I can understand why basketball players are tall and jockies are small but… What is it about having no neck that makes one more suitible for the sport of football?
Someone said “It’s makes it harder to get your head ripped off” but I doubt this evolutionary explaination is all there is to it.
I would think that having no neck would be quite a detriment - having your head firmly anchored to your torso would prevent you from being able to move your head around to see what’s going around and all.
It’s advantageous for football players to have significant amounts of muscle mass (as our high-school football coach used to say, “dancing is a contact sport - football is a collision sport”), and that would presumably include muscles around the neck and shoulder. I would assume that having significant shoulder muscle would specifically be an advantage for blocking/tackling.
Football linemen have sizeable necks. It’s just that their shoulders are so big that everything sort of blends together in to one big unrecognizable mass of muscle.
Receivers and quarterbacks tend to have necks. Look at Peyton Manning sometime.
You get hit a lot in football, and sometimes fall on your head (think of how frequently you see, say, a running back dive over the goal line and land on the point of his helmet, or otherwise do an inadvertent somersault and land head first). Having strong neck muscles is a very good thing when your head gets slammed around; in fact, one of the football drills I remember consisted of lying on the ground with arched back and propping yourself up by the back/top of your head, then sort of swirling your head around – gives you a headache, but builds the neck muscles pretty well. And, as BobT implied, the same types of exercise that tend to build shoulder/back muscles tend to work the neck as well.
One of the functions of muscle is to act as a shock absorber, just like the shocks on your car. Football players have lots of neck muscle because that makes it less likely that they’ll get a neck injury. You see the same sort of thing in a skier’s calves.