Which Sport Benefits the Most From Analytics? – Huffington Post (blog)

Baseball has only about 27 possible base-out states (combinations of base-runners and outs) that it needs to deal with. Football, in contrast, has billions of possible combinations of down, distance, yardline, score, time, etc.) Baseball is an orderly serial sequence of pitcher-batter matchups, and defense is only marginally involved. Football is parallel, involving 22 players simultaneously colliding in apparent chaos.