Hello there, my dear sport enthusiasts! I am not one of you. You may, then, wonder why I’m writing an article for the sports section. The answer to this question is quite simple: I thought it would be funny if I ranked the major sports by my own entirely subjective ranking system that has very little genuine credibility.

My criteria are laid out as such: 

1. How cool are the uniforms?
2. How cool do the players look?
3. How fun is it for me, a non-sports watcher/understander, to watch? (Sorry, football.)

Now that we have that out of the way, let me begin. I’m not a sports guy. I much prefer watching Chopped or Cutthroat Kitchen. Those get me as excited as a guy with a beer-soaked beard watching the Super Bowl. So, I will be conducting some preliminary research for this article by watching some games and assigning each sport a numerical value from 1-5 for the four criteria, adding them together, and seeing which sport is superior. I will be ranking the major five American sports– football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer. I’m excited to see which of these wins, and who knows, maybe this will be the beginning of a beautiful, blossoming relationship between me and sports! 

First up is the uniform portion of my ranking. Just to clarify, I understand that the uniforms are functional, but I just don’t care. I’m not ranking how good they are at serving a purpose, I’m ranking how cool they look. 

Coming in first is baseball. These uniforms don’t look at all like they’re athletic in nature. They seem to have not particularly evolved since the inception of the league in 1869. They have gotten slightly sleeker, but that’s about it. I like the uniforms, though. They’re pretty fashionable, with my one criticism being the occasional bloomers and high socks that some of the players rock. This sentiment is echoed in all of my other decisions. 4.5 out of 5.

Second is hockey. I love the bulky silhouette and the helmets look very cool. The big, lobster-like gloves are awesome, when the players fight it looks like someone riled up the tank at an Asian market. I don’t love the shorts and long, thick socks combo, but overall this uniform is cohesive and pretty cool looking. It gets a solid 4 from me.

Third is soccer, which lacks cool helmets. The jersey material is gross looking and I’ve noticed that many teams have pretty obnoxiously colored uniforms. The high socks disturb me once again, but overall these aren’t too bad, 3 out of 5. 

Tied for last is football and basketball, though my criticisms of each are highly different. Football uniforms are ugly, straight up. Helmets are cool, everyone likes helmets, but the rest of the uniform is idiotic. The top is bulky and the bottoms are skin-tight. The players look like the members of a very violent theater-troupe, crashing into each other with their shoulder pads and bright blue leggings. Now onto basketball; I hate modern uniforms. If it was 1975, basketball would be #1 on this list. There’s a reason why basketball shorts are the pinnacle of un-fashion. Too long. They’re both a 1.5/5 for me.

Ok, that was a lot. I have many thoughts on fashion. I’ll try to keep the Player Cool-Ness ranking shorter. First is basketball, as the physical feats associated with the game are awesome. A good dunk is a total crowd pleaser, and the coordination combined with clever maneuvering makes a basketball game highly entertaining, which is what earns this a 4.5/5. Coming in second at a cool 4/5 is soccer. When the players are actually playing and not flopping around like injured baby deer/ fish out of water, they look super cool. Imagine kicking a ball across an entire field and your buddy so perfectly subdues the ball with the side of his leg and makes a game winning goal! Awesome! Hockey is pretty cool too, especially when they get into fights! Fights bump this to 3.5/5! Those add some much needed excitement and even when there aren’t fights, the coordination between players that the top 3 require is what makes these much cooler than football and baseball. Baseball is fourth, because batting looks cool but the in-between isn’t highly exciting or awesome to me. It also probably doesn’t help that a lot of the players look kind of like my dad, docking it down to 2.5/5. Last is football. Tackles are cool looking but the posture players are required to maintain is silly looking, and the games have so much downtime that the ratio of boring to cool does not do enough to make me enticed. 1.5/5 stars, sorry. The uniforms also make it hard for me to find them cool at all.

Lastly is the ease of understanding. I will try to keep this one brief, but it is likely I will fail. Coming in first is basketball. Super simple. No double dribbling, no traveling, no fouls, three pointer, etc, etc. I get what is happening as I watch it and I am thoroughly entertained because it pretty much just keeps going until it’s over, with minimal stoppage. 5/5! Tied for second is hockey and soccer. I find hockey very fun to watch, the fact that fights are pretty much allowed might confuse a hockey-newcomer, but I’ve watched my fair share of games despite not being much of a sports guy so I get it and I think it’s a cute shtick. Like, “Yeah, this is the sport where we fight– but it’s not like boxing or anything, we can just do that here.” It’s cool and it’s 3/5! Soccer is also fun to watch, but penalty kicks and corner kicks and the different rankings of cards can be hard for sports newbies to understand and appreciate, which is why I’ve ranked it at a 3. Fourth is baseball. This one is more confusing because the goal of the game in soccer, hockey, and basketball are pretty cut-and-dry. Get the ball/puck in the net, don’t let the other team get it in yours. Easy. Baseball just has more going into it, but I can parse what’s happening. 2.5/5.  Now… football. I watched a game to write this article and I can safely say: What?? And oh my, so boring. Too much stoppage. Why does the game forget it’s supposed to be a form of entertainment every three minutes. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw in a MAD Magazine from 1982 that my uncle gave me. The joke is essentially that a woman asks her husband how much of the game is left, so she knows if she should start dinner. Her husband replies that there are twenty minutes left in the game, so his wife says she’ll start cooking, to which he replies something along the lines of, “Well hold on, that really means about two hours with stoppage time.” And then his wife’s head physically explodes. That is what was playing through my mind as I watched football. It really felt like pulling teeth. Easily 1/5, just don’t tell my grandpa or he’ll call me “twinkle-toes.”

Ok, time for what you’ve all been waiting for. The ranking is:

1. With 11 points, Basketball!
2. With a crisp 10.5, we have soccer.
3. In third is hockey with 10.
4. This is a close race, and baseball has come in fourth by a small margin at 9.5.
5. Surprising nobody, football is last at an astoundingly low 4 points.

There you have it folks. The sports, as ranked by Lincoln.