*Poll* Is the NFL hurting the entertainment value of the game?

But, IMO, most of the changes are necessary. When you read the horror stories about concussion injuries and the effects of head trauma on NFL players after their playing days, it makes you much less angry about the BS late hit penalties you sometimes see. I (like most people) love seeing a nice hard hit, but not if it’s going to give someone long-term brain damage or anything like that.

That being said, some of the changes the NFL is making are kind of overkill. When a defender clearly goes in with his head and hits the helmet of another player in attempt to knock them out, throw the flag. However, flags should not be thrown in the case of incidental contact. That is asking way too much of the defenders. In today’s NFL, if a player goes in for a wrap-up tackle and their helmet just HAPPENS to touch the other player, it’s a flag. Give me a break. And the protection of quarterbacks is absurd. Guys are trying to put their hands up at the LOS to block passes or the QBs field of vision, and they get 15 if their fingers even nick the QBs helmet? Ridiculous. I would hope the NFLs gear is good enough to protect a player against another man’s fingers.

5 Years ago ESPN was actually marketing the big hits with their Jacked Up! segments every Monday night. More recently than that bloggers have found the NFL shop selling framed pictures of hits that drew fines for the players in the picture. Its just a matter of what they can make money with. The QB position is what the majority of fans find the most exciting these days, and that’s the position the NFL can make the most money off of. Get too rough with the star of the show and that’s going to be trouble, but when somebody like Pierre Thomas goes completely limp after a helmet to helmet hit….that’s good clean football. Concussions are only bad for QBs or else they would be protecting everybody, right?

Football has everything that any other sport has—grace, speed, strategy—plus the element of violence. It’s almost like team wrestling on a large field, where the object is to escape.

I think the biggest mistake the NFL is making now is increasing the number of judgment calls by officials. They should be doing the exact opposite—loosening the rules up so that the game is decided by the players, not the referree. Doing away with force-outs on passes was a good first step, but they’ve got to take it further (eliminating the tuck rule should be next).

see where i’m headed..?

That’s what takes my entertainment value down.

But, the rules are too difficult to call on the field. Too much of what happens on the field is wrongly called – which usually hurts the defensive team – but then nothing can be done about it after the fact. They can’t take back the penalty and replay the game. Additionally, there are plenty of missed calls (like the no call on the hit on PT in the game against SF) that may end up in a fine or suspension afterwards, but does nothing for the offensive team that should have earned 15 yards and a 1st down (by the letter of the law). IMO, they need to come up with rules that can be rightly hashed out on the field, or do away with the rules entirely. I’m all for player safety, but I think better equipment can do as much or more than trying to prevent these hits. I don’t think players really think that quickly on the field, and many of these hits are unintentional and unpreventable because this game has become so fast.

The popularity of the sport seems to be based more on scoring than violence. Thus, the rule changes are actually increasing the popularity of the sport. Scoring is up, violence is down, and the popularity of the sport is at an all time high and growing. You might want to change your thesis. How are you going to defend any thesis that argues the NFL is losing popularity?

It’s the damn officials who can’t seem to find a happy medium who are killing it.

I was watching Monica Culpepper’s fake boobs on Survivor tonight and found out that she’s married to Brad Culpepper, former NFL DT. He thinks 300+ players are “unnatural and unsafe”. He weighed 280 in his playing days and since has dropped 100.

I agree. Make a rule of a maximum of 280 pounds and everybody has to weigh in before kickoff. It’s the right thing to do.

Some rules make sense to implement, like the helmet to helmet thing. Others don’t, like the Brady-inspired rules (i.e. breathe on him wrong, they flag you).

Football has violence in it, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be SAFE. It’s a game, and no game is worth permanent brain damage, paralysis and/or death.

I am still very entertained by the NFL.