Horses should play every sport. I’ve argued before that the baseball postseason should be played on horseback, but now I take this modest proposal one step further: Do away with the awful, ridiculous humans and just let the horses play all the sports.
A feasibility study of horses playing sports
After the Belmont Stakes, we’re mostly done caring about horses for the rest of the year. Let’s see how realistic it would be to have horses play other sports, so we can keep them in our lives year-round.
Bill Hanstock is a writer, author and Emmy Award-winning producer. He began writing for SB Nation in 2011.
Would this be possible? And how much would each sport be improved by the subtraction of people and the addition of horses? Let’s evaluate each of the five major options and find out!
Baseball
Feasibility score: Quite low. Let’s say 28/100. Horses can’t throw, catch, swing a bat or wear a glove. I mean, you can put gloves on their hooves, but they wouldn’t really be functional. On the positive side, horses are really good at standing around and running, which is half of the way to being actual baseball.
Entertainment score: 10/100. Looking at horses standing around is great, sure, but you could just go to any pasture and see that. In fact, you should do that right now. It’s pretty awesome. Go ahead, we’ll wait for you to come back.
Football
Feasibility score: 70/100. A horse could probably hold a football in its mouth and try to run to the end zone while a phalanx of other horses run interference. Also, movies like Gus and Francis have let us know that equine beasts can actually have careers as kickers.
Entertainment score: 40/100. This is more exciting than horse baseball, because it’s just watching a bunch of horses run around, but not in a “race horse” kind of way. Just a bunch of horses frolicking, with a football nearby. As the illustration points out, even if the horses CAN hold the football in their mouths, they’d most likely just forget about the football and run hither and yon. That’s pleasant, though!
Soccer
Feasibility score: 90/100. This is basically just polo! The horses could probably whack at the ball with their forelegs to nudge it along, or could just kick with their hind legs, likely resulting in a lot of own goals.
Entertainment score: 80/100. Imagine a bunch of horses running around, kicking at a soccer ball. Imagine all the own goals! This would probably be more entertaining than a lot of actual, real soccer matches, with the added benefit of horses on the pitch.
Basketball
Feasibility score: 1/100. Horses can’t dribble, can’t handle a ball and can’t jump nearly high enough to dunk. I mean, they can jump pretty high, but they can’t get their arms above their head at the same time.
Entertainment score: 50/100. Since horses can’t dribble, it would be neat to watch Twitter highlight truthers self-destruct in a world where every play is traveling. Also, imagine horses leaping and leaping under the basket, trying to get their arms above their heads. I’d watch a whole season of that, for sure.
Hockey
Feasibility score: 0/100. Horses on ice skates with sticks taped to their fetlocks? Probably just typing that sentence is illegal.
Entertainment score: 100/100. If the scale could go higher, it would. WE WANT TO SEE HORSES PLAY HOCKEY. GIVE US HOCKEYHORSES, ALREADY. Here’s 10 seconds of a horse running on ice. GIVE US 82 GAMES OF THAT.
IN CONCLUSION
Our study has concluded that it is almost entirely unfeasible to replace humans with horses in all major sports. And that we should do so immediately.
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