Football might be the world's most misunderstood sport.  To a casual viewer the game feels random and jumbled, giant men slamming into each other with no rhyme or reason.  When a big play happens it is exciting, but most people, even football fans, might have a hard time explaining what the men slamming into each other did differently this time that made the huge play possible.

Of all the major team sports, football is by far the most complex.  There are more men on the field, the action happens faster, and the way we watch it on television obscures more than it illuminates.  The camera (and the viewer) follows the football, but much of what happens to make each play possible happens away from the ball.  Did you see how the wide receiver got open down the sideline? Or who threw the crucial block to make that long run possible? Only if it was caught on camera, and only if you know where to look.

Sometimes it seems like the people who love the game the most understand it the least.   Check out the Hall of Fame sometime: fully one third of the players in the Hall of Fame are either running backs or quarterbacks.  These positions make up, at most, 3 of the 22 positions on the field at any given time.  Does this give anyone else the impression that maybe even "educated" football men don't really understand the contributions of everyone on the field?

In his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN, Gregg Easterbrook helps make his readers better football fans.  He highlights the hidden ways that football games are won, and also seeks answers to the ways in which the game does not make sense.

A typically illuminating paragraph from this week's column:

"Minnesota cornerback Antoine Winfield sacked Carolina quarterback Jake Delhomme, picked up his fumble and ran it back for six points. TMQ suspects this play was an uncalled "automatic" -- if Winfield saw a certain alignment, he was free to blitz. On the play, Delhomme only looked to his left, with Winfield coming from his right. The Vikings' corner left his man uncovered, but Delhomme never looked that way. From film study, Minnesota coaches must have noticed a formation or down-and-distance situation in which they were certain Delhomme would never look to his right."

The viewers at home saw the play happen, but TMQ is able to see the play and figure out what made this play different from the others where the quarterback wasn't forced into a fumble.  Insights like this help lift the cloud of brutality and violence from football and help to reveal the intelligence and insight that goes into every play.

It is this same gift for insight that Easterbrook applies to the world outside of football in his column.  In between highlights from the previous weeks games we'll find TMQ commenting on the hot topics of the day like global warming, vehicle fuel efficiency standards, and, this week, government bailouts of investment banks:

"[A]ttached to the bailout is no requirement that the AIG top managers who lavished money on themselves, justifying it on decisions now known to be "inexcusable" (Paulson's word), give up any of their bonuses, which are now effectively tax-supported. At the moment of the Treasury Department's maximum power over AIG, the federal government asked nothing of company officials. Essentially Treasury said, "We propose the taxpayers give up $85 billion, and you give up nothing." The Bush administration sure drives a hard bargain! This is the same basic agreement -- $700 billion in return for no concessions about pay -- the White House now wants to reach with the financial industry as a whole."

I couldn't have said it better myself. And in a column ostensibly about football, no less!

Plus, TMQ has a running segment on the "Obscure College Score of the Week." Really! How great is that?