Pushing the Football Down the Web

As is often the case with me, let me start out with a disclaimer: I know next to nothing about American football. What I do know I learned from downloading “Football for Dummies” to my Kindle and reading half of the introduction. That said, I watched an entire football game yesterday because my son wanted me to and, living in Baltimore, I felt moderately inclined to support the Baltimore Ravens in their attempt to reach the Super Bowl. Why do they call it the “Super Bowl?” I looked on Wikipedia and the answer of why the Super Bowl is called the Super Bowl makes about as much sense to me as the game of football.

What I can say is that the game has changed since I was a girl. When I was a girl, there was a lot more butt slapping and arm punching. Now, it seems, that congratulations are given via chest bumps, jumping on people, and (I think this part is the same) back-slapping by coaches. There are more hugs too, and tears, come to think of it. That’s nice.

But what’s really different about football is the existence of the NFL Web site.

Despite my football ignorance, you can tell a lot about the game from the site. Like, there are two sides, just like in the U.S. presidential election. There are the “Blue Teams” and they are called the National League and then there are the “Red Teams” and they are called the American League. I can’t tell if there is a Football Electoral College though. After the Super Bowl is over, do all the coaches and retired players get together and decide who really won?  If there is a tie, do the Hall of Famers act as Super Delegates and cast the deciding votes?

But, back to the NFL Web site.

Like the game it promotes, the NFL site is busy with a very complicated playbook of e-commerce, RSS, streaming media, photos, stats, blogs. That seems to make sense. The game is complicated too. And, I’ve got to say the on-site play-by-play coverage was much more fascinating to me than the game itself.  Of course, I’ve seen this type of real-time push technology before (at least I hope it was push technology). The online play-by-play consisted of a mini football field some bars and x’s, and real words underneath explaining what happened (what are on air sportscasters talking about?). It all looked like a Gantt chart with words and tasks under it. That I can understand. But this little tidbit of functionality was extra fun: there must have been some kind of 5 second broadcast lag because I managed to astonish my son several times by being very accurate about calling the play before it occurred.  “Yeah, I bet he’ll only make it to the 43 yard line.”

So the site had the full playbook of structured content authoring and delivery.  I like structured content. That’s why I like the Web 2.0 technology trend so much. Everyone thinks it’s all about freedom and collaboration and it is…but that’s freedom of expression. The structure of every blog is about the same. Posts, comments, sharing, permalinks, et al. You turn them on, you turn them off but it’s a pretty limited world of interactions. It’s that very structure and control that allows such broad participation. Structure and control allow the Web 2.0 game to be played. We've all got the playbook and the rules and standards and we just go at it.

I'm sure the NFL Web team has their problems.  All Web sites are  held together with a few smart people and a lot of wishful thinking.  And, it appears that the NFL site might not be much different. After I got tired of being a Football seer with my son (actually he looked over my shoulder and I was outed), I went out of bounds and started looking at the Web page source code. When looking at the source code on the home page, I found this tell-tale comment:

 “//moved all the functions into s_code_common.js until we can overhaul this atrocity”

Oh well. Like the Tennessee Titans, we all have our atrocious moments.