12 Sports Movies, Ranked By How Completely They Get Sports Wrong

One takes many risks when playing football, including possible spine injuries, concussions leading to CTE, torn ACLs, and sometimes an errant finger coming into your facemask and poking your face. One thing football players don’t have to worry about though (unless they are playing against a team coached by Al Pacino), is having their eyeballs ripped from their sockets and dropped onto the playing field. So while the scene in Any Given Sunday when this occurs might be a classic gruesome look at the horrors of football, it is as fictional as you would think. 

Sure, eyeballs might get jabbed by a random finger that finds its way into the facemask, but the act of it getting cleanly ripped out is pure lunacy. While it may have been a scarring enough scene that you have never quite been able to get it out of your head (pun intended), you can relax knowing that this has never happened on an NFL field. Now more than ever, with the rise of facemask visors and player safety being a more significant concern than ever before, you won't see any eyeballs on the field anytime soon.

There is no denying how awesome the Flying V looks when the Mighty Ducks pull it out to defeat their rivals in the league championship, but that doesn’t mean the move is even remotely possible or realistic. Just ask Auston Matthews, one of the best players in the NHL. When doing a GQ interview about realism in hockey movies, he referred to the famed scene as “the most unrealistic thing I’ve ever seen.” 

The move involves most of the team forming a protective V-shape around the player with the puck as they block defenders. At the same time, he skates down the ice, and at the very end, they all separate, blocking out their assignments. Essentially, it is like using a football offensive lineman but in youth hockey, which is the only level of the sport in which a stunt like this might work. 

The Mighty Duck sequels even point out how poorly of a designed play it is because, in both D2 and D3, they try to use the Flying V, but both times they wind up giving up a goal rather than scoring one. Simply put, if the player with the puck doesn’t weave their way through an entire team of defenders and score, then the puck will go to the other section while nobody stays behind to play defense. The move makes no practical sense, but it looks good on screen.

When the world's most famous rock climber, Alex Honnold of Free Solo fame, says that your movie has “probably the worst scene in all of climbing,” it is safe to say your film isn’t a great depiction of the sport it displays. Vertical Limit has some pretty intense scenes featuring some scary rock-climbing moments, but it is plain as day how the characters' choices are removed from reality and the physics of real climbing vs. what happens on-screen. 

In the GQ interview where Honnold breaks down the most infamous scene from the movie when a character cuts the rope holding their father, sending him to his demise, he points out several factors that make the scene complete and utter fiction. In the scene, five climbers attached to the same rope lose their grips and are suspended in midair. After they’re suspended, the mechanism holding them begins to falter. Honnold points out that if they were to all fall as they do but are initially caught and held up by the mechanism, then there is no way it would suddenly lose its grip. 

If they were going to fall to their deaths, it would have been when the initial fall occurred, not when dramatically holding on for dear life afterward. Secondly, he points out that no sandstone structures in the world have an overhang as the wall does in the film. If this were real, they would have been right up against the wall after their initial fall, able to get a grip and not suspended several feet in the air away from it. Lastly, he points out the rather obvious that at no point in the real world would you ever intentionally cut the rope that's keeping someone alive, especially not if they are your father.

Henry Rowengarter got to live out every young baseball fan’s dream when he got to suit up for the Cubs and pitch for a season in Rookie of the Year. The only issue with this concept? The MLB has strict rules of having to be 17 years old or older to play in the league, and little Henry with the magic arm is only 12 years old. So sure, the entire thing wouldn’t have happened in real life, but there’s a lot more grounding the film in fantasy than just the age rule preventing him from playing. 

The film is about a kid who isn’t great at baseball, but he sure does love the game. A few months after breaking his arm and having to wear a cast all summer, he finds that the cartilage in his arm has changed and has given him the ability to throw up to 100 miles per hour (a feat that only a few actual big leaguers can pull off). In a publicity stunt, the Cubs sign him to a major league deal, and he spends the season pitching in Chicago, taking the league by storm. So while he may not have been allowed to play in the MLB for real, he probably wouldn’t have been able to whip 100 mph fastballs easily, but alas, it’s just a kid's movie.

Many sports movies find that any sort of realism is lost during the final play of any game because the most dramatic thing possible must always take place. This leads to plenty of unrealistic scenes. In The Program's case, the final play would have been blown dead by refs the moment it occurred.

In the play, quarterback Joe Kane avoids several defenders as he maneuvers around the backfield, waiting for a receiver to get open. While moving around in the pocket, he begins his throwing motion when the ball slips out of his hands and falls on the ground in front of him, which he then picks back up and throws for the winning touchdown. In the film, the announcers declare, as it happens, that he fumbled the ball before picking it back up, but any competent football fan would tell you instantly that this isn’t the case. 

Because he was trying to throw the football and had begun the process of throwing it when the ball flew out of his hand, the play would have been immediately ruled dead, and the game would have been over without any last-second heroics. If this movie were real, then Joe Kane would be the laughingstock of college football.

Sometimes it is easiest to point out the absurdities in sports movies simply by putting the bananas onscreen feats alongside the real thing. When Brendan Fraser’s character at the end of The Scout pitches in a World Series game, every pitch he throws is a strike - and all 27 batters strike out - resulting in a perfect game. The most pitches consecutively thrown for strikes (since 1988, when the stat began being tracked) was 38 in a row by Bartolo Colon in 2012. So right there, it is clear that the 81 straight pitches in a game (or even practice) is an absurd idea. It would be like a golfer getting a hole-in-one on every swing or a basketball player making a half-court shot every possession; it isn’t even remotely possible. 

Throwing 81 straight strikes for 27 consecutive strikeouts would mean that players on a team in the World Series, one of the best teams in the league, couldn’t hit a single ball thrown to them and that the umpire made no mistakes calling balls and strikes. Okay, one more real-life comparison should wrap up this easy argument that The Scout is total and utter nonsense. The MLB record for batters struck out in a row is 10, and while that number has been tied by two players since, it initially occurred in 1970. So clearly, 27 is an impossible number of strikeouts, and the idea of anyone throwing for 81 consecutive strikes was likely drawn up by someone who has never touched a baseball.