New Orleans Whatsits -v- San Diego Thingies.
85,000 people at this game?
What is the matter with them, don’t they know Spurs:smack: are playing at home and that West Spam are playing the Arse.
Ah well, I guess there’s no accounting for taste altho’ I strongly suspect a goodly percentage of those spectators are full of lunchtime cheer;)
Hmmph…drunken soccer fans or not, they have a singer that sang the wrong words to My Country 'Tis of Thee
Just as a matter of interest. Has any US football player ever been so seriously injured that his career has been ended.
I find it a bit hard to understand how they can get badly injured with all the padding/helmets and stuff they wear
Quite a few, including:
Joe Theisman
The Theisman injury is probably on Youtube somewhere. You don’t really want to see it.
If it’s any consolation; the singer of our anthem was shit too. You could tell the crowd wanted to sing along but she went and changed the tempo of the song, making it impossible to follow. I hate it when people do that.
I noticed that right away. I was kinda glad to learn that lousy singers with an overinflated ego can ruin a much easier melody too.
As for the game, field looks better than last year, but I still don’t think it’s really right for football.
Thank you and you’re quite right. Having read about Theismans injury I certainly have no desire to see it
Another question. What sort of money do these US footballers earn. Is it comparable to English footballers
Bah…it should be Darryl Stingley. I plead guilty to one count of cereberal flatulence.
I saw Theisman’s injury at the time, and still shudder to think about it.
Is it me, or is there absolutely no atmosphere at these London games? Maybe it’s just watching it on the BBC, it doesn’t feel right. They keep having to fill in for the commercial breaks. But how can an English crowds get truly worked up about San Diego v. New Orleans?
Ex-pats (no, not that kind), US military, people on vacation…I get your point though.
I thought it’d be mostly expat Americans, but it seems a lot of those there knew the words to that song.
As regards padding, I think they feel they can hit harder with them on. Although some of career-ending injuries aren’t the result of a direct hit - they happen when someone moves the wrong way or hits a bad bit of ground. A fair number of stadiums in the US use an artificial surface (although those have improved with respect to injuries).
I don’t know what your guys make…the NFL has a salary cap, which limits the total amount any team can pay to its players. This year, it’s about $116 million per team for the year.
The league minimum salary for a rookie was about $285K in 2007. Star players make millions per year.
Drew Brees, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, has a deal worth $60 million over 6 years.
The body armor really only mitigates the bruising that results from all the impacts - and those impacts are frequently much more severe than those in rugby due to the design of the game. There’s no equivalent in rugby to a receiver coming across the middle and getting leveled by an inside linebacker. But serious injuries are more typically major joint damage and broken limbs that occur when multiple bodies collide from different directions and bodily extremities are forced into positions they weren’t ever meant to be in. A 300lb body running at top speed isn’t going to be stopped by a guy’s knee, and if the tacklee is simultaneously hit from the opposite direction at the shoulder, and his foot is planted…well, that’s a broken leg or a badly blown out knee. Theisman wasn’t hit at speed, but it was a similar situation. (Note: you don’t necessarily want to click on that link.)
Another category of serious injuries are concussions. Even with the helmets, concussions are sufficiently common that players can suffer from them repeatedly, and concussions are a sort of cumulative thing that can result in serious issues after a while. I believe there was a prominent quarterback recently who had to retire because of repeated concussions, but I can’t think who it was off the top of my head.
The game is simply dangerous. In 1905 (before much protective gear was in common use) there were 19 fatalities and Teddy Roosevelt threatened to ban the game if changes weren’t made. This led to the legalization of forward passes and formation rules designed to reduce high speed collisions - 7 men must line up at the line of scrimmage rather than behind it, and so hit each other after one step instead of at full speed.
The NFL has lots of 270 pound men who could give olympic sprinters a decent race - there are plenty of gruesome injuries even with the padding. Although possibly the padding increases the number of torn ligament type injuries than crushed bones type injuries.
Troy Aikman retired in 2001 after his suffering his 10th career concussion the previous season. Probably a few other guys with similar situations…
Yeah, it’s pretty quiet in there, although I suppose a 3-3 game going into the 2nd quarter perhaps isn’t the ideal type of match for this sort of thing. Neophytes want to see scoring; you need to have watched a sport for a while to appreciate close matches. That said, three TDs don’t seem to have changed things much (I really should write these posts faster). Another thing to take into account is that this is an absolutely huge ticket to have, meaning a whole bunch of 'em will have ended up in the hands of corporates, with all the effect on atmosphere that entails. Will ask my housemates (who have tickets) whether it really seemed that quiet in the stadium, or whether it’s just the broadcast sound.
On pay, the top paid Prem footballers are making about £130k a week (for some reason it’s always quoted per week), which at current rates works out to about $10.5m a year. I’d hazard a guess that the average is around £20k per week, or about £1.5m per year.
Nice to see LaDainian Tomlinson is reserving his best form for we NFL-starved Brits, incidentally. 
Edit: actually I think my average pay estimate is rubbish. Will research.
Whatever happened to The Fridge?
Sorry but I forget his real name
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I thought it’d be mostly expat Americans, but it seems a lot of those there knew the words to that song.
FWIW a lot of Brits know the words to The Star Spangled Banner
Adults that is, not the sprogs who have great difficulty remembering their names
Okay, The Independent says the average Prem footballer earned £676k per year in 2006, or just over $1m. I wasn’t too far out, then.
Upon googling around a bit I believe I was thinking of Steve Young, but it’s not hard to find other names as well.