millions of dollars a year?" The argument quickly escalated into a discussion about which sports require the most skill.
My friend and I were going back and forth for hours, taking into account every sport and pseudo-sport in existence, while bringing up all kinds of statistics from the Internet and ESPN.
Anyone who has been involved in the argument in one form or another knows how complicated it can get.
First of all, all sports require skill. The use of the word "skill" is important. Some people equate it to mean talent or natural ability; however, in reality skill is something that anyone can develop. It's something that some people learn faster and have a larger capacity for the information than others.
Does this mean that someone who is a superstar in one sport would be able to switch to another sport and become a superstar quickly and easily? No. While there have been cases of athletes able to do this, it is not the norm.
It is not fair to compare skill amongst different sports. There are simply too many factors involved. How do you compare the athletic ability of a marathon runner to that of a lineman in the NFL, or the endurance of a NASCAR racer to the endurance of a boxer? Each discipline maintains areas of completely different types of athletic capacity.
If you ask 10 different people this question, you could easily get 10 different answers, but no answer is likely to be a fair assessment of every single sport.
Golf might be a good vote for someone who considers skill to be something ostensibly inborn, while football might sound good to someone who considers sports to be primarily about strength or speed.
If skill entails the use of a lot of equipment and organization even on the casual level, you would probably have to consider baseball and hockey.
To play a casual game of basketball or football all you need is a ball and people to play. For hockey or baseball, everyone must have a glove or a stick and at least some concept of the sport in order to set up a game properly.
In fact, this is probably a reason that basketball and football are two of the most popular sports in America. The average Joe can play without much hassle or setup, whereas hockey requires a large financial investment for sticks and skates.
With that said, I can see what my friend was saying about football in the sense that in its crudest interpretation, it is basically a combination of running, throwing and catching. When one takes into account that hockey involves skating and basketball involves dribbling a ball constantly, the skill required to play football might seem pale in comparison.
While it is not fair to make this argument since football involves those abilities at their highest possible levels and around people in peak physical condition, if someone who had no concept of any sport was to suddenly decide to play a sport, football would probably be pretty easy to learn.
That argument about football alone could go on for hours, now imagine if you considered every other sport. The fairest conclusion is to agree that all sports require skill and there is no way to compare the individual components of each sport to one another.
Sure, you can say that football has the fastest athletes, or boxing has the toughest athletes, but when all is said and done, skill will always be a subjective term. Is it fair to say that Michael Jordan was a better athlete than Babe Ruth? Let each athlete and sport be great on its own and leave it at that.
