Hope this doesn't sound like a rant ...

[Bob Gill]

... but maybe it is anyway.

I know I'm in the minority, but I just don't like football as it's played today in the NFL. It really hit me last night during the Rams-Vikings game. I like both of those teams, and I was looking forward to the game, but in the fourth quarter I actually turned it off and switched to a rerun of Password. That doesn't mean I'll never watch another game or anything that drastic, but I find myself with very little interest in these games where the two quarterbacks combine for 800 yards, six or eight touchdowns, 15 incompletions and no interceptions. We get two, three, four games like that each week, and the announcers never tire of talking about what a great game this is.Apparently the general public loves this brand of football, but I'm getting to the point where I have very little tolerance for it.

Baseball reached a similar point 20 years ago in what they now call the steroid era, when guys were hitting 57, 59, 63 home runs and not leading the league. But baseball did something about it, clamping down on steroid use; but the NFL, given the new rules that almost make it illegal to tackle a quarterback, seems intent on making its "product" look more and more like a video game, with pinball-like passing numbers. I don't like where the game is right now, and I sure don't like to think about where it's going.

Well, I have no big conclusion to this. I guess I just wanted to vent, as they say.

[John Maxymuk]

Bob, it's funny you say that. I too looked forward to watching that game, but turned it off before halftime for the same reasons you gave. For that matter, I didn't care much for last year's Super Bowl either. Offense is fun to watch, but not so much when the defense is so hamstrung by one-sided rules that making a defensive stand is nearly impossible. I much prefer more of a mix of offense and defense and hope things evolve back in that direction.

[Jay Z]

Every sport has these issues. Not just football. A lot of it is big money and metrics.

Baseball has longer between each pitch than football has between each play. That's ridiculous. Some people hate the shifts. At least those are interesting to me. The parade of one inning relievers is boring. We all know now there are 10,000 men in the USA that can throw 95 MPH for 15 pitches. We can't remember their names.

Basketball has superstars sitting out regular season games to "rest" because they know their teams can get #1 seeds or make a playoff run anyway.

Football, I don't know how you correct some of it. Turnovers are way down from years ago. That actually holds down scoring a bit. But it's a repeatable skill, and teams and players just spend a lot more time now focusing on not turning the ball over. The easy picks by some moron QB misreading the zone just aren't there any more.

Same with other skills. Kickers, obviously. The toe touch on the sidelines is simply an entry level skill now for a WR. It used to be interesting, now they nail it every single time.

Defensive players are more skilled too. But the NFL doesn't want Brady and Rodgers missing the season due to some hit by a no-name DL player. That's not going to change.

Suggestion time. Move the hashmarks back to where they were? Narrower field? Longer field? Rounder ball? 3 downs? Maybe crack down on the OL? One of the things in the Super Bowl was absolutely no pass rush by either team. There's 25 QBs in the league that can pick apart a defense with no pass rush. A rush, without killing the QB, is still going to affect the QB.

[JuggernautJ]

Suggestion time...

Take the microphones out of the helmets and make the QB and the defensive captain call the plays.

[Bob Gill]

Suggestion time. Move the hashmarks back to where they were?

Yes! I've advocated this one for years. Seems like it would add more variety to the play-calling, if nothing else. And even with the goal posts on the end line, you still might get some difficult angles for closer field goals, which could make them slightly more difficult. And it's simple enough that a lot of people wouldn't even notice it, which is a good point for any rule change. Worth thinking about, anyway.

[JohnTurney]

thought last year Super Bowl sucked. And I don't always want Super Bowl V or X, either. But defense is more hindered than ever and it does make the stats in passing game inflated.

[Reaser]

Agree 100%, Bob. Also agree with Jay Z about there being problems in all sports -- at least all popular U.S. sports.

Only difference is that I still 'have to' watch everything. Even though I literally despise what I'm seeing. Thursday night is a great example, people going crazy about how great of a game it was and the whole time I was extremely disappointed in the game but naturally watched all of it and watched the post-game show and so on.

I'm glad High School football, at least in The Great State of Washington, hasn't completely devolved into the NFL and college football (and most HS ball around the country) ... yet. Still can watch the wing-T against the double wing and see 6-2 defense's and so on. Besides the purity and that people are representing their hometown's -as opposed to the mercenary nature of being recruited, FA, etc- that I can still see something resembling a legitimate style of football is why I love Friday nights and watch numerous HS games from my home state.

Either way, love football, hate modern football but so conditioned after a lifetime, literally what I was doing as a child, of watching football and football shows and so on that I can't and don't think I'd ever be able to stop watching. There are times I think if I was the typical casual football fan how easy it would be to stop watching, not just now but I would have stopped by 2010. It's not like football just got ridiculous, it's been horrible and I post about it year-after-year on these forums, ha.

[JWL]

Suggestion time.

The defensive holding penalties can be cut down. The most annoying play of the season for me to this point was the holding penalty that wiped out a Lions interception towards the end of their Week 2 game in San Francisco. The hold had nothing to do with the interception. Jimmy Garoppolo didn't even look at the side of the field where the hold occurred. Beyond that, I am not even sure the hold was all that bad. Mind you, I don't have Game Pass and can't look at it over and over again to scrutinize it.

[Reaser]

why I love Friday nights and watch numerous HS games from my home state.

To expand on this, if people don't mind and it doesn't derail what has the makings of a great thread.

I'd say tonight is the most enjoyable night of football conversation I've had in years. From about 4pm to midnight it was non-stop WA HS football; the games as they were currently happening, past games, HS stadium history, and so on. With a group convo of 3 former HS teammates, another guy who played at another area school, my uncle who was at yet another area school, my cousin (a HS cheerleader who was giving us updates from the game she was at), a former HS coach at another area school and a former player from a different part of the state that covers HS football now.

It was great, and no we didn't talk about our glory days (though most played college football and were good in HS and/or on good HS teams) but we talked about 1960's WA HS football stadiums, how many seniors were starting on a random 1961 team, who was in attendance at what 1990's state playoff games, players we saw as kids, current HS HC's we played against in HS, all the while everyone was either physically at a different HS game from everyone else or at home streaming various HS games (myself with 3 TV's watching 3 different games) and there was huge games statewide and from our home area tonight -including a classic #1 v. #3 game that was decided with 15 seconds to go- so we had all the updates going and best of all, to cap the night off I got a lot of props for my pregame prediction of a final score of 63-0 and the final score of that game ended up 63-0 -- that's incredibly harder to predict as an exact score than it reads. We even had a former teammate who now lives in MN chime in with the HS game he was at which was actually at the Vikings practice facility and he was sending photos (that place looks amazing and props to them for hosting HS games. Similar to "The Star" hosting HS football.) It was a blast and roughly 8 hours of what being a football fan should be about.

In context, I can't think of the same type of day/night conversations happening in the NFL now. Put the same group together -we all watch every level of football as overall football fans do- and we'd have the same great conversations going about the PAST, but we would have zero excitement about the games we were all currently watching and it's pretty predictable the entire conversation would eventually devolve into "the NFL is so [bleeping] soft now!" So, instead of having fun about talking about watching the Seahawks in the Kingdome, or when I got Dave Krieg's autograph or how Kassulke has one of my favorite hits of all-time because I love watching QB's get frontsided, we'd just be talking about how bad (understatement) the quality of the NFL is now, and the asinine penalties, and the inane coverage, and meaningless and inflated statistics, and so on.

That's the difference, to me.

[bachslunch]

[quote="Bob Gill”]Baseball reached a similar point 20 years ago in what they now call the steroid era, when guys were hitting 57, 59, 63 home runs and not leading the league. But baseball did something about it, clamping down on steroid use; but the NFL, given the new rules that almost make it illegal to tackle a quarterback, seems intent on making its "product" look more and more like a video game, with pinball-like passing numbers. I don't like where the game is right now, and I sure don't like to think about where it's going.[/quote]

Though interestingly enough, baseball was at a major height of popularity during the Steroid Era, especially because of the amount of offense generated. Since then, there have been all kinds of complaints about how badly baseball needs fixing, which I’m not convinced of. It’s by nature a slow paced game, and that’s fine by me. I’m not sure clamping down on PED use actually made the game more popular, though it may have been necessary.

Where pro football is headed is an interesting question. There’s no question that fhe NFL considers losing its marquee players (read QBs) to serious injury bad for business, and the Darryl Stingley type hits that used to happen don’t make the league look good. And the threat of concussion lawsuits won’t go away, either. The NFL seems to be trying hard to address these issues, and the result is perhaps not surprisingly an increase in offense. Given that football (like boxing) is an inherently violent sport, it’s also going to take time, tweaking, and patience to find a solution that balances the various issues. We’re in the middle of growing pains on this issue, but hopefully things will get figured out.