American football is the most complex and strategic of all popular sports.

Rebuttals "I have already explained that the roles in football are not dynamic at all. " I should have clarified. I meant that your argument was that the roles themselves were more dynamic in other sports, whereas I was stating the variety of roles in football is what makes it dynamic. Furthermore, regarding complex roles, it could be easily argued that the single most complex and dynamic role in all of sports is the quarterback. "I am not psychoanalyzing the player. " I wasn't referring to the player, I was referring to the role. I claimed that the sport of football is more complex, whereas you seem to be claiming that the roles in other sports are more complex. "This is like saying that quantity is always better than quality. " Regarding complexity, quantity is absolutely one of the defining characteristics. The more variables the more complex. A complex mechanism is one that has many different moving parts, regardless of how simple each part (role) may be. Even you stated that the specific roles in other sports are more complex because they require the player to take on more responsibilities. More being the operative word. "You can't have a complex sport without complex roles. " Of course you can. That's like saying you can't have a complex watch without complex gears. Let's say that hockey has 3 roles, A, B, C, and football has 11 roles, D - N. Even if roles A, B, C are more complex than D-N, the fact that 11 different roles in football have to execute in concert with one another makes it a more complex entity as a whole. At the very least it makes them equally complex, just in different ways. It's like comparing doing one hard thing versus doing many different easy things at the same time. "I also argued that individually these plays are not that unique and not very difficult to execute. " You could not be more wrong in this regard. The plays are incredibly unique, many showing no resemblance to the others at all. There is far, FAR more variety of plays in football than in any other sport. And because of the amount of moving parts in every play (all the different roles) many plays are very difficult to execute properly. This is why 5 year old's play soccer and baseball, but they don't even start incorporating passing plays into football games until high school. Strategy This will have to be much briefer than I hoped. In short, because of the complexity in football (amount of roles, plays, rules, scoring), we see the highest levels of strategy in football. In no other sport are the coaches more involved with every play than in football. You have the head coach, O-coordinator, D-coordinator, and they are all responsible for choosing every play in the game. The play depends entirely on the situation (score, field position, time, down and distance). In any other sport plays are only drawn up during time outs, and they are very basic in nature (pass to this guy, pick 'n roll, and shoot), then the rest of the game is mostly improvisation, not strategy. In football, the set plays allow the game to proceed like a chess match. Each team has a chance to stop and think about the situation, pick the best play out of hundreds, line up and see who made the better call. Think about how much talk there was about Pete Carrol's passing call in the Super Bowl. I can't think of any other sport in which the coaches decision regarding a specific play is so impactful and scrutinized. In summary, football is the most complex sport because no other sport has as much variety in roles, plays, rules, and scoring. Even if you agree with Con regarding the roles, that's still 3 of 4 in favor of football. Football is the most strategic of sports for two primary reasons: 1. A large variety of roles and plays allows for a larger variety of strategies, which puts a higher emphasis on strategy. 2. The set plays allow the teams to contemplate and execute their strategy more clearly and effectively.