How did football become the most popular sport in America? I saw a chart on Twitter a few weeks back showing that 70+ of the 100 top watched TV broadcasts in America in 2021 were football games. I'm a baseball fan and was shocked to see that not even the World Series was as highly watched as routine weekly football games.
As a Saints fan, I’ve had this precise problem for years: the arbitrarity of injury “luck” swamps the “justice” of “the better team winning” somewhat routinely, and it’s hard to get excited and invested when you become aware of that. Even when injuries aren’t a problem, watching the games really does feel almost like holding your breath; every time Brees dropped back deep, my heart would be in my stomach.
It makes me slightly more understanding of the QB-friendly rules; all injuries suck, but the “product” of the NFL just falls apart when a QB is injured, so they take it seriously and try to make it rarer. But it’s still too much, esp. in concert with bad officiating; the aggregate effect is interesting in how much it saps the games and plays of their seeming consequence. I guess it’s a little life lesson: it can all go away in a flash. It’s also revealing of how fragile the dynamics of games systems are; lots of kinds of arbitrarity seem fine and even good, “part of the game,” but other kinds unpredictably do not! Great post, as usual.
The problem is exacerbated by the nfl playing one game a week. When you play a seven game series you’re more likely to iron out luck and get the better team winning (not always of course, just more likely). And a player with a more minor injury needn’t miss the whole series.
Not that I think the nfl should play seven game series. It would be dope but you’d get 100% injury rates.
As much as this Jets fan will curse Bill Bellicheck’s name to the end of my days, he always had a roster and a plan where the next man up could come in and do the job.
Baseball (my favorite sport) has a smaller version of this with relievers getting gassed during the long playoff run, but in that case it’s sort of just desserts.
"But the average NBA fan can trust that their team’s lineup in the beginning of the season will be more or less the same as the lineup in the playoffs, barring trades."
Injuries may be less frequent but there are far fewer players, so often injuries matter even more. Street Clothes Davis is only one example. We can expect the Spurs to sink like a stone if Dončić misses any significant time. The Splash Brothers dynasty had a whole mini-era erased by injuries. So did the Clippers with Leonard. The Nets probably win it all in 2021 without untimely injuries. That's just off the top of my head.
Based on the title I remembering your post about the league being boring this year I suspected you had an issue with the Eagles. (A local writer accused them of being boring earlier in the season, lamenting the days of TO doing setups and calling out his QB...I think he was just being funny though) But fair enough as I have to admit I like my Eagles chance because they are relatively in great health. Scary place to be, no excuses. Though if Mahome's turns in an NFL Sainthood worthy performance, well then you tip your cap.
I'm a Pats fan (and have been for over 30 years, so even before the Dynasty, when we sucked). I've thought about this a lot - I think one of the things that was a little overlooked about the so-called "Patriot Way" was that they realized early on that middle-class players (veterans with ending rookie contracts) were the best deal in football and allowed you to build up tremendous depth. This gets them a lot of criticism for the "ponies not horses" part of the debate, but effectively it meant that (short of losing Brady in 08) the team could weather losing a number of starters because it had reasonable patches in place. So thing 1 I think is that smart teams can think of how to leverage the roster (especially with the new practice squad rules) to try to plan for this type of issue, accepting that it means you are not shooting for an elite team (or, more accurately, not shooting for a team of elite players with the exception of the QB of course). And eliminating the Emergency QB also explicitly took away a major chunk of injury insurance that the 49ers could have used.
Another factor in this honestly is that in the last few CBAs the amount of hitting, hard conditioning, and preseason practice has gone down drastically, as has the number of in-season padded practices. While I agree that preseason games are mostly injury-fests and too risky (though bubble players might beg to differ), I 100% think that losing that conditioning time is correlated to the higher injury rate.
For the other 3 major sports they often talk about a marathon not a sprint, given the huge number of games. The NFL is a marathon of another sort, given the attrition, and teams ought to explicitly plan for that.
I disagree that this is unique to football. If anything, due to the size of rosters and the sheer amount of players on the field, injuries impact the NFL the least (except, of course, at the QB position). I think you can argue that having enough depth on your roster to withstand the onslaught of injuries is proof that the Super Bowl champion is worthy.
Basketball, on the other hand, is a total crapshoot due to the small amount of players on the floor and the outsized impact a single player can have. Look at the Nets two years ago, when they were without Harden and Kyrie - they lost to the eventual champion Bucks by the slimmest of margins. Or last year, the Bucks took to the Celtics to the limit without Kris Middleton, but came up short because they needed his offense. The Celtics could have won the Championship if not for Robert Williams' knee giving out on him and crippling their interior defense. Kawhi's Raptors won after Klay tore his ACL and KD's achilles exploded. Every playoffs have many examples of this, but the difference in basketball is that there's no way to scheme around the absence of these players or have a "next man up" mantra like in football. If your second or third best player is out for a week or two, you're likely done. In the NFL, if your best offensive lineman goes down, you can still find ways to produce on offense. As a Patriots fan (I know), it felt gratifying to see the team win with Troy Brown at CB or third string special teams guys making key tackles because the team had planned for those moments when their 53 man roster would be pushed to its limits.
I'll reiterate the caveat that if your QB goes down, you're probably fucked and it's a fair criticism about the modern sport that one player can affect things so much.
Most, if not all, of the players love the violence. They're fully aware of the war of attrition and still go out there. I'm a Bills fan and this year was tough, but the crazy thing was guys like Micah Hyde, who herniated a disk in his cervical spine, chomping at the bit to be healthy in time for the playoffs. Did you see how determined Pat Mahomes was after his ankle sprain? Shaking his head and yelling at the sidelines..."No, I'm staying in." Or Mike White going to see multiple doctors to try and get cleared to play after he suffered broken ribs.
I think you're right, the injuries detract...but the competitiveness and dedication in these players is something else. That's what draws me in.
Another issue to me is that any Super Bowl winner has a very good chance of playing fewer than half of the teams in the league over a season. I think the salary cap sort of helps blunt the effect of this a bit and evens the playing field but to me there are more "What Ifs" at the end of the season in football than other sports. Soccer (in most leagues) has a balanced schedule, every team plays each other twice and baseball plays so many games that after 162 of them, you basically know who the best team is (playoffs almost seem redundant in my opinion). Don't see a way around it though with how punishing the sport is.
I definitely I agree with a lot of this - football is the sport I love most by far, and injuries are a problem. I think the injury reporting issues sited here as muddling the data also speaks to an improvement in league culture that takes the health of its players more seriously, especially concussions. The NFL still has work to do here, but they care when star quarterbacks can't play, it hurts the brand if not the bottom line. It's frustrating, but I don't share the conclusion that it ruins my enjoyment of the game, and there are solutions. Teams need to get deeper - money, practice time, and attention can get spread out to the 2nd team. Mahomes is a super star, nobody can replace what he does, but Andy Reid has a game plan for Chad Henne that gives them a shot to win even if mahomes goes down, and that's still an enjoyable part of the game for me.
A few years ago I resolved to stop watching American football because of injuries to players, some of them life-long. I noticed how many died in their 50s. Now I watch baseball, basketball and what the rest of the world calls football. Injuries, yes, but many fewer, and very few that are life-shortening.
As more of a baseball fan, I can say that injuries are on the rise there too. And while individuals players in baseball are much less significant than in football (Trout and Ohtani couldn't carry the Angels to the playoffs by themselves), it still sucks ass and makes the game less fun to watch.
I can't say for sure what the reason is, but my guess is just that we're pushing people closer and closer to the limits of human performance, and their bodies suffer as a result. It used to be incredibly rare to see a pitcher throw 100+ mph, now it seems as if every other team has a reliever that can do so.
How did football become the most popular sport in America? I saw a chart on Twitter a few weeks back showing that 70+ of the 100 top watched TV broadcasts in America in 2021 were football games. I'm a baseball fan and was shocked to see that not even the World Series was as highly watched as routine weekly football games.
As a Saints fan, I’ve had this precise problem for years: the arbitrarity of injury “luck” swamps the “justice” of “the better team winning” somewhat routinely, and it’s hard to get excited and invested when you become aware of that. Even when injuries aren’t a problem, watching the games really does feel almost like holding your breath; every time Brees dropped back deep, my heart would be in my stomach.
It makes me slightly more understanding of the QB-friendly rules; all injuries suck, but the “product” of the NFL just falls apart when a QB is injured, so they take it seriously and try to make it rarer. But it’s still too much, esp. in concert with bad officiating; the aggregate effect is interesting in how much it saps the games and plays of their seeming consequence. I guess it’s a little life lesson: it can all go away in a flash. It’s also revealing of how fragile the dynamics of games systems are; lots of kinds of arbitrarity seem fine and even good, “part of the game,” but other kinds unpredictably do not! Great post, as usual.
The problem is exacerbated by the nfl playing one game a week. When you play a seven game series you’re more likely to iron out luck and get the better team winning (not always of course, just more likely). And a player with a more minor injury needn’t miss the whole series.
Not that I think the nfl should play seven game series. It would be dope but you’d get 100% injury rates.
As much as this Jets fan will curse Bill Bellicheck’s name to the end of my days, he always had a roster and a plan where the next man up could come in and do the job.
Baseball (my favorite sport) has a smaller version of this with relievers getting gassed during the long playoff run, but in that case it’s sort of just desserts.
Go birds
"But the average NBA fan can trust that their team’s lineup in the beginning of the season will be more or less the same as the lineup in the playoffs, barring trades."
Injuries may be less frequent but there are far fewer players, so often injuries matter even more. Street Clothes Davis is only one example. We can expect the Spurs to sink like a stone if Dončić misses any significant time. The Splash Brothers dynasty had a whole mini-era erased by injuries. So did the Clippers with Leonard. The Nets probably win it all in 2021 without untimely injuries. That's just off the top of my head.
Based on the title I remembering your post about the league being boring this year I suspected you had an issue with the Eagles. (A local writer accused them of being boring earlier in the season, lamenting the days of TO doing setups and calling out his QB...I think he was just being funny though) But fair enough as I have to admit I like my Eagles chance because they are relatively in great health. Scary place to be, no excuses. Though if Mahome's turns in an NFL Sainthood worthy performance, well then you tip your cap.
I'm a Pats fan (and have been for over 30 years, so even before the Dynasty, when we sucked). I've thought about this a lot - I think one of the things that was a little overlooked about the so-called "Patriot Way" was that they realized early on that middle-class players (veterans with ending rookie contracts) were the best deal in football and allowed you to build up tremendous depth. This gets them a lot of criticism for the "ponies not horses" part of the debate, but effectively it meant that (short of losing Brady in 08) the team could weather losing a number of starters because it had reasonable patches in place. So thing 1 I think is that smart teams can think of how to leverage the roster (especially with the new practice squad rules) to try to plan for this type of issue, accepting that it means you are not shooting for an elite team (or, more accurately, not shooting for a team of elite players with the exception of the QB of course). And eliminating the Emergency QB also explicitly took away a major chunk of injury insurance that the 49ers could have used.
Another factor in this honestly is that in the last few CBAs the amount of hitting, hard conditioning, and preseason practice has gone down drastically, as has the number of in-season padded practices. While I agree that preseason games are mostly injury-fests and too risky (though bubble players might beg to differ), I 100% think that losing that conditioning time is correlated to the higher injury rate.
For the other 3 major sports they often talk about a marathon not a sprint, given the huge number of games. The NFL is a marathon of another sort, given the attrition, and teams ought to explicitly plan for that.
I disagree that this is unique to football. If anything, due to the size of rosters and the sheer amount of players on the field, injuries impact the NFL the least (except, of course, at the QB position). I think you can argue that having enough depth on your roster to withstand the onslaught of injuries is proof that the Super Bowl champion is worthy.
Basketball, on the other hand, is a total crapshoot due to the small amount of players on the floor and the outsized impact a single player can have. Look at the Nets two years ago, when they were without Harden and Kyrie - they lost to the eventual champion Bucks by the slimmest of margins. Or last year, the Bucks took to the Celtics to the limit without Kris Middleton, but came up short because they needed his offense. The Celtics could have won the Championship if not for Robert Williams' knee giving out on him and crippling their interior defense. Kawhi's Raptors won after Klay tore his ACL and KD's achilles exploded. Every playoffs have many examples of this, but the difference in basketball is that there's no way to scheme around the absence of these players or have a "next man up" mantra like in football. If your second or third best player is out for a week or two, you're likely done. In the NFL, if your best offensive lineman goes down, you can still find ways to produce on offense. As a Patriots fan (I know), it felt gratifying to see the team win with Troy Brown at CB or third string special teams guys making key tackles because the team had planned for those moments when their 53 man roster would be pushed to its limits.
I'll reiterate the caveat that if your QB goes down, you're probably fucked and it's a fair criticism about the modern sport that one player can affect things so much.
Most, if not all, of the players love the violence. They're fully aware of the war of attrition and still go out there. I'm a Bills fan and this year was tough, but the crazy thing was guys like Micah Hyde, who herniated a disk in his cervical spine, chomping at the bit to be healthy in time for the playoffs. Did you see how determined Pat Mahomes was after his ankle sprain? Shaking his head and yelling at the sidelines..."No, I'm staying in." Or Mike White going to see multiple doctors to try and get cleared to play after he suffered broken ribs.
I think you're right, the injuries detract...but the competitiveness and dedication in these players is something else. That's what draws me in.
Another issue to me is that any Super Bowl winner has a very good chance of playing fewer than half of the teams in the league over a season. I think the salary cap sort of helps blunt the effect of this a bit and evens the playing field but to me there are more "What Ifs" at the end of the season in football than other sports. Soccer (in most leagues) has a balanced schedule, every team plays each other twice and baseball plays so many games that after 162 of them, you basically know who the best team is (playoffs almost seem redundant in my opinion). Don't see a way around it though with how punishing the sport is.
I definitely I agree with a lot of this - football is the sport I love most by far, and injuries are a problem. I think the injury reporting issues sited here as muddling the data also speaks to an improvement in league culture that takes the health of its players more seriously, especially concussions. The NFL still has work to do here, but they care when star quarterbacks can't play, it hurts the brand if not the bottom line. It's frustrating, but I don't share the conclusion that it ruins my enjoyment of the game, and there are solutions. Teams need to get deeper - money, practice time, and attention can get spread out to the 2nd team. Mahomes is a super star, nobody can replace what he does, but Andy Reid has a game plan for Chad Henne that gives them a shot to win even if mahomes goes down, and that's still an enjoyable part of the game for me.
A few years ago I resolved to stop watching American football because of injuries to players, some of them life-long. I noticed how many died in their 50s. Now I watch baseball, basketball and what the rest of the world calls football. Injuries, yes, but many fewer, and very few that are life-shortening.
As more of a baseball fan, I can say that injuries are on the rise there too. And while individuals players in baseball are much less significant than in football (Trout and Ohtani couldn't carry the Angels to the playoffs by themselves), it still sucks ass and makes the game less fun to watch.
I can't say for sure what the reason is, but my guess is just that we're pushing people closer and closer to the limits of human performance, and their bodies suffer as a result. It used to be incredibly rare to see a pitcher throw 100+ mph, now it seems as if every other team has a reliever that can do so.