Pulling back from the NFL hype

It was a typical NFL postgame show in every respect: a duo of irritatingly excited announcers yelling over seizure-inducing graphics and hammering background music meant to dramatize every single piece of on-the-field action.

It’s effective for some, I guess, but there was something about its abrasive, P.T. Barnum-style gaudiness that made me groan out loud and turn off the television. I mean, it was only preseason, and there’s not one piece of those four games that’s worth a single $14 beer at "Insert Corporate Name Here" Stadium.

That was my moment of epiphany, one might say, my "night of fire" where I realized that the National Football League of 2013, that $9 billion-a-year megalomaniacal conglomerate, is just a far different entity, with far different goals, than the thing I grew up with in the 80s and 90s.

It was fairly pure back then. Few stadiums had domes, and snow was a permanent fixture on many a winter field as games went on in temperatures that caused whistles to freeze to referees’ lips. It was about winning, not statistics, and there weren’t a whole lot of rules.

You could hit — God, you could hit — and it was a rough-and-tumble game played by unrefined men.

Now, it’s not just a game. Every Sunday is an event akin to "The Running Man" where society shuts down, the streets are Christmas-morning bare, and every male between the ages of just-born and not-quite-dead refuses to budge from in front of their television.

Then there’s others who don’t really care about the sport, but are involved in fantasy football, and so they watch also, splitting their time between leering at the TV and compulsively checking their phones for scoring updates.

I admit that I’m a part of that particular problem, as I’m in a fantasy league that I do enjoy. But even I think that this Dungeons and Dragons for ex-jocks has created a sort of bizarre subculture filled with "writers" who understand statistics but not sports and commentators who judge a player’s value only on the amount of touchdowns he throws, not the number of games he wins.

And through all of this, there’s the NFL itself, which insists on tweaking and twisting the rules every few years to pull pro football further and further from its violent past. They say the changes are in the name of "player safety," but like any other business, it’s about protecting investments.

Eventually, I assume, it will either abolish defenses altogether (maybe replacing them with cardboard cutouts of Ronnie Lott, who would never survive in the tender NFL of today) or move to a flag-football system that’s played on a field of soft, down-filled pillows built under a rainbow.

But even with the awful mutations of the last 15 years, and the aggravating, all-encompassing fantasy craze, I still love this game. It’s dramatic and (when the league can’t help it) unforgivingly brutal, and it can still create those beautiful moments that only football can.

The older I get, though, the more I’m drawn to sports like boxing and baseball that have maintained their fundamental character a bit better and seem to revel in the fact that, yes, they’re not made for TV, but no, they’re not going to change it, and they’re sorry if you don’t like it but you can always watch something else.

The NFL, like any jilted lover, will move on, whether or not I (or any other disenchanted fans) choose to follow it. After all, when you’re making that much money, you don’t need to listen to anybody, and that league proves over and over that it will do what it wants, regardless of how its faithful feel.

Maybe it’s for the best, though. The memories have been great but the glory days have passed, and nothing upsets me more than watching the slow decline of a once-great thing.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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Technorati Tags: NFL, Football, Fantasy Football

Tearing out the NFL's violent heart

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2012  

BY STEVE JANOSKI

‘At the very heart of that physicality is the savage hitting that goes on, and those of us that played at any level knew exactly what we were getting into.’



As with most awful things, it started slowly: a rule change here, an increase in the penalty yardage there.

Sure, there were reasons for some; as players began mutating from normal men to the behemoths that take the field now, the hits got harder, the injuries, more vicious and frequent.

But it seems like in the 1990s, some great movement began to occur in the NFL that started moving football away from its blue collar roots of leather helmets and open playing fields and into the white collar arena where the number of luxury boxes became far more important than who could afford the games.

More domes began to appear, sheltering players and fans alike from the elements, and a huge wildcard — the weather — was eliminated.

And the rules began to change as well to mirror this transition and, eager to protect the million-dollar players who no longer need jobs in the off-season to support their families, the NFL began instituting rules that are slowly robbing the game of the things that made it great.

Rules have been introduced stripping defensive players of their ability to go anywhere near certain offensive players, such as the infamous "roughing the passer" rule, which declares that even the slightest touch from a defensive player could shatter a fragile quarterback, a la the liquid-nitrogen frozen T-1000 in the 1991 classic "Terminator 2."

Players must watch when and where they hit, horse-collar tackles are banned (for what reason?), and four-man wedges on a kickoff are no longer allowed. Fines for plays deemed out of line are as common as a Miami rainstorm.

At this point, the league should look to rename itself the National For the Love of God Don’t Hit Me League.

Again, I understand why these things are done. They slant the game toward more explosive offenses, which is good to attract fans, and protects prized players that earn mountains of cash for the league through their endorsements and the like.

But this year, the league has taken it one step too far, and has truly thrown down the gauntlet with their "defenseless player" rules, which state that a foul is committed if a player "initiates unnecessary contact against a player who is in a defenseless posture."

I’ve seen this penalty called a number of times this year, mostly on defensive backs or linebackers who level some poor receiver sent over the middle on a route that he generally knows will likely have a painful ending if the ball comes his way.

As a former receiver in my younger days, I realize the genesis of this rule. Some of the hits taken while going over the middle, even in practice, were some of the most obscenely brutal because inevitably, you were looking for the ball and not the linebacker coming to lay you down.

But in that way, it was also a mark of honor. If someone said that you were "willing to go over the middle," it meant that you had stones, you could take a hit, and that most importantly, you weren’t scared. You were tough.

This rule totally nullifies the need for that toughness, and soon I expect to see all manners of players shying away from laying big hits for fear of seeing that cursed yellow rag fly through the air afterwards.

Football has always been amongst the hardest games because of the pure physicality needed to survive it; that’s what’s drawn many of us fans to it, and what keeps us watching.

At the very heart of that physicality is the savage hitting that goes on, and those of us that played at any level knew exactly what we were getting into.

There was always the chance that sometimes you’d get whacked so hard that you’d see double for a couple of minutes, or your head would hurt for a couple days, but that, simply put, was the price of admission.

Don’t like it?

Find another game where there was no hitting. There were plenty of sports for the weaker of heart.

By the time a man reaches the NFL, though, those with no heart have been weeded out already, and those that step onto that field are as hard as coffin nails.

But if this is the direction that the NFL is truly headed, where they sacrifice the integrity of the game in order to protect their investments and people’s fantasy football players, they may as well ban tackling altogether give the guys pillows to hit each other with.

Sure, they may attract a different audience then… but they’ll probably make more money. And for the NFL execs, that’ll be reason enough.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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