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My only football diary ever …
Like most fans, I had no rooting interest in this Super Bowl, and couldn’t even figure out my usual, ‘cheer for the underdog’ deal, because both teams were underdogs/favorites depending on where you looked. But, I started to cheer for the Pats because the rest of my family was cheering for the Giants, and because New England became the dog by getting down early by 9.
But then Tom Brady got into a groove, and I realized, “This is what I’m watching for, guys at the top of their game, showing how beautifully this game can be played.” For a stretch, he was playing quarterback as well as anyone ever has in a Super Bowl, and he set a record for most completions in a row, 16.
But then it was over. Justin Tuck sacked Brady, Brady landing hard on his already injured left shoulder. Pre-sack, Alex Speier reports, he was 20-24, 201 yards, 2 touchdowns, 0 interceptions, and an absurd 141.9 QB rating. Post-sack, Brady went 7-16 (excluding a clock-killing spike on the final drive), 75 yards, 0 TDs, 1 interception, and a 32.0 QB rating.
Admittedly, injuries are part of the game, but injuries to the NFL’s transcendent stars damages the attractiveness of the game, doesn’t it? Well, apparently not, or at least not if you read the mainstream sports press, which hardly has commented on the damage done to the game by Brady’s injury. Admittedly, though, the injury evened things up between the Giants and Pats, and likely led to the on-edge game finale, which featured an excellent catch by Mario Manningham. I just wanted to see an epic battle between two of the game’s greatest quarterbacks playing at their best, and did start to see that, but then it was taken away.
The problem the NFL has is that the players have become too large and fast, so the violence that results causes too many injuries to the somewhat smaller high-skill athletes. You can’t legislate away speed, so the way to solve the problem is to legislate weight limits.
First of all, no one under any circumstances over 300 pounds. The league did fine for several decades without 300+ pound athletes, so what is the point of the fat guys? (A ban on 300+ will have the subordinate effect of improving the health of countless NFL and NFL-wanna-be athletes.)
Secondly, certain heights would have weight limits, and there would be two classes of big and normal players, with only four or five of the ‘big’ athletes allowed on the field. The controlling idea is to make player weights much more similar to what they were in the 1960s, when most linebackers were 210 to 230 pounds and Dick Butkus was a huge one at 6’3″ 245, and Merlin Olsen a man-mountain lineman at 6’5″ 270.
Not that the preceding would solve all problems with the oversized and therefore excessively injury-prone NFL. In fact, it might not even solve the Justin Tuck ‘problem’. The man was nicknamed ‘The Freak‘ by his Notre Dame classmates for his combination of speed, athleticism and size. But I hope it would downsize the problem. Tuck, 6’5″, weighed 256 when he was drafted in 2005 but now weighs 274 (according to Wikipedia). It would’ve been nice if NFL regulations had discouraged Tuck from putting on pounds, but I’m not saying 18 pounds would’ve prevented Brady from reinjuring his shoulder.
But, in general, moving toward lower weights, not only among linemen but also among linebackers, edge rushers, tight ends and running backs, would reduce injuries, which is a good thing in itself. And a good thing because the main entertainers, the high-skill players, will get injured less often and less severely. And, hey, what are the drawbacks? None as far as I can see.
16 Comments
No drawbacks?
How about the discrimination lawsuits from players who are cut because they are too big?
You want to protect quarterbacks more? Simple: go back to the rules of the 70′s and 80′s where receivers had to be good to get open because the defensive backs could ride them all over the field. (No five-year “chuck” zone limitations.) Then you get back to offenses where running the ball is important.
It took something like 45 years for Dan Marino to become the first QB to pass for more than 5,000 yards in a season. His record stood 19 years until this year when Drew Brees broke it. But this year there were three other QB’s who also passed for more than 5,000 yards, plus a couple in preceding seasons. It’s not the National FOOTball League anymore, it’s the National AIRball League. Thus QB’s have become disproportionately and excessively vital, plus they’re now consistently attempting 40, 50, even 60 or 70 passes a game. The law of statistical probability says that the more attempts, the more opportunities to get injured.
Plus another part of your analysis is flawed. The game turned on five plays, only one of which might — MIGHT — have been influenced by the injury to Brady’s NON-throwing shoulder:
1. The safety. Absent those two points the Pats would have been playing for FG position at the end of the game. Brady may have lost a chance to win the SB on his very first place.
2. The first fumble. Pats recover, Giants don’t score the Cruz TD. Pats win.
3. The second fumble. Pats don’t have 12 men on the field, NY doesn’t add that field goal. Again, Pats playing to win with a FG at the end.
4. Welker’s drop. This is the one play where Brady’s injury MIGHT have affected his throw to the left, but the ball was still catchable, esp. for a receiver as consistent and reliable as Welker. You could see by Welker’s reaction and that off the Pats D on the bench that they knew the drop might end up costing them the game.
5. Belichick’s decision to challenge the Manningham catch. If he doesn’t challenge the extra time out gives the Pats another chance to stop the clock and probably gives them another 20-45 seconds on the clock after the Giants’ last score.
Do yourself a favor: don’t write any more football diaries.
I enjoyed your post. Glad you did!
No. All such lawsuits would be laughed out of court. There would be the obvious danger of that size players hurtling themselves at each other, so the discrimination would be considered reasonable, weight not being a protected class …
None of your other ‘criticisms’ is about what is written in my diary. For example, I didn’t imply or say that the game turned on one play, I said that play ruined the quality of the game for me. Also, I write that I want to protect all skill position players, not just quarterbacks. Running backs, the (second?) most entertaining football players, have remarkably short careers.
Ad hominem attacks aren’t good for your soul. Anyway, if you have your first legally well-informed and/or on-target criticism, please speak up.
You want to improve the game?
Here’s a few suggestions:
1. Take off all the equipment.
2. Disallow forward passing.
3. Only the person holding the ball can be touched by the opposition.
There is a game like this. It has much less injuries.
There are many injuries in football that have nothing to do with the size of the players involved. The Giants lost two tight ends because they landed wrong. Landing wrong is not necessarily related to the size of the tackling. Often a player on offense is tackled by someone his own size, e.g. running back and linebacker, or wr and cb, but lands in the wrong position. Brady got hit because the Giants line were starting to get to him again. In fact, that is why he wound up under the pile.
I think that if you limit the size of the players, you will also have to limit the speed. Except for a few, Jim Brown immediately comes to mind, the players of the bygone eras couldn’t play with the players of today. When the Jets played the Broncos in Denver this year, their best db more or less got out of the way of Tim Tebow who was running with the ball. In this case the qb was bigger and stronger than the db. Many of the qbs are as big and strong as the linemen of whom you speak.
“2.” is American football at its most beautiful. But taking off all the equipment seems like a great idea, actually. In particular, the hard plastic all has to go.
I don’t want to put severe limits on the size, just get it back to how it was in the 1960s. Anyway, of course there are multiple causes of injuries. But sometimes players “injure themselves,” their knees and ankles, in part because they weigh so much and their knees and ankles can’t handle the weight.
The catalyst for this diary is that the Super Bowl lost one of its key sources of entertainment when that one hit turned Brady from a magical to an average quarterback. Significant injuries to skill players are quite common — Peyton Manning, Jay Cutler — and they make football less entertaining, in my humble opinion. I don’t see how reducing player weights would reduce entertainment value at all.
I’m not sure that the injury was totally the reason Brady’s passing went down. The Giant (no pun) line was after him. You seem to assume that Brady was going to continue on his record setting pace, but that is why it was record setting. The Giants caused the grounding penalty on the first play because he was under pressure. For a short time the Patriots’s line was providing good protection and the Giants were scrambling to redo their pass defense. Justin Tuck started to get to Brady again, that’s why he was tackled. But, injured or not, qbs have thrown behind the receiver before and will again. Nobody noted a real change in Brady’s motion post tackle and Branch and Hernandez dropped two good passes that were post the tackle. The final series did not turn on his possible injury: the Giants got after him in a big way, and the “Hail Mary” was a well thrown ball that almost gave them the victory.
I guess that I am one that doesn’t want to turn back the clock in sports. My favorite game is tennis. Very few of the past players could play with the current top twenty men or women. The players are bigger and stronger and hit so much harder. Even if you gave the oldtimers the same training and equipment, they would be hard pressed to win. Look at some of the past champions. They were great in their era, but similar sized players now days have trouble staying on the court with the big kids, again both men and women. There was a time when a player taller than 6’2″ and weighing over 200lbs was actually at a disadvantage. Those days are long gone. In all the sports they just have to cope with what is.
You are obviously not very well acquainted with court rulings involving pro sports, or employment in general. The right to make a living is paramount. You can’t penalize someone for being “too good”. Nor can you penalize them for doing something that “might” be injurious to their own health, or to someone else’s. Their is obvious danger in race car drivers tangling with each other at 200 mph, in ski aerialists doing stunts, etc. Boxing, wrestling, and MMA have weight classes to even things up, but there is still a heavyweight division with no weight limit. You ban players over a certain size in the NFL, there is NO PLACE ELSE for them to practice their profession.
“I don’t want to put severe limits on the size, just get it back to how it was in the 1960s. ”
There were just as many serious injuries in the sixties as there are now. maybe more.
No, the right to personal safety, in this case a very obvious and easy case to make, can trump what you describe as the “right to make a living.” In fact what you’d be defending is the right to make a living and not have to lose a few pounds (that might hurt somebody when you inevitably fall on them) in order to do so. It is not a great burdensome (in legal and common sense terms) to ask a guy 6’5″ 330, say, to get down to 6’5″ 280 or 290.
I think the football experts disagree with you on that. I thought he had relatively good pass protection in the second half. He was just a little bit but enough off, and experts say it’s because the left shoulder is importantly involved when you throw passes, especially long ones, with your right.
Even if there were, and I don’t think either of us have the facts, I assume the vast improvement in protective equipment, which needs to improve even further, would result in far less severe (and minor) injuries than in the past, if size came down. What’s the downside?