Tampa Bay’s quarterback Chris Simms was hammered so hard in today’s game with the Carolina Panthers that he had to be hospitalized and have his spleen removed. Ouch.
Wimpy? I’ve never heard it called wimpy.
The phrase I recall was “nasty, brutish, and short.”
You’re thinking of life. NFL football is many things, but with an average game taking 3 1/2 hours to play, short isn’t one of them.
Oh, I have. There is a meme among certain admirers of sports such as soccer (yes, I know.) and rugby that the pads American football players wear makes it a wimpy game. Search the archives. There have been anumber of threads about this over the years.
I hear it called wimpy by Australians and others often. A typical comment is that they wear all that padding and there is so much down time between plays.
Yep, and as I’ve said (and will continue to say) in those threads: the naysayers just don’t get it. The pads and helmet are only there so the players can hit each other harder. Without them, you’d see a lot more cuts and bruises, and a lot fewer breaks, tears, splenectomies, paralyses, deaths, etc. It’s a much more violent game with all that armor on.
Damn me if that hasn’t got “Law Of Unintended Consequences” written all over it.
Yep, we’ve been through this all before. A century ago, American football and rugby both had horrific injury rates. One sport decided to act by increasing player protection, the other gradually changed the sport so that it can be played with a decent safety level without padding. Both still see occassional severe injuries.
www.injuryresearch.bc.ca reports that there are approximately three times more injuries in rugby than in American Football or Football so I would say that all the padding reduces the chance of injury but that doesn’t make it a wimpy sport by any stretch of the imagination.
I was at a U. of Michigan game a couple of weeks ago, and in the program was a story about the 1905 (or so) UM football team. It said that the forward pass was introduced that year to make the game less dangerous for the players. The previous NCAA season had been host to, IIRC, 15 deaths and many more serious injuries.
I can’t speak for rugby or soccer players, but the fact is professional American football players are complete freaks of nature. A lot of these guys are somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 pounds and can run 40 yards in under five seconds (er…not sure what that equates to in the metric system). I know I’d want at least a helmet if one of them was trying to knock me down.
Rugby players are almost as freakish - the extremes are people such as Jonah Lomu, who weighed in at nearly 300 pounds and could do 100m in under eleven seconds. Soccerball, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily rely on physical presence, and short & slight players abound - a quick search shows that Wayne Rooney is five foot ten, and Michael Owen two inches shorter still.
How did Rugby change?
There’s an offensive lineman on the University of Alabama’s college team, a true Freshman, who weighs in at 350 pounds and runs the 40 yard dash in under 5 seconds.
Heh. In the Patriots game yesterday when the Pats went to the no-huddle offense (essentially eliminating the down time between plays) one of the Denver players was so wrung out he threw up on the field, on live national TV.
Don’t click if you’re squeamish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i20JldOtbE0
Not only that, but he was only out for two plays. He brought his team back from a 17-0 deficit to take the lead, only to lose when the Panthers kicked a 46 yard field goal with 2 seconds left. That he could perform at such a high level is incomprehensible to me.
Short? NFL games?
Jesus GorillaMan a bit more clarification would have been nice. That was horrible.
ATTENTION EVERYONE: Posh Spice is to be seen in that video.
Yeah, Simms was getting a bad reputation because of his performance thus far this season. I hope his performance in the Panthers game will change some minds, but I fear that people won’t look further than the “L.”
I’ll add that the video linked to by GorillaMan was during the a England World Cup game so was probably watched live by the total US population*2 or 3 at least.
