Popular as it might be, professional football in America is greatly misunderstood. At its core it is a great dance, a dizzying ballet of millions of variables clashing together through the course of a game, a season, an era. It is simultaneously brutally simple and wildly complex.

These two models were created in its honor, and to help illustrate of the more intangible forces inherent to the sport. The first model shows the cascading higher-order goals at play. The second is a basic mechanical feedback loop applied to the game, hinting at the complexities involved in both game and season management.