Colonize the moon specifically to set up a play area to allow for football games with low-g tackles where a Hail Mary play might take several minutes to resolve.
I don't know if I'm a typical football fan, but I like it because it's the sports version of chess, but I don't watch it because watching the hard hits and knowing about CTE makes it not really fun. I'd love to watch pro flag football.
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 an extreme casual for the other major sports and a recent dedicated fan of the Raptors, I find the NBA to be the most star & personality-driven. There are so few players on a team, they're not wearing helmets or masks so you can see the full range of their emotions, there isn't the same culture of remaining stoic and Professional after scoring a goal, and they're always showing off their fits pre-game (and on the bench if they're injured).
As a non-sports person, it's fast-paced enough to not be boring (baseball), but not so fast that your eyes can't follow (hockey pucks specifically), has easy to understand rules (football isn't that hard but basketball is simpler), and you get to witness fun acrobatic feats of athleticism. Very accessible to get into!
I say it's the rarity of it compared to the other sports. A baseball team plays almost every day during a 162-game season. A basketball and hockey team plays roughly every other day or so in an 82-game season. But football is once a week for 17 games. Each one matters a lot more.
And just as important...when football is not being played, the talking heads take center stage, hyping up games and dissecting the league inside out and backwards.
Football is really well structured for TV, and the league has worked hard to keep it that way. The games are mostly all Sunday afternoons, with some special events Thursday and Monday nights. They mostly fit within a predictable time slot (unlike baseball, which can take two hours or six), and the action - pause - action tempo fits really well both to give the commentators something to talk about and to alert less serious fans to when they need to pay attention. Each team only plays once a week which means that you can follow a team or two closely, with your friends, without it being a part-time job. And finally, it's a fall/winter sport, and there's not much more to do on a Sunday afternoon when it's 15 degrees outside.
In contrast with baseball so many of the games are during the day on a Tuesday afternoon or something, and there are so many of them, and it's during the summer when you might want to do something else, that it's really hard to keep up. Baseball is an ideal game to go watch while drinking a beer and chatting with your buddies on a warm June day, and it's great game to keep on the radio as background chatter while you work in your garage. But football is a perfect TV sport.
This wasn't the case until the mid-80s. The NFL requires TV timeouts. That's not a natural part of the game. College football has suffered the same fate to game flow as well.
Football wasn't well structured to TV until the mid-80s when they made the decision to structure around TV broadcasting requirements and the subsequent ad dollars. Every major sport has followed that as a result which is why the games stretch out well past the actual time on the game clock.
Baseball used to have a flow to it that made it great to see in person, except when it's a televised game and then it drags on with the TV timeouts. Same goes for the NBA and NHL. TV made the sports great to watch at home but the games, players and in-person fans suffer as a result IMO because game flow suffers.
Television. Football's pace and constant stop/start made a perfect pairing for television/commercials/commentary and getting up to grab food/drink. I still think baseball would be more popular than it currently is if they cut out the half-inning commercial breaks (ideally all except 7th inning stretch). But that would take away ad revenue and lead down another web of decisions
Football's salary structure is also more geared to even the playing field. The AFC championship game was between KC and Cincinnati. In any other sport, these are "small markets" that can't afford star players, so they cycle between winning for a couple of years and then bottoming out for twice as long to draft more players that will leave them for the Lakers or Yankees (pick your sport).
The NFL gets investment from every single market because there's hope in every single market. MLB and NBA said bye bye to that in the 90s/2000s. It's the only pro league where Green Bay Wisconsin could produce a winning team year after year for practically three decades.
In the NBA small market teams can compete financially for the most part. The hard cap levels the playing field. It is more that no one wants to play in Utah or Minneapolis.
This isn't true, though. It's not a hard cap like the NFL - it's a soft cap. Big spenders like the Warriors have advantage over every single team in the league. Larger markets = higher local tv spend and higher ticket prices, so they can afford to regularly go in the luxury tax more than a team like Memphis (the warriors are spending like $500 million on a basketball team this year!).
Are owners cheap? Absolutely, but there's a significant financial advantage to being the Nets vs. being the Bucks, from revenue to simply the value of the asset. Players are typically happy to sign extensions with small market teams (Giannis is still in Milwaukee, Dame is in Portland, etc.) but prioritize playing on winning teams and the structure of the NBA is such that it's hard to maintain those teams in a small market on account of the luxury tax. Milwaukee is over the cap by just paying three guys - it's very very difficult to put a good team around that.
The NFL doesn't have this issue because it's only national TV revenue that gets split up evenly. One market doesn't have an inherent advantage over others.
The cap is not as hard as the NFL, that is true. But it is harder than baseball's. And it isn't unusual to see small markets in the NBA close to the payroll leaders, and big markets down at the bottom. That never happens in MLB.
They might do it for a year, but they can't sustain it, whereas big markets can. This is why Milwaukee will probably shed salary this summer, and that will start the "Goodbye Giannis" train over the next couple of seasons.
Milwaukee has been top 7 in payroll or higher for four of the last five years, including three times in the top 5. I'd say that is sustaining it. It is unfathomable that the Rays or Pirates or at least half of MLB would do that.
Money is a factor in the NBA, but star preferences are a much bigger one.
It's actually very simple: MLB makes it very hard to watch their games. They pushed everything through their app or Cable packages and it's very expensive and it ain't worth it for casual so casuals have switched sports.
This is actually another good point that ties in with what's said earlier - because the NFL games are once a week and people make social events out of them, 75% of the audience doesn't even need a cable package. Everyone just goes to Bob's house every Sunday! Whereas Bob's wife doesn't want the boys coming over to watch baseball 162 times during the MLB season.
The NFL does this too, though. My personal anecdote is: my father-in-law--who is in his 70s, a 'cord cutter', and a rabid Cowboys fan who now lives in Florida--received the gift of an NFL app subscription for Christmas. Then he learned he couldn't actually use it, because it only works on mobile devices (LOL), not on his streaming TV. He doesn't want to watch games on his phone, and he doesn't have a tablet. Not being a regular ball-sports watcher, I was appalled, but apparently this is so typical of the NFL's flagrant greed and contempt for its fans that most people just shrug it off.
I got the same unpleasant surprise this year. Can’t get replays on my laptop! Bah humbug. Hoping they change that ‘policy’ but also resigning myself to cancelling my subscription after several years.
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.
A couple months ago on PTI someone was saying NBA injuries play a bigger role than any other league. I thought they had a point but that they may be underrating the NFL. There are times when a offensive linemen goes down and the team isn't the same but its not fully attributed to the injury. The NBA is so much more knowable. You can learn the names of all the starters in a week if you care to. Its Dunbar's Number sized. Making the injuries that much more obvious of a factory.
In the NBA you can substract one player and a very good team becomes a bad team. In the NFL that is only really even arguably true of the QB. The NBA is next level when it comes to injuries.
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.
Plus, Brady's incredible durability/longevity and his willingness to take less money to allow for a better overall team. I would wager we'll never see another career like 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.
Lol I just made essentially the same comment. I would agree with you that basketball is more vulnerable to injuries, and that injuries change the course of the playoffs just as frequently.
You could argue that NFL teams have one truly essential player, the QB. And as we’ve seen in recent years, teams can win with a backup QB.
NBA contenders almost always have at least three players that are truly essential, so they are more vulnerable in that sense. Playoff series are also seven games, so there is much less variability. In one game eliminations in the NFL, an injured team can eke out an upset win, even though they would lost the game 7 or 8 times out of 10.
I would also say that the difference between injury potential for NFL and NBA is not as great as it appears. NBA plays way more games, so although the chance of getting injured in any given game is much lower, the overall chance is still fairly high. Also, watch how high those guys jumó and then land on a hard court. I’m shocked every game that Ja Morant doesn’t shatter his whole body.
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.
The outcome of any team is determined by its constituent players, including their availability to play.
Colonize the moon specifically to set up a play area to allow for football games with low-g tackles where a Hail Mary play might take several minutes to resolve.
I don't know if I'm a typical football fan, but I like it because it's the sports version of chess, but I don't watch it because watching the hard hits and knowing about CTE makes it not really fun. I'd love to watch pro flag football.
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 an extreme casual for the other major sports and a recent dedicated fan of the Raptors, I find the NBA to be the most star & personality-driven. There are so few players on a team, they're not wearing helmets or masks so you can see the full range of their emotions, there isn't the same culture of remaining stoic and Professional after scoring a goal, and they're always showing off their fits pre-game (and on the bench if they're injured).
As a non-sports person, it's fast-paced enough to not be boring (baseball), but not so fast that your eyes can't follow (hockey pucks specifically), has easy to understand rules (football isn't that hard but basketball is simpler), and you get to witness fun acrobatic feats of athleticism. Very accessible to get into!
I say it's the rarity of it compared to the other sports. A baseball team plays almost every day during a 162-game season. A basketball and hockey team plays roughly every other day or so in an 82-game season. But football is once a week for 17 games. Each one matters a lot more.
And just as important...when football is not being played, the talking heads take center stage, hyping up games and dissecting the league inside out and backwards.
The NBA is the #2 league in terms of average viewership but the SECOND round of the NFL draft routinely beats NBA playoff games.
Jesus. The second round of the draft!? That's nuts. I'd much rather watch an NBA playoff game.
Football is really well structured for TV, and the league has worked hard to keep it that way. The games are mostly all Sunday afternoons, with some special events Thursday and Monday nights. They mostly fit within a predictable time slot (unlike baseball, which can take two hours or six), and the action - pause - action tempo fits really well both to give the commentators something to talk about and to alert less serious fans to when they need to pay attention. Each team only plays once a week which means that you can follow a team or two closely, with your friends, without it being a part-time job. And finally, it's a fall/winter sport, and there's not much more to do on a Sunday afternoon when it's 15 degrees outside.
In contrast with baseball so many of the games are during the day on a Tuesday afternoon or something, and there are so many of them, and it's during the summer when you might want to do something else, that it's really hard to keep up. Baseball is an ideal game to go watch while drinking a beer and chatting with your buddies on a warm June day, and it's great game to keep on the radio as background chatter while you work in your garage. But football is a perfect TV sport.
the action-paus-action tempo and halves and quarters format is also ideal for commercial breaks, station identification, etc..
This wasn't the case until the mid-80s. The NFL requires TV timeouts. That's not a natural part of the game. College football has suffered the same fate to game flow as well.
Thanks, that was helpful.
Football wasn't well structured to TV until the mid-80s when they made the decision to structure around TV broadcasting requirements and the subsequent ad dollars. Every major sport has followed that as a result which is why the games stretch out well past the actual time on the game clock.
Baseball used to have a flow to it that made it great to see in person, except when it's a televised game and then it drags on with the TV timeouts. Same goes for the NBA and NHL. TV made the sports great to watch at home but the games, players and in-person fans suffer as a result IMO because game flow suffers.
I went to a minor league hockey game last weekend (AHL), and there were TV timeouts even for that! Local sports channels need content, I guess.
Despite the "national pastime" moniker the NFL surpassed baseball in popularity back in the 50s. I too wish it wasn't so, but there is no denying it.
Television. Football's pace and constant stop/start made a perfect pairing for television/commercials/commentary and getting up to grab food/drink. I still think baseball would be more popular than it currently is if they cut out the half-inning commercial breaks (ideally all except 7th inning stretch). But that would take away ad revenue and lead down another web of decisions
Football's salary structure is also more geared to even the playing field. The AFC championship game was between KC and Cincinnati. In any other sport, these are "small markets" that can't afford star players, so they cycle between winning for a couple of years and then bottoming out for twice as long to draft more players that will leave them for the Lakers or Yankees (pick your sport).
The NFL gets investment from every single market because there's hope in every single market. MLB and NBA said bye bye to that in the 90s/2000s. It's the only pro league where Green Bay Wisconsin could produce a winning team year after year for practically three decades.
In the NBA small market teams can compete financially for the most part. The hard cap levels the playing field. It is more that no one wants to play in Utah or Minneapolis.
This isn't true, though. It's not a hard cap like the NFL - it's a soft cap. Big spenders like the Warriors have advantage over every single team in the league. Larger markets = higher local tv spend and higher ticket prices, so they can afford to regularly go in the luxury tax more than a team like Memphis (the warriors are spending like $500 million on a basketball team this year!).
Are owners cheap? Absolutely, but there's a significant financial advantage to being the Nets vs. being the Bucks, from revenue to simply the value of the asset. Players are typically happy to sign extensions with small market teams (Giannis is still in Milwaukee, Dame is in Portland, etc.) but prioritize playing on winning teams and the structure of the NBA is such that it's hard to maintain those teams in a small market on account of the luxury tax. Milwaukee is over the cap by just paying three guys - it's very very difficult to put a good team around that.
The NFL doesn't have this issue because it's only national TV revenue that gets split up evenly. One market doesn't have an inherent advantage over others.
The cap is not as hard as the NFL, that is true. But it is harder than baseball's. And it isn't unusual to see small markets in the NBA close to the payroll leaders, and big markets down at the bottom. That never happens in MLB.
They might do it for a year, but they can't sustain it, whereas big markets can. This is why Milwaukee will probably shed salary this summer, and that will start the "Goodbye Giannis" train over the next couple of seasons.
Milwaukee has been top 7 in payroll or higher for four of the last five years, including three times in the top 5. I'd say that is sustaining it. It is unfathomable that the Rays or Pirates or at least half of MLB would do that.
Money is a factor in the NBA, but star preferences are a much bigger one.
It's actually very simple: MLB makes it very hard to watch their games. They pushed everything through their app or Cable packages and it's very expensive and it ain't worth it for casual so casuals have switched sports.
This is actually another good point that ties in with what's said earlier - because the NFL games are once a week and people make social events out of them, 75% of the audience doesn't even need a cable package. Everyone just goes to Bob's house every Sunday! Whereas Bob's wife doesn't want the boys coming over to watch baseball 162 times during the MLB season.
The NFL does this too, though. My personal anecdote is: my father-in-law--who is in his 70s, a 'cord cutter', and a rabid Cowboys fan who now lives in Florida--received the gift of an NFL app subscription for Christmas. Then he learned he couldn't actually use it, because it only works on mobile devices (LOL), not on his streaming TV. He doesn't want to watch games on his phone, and he doesn't have a tablet. Not being a regular ball-sports watcher, I was appalled, but apparently this is so typical of the NFL's flagrant greed and contempt for its fans that most people just shrug it off.
I got the same unpleasant surprise this year. Can’t get replays on my laptop! Bah humbug. Hoping they change that ‘policy’ but also resigning myself to cancelling my subscription after several years.
As a society the US (we) love and celebrate violence. Football is a very violent sport, thus we love it.
https://americaswargame.substack.com/p/what-is-americas-war-game
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.
This comment helped me understand more clearly what FdB is saying in the piece. Thank you.
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.
A couple months ago on PTI someone was saying NBA injuries play a bigger role than any other league. I thought they had a point but that they may be underrating the NFL. There are times when a offensive linemen goes down and the team isn't the same but its not fully attributed to the injury. The NBA is so much more knowable. You can learn the names of all the starters in a week if you care to. Its Dunbar's Number sized. Making the injuries that much more obvious of a factory.
In the NBA you can substract one player and a very good team becomes a bad team. In the NFL that is only really even arguably true of the QB. The NBA is next level when it comes to injuries.
Subtract a star edge rusher, left tackle, or cornerback and you can kill an NFL team's season.
Kill a season, yes, but not usually make a very good team bad, which can happen in the NBA.
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.
Plus, Brady's incredible durability/longevity and his willingness to take less money to allow for a better overall team. I would wager we'll never see another career like 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.
Lol I just made essentially the same comment. I would agree with you that basketball is more vulnerable to injuries, and that injuries change the course of the playoffs just as frequently.
You could argue that NFL teams have one truly essential player, the QB. And as we’ve seen in recent years, teams can win with a backup QB.
NBA contenders almost always have at least three players that are truly essential, so they are more vulnerable in that sense. Playoff series are also seven games, so there is much less variability. In one game eliminations in the NFL, an injured team can eke out an upset win, even though they would lost the game 7 or 8 times out of 10.
I would also say that the difference between injury potential for NFL and NBA is not as great as it appears. NBA plays way more games, so although the chance of getting injured in any given game is much lower, the overall chance is still fairly high. Also, watch how high those guys jumó and then land on a hard court. I’m shocked every game that Ja Morant doesn’t shatter his whole body.
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.