[MicroBob]

Most people who are fans of football don't TRULY understand the rules. They think that an underhand shovel-pass forward is not legal and couldn't tell you how many yards a clipping penalty is. But they like watching the games and consider themselves fans and like to brag about how awesome Ben Roethlesberger or Peyton Manning are and even wear their jerseys or whatever.

FWIW - most baseball fans are pretty clueless about the sport too. They don't know what actions constitute a balk and certainly couldn't tell you the infield-fly rule and haven't the slightest clue about how the organizational farm-systems work, etc etc.


Both sports can be incredibly complex the deeper you delve into them. That doesn't really have much to do with how easy or difficult they are to understand or enjoy by the everyday fans or to a newcomer though.
You can be a fan of baseball without having any idea why it is or isn't a good idea to intentionally walk someone in a certain situation.
And if you didn't grow up with the sport it's kind of difficult to become a fan because this whole business of "this situation he has to tag the base...this situation he has to tag the runner...this situation the fly-ball is deep enough where he can tag-up and try to score but he has to wait for the ball to be caught....etc etc etc" is what we are talking about when we say whether the sport is too complicated. It gets really confusing incredibly fast to a new viewer who is having a tough enough time finding where the ball is much less watching the various runners and fielders racing around all over the place.

When we speak of football being to complicated to be understood very easily by a foreign audience we aren't referring to Bill Walsh Cover 2 schemes. We are just referring to the basic rules and strategies such as 2-minute offense and spiking the ball to stop the clock (ldo..because some plays the clock keeps running and other plays it doesn't) and taking a knee at the end of the game to run out the clock.
evidently the London fans were really booing big-time today when the Giants were running the clock out...whereas Americans understand that this is pretty standard and booing this would be silly.