So in one of the other threads, CW mentioned his irritation at misused military terms in articles. Basically, the idea is that the stories had to stand up to someone with a higher level of expertise, which it probably should.
This got me thinking about football.
I'm kind of a dork. In my free time, I try to consume technical football stuff. At one point in the past month, I watched 90 minutes of receiver clinic. They ran like 2-3 actual different routes. Everything was about where to place one's hands to get space (also if it's an out-breaking route, look in right at the break to throw DBs). I'm in the middle of something about Oregon's outside zone scheme and the finer points of the flow of it.
(Football is also weird because it's a sport we literally can't see the whole picture of unless we're in the building and have a good eye for it. Quality replays we can analyze are few and far between)
And I found it interesting because huge portions of football writing don't touch on this. Like I'm sure football coaches often scoff at some of the things that are written, both by reporters and fans. But what's interesting is that fans, by and large, not only don't care, but much of the time the tone of fans carries farther away from the technical stuff and farther into the more juicy faux-controversial stuff. This in turn lends credence to writers who ... don't exactly stoke that controversy, but slide in with the fan flow.
A few examples. Badger fans swore and still swear that Chryst ran outside too much and threw too much in the TCU Rose Bowl. But if you go back and watch knowing the runs UW uses, it's kind of a normal gameplan. They mix in a few but not too many passes on run downs, they ran a normal blend of the three run schemes they had. They just lost at enough small junctures, had enough miscues and messed up field position enough to blow the game.
Another would be the early Michigan offense in 2018. There was all this lamenting it was just run-run-pass and not enough complexity. And then if you watch, it was a really diverse scheme, just not a well-run one. To hear the commentary, they were going 22 personnel and running iso to one side.
But the lamentations were more interesting. They settled into narratives. They made the sport more fascinating in its way. In essence, the not knowing the expertise prevents things from being mundane.
I don't know what it tells us about us. This place is obviously better than a lot of homer boards. But I thought it was interesting that often the expertise becomes not only something that's not paid attention to, but something that takes away from the juicy stuff we might dig into.