Why is the NFL not as enjoyable to watch, as it was 25 years ago? (or is it?)

The Game Room
21

Let’s see … 25 years ago, in the 1980s, you had guys manipulating the draft process and forcing trades to get on the teams they wanted (Elway, Kosar), rookies refusing to sign (Jeff George, Kelly Stouffer), guys holding out (Dickerson, Riggins, Mike Singletary), and going to Canada (Cousineau) to get more money, to say nothing of jumping to the USFL for bucks and the 1987 strike that took actual replacement players to end … I feel safe saying the OP’s idea that players were in it for the love of the game to be erroneous. They didn’t change teams much because they weren’t allowed to. Which meant if your team sucked, it was likely to keep sucking for quite awhile.

The game itself is different, and if you’re a fan of low scores and fullback dives, worse. But the trend towards more offense seems to please most people. Personally, I don’t miss the days when half of all passes were incomplete.

The ownership has moved from maybe 30% greedy scuzzballs to 50% … but does anyone think Art Modell, Norman Braman, Carroll Rosenbloom, Robert Irsay or Hugh Culverhouse wouldn’t fit right in with Jerry Jones?

And there are more thuggish and criminal players, but let’s not romanticise the past. A decade ago, 21% of the players in the league had been charged with felonies. Jack Tatum took pride in paralyzing a man with a cheap shot in the preseason. It is violent game played by violent men, and always has been. We just know about it more now.

As for TV …Brent and Irv were grinning buffoons, every bit as asinine as the plastic hairdos and moldy jockstraps ESPN puts on. Mike Mayock and Ron Jaworski beat any analyst allowed near a microphone pre-Madden. Jimmy I’ll give you – I miss the honesty of the media admitting gambling was a big deal. Phyllis George < Erin Andrews.

The multiplicity of networks and games nowadays means I have a much greater chance of watching my team. I used to get excited to see Howard Cosell give them 20 seconds on Monday Night Football. Now I can watch whole games courtesy of the NFL network. And above all, the DVR has utterly transformed my TV experience.
We all have nostalgia, but you gotta be realistic.

22

Exactly. If the OP is in his late 30s, then the “golden days” to which he is referring include the 1982 strike (which wiped out nearly half of the season), and possibly also the 1987 lockout (which wiped out one week’s worth of games, and led to three other games largely played by replacement players). There was a strike in 1974, as well, which wiped out part of the preseason.

I still enjoy the NFL a great deal (and have since I first started following football in the 1970s). What I’ve seen as big changes to the game:

  • I think that, as has been noted, free agency and the ubiquity of information / analysis on TV and online have changed how fans experience the game (and not always for the better).

  • I also think that fantasy football has made a big change for some people, as they cheer for players, rather than teams (and in a fickle way, at that).

  • Players are now full-time players. They make enough money playing football that they don’t have to take jobs in the off-season to make ends meet. And, most teams are running extensive off-season programs. Between that, and improvements in nutrition and training techniques, the players seem to be much faster and stronger on an overall basis.

  • Changes to the rules have opened up the offenses and scoring, but at the expense of some of the things that some fans enjoyed (shutdown defenses are much rarer now, the running game is not as important as it used to be, etc.)

23

Continuity is great when you have good players. When your guys suck, being unable to unable to improve your team is not exactly fun.

Consider the 1970s Oilers and Dan Pastorini. For 9 years, Oilers fans had the “fun” of knowing who their quarterback was, and that he was crummy (don’t let his last two years fool you; that’s Earl Campbell talking). The Bills enjoyed an extended run of Joe Ferguson (Ever wonder why OJ Simpson only played in a single playoff game in his entire career?)

Meanwhile, Don Strock spent a decade being told how he could start for lots of teams, Joe Theismann and Danny White had the joy of extended internships on the bench, and Archie Manning spent his career being told how it was a shame he was stuck on the Saints.

Archie finally got away … when he was 33 and ineffective … to Houston. I suspect Oilers and Bills wish they had free agency long about 1978 …

24

The irony is that the Oilers drafted two QBs in 1971: Pastorini (first round) and Lynn Dickey (third round). Through their first five seasons together in Houston, Pastorini was the primary starter, though Dickey started 10 games. The Oilers traded Dickey to the Packers in 1976; after suffering through bad injuries in '76 and '77 (which also cost him all of '78), Dickey had a half-dozen fairly respectable years for the Packers, and wound up with a considerably better career passer rating than did Pastorini (70.9 vs. 59.1). It makes me wonder if Oilers fans ever though that they’d traded the wrong quarterback.

(Though, if the Packers had instead gotten Pastorini, it would have deprived Packers fans of one of my all-time favorite bootleg Packer bumper stickers: “They may beat our Pack, but they can’t lick our Dickey!”)

25

This goes for me, too, but I never watched it “religiously”.

I find it way too slick and predictable. Lots of flash, no substance, no excitement. I feel that if all teams wore identical uniforms, you couldn’t tell one from another. Too much last-minute heroic crap all for nothing. A little like watching wrestling or monster trucks.

I like college ball for the talent level, being not-quite-professional and prone to the odd mistake that add a little spice to the game. Also, the rivalrys, the difference in conferences and the strategys. Some teams focus on killer defense, some have razzel-dazzel offence. Lots to pick from.

That and I actually have a connection to a college team (Alma Mater) and the other teams we would regularly play. Not a Pro team even close to me. Hell, not one in the entire state!

26

It’s actually about 12 minutes of actionspread out over 3-4 hours.

27

Ummmm, professionals make the “odd mistake” too, just a lot less of them and their usually much more deadly. I find college ball usually unwatchable simply because there are way too many mistakes, and they don’t generally have huge stakes. Why watch the minor leagues when there are big league games to watch?

My other major bitch about college ball is that way too many games are decided, not by coaching, gameplanning, or effort, but simply based on which teams have the best athletes. The gameplanning that goes into every NFL game is fascinating to me, while the college game seems simplistic and to be “you run what you run, we run what we run, and we’ll see who recruited the better athletes”. In the NFL, almost everyone is an exceptional athlete. It’s the game played by the best in the world against the best in the world. Not a game played by a few really good guys against fewer really good guys.

The NFL has all of that, and more.

I think that’s the only real reason to watch any college game outside of the huge bowl games. I want Notre Dame to lose, so I’ll watch those games. But only for awhile before I get frustrated by the level of play.

28

If I’m going to watch paid athletes play I’m going to watch the best, which is why I typically don’t watch college ball.

The NFL, if anything, is better than it ever was. What annoys me is the commercial aspect of it, but it’s a business so I have to accept that for what it is. But man, how many beer ads can you watch? More to the point, how is it that people don’t get so completely turned off by all of them that they absolutely refuse to buy the products?

I’d rather they charged more for the ads (which the companies would pay) and had fewer of them. It seems to me that they have increased substantially over the years, but that might be my nostalgia and/or the fact that I am no longer part of their target audience since I don’t drink alcohol anymore, thus making me more acutely aware of the ads.

29

I’m not really a football fan, but my father was, and my wife is, so I’ve been immersed in it all my life.

My father grew up in Chicago (his memories of World War 2 start with “I was listening to the Bears-Cardinals game on the radio…”) and my wife grew up in Cleveland and still considers Jim Brown to be a god. Both of them were raised on smash-mouth, black and blue, who can hit harder teams.

You know what, they both like the current game better. Before he died, my father admitted what he really liked was the old AFL, where every game was 35-31 and the last team that scored won. My wife may still enjoy an 80-yard, broken-field touchdown run more, but she’s perfectly content with a spread offense and a field goal with three seconds left for the win.

Yeah, the commercials seem excessive, and we really don’t need six replays of a routine play, but the game itself seems to be doing well.

30

For me it also is the continuity of the teams. As a Cowboys fan, the good old days were the mid 90s. And with only a few changes, the team was the same year in and year out when they were winning Super Bowls. And it wasn’t just the Cowboys, but the 49ers and Bills who were their main rivals also having the same players year in and year out. I could always count on seeing Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Bruce Smith, Don Beebe, etc being Bills, and Steve Young, Jerry Rice, Bill Romanowski, etc always being 49ers. Now I find it hard to either like or dislike a team when the roster changes so much every year.

31

It’s not as enjoyable as it used to be.

I was thinking about this last weekend when I fell asleep yet again watching a sunday afternoon game.

A big part of it is age. I realize that I’m not the demographic the networks are catering to, so the graphic images, bouncing FOX bot, etc. annoy me to no end. It’s tied into the “look and feel” of the game for me, and I don’t like the new look and feel as much as the old one. I also loathe ESPN and its influence on the NFL in general.

The new game is geared too much toward the offense for me. Instant replay slows down a game already slowed by TV timeouts. I can’t stand the female sideline reporters. Fantasy football stats being scrolled on the screen like stock symbols. Jerry Jones always getting face time during a Cowboys game, especially after a big play. The bye week. I could go on, but I’m getting annoyed just thinking about these things.

I will stop here, because there is nothing I can do to change it. I used to be able to watch all three games on a Sunday. Now, I’m lucky to get through the Steeler game without nodding off.

32

Baseball does not stop the game for ads. Football is controlled and run by sponsors.
It does lack baseballs purity. It is a lesser game .
Football is a bigger business than it was 25 years ago in a financial sense. but when Monday Night Football was big the country stopped. Its ratings were enormous and the announcers were loved and hated. It was huge. I doubt todays fans really can understand how big it was.

33

Anytime I read “baseballs purity”, I throw up a little. What a pile of horsecrap.

34

To expound: segregation, steroids, gambling, bad guys playing, cheating, changing rules for viewership, and the DH. Just off the top of my head.

35

I don’t enjoy the NFL as much as I did 25 years ago but apparently that’s a minority opinion. I did just fine watching a half-hour pregame show. I still can’t believe that there is now a 3 hour ESPN pregame show and that people watch it. The Browns move to Baltimore soured me on the league, along with the Oilers move to Memphis and then to Nashville, and the Rams move to St. Louis. (The Raiders move back to Oakland didn’t bother me any.) I dislike the kicking game. Field goals are too easy and too many games are won by last second field goals (Yawn). I dislike highlight shows that are really just talk shows with various old pros yammering on about nothing. (Is Favre coming back again or not? What are T.O. or Chad Johnson-whatever-his name is now up to?) Who the hell cares. I liked the late 1980s AFC Central, where each team’s coach was a strong character and each team had its own personality. Nowadays every coach is a automation who professes to be an expert in the west coast offense, except for the Ryan boys, who are just jerks.

It is time for my nap now. And get those kids off my lawn.

36

The Rams, of course, didn’t start out in Los Angeles, either, but there aren’t still too many people upset about their move from Cleveland. :smiley:

I’m not sure that they’re “too easy”, so much as kickers have, indeed, gotten a lot more accurate over the past 30 years.

In the 1970s, a placekicker who hit over 50% of his field-goal attempts was doing fairly well. Today, the minimum standard is more like 70% or 75%, and the best kickers are hitting 80% (not to mention the fact that they’re expected to be close to 100% from inside of 45 yards).

The NFL actually took a step to rein this in some years back, by introducing the “K-balls” – balls which are only used for kicking plays, and which are kept in tight control by the officials before the game, to keep kickers (and punters) from practicing with them, and breaking them in (a broken-in ball becomes a little softer and a little rounder, and is easier to kick).

I’d have to do some research on what percentage of NFL games are decided on last-minute field goals, but I’d be surprised if it’s very high (or if it’s substantially changed from a few decades ago). Granted, most overtime games probably are decided on field goals…

37

Same difference. K-balls be damned. They’d narrow the width of the goal posts, outlaw soccer style kicking go back to wide hashmarks if they really wanted to make field goals more difficult. Which they don’t. Place Kicks are snooze fests.

38

I meant defensive laterals

And… Fencik having head-on-collisions… but then, nowadays it could get… costly and politically incorrect. Perhaps it’s the too much “details details…” problem with everything: NFL’s ongoing tailoring of every minute details of the game to suit themselves. Invest so much time following the game yet we have no voice.

Inapt officiating used to really get me and the owners who doesn’t really give a too much shit about forming a worthwhile team as they happened to own a team in a top sports market town that would support the team for centuries regardless of how pathetic they really are (sometimes even these teams get lucky).

BTW (Thread Drift… but then, NOT, in my case), anyone (in Chicago) ready (already :rolleyes:) to give up on Virginia McCasky? I am. I want another team in town or McCasky family to give up the ownership (80%) of Bears. Any suggestion for another team for me to root for… perhaps Greenbay, god forbid.

39

That’s completely inane. It’s not “politically correct”, it’s an attempt to minimize the toll of playing the game on the players. With playing professional football taking years off your life, the increase of awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the stories from ex NFL’s having huge health problems, it’s important to the NFL (and to us as human beings) to attempt to minimize those kinds of trauma.

Football is clearly a violent sport, and that’s not going to change. But wistful nostalgia for a time when guys speared others, when “head on collisions” were cool, is, to me, barbaric. Contrary to James Harrisons’ ramblings, there are clean ways to play football. You don’t have to lose the big hits. Just make them less dangerous, less life threatening, and less costly to the players.

40

Admittedly, as a lawyer, that’s one of the things I like about it.

I do think there’s a tendency toward nostalgia, because one tends to remember only the great players and blur together everyone else.