(10-28-2015 12:21 PM)Wedge Wrote: If anyone thinks that offenses are less entertaining, it might be because of a trend in both college and pro football to emphasize safer pass plays, to find an open receiver on a short route and let him try to get yards after the catch.
I'm sure it drives a lot of older fans nuts (and retired players calling games on TV complain, too) when they see receivers running 4 yard out routes on 3rd-and-8, because they'd rather see old-school QBs like Stabler or Favre chucking up a long pass into double coverage, but they don't complain when the receiver breaks the tackle and turns it into a gain of 20.
I normally agree with your posts Wedge. But, not this one. If you knew the old guys who played in the 50's & 60's you would soon realize that they played, most of them anyway, because they loved it. It wasn't lucrative, it wasn't filled with endorsement money, it didn't have sleek logos and well crafted corporate images for the teams. The old NFL wasn't too far akin from old style professional wrestling, or the spikes first slides of Ty Cobb. The guys who played came from tough backgrounds and played tough, and took nothing for granted.
Like so much of our nation these kids today think only of the money, their image, and think little of the teams or each other. In their selfishness they may possess the physical strength to play but not the character or mental toughness to play selflessly for a cause greater than their own statistics. That's why the "so called" stars don't block downfield, don't sacrifice their bodies for their teammates, and at the slightest sign of pain head out for the career saving MRI.
I submit that the play isn't as good as it once was. In fact it's not even close. But you can't sell that to kids born after 1990.
Yes, the rules have hurt, but it's the nature of the men themselves that has really changed. These guys may be faster, even bigger, and likely stronger, but they are hardly tougher. Toughness is in the mind and their minds have never really known hardship, the kind of poverty that the men of the 50's were born into in the 30's, and most have never known the loss of friends that the 40's and 60's produced in war. Sure they come from some hard situations in life, but they truly hardly compare to traveling West looking for pennies a day with which to buy potatoes.
In short the whole game has changed along with the men who play it. It is controlled, used to produce revenue with every nuance of branding that can be sold from the images of the teams to those of the individual players. All of that must be safeguarded and therein is the loss of the sheer joy of playing, playing for less, playing in tougher climates, harsher field conditions, and with poorer equipment, but playing like hell just to win.
As with baseball, basketball and now football, just to make the show makes you a millionaire, and in that one fact alone there is too much to lose to play the game with the reckless abandon with which it was meant to be played. They are taking the toughness out because they fear what they will lose economically which means the game is not played for the fun of it, but profit. It is not played for the thrill of winning, but for the acquisition of personal gain. And it is not played with the toughness of self sacrifice for winning, but rather out of the fear of losing all the aforementioned.
And that my friend is just half of the truth. The other half is that the kids starting in peewee and moving through the college ranks are less trained in the fundamentals of the game, and have less recognition of what is happening before them in play because they never learned to think through the progression of the game (meaning they were not ever really a student of it), and because colleges are swamped now with these under-trained, under-schooled prima donnas they run the spread with oversimplified schemes made possible by rules against physicality and defensive techniques so that they can light up the score board for a whole generation that can't watch anything for 2 minutes without the need for instant gratification and stimulation, which the last time I checked was a neurological response to impulses rather than to thought and the art of a craft well preformed. And they want to root for a winner, because by proxy it is for themselves, rather than out of love for an idea, an alma mater, or friends. Hence the gross abundance of taunting moronic t shirt fans anywhere you go.
That is why the game has passed me by. I find no glory, honor, or sacrifice in it to make it noble. Just narcissistic endeavors to enrich. Oh, and by the way, the house wins against the spread 85% of the time. In that it is still kind of like professional wrestling.
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OT: NFL Quality of play down
