johnsmith
10-27-2016, 12:46 PM
Wasn't sure if I should piggyback the other thread on this or start a new one. I chose the latter....
Good article from Magary though.....
http://deadspin.com/making-football-safer-makes-it-worse-1788277112
Yes, this is another “What’s wrong with football?” post, but before I go there, let me just state up front that the NFL could devolve into a series of 12-hour bocce matches and I would still watch it. More importantly, I would still DEFEND it from annoying fartsniffers and NBA stans who take every opportunity to bitch about the NFL being bad. Football is Family for me in the sense that I believe that only people who love the sport, like me, get to complain about it. Everyone else, including half the Deadspin staff, can go gargle toilet water. We square on that? Good.
Because these games have sucked lately. Seattle-Arizona was a bad joke that gets beaten into the ground so hard that it eventually turns the corner and becomes funny at the end. I’m not ready declare this some permanent, ongoing trend. The NFL is like SNL: People have bitched about the quality of product longer than most other people have been alive. There will always be injuries, and there will always be shitty quarterbacks, and there will always be the risk of tuning into a primetime game that ends in a 6-6 tie. When I was a kid, one of the most hyped-up regular season NFL games ever was a 1990 MNF matchup between the Niners and Giants that ended 7-3. It was one of the worst games I ever watched despite the fact that the two teams would later meet in the NFC title game (the Giants then went on to win one of the best Super Bowls ever). Sometimes sports are shitty, and that’s the price of doing business when you’re a fan.
But there’s one obvious, undeniable change in the sport that has affected the quality of play, and that is safety. As much as I like to goof on the NFL for being lax in addressing concussions, the fact is that more players are being removed from games than before because of the concussion protocol. Never mind that this protocol can be flawed and confusing, or that the average NFL team follows protocol directions about as well as a five-year-old does the rules of Monopoly. Players are getting pulled more often, and the players getting pulled are usually the ones playing the most high-profile positions (QB, RB, WR), because those are the players who are most often caught in defenseless positions.
Any time a player gets pulled—regardless of whether or not he’s a superstar—it affects the product you see on the field. Each missing player is a paper cut on the NFL’s bloated body. The competition is at its best when A) The best players are playing and B) Players out on the field know what the fuck they’re doing. So when a guy gets taken out of a game for any reason, not only is the talent pool diluted a touch, but then the guy you send out to replace him is far less likely to have a firm grasp of his assignment (again, I don’t know why NFL teams, still flush with revenue, don’t have multiple coaching units to give backups more reps during game weeks… seems like a decent investment). That means losing a player fucks you on both the front end AND the back.
That has a ripple effect on the rest of the team, and beyond. If one scrub is out there fucking up, other players have to compensate for him, and then THEY get stretched thin, and maybe they get injured in the process. GMs have to scour the waiver wire for bodies. Coaches have to scramble game plans. Fantasy teams get ghosted. And the refs? Holy shit, these refs barely know what’s in the rule book anymore. In its quest to convince us that it is trying to protect players from injury, the NFL has muddled to rulebook to the point where every ref has their own particular strike zone for late hits and head shots. And when the refs are inconsistent, the players are less certain of what they can and cannot do out on the field, which makes them confused, which means they fuck up. No wonder guys are retiring early. It’s chaos out there.
This represents an unsolvable problem for the NFL. I don’t want players to get killed. I don’t want them drooling oatmeal at age 50. No one does. But, as we’ve said here before, it’s nearly impossible to legislate violence out of a sport that is inherently violent. It’s uncomfortable to say this, but the NFL viewing product is clearly better when concussed players skip out on the protocol and stagger back onto the field. The NFL used to allow (or, more accurately, encourage) players to do this with impunity, because brain injuries are insidious and do the most damage long after a player has retired, long after his entertainment value has been fully extracted.
That is no longer socially or morally acceptable. I guarantee you that, if the NFL had its druthers, it would just go back to 1975 and pretend concussions and drugs and wife beating didn’t exist. But they can’t do that, and so the only way to make games both safer and more watchable is to change the sport at such a fundamental level that it may not even be football anymore. And they’ll never do that because they’d rather lose casual fans than diehards like me, the people who will tune in no matter how warped and garbled the product may be. If it’s a choice between no football and mildly safer (but terrible) football, I already know what choice I’m making. And the NFL knows it, too.
Good article from Magary though.....
http://deadspin.com/making-football-safer-makes-it-worse-1788277112
Yes, this is another “What’s wrong with football?” post, but before I go there, let me just state up front that the NFL could devolve into a series of 12-hour bocce matches and I would still watch it. More importantly, I would still DEFEND it from annoying fartsniffers and NBA stans who take every opportunity to bitch about the NFL being bad. Football is Family for me in the sense that I believe that only people who love the sport, like me, get to complain about it. Everyone else, including half the Deadspin staff, can go gargle toilet water. We square on that? Good.
Because these games have sucked lately. Seattle-Arizona was a bad joke that gets beaten into the ground so hard that it eventually turns the corner and becomes funny at the end. I’m not ready declare this some permanent, ongoing trend. The NFL is like SNL: People have bitched about the quality of product longer than most other people have been alive. There will always be injuries, and there will always be shitty quarterbacks, and there will always be the risk of tuning into a primetime game that ends in a 6-6 tie. When I was a kid, one of the most hyped-up regular season NFL games ever was a 1990 MNF matchup between the Niners and Giants that ended 7-3. It was one of the worst games I ever watched despite the fact that the two teams would later meet in the NFC title game (the Giants then went on to win one of the best Super Bowls ever). Sometimes sports are shitty, and that’s the price of doing business when you’re a fan.
But there’s one obvious, undeniable change in the sport that has affected the quality of play, and that is safety. As much as I like to goof on the NFL for being lax in addressing concussions, the fact is that more players are being removed from games than before because of the concussion protocol. Never mind that this protocol can be flawed and confusing, or that the average NFL team follows protocol directions about as well as a five-year-old does the rules of Monopoly. Players are getting pulled more often, and the players getting pulled are usually the ones playing the most high-profile positions (QB, RB, WR), because those are the players who are most often caught in defenseless positions.
Any time a player gets pulled—regardless of whether or not he’s a superstar—it affects the product you see on the field. Each missing player is a paper cut on the NFL’s bloated body. The competition is at its best when A) The best players are playing and B) Players out on the field know what the fuck they’re doing. So when a guy gets taken out of a game for any reason, not only is the talent pool diluted a touch, but then the guy you send out to replace him is far less likely to have a firm grasp of his assignment (again, I don’t know why NFL teams, still flush with revenue, don’t have multiple coaching units to give backups more reps during game weeks… seems like a decent investment). That means losing a player fucks you on both the front end AND the back.
That has a ripple effect on the rest of the team, and beyond. If one scrub is out there fucking up, other players have to compensate for him, and then THEY get stretched thin, and maybe they get injured in the process. GMs have to scour the waiver wire for bodies. Coaches have to scramble game plans. Fantasy teams get ghosted. And the refs? Holy shit, these refs barely know what’s in the rule book anymore. In its quest to convince us that it is trying to protect players from injury, the NFL has muddled to rulebook to the point where every ref has their own particular strike zone for late hits and head shots. And when the refs are inconsistent, the players are less certain of what they can and cannot do out on the field, which makes them confused, which means they fuck up. No wonder guys are retiring early. It’s chaos out there.
This represents an unsolvable problem for the NFL. I don’t want players to get killed. I don’t want them drooling oatmeal at age 50. No one does. But, as we’ve said here before, it’s nearly impossible to legislate violence out of a sport that is inherently violent. It’s uncomfortable to say this, but the NFL viewing product is clearly better when concussed players skip out on the protocol and stagger back onto the field. The NFL used to allow (or, more accurately, encourage) players to do this with impunity, because brain injuries are insidious and do the most damage long after a player has retired, long after his entertainment value has been fully extracted.
That is no longer socially or morally acceptable. I guarantee you that, if the NFL had its druthers, it would just go back to 1975 and pretend concussions and drugs and wife beating didn’t exist. But they can’t do that, and so the only way to make games both safer and more watchable is to change the sport at such a fundamental level that it may not even be football anymore. And they’ll never do that because they’d rather lose casual fans than diehards like me, the people who will tune in no matter how warped and garbled the product may be. If it’s a choice between no football and mildly safer (but terrible) football, I already know what choice I’m making. And the NFL knows it, too.