Wow. You aren't one to overdramatize, but you went way WAY overboard here. When has any NFL player dropped dead on the field? We've been trending toward changing the game for safety and now you think if we don't go even further, we'll have "every year or two a few guys drop dead on the field"??? What?!? Ease off the bong there, man.UOK wrote:Let me simply say that the title of this thread pisses me off. This is not the end of anything. It's not even the beginning of the end of anything.
All this "I watched football because it was a man's game, brutal and violent and people were tough! Now society's all soft and so is this pussified league! And now, NOW they're making goddamn rules saying you can't hit each other!? Rabble rabble rabble rabble, etc."
C'mon. I get it - football used to be a lot less of a mess, and the players were far less protected than they are now, but the sport isn't dead just because there are rules in place to sculpt the game into something that won't result in players having dementia when they're 35 and killing themselves at 45. They want players to be available for the fans to enjoy on TV and in person, but not at the expense of risking their bodily functions and quality of life.
The romance of football is partially the bodily sacrifice these guys make, sure, and the brute violence and physicality is special, but I don't want the NFL to devolve into a reckless game where every year or two a few guys drop dead on the field because it's a "man's game," and a week after a player's inducted into the Hall of Fame he blows his head off in his apartment.
This is a recipe for potential disaster. And by disaster I mean the NFL may have crossed the threshhold of starting to drive fans away by changing the game in ways that make even more regular good football plays into penalties. Of course, the determining factor is how the officials actually call it.
But by the word of the rule, lowering your body to prepare for impact... which biomechanically results in the head lowering... followed by a hit where the helmet makes first contact... leading with the head is the only way to actually run effectively... against a high speed target which may be changing direction at the time of contact... should lead to many such offenses.
Since we'd all anticipate that the NFL doesn't want to turn the game into a penalty fest, this will result in the letter of the law not being followed in many cases, but then followed in others... Without opportunity for criticism since it follows the letter of the law... This could very well end up being even worse than the catch rule, where the same action gets flagged in some cases but not in others and players end up confused as to what they can and can't do, in actions which conflicts with their historical penalty free play and their body's biomechanical nature.
