Surprisingly interesting even if you aren't super into sports.

May 2, 2017 1:56 AM

An SB Nation essay on the future of football.
posted by DoctorFedora (56 comments total)

When the 2000s rolled around and CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) emerged as a real correlation with the game of football, the NFL and others followed the noble example of tobacco companies by falsifying research, denying all charges, and focusing on selling the product to children.

This is like a half step short of invoking Godwin's law. Phew.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:53 AM on May 2, 2017

Is this the first SBNation story posted to the blue that's not by Jon Bois?
posted by ardgedee at 3:42 AM on May 2, 2017

The most unique suggestion: Allow football teams to have as many people on the field as they like, but limit the total amount of weight to a flat 2400 pounds, aka the “one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses” system of football weight management.

I love this.
posted by octothorpe at 4:09 AM on May 2, 2017 [32 favorites]

It's definitely an interesting article, and towards the end it starts to make some actually useful points. (As someone who doesn't know the game that well) My view is:

Limit the number of players available on the team - no more switching out the entire team when you change from offense to defense. You have to play both ways - that means stamina and you can't run around all day if you weigh 300 lbs.

Get rid of the specialist positions as well. Let's get some fatigue into the game.

Get rid of the armour, and ban the three point stance.

No timeouts. Get the ball moving as much as possible - let's get some fatigue into the game.
posted by awfurby at 4:27 AM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

I've been interested in the total team weight limit since one of my brothers played Sprint football in the 90s and there was a lot of coverage at the time about retired pro linemen who could barely walk because if the damage their weight had done to their knees. It's sort of fun to play around with on video game football and see what sorts of teams you can build within the arbitrary limit.

I'm also a fan of forcing players to play both ways. Too much specialization allows such heavy linemen and such hard hits.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:44 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

The commercials are a big reason for me to not watch football these days and part of that is just that I see so few commercials on any other thing that I watch. I almost never watch anything on commercial TV live these days so I almost never see TV commercials other than during sports broadcasts and that general unfamiliarity has made them extra jarring when I do see them. Also they're mostly ads for terrible beer and Denis Leary screaming at me about trucks that I'll never buy.
posted by octothorpe at 5:00 AM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

awfurby - have you ever considered just watching rugby instead?
posted by thecjm at 5:34 AM on May 2, 2017 [13 favorites]

I think yellow cards and red cards should be added to every sport... heck... sometimes I want to carry and red and yellow card at work.
posted by midmarch snowman at 5:39 AM on May 2, 2017 [12 favorites]

I think yellow cards and red cards should be added to every sport... heck... sometimes I want to carry and red and yellow card at work.

I just thought of a pony request for MeTa.
posted by TedW at 5:48 AM on May 2, 2017 [7 favorites]

The late great Blackie Sherrod once proposed limiting the number of substitutions to one per down, including kicks and changes of possession. This change would instantly eliminate kicking and blocking specialists.
posted by HillbillyInBC at 5:52 AM on May 2, 2017

This is like a half step short of invoking Godwin's law. Phew.
...wat? That's an accurate description of what they actually did.
posted by protocoach at 5:53 AM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]

The most unique suggestion: Allow football teams to have as many people on the field as they like, but limit the total amount of weight to a flat 2400 pounds, aka the “one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses” system of football weight management.

Even better, an entire squishy little Goblin team versus my Dwarf Deathroller.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:09 AM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

I like the distinction he makes between game and product, and the comparison to boxing. I don't know anybody who boxes.
posted by dbx at 6:12 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

I know one guy who boxes but he's a rather self-absorbed philosophy professor, so I don't know what that says about the state of the sport these days.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:43 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

The thing that I don't really see addressed here is just how much the meta-game (for lack of a better term) has become about hyper-specialization. Like, of course it's not tenable to have 330-pound offensive linemen playing rugby out there; that's not what their role is, and it's not what the professional ranks (and by association college football, the NFL's unpaid labor reserve pool) select for. Players become extraordinarily good at doing one tiny little sliver of the game, they revolve their lives around it, and they sculpt their bodies to maximize their abilities at that one hyper-specific thing. And that's largely what people are paying to watch. This year's college draft just happened, and you can go read ten thousand breathless words about how the Carolina Panthers are re-inventing the game by drafting two guys who can run the ball AND catch the ball, because it's a position that basically doesn't exist in the pro ranks and no one is convinced that a single human can mold his body into the shape required to do both at an elite level. Calls for weight limits or substitution limits or whatever else are all asking the sport to become something that it fundamentally hasn't been in fifty years: a game of generalists. Rugby features a lot of jack-of-all-trade athletes playing a largely similar game as what the NFL produces, and it draws 1% of the viewership as football, at least in part because you aren't watching players who are one of less than a hundred people alive with a specific set of physical tools. You can't flip a switch and change that underlying principle overnight, because it'll kill the sport as surely as The Lawyers will.

I don't know. I don't have an answer either, other than to say that my kids'll never play the game in its current form. But changing the game like this article is describing would be a much larger change than adding helmets and the forward pass, and I don't see any way that it will happen without killing the golden goose. And so while it's morally imperative to do SOMETHING about the bloodsport, I have yet to see a suggestion that doesn't remove the basic tenet of what the game is.
posted by Mayor West at 6:47 AM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

BMI restriction seems like an obvious limit to put on the game. I know of a guy who was offered a scholarship to Big Ten program but turned it down to go to a D3 school because he didn't want to gain the 60-80 pounds they had planned for him (he was a lineman).
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:47 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think yellow cards and red cards should be added to every sport

Only after we're done adding the penalty box to every sport.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:55 AM on May 2, 2017

Don't want to abuse the edit window, so I'll add this as a separate comment: if you were to grab the offensive tackle off the practice squad of the Cleveland Browns (that is to say, a barely-professional player on the worst team in the professional ranks), and transport him back sixty years and throw him onto the field under Vince Lombardi, he would instantly become the greatest football player ever to live. He would so thoroughly dominate the game that it would send shockwaves across the country, like watching Jordan take Chicago by storm. He'd be so much bigger and stronger and more athletic than any other player in the league that it would be like his team having an extra player on the field at all times. He'd struggle to play offense and defense at first, but would probably adopt the fitness level required to make it through 60 minutes of play, and then he'd be fifty pounds heavier than the guys he's being asked to block, and it would be like watching a high school game with a 6'5" tackle blocking a 150-pound 14-year-old freshman defensive end--literally separate classes of human being.

And there's the rub. Every other team in the league would start scouring the college ranks for other similarly-mutant-looking athletes, because the competitive advantage of having such a freak of nature on your side is just too stark. And you can't unring that bell.
posted by Mayor West at 6:56 AM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

Calls for weight limits or substitution limits or whatever else are all asking the sport to become something that it fundamentally hasn't been in fifty years: a game of generalists.

Well, yes. But that's the point isn't it? Football can't (certainly shouldn't) continue in its current form, which is people getting rich as they incur brain damage for our amusement, and therefore inspiring high school and college athletes to incur brain damage for free. The ethical choices are that we change football dramatically or cease to play it entirely.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:57 AM on May 2, 2017 [21 favorites]

Yeah, don't even get me started on the number of college scholarships given out for football. A popular argument in some circles is that Title IX is killing men's sports when the reality is football is killing other men's sports.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:03 AM on May 2, 2017 [16 favorites]

You can't really say that the reason we don't watch rugby is because football is somehow inherently more interesting.

Football has been the subject of relentless promotion as a spectacle; our interest in it has been carefully grown and cultivated. And its popularity is self-reinforcing, because participation in sports - both as player and as viewer - is so very social. Football doesn't have to be the way it is now in order to draw in the crowds.

In other parts of the world, it's other sports (especially soccer) that get this status as a national pastime.

And yeah, to echo the above comments, saving the pastime isn't worth the damage it does. If you really think that changing football will kill it, then we should kill it.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:27 AM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

...wat? That's an accurate description of what they actually did.

Sorry, I meant that writing something like that effectively shuts further conversation down, not that it was an unfair comparison. I probably could have said it better.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:27 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

...and therefore inspiring high school and college athletes to incur brain damage for free.

Yes, this.
posted by NoMich at 7:31 AM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

Good essay. The outline about football being blocked by its own evolution at every turn suggests that it requires a redesigned game, not just a few changes. The entire stadium is configured to watch a collision between two teams. Size, speed and combined forces are currently the only ways to succeed, now working against its economics. I would suggest altering the game to require teams to run plays along the perimeter of a newly designed field, with players downed by smashing into them sideways and forcing them out of bounds in clutter-free sideline zones. Passes would be downed if a player caught them midfield. A baseball field could even be used. The point is that the forces are shunted away and not completely stopped by dead impact to the players.
posted by Brian B. at 7:32 AM on May 2, 2017

I know one guy who boxes but he's a rather self-absorbed philosophy professor

Is he a character from a Python sketch?
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:33 AM on May 2, 2017

I think yellow cards and red cards should be added to every sport... heck... sometimes I want to carry and red and yellow card at work.

My fourth grade daughter and her friends adopted them as part of a peer technique to call out bullying during class.

I love this article. Football HAS to change; both as a sport and as a product; the game is so fast now at the NFL level that it can only be understood in slow motion. Players are so big and so strong that they can give themselves a non-contact, season-and-possibly-career-ending, almost-requiring-amputation knee injury during PRACTICE, as Teddy Bridgewater (quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings) did less than a year ago. There is so much force on the field that two players impacting in mid-air can cause a major injury -- Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor of the Seattle Seahawks both went for the same ball last year and collided mid-leap, and the impact broke Thomas' tibia almost clean in half.

It's scary. I love the game but I hate seeing people get hurt, and the injuries you see on the field aren't even the big problem, it's the little ones you see in practice over and over. Something has to change.
posted by KathrynT at 7:37 AM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

When the article quoted the NFL's medical panel from 2005 saying that TBI is nbd, it made me want to punch the lot of them.

TBI is a concussion so hard that your brain is injured. If you've had a concussion you know how they can affect emotion, language, and cognition. And then the symptoms go away on their own as the brain, bruised, returns to normal.

In TBI the brain doesn't return to normal on its own. It's more like a stroke than a concussion, with weeks or months of rest, therapy, and drugs to get the brain into a better place, maybe back to the way it was before. Maybe.

And the players are getting one TBI on top of another on top of another.

Fuck that panel. Fuck the NFL.
posted by zippy at 8:07 AM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

And don't forget, folks: the entire NFL is tax free as a public good.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:12 AM on May 2, 2017 [7 favorites]

It's interesting that he brings up the CFL from time to time, which seems to me to be a more wide open game due to the larger field, and also one that values smaller players. So I pulled some statistics; half the rosters in the current CFL as well as the average weights (from here) of drafted NFL players both in 2013 and back in 1980 before the embiggening happened. A graph is here.

I was surprised to see that CFL players seem to have matched their NFL counterparts on the offensive side of the ball; the offensive line in particular ballooning from 270 to 310 pounds over that time period. But the (CFL) defence hasn't grown like the (NFL) defense; the defensive line has gone from 260 to 280 in the NFL, but is only 265 in the CFL. So it seems like rules can have an effect on the shape of athletes.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 8:15 AM on May 2, 2017

And don't forget, folks: the entire NFL is tax free as a public good.

That's not true. First off, it was the league office itself that was tax exempt as a trade organization, not the individual teams, so we are talking about taxing several million dollars in income, not the league-wide billions your comment suggests. Secondly, the NFL league office gave up its tax exempt status in 2015. The NFL sucks for many reasons, but tax avoidance is not one of them.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:22 AM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

Another fine article (which I may have previously linked) from SB Nation on the damage football wreaks: Football Killed Tyler Sash.
posted by Existential Dread at 8:24 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Related to another article in the series, I watched half the games last season that I normally do. The days not watching football were great. No stressing over a thing that, ultimately, doesn't matter. No commercials. Freedom from a game that I often don't enjoy that much, and which I increasingly loathe as an institution. I think I might like the version of the game described in the FPP article - faster, safer, more generalist - but until that game exists I think my solution might just be to stop watching.
posted by codacorolla at 8:26 AM on May 2, 2017

It was the league office itself that was tax exempt as a trade organization

Correct, which is no different than many other leagues. The PGA Tour and the NHL league offices are both tax exempt. MLB gave up its exemption in 2007.

I'm not sure why the NBA never has been.
posted by HighLife at 8:27 AM on May 2, 2017

If you wanted to increase the number of injuries in football, you'd be hard pressed to find a better way to do it than having players play on both sides of the ball.

Youth football is not only stupidly dangerous, but it's also increasingly pointless on a developmental level. As Mayor West points out, a generation ago players were not the physical outliers they are today. At most positions professional success is only possible for people with a fairly specific body type. I suspect that we'll see more players like the Lions' star defensive lineman Ziggy Ansah, who grew up in Ghana and only began playing American football during his sophomore year of college. More and more often you see players like him with an ideal physique but not statistically dazzling college careers who go at the top of the draft. Playing football requires sophisticated technique and hard work, but having the right physical gifts is so fundamental that 80% of Division I players are basically disqualified from the pros right out of the gate. I don't know what the right model for football development would look like, but it would begin later and feature far fewer players and could do so without compromising the things that make professional football so exciting. As everybody is always saying, CTE is more about repeated hits than hard hits, so it would make a big difference if players began playing at age nineteen instead of age nine. Doing so would also allow players to make a more informed choice about whether they wanted to take the risk of playing.

The other great injustice of football is that players earn so little. I'm not sure what amount of monetary compensation makes the physical damage of the game worth it, but it's clearly much greater than what players earn today. Their most recent union contract is awful, especially when you compare it to the MLB contract. Rookie contracts are hugely unjust. The average NFL career last less than three years, but players are on rookie contracts that pay in the mid-six digits for the first four years of their career (there's some variance based on when you're drafted) before they have a more substantial payday. Players are also on the hook for their own medical care a few years after they exit the league, whereas in baseball the league covers you for your entire life if you are on the roster for even one major league game. Baseball players also get much more substantial pensions than NFL players. I am doubtful that the rules of the game will be significantly altered, but hopefully the next union negotiation will lead to much greater compensation. Hopefully they will abolish the stupid salary cap, which hasn't successfully increased parity in the league and is effectively a tool to keep money out of the hands of players.
posted by vathek at 8:27 AM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

Still reading the article, but to me, the future of football seems simple: 7-on-7 (maybe with token linemen) with thud tackling and a running clock.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:29 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

The most unique suggestion: Allow football teams to have as many people on the field as they like, but limit the total amount of weight to a flat 2400 pounds, aka the “one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses” system of football weight management.

In a dark bioengineering lab, a technician locks up for the night. As the door closes, a shaft of light illuminates a placard: PROJECT TENNESSEE TITAN
posted by jason_steakums at 8:41 AM on May 2, 2017 [22 favorites]

If you wanted to increase the number of injuries in football, you'd be hard pressed to find a better way to do it than having players play on both sides of the ball.

This made me think of a game that, while not football, would be thrilling to watch. The field is very long, and both teams start on the same end of the field, offense in the center with the ball, defense behind them and to their flanks, and instead of a collision of teams it's a chase.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:46 AM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

This made me think of a game that, while not football, would be thrilling to watch. The field is very long, and both teams start on the same end of the field, offense in the center with the ball, defense behind them and to their flanks, and instead of a collision of teams it's a chase.

At the risk of having missed the joke, you've just described The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles version of football. Bound-for-street. Say "hi" to Drake for me.
posted by codacorolla at 9:34 AM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

I didn't intentionally describe the Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles rules, but the similarities just make me like the idea more.

At the very least I want a TTCFLC online multiplayer game.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:46 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Jon Bois sort of wrote down the rules for the predecessor for TTCFLC Football, Endurance Football, here.
posted by creade at 9:58 AM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

The most unique suggestion: Allow football teams to have as many people on the field as they like, but limit the total amount of weight to a flat 2400 pounds,

Six Clarence Beeftanks.
posted by zippy at 11:42 AM on May 2, 2017 [7 favorites]

the NFL league office gave up its tax exempt status in 2015

Largely so that they wouldn't have to report the truly obscene amounts of compensation pay received by Roger Goodell
posted by Zonker at 12:27 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Reading the article, it seemed like most of the critical problems have been solved or at least mitigated in rugby. I think the important difference between the two games is that committing to the more extreme amounts of force requires sacrificing advantageous position and speed in rugby, while football is set up to quickly reset field positions.
posted by ethansr at 2:05 PM on May 2, 2017

The other great injustice of football is that players earn so little.

The average is dragged way, way down by college players who aren't (officially) paid at all.

I feel like any discussion about the future of football is broken unless it addresses how to get colleges out of the minor league football business. Too many schools, mine included, are essentially football teams and stadiums with attached academic programs.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 3:19 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

Despite the many superficial similarities, football is quite different than rugby. What I find so fascinating about football is that it blends sophisticated choreography with incredible feats of athleticism. I think many casual viewers see the obvious appeal of the athleticism but have a poor grip on the choreography, which is difficult to see unless you know what to watch for or are watching specialized game film. Coaches choose specific assignments for every single player during every play based on guesses about what the other team will do. It's a kind of strategy game, played out with immensely talented athletes attempting to disrupt the opposing team's strategy. Players are forced to improvise when plays break down (as they frequently do), but there's far less improvisation than in any of the other major team sports. In my experience many people underestimate how determinative and complex strategy is in football. Resetting the field position on each down is what makes this possible. It's also a major part of what makes football so dangerous, especially to linemen, but it's completely fundamental to football.
posted by vathek at 4:01 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

The author is not wrong. Football IS done if it doesn't change. I give it twenty years?

Didn't take long for boxing after Ali started showing his pulverized self on TV.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 4:09 PM on May 2, 2017

As an American who has moved over to a rugby-playing nation, I can certainly see the arguments above about the differences. I suppose it's down to a personal preference at some point (I now like watching rugby more than American football, for a number of reasons), though I don't think I could consider concussions one of them.
posted by Metro Gnome at 9:12 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is going to sound super weird and borderline masochistic, but maybe a solution would be helmets that cause less damage per impact (so bigger, with more foam, replaced more often, etc) and also cause more superficial pain per impact (maybe little ridges or bumps on the inner lining?). I suggest this because I agree that players wear helmets for a reason, as unintentional collisions of an unprotected head with a knee or elbow or other head can be very bad, but I also agree that helmets encourage using the head as a weapon, or at least make it possible to not feel the many sub-concussive impacts a player faces on a daily basis. Maybe if each of those sub-concussive blows were ouchy it would lead players to protecting their heads instinctively.

I also love the idea of widening the line of scrimmage and the field to naturally reduce the mass of the average player.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:44 AM on May 3, 2017

DoctorFedora: What an excellent and interesting article, thanks for posting.

Octothorpe: the 2400lb limit is an interesting idea, but won't work as it's too easy to "hack" by either having a few larger players on your team able to dominate everyone on the field, or other ways... off the top of my head, a 53 man squad is carrying something like 25lbs in non-essential kidneys.

In general I think the suggestions above to introduce more fatigue into the game will make it more dangerous rather than less... and also situational substitution is a massive part of the sport's tactics and strategy. And while an answer to the eternal adverts needs to be found, the pace of the game is something that makes it unique and intriguing, almost anything could happen on any play, and you get 80 or so of those potentially exciting moments in each game.

I'm possibly think the same for the armour, these might reduce the impacts between players, but not with the ground; I'm not sure here, but it's still a game of inches where you can't afford to drag the opposing ball carrier down, so it'll still be a collision sport.

As for helmets... they're an integral part of the game and are part of the look of the sport, and are something else that separates it from almost everything else... but also the "more weapon than protection" rings true. I think being able to see much more of players' faces and expressions would add a lot to the game's popularity, so keep the padding combined with suitable neck rolls? I worry about noses though.... they're squishy.

Overall, I think the question needs to change - not how American Football can be changed, or somehow watered down, but how can it be improved? The parts of the article about spacing are intriguing, but I wonder if you're then just encouraging higher speed collisions?
posted by DancingYear at 7:44 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was intrigued by Mayor West's comments on players now, compared to 50 years ago, so just as a single data point:

First Cleveland Browns practice squad Offensive Tackle I found via google search: Dan France, 6-6, 312 lbs.

( http://www.dawgsbynature.com/2016/9/5/12801388/full-list-of-players-on-the-cleveland-browns-practice-squad )

And I'll fudge the years a bit, and make it fifty years not sixty, because the stats are going to be easier to look up: so we're in 1967, at the Ice Bowl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_NFL_Championship_Game, Vince Lombardi's last game as a Green Bay Head Coach. Thanks to the wondering Pro Football Reference... the heaviest players on the roster were 260lbs: http://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/gnb/1967_roster.htm

( Interestingly the mean average weight between rosters isn't that different, but again, taking a single example and sticking with the Packers: http://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/gnb/2016_roster.htm )
posted by DancingYear at 8:01 AM on May 3, 2017

The 2400 pound rule would need another rule, or else it will turn football players into jockeys. Assuming all players are eligible receivers, there's a significant advantage to having more players than your opponent. This is why, in hockey, rule violations are punished by removing a player from the ice. A football team composed of players weighing 200 pounds could put twelve men on the field. A team composed of players weighing 100 pounds could put 24 men out. And a team composed of players weighing 96 pounds could play 25 at once. The 25-player team would always have an open man on offense, and would be able to double-team someone on defense. This is an arms race to see who can field the smallest players.

There is no advantage to having larger players when your opponent has a numerical advantage. Realistically, size can even be a disadvantage at even strength, which is why you rarely see defensive linemen covering wide receivers.

To say nothing of the fact that determining the weight of the players on the field before each play would be pretty time-consuming to do, considering all the substitutions. Even if you have a database of the players' weights and you just plug them into a spreadsheet that adds it up for you, you could have 50 new players (assuming both teams field 96-pounders) every play, if they substitute everyone.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:20 AM on May 3, 2017

The commercials are a big reason for me to not watch football these days

DVRs solve this problem nicely. Great for most sports.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:52 AM on May 3, 2017

I guess I'm OK with killing football someday as long as the Vikings win the Super Bowl first.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:52 AM on May 3, 2017

The 2400 pound rule would need another rule, or else it will turn football players into jockeys.

I assume he means on the field at any given time and the other existing rules stay in place. So only ten 100 lb jockeys and a 1400 lb quarterback who never gives up the ball. On defense you might want two 750 offensive linemen for more coordinated tackling.

The other rule is that in the NFL you can only have a 53 man roster. So a little under 45.5 lbs each. So the NFL would have to start scouting six year olds or well developed four year olds.
posted by rtimmel at 11:06 AM on May 3, 2017

"I assume he means on the field at any given time and the other existing rules stay in place."

He explicitly states that a team could put any number of players on the field at a given time, which is quite different from the existing rules.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:27 AM on May 3, 2017

awfurby - have you ever considered just watching rugby instead?

Nah, I don't actually like it, and I don't really like American Football either. Australian Rules Football is my game - everyone runs 10-15kms per game, the ball is in constant motion, the skills are brilliant and it still has the required level of brutality.
posted by awfurby at 10:47 PM on May 4, 2017