Somehow, that isn’t all that comforting to this Redskins fan.
Rugby football does just fine without them. Amazing how that works. :smack:
I stand corrected (with no interest in reviewing.)
If I were to draw up a list of things that I’m concerned about, that list would have to be mighty long before it included a football player choosing to participate in an activity that could result in serious injury/brain damage.
Of course, I was a rugby player myself (2d row), so I could get with the idea of lessening/eliminating pads/helmets.
This stat highlights the fact that the Super Bowl still has been won by only 20 of the 32 teams (prior to the Eagles win, it was 19 of 32). For the last 20 years or so, about every four years a new team joins the club (Bucs in 2002, Saints in 2009, Seahawks in 2013 and Iggles in 2017). Prior to that, there was quite the run of new champions (Broncos 1997, Rams 1999, Ravens 2000, Patriots 2001). Before that, there was a LOOOOOOONG stretch where joining the club was VERY hard (prior to the Broncos, the Giants in 1986).
Of course, as has been noted, the return from five-team divisions to four-team divisions is what made the quoted achievement possible in the first place. Teams to root for now: Lions (haven’t even been IN a championship game since 1957, despite appearing in (and winning!) the first three Playoff Bowls); Browns (the last NFL champions that didn’t play in the Super Bowl (1965), though some might quibble that, official NFL records aside, the Browns franchise moved to Baltimore and this “Browns” team is more like the second version of the Senators); Cardinals (haven’t been champions since 1947, but did make one Super Bowl).
After that, who you want to root to break the jinx is probably dependent upon your loyalties. Do you want the Bills or the Vikings to overcome 0-4 SB records? Do you want the Chargers or the Oilers/Titans to finally return to the championship days (former AFL champs each)? Or do you pity the Falcons, the only other pre-combined-NFL team we haven’t mentioned that hasn’t won a SB? YMMV
Rugby and American Football, while they have some similarities, they are very different sports. The collisions in football are much worse.
My favorite ad was the M&M Danny DeVito. Him asking passersby: “Do you want to eat me?” Good stuff.
Yeah, and rugby has only one official on the field. If he didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.
Whatever the rules of American football re: blocking and such, I imagine that some amount of the violence is due to the feeling of invincibility all the armor provides.
That’s certainly part of it, sure. The use of one’s helmet to ‘spear’ an opposing player, e.g.
Somebody did try to start a no-gear league last year. So far, it appears from the AF7L site (just add .com to that) that they plan to play again this year. They are spread all over the country: 5 teams in Pennsylvania, 7 in New Jersey and 4 in Baltimore. The “7” in the name refers, I think, to the number of players on a team (on the field).
I thought you meant the Lingerie Football League. Which is still in business and does need a TV deal, btw.
No, the Lingerie League has helmets and pads and uniforms that emphasize the décolletage. They need protective gear because women playing contact sports become assholes. I watched a women’s World Cup preliminary game once, and those ladies are nasty on the field. Women do not play mixed regular footie because the men would be terrified of them.
This - girls and women can be a lot uglier and more malicious to each other, in competitive sports, than boys or men are.
Anyway, one last thought about the game itself - don’t know if this was mentioned upthread, but there was clearly a blatant illegal contact by an Eagles DB against a Patriots receiver on the last Hail Mary. That would have been offset by Gronk’s own blatant offensive PI against an Eagles defender, also on the same play. If the penalties offset, would New England have been given one last untimed down?
They’d have replayed the down but with the clock reset to… 9 seconds IIRC.
It would be an untimed down:
But Velocity as I read your post I thought you were going to talk about the brutal hit, blindside, on that Pats receiver after he caught the ball. Who was that, and I hope he is okay. But being okay is only relative — there’s only a certain number of hits to the head before one suffers permanent side effects, and I don’t think there’s any global, uniformly-defined and quantifiable way to define that threshold.
That was Brandin Cooks, and his bell is still ringing. No question that if it were an NCAA game the officials would have called targeting.
There was no PI on either side because the players making contact were going for the ball. We have seen that repeatedly in the regular season. PI is called if one player is going for another player, but if they look for the ball (as in, might be trying to deflect or pick it), it becomes incidental contact. That was what happened here.
The Eagles DB decked the Patriots WR before the ball was even thrown, and Gronk wasn’t even looking at the ball when he shoved an Eagles defender.
And with 10 other players clustered around the ball’s arrival, jockeying for position in a manic endgame of 500, that’s why you don’t throw the flag there unless it’s ridiculously blatant. IIRC pass interference calls on Hail Mary’s are very rare.