You’re reading this because you like sports, so we don’t have to tell you there’s nothing better than watching a jaw-dropping highlight.
What we want YOU to tell is us this: which sport has THE best highlights? Are slick defensive plays in baseball more entertaining than a Mario Lemieux rush, or a Blake Griffin dunk? Is a Barry Sanders touchdown run more electrifying than a Christiano Ronaldo strike?
Between now and Jan. 2 we’ve enlisted sportsnet.ca writers to make a written and visual case for their sport and we want you to vote using our poll below.
Dec. 29: Hockey
Dec. 30: Football
Dec. 31: Baseball
Jan. 1: Soccer
Jan. 2: Basketball
Of course, with a competition like this, there is no loser and the real winners are our eyes.
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Today…the National Football League. The behemoth of sports, the 800-lb. gorilla. You might see diagrammed artistic plays perfectly executed in soccer…maybe. You might see harder hits in hockey…maybe. You might see more intricate aerial contortions of the human body in basketball…maybe. And you might see…well, I dunno what kind of highlights our baseball experts will show you, but they’re gonna be crappy compared to football.
This right here is the only sport that gives you highly coordinated, flawlessly executed, athletically profound acts of beautiful violence. It’s all-in-one. Everything the other sports have, the best of the NFL has put together, in the same play—and because the stakes are so high and the season so short, that one play also means more than one play in any other sport. (And it’s got a strangely shaped ball, which means all sorts of weird and wonderful things are possible.)
So yeah, no contest. Here’s the video evidence.
1. Odell Beckham Jr. and the catch heard round the world
“That is absolutely impossible, what he just did.”
The official HD video is in the link above, but here’s the thing about the NFL and its impact: You saw this highlight already. It was playing in your head as soon as you clicked on this article. You’ll never forget that catch—just like I could name six other NFL plays you’d instantly picture on replay as soon as I mentioned them. They’re unforgettable.
But…just in case, a quick refresher:
This catch is everything that’s fantastic about the NFL—both in terms of sheer physical beauty and immense media exposure. First of all, it’s a feat that probably no other athlete on Earth can accomplish—the combination of size, speed, leaping ability, physical toughness and sheer coordination required to snare that ball basically defies all logic.
And it made a huge impact. Even when it doesn’t matter, in the NFL it matters. You can be watching an NFL game that, in the grand scheme of things, won’t impact the playoff picture at all. And then five seconds later you’re watching the play that everyone in sports will be talking about for the next week, or month. No highlights reverberate around the sports world the way a truly wonderful NFL play does—and if you don’t believe me, check out the Year In Highlights pieces this year.
This is the one play everybody saw.
2. More drama, more moments, more access
“I can throw the ball if you need me to throw the ball.”
Watch that masterfully-crafted six-minute film and try not to get goosebumps. The NFL routinely puts mics on most of its best players—a technical feat that’s much tougher to do in the NBA, say, or professional soccer. And while it’s easy enough to do in hockey, then you’re putting mics on hockey players and relying on their magnetic personalities to compel viewers to—hahaha, sorry, we put “hockey players” and “magnetic personalities” in a sentence without the words “certainly don’t have” in between and accidentally cracked ourselves up.
Anyway, show me any highlight pack from any game in any sport that’s packaged as cinematically as this, that gets you close enough and emotionally involved enough to make a regular season game between Detroit and Cleveland seem like an epic tilt worthy of a full dramatic reenactment. Doesn’t happen. Only the NFL.
3. That one time Bo Jackson and Barry Sanders went head to head on Monday Night Football and totalled 305 yards and three touchdowns
(Soundtrack has a little cursing. Sorry.)
Sometimes, in the NFL, things happen and you watch and you say, ‘Damn, I’ve never seen this before and probably won’t ever see it again.’ Everything in football is fleeting. There’s only 16 games in a season. The average career is three seasons. Even the greatest players are mostly done by the time they’re 32. So the chance to see the two greatest of all time, in their primes, go head-to-head is a thing to truly savour.
How many times did Gretzky and Lemieux step onto the ice together? Too many to count. Same with Magic and Bird, or Randy Johnson and Barry Bonds. Even Leo Messi and Christiano Ronaldo go head-to-head multiple times per year. That game above was the only time those two legends shared a field. It stands alone.