Friday, October 27, 2017

The Beauty of the Game

My daughter and I went to watch a parks and rec 1st-2nd grade flag football league game last night.  I had a lot of fun watching the kids run around, the coaches trying to get people to focus.  It's funny but in a month league like this the big improvement I saw from the last game we watched to this one was on defense.  Kids now knew to get to the flag when on defense.  There were passes, there were runs, there was even a punt.

This year I decided that I could no longer watch football.  The CTE stuff has just taken it out of me.  It's hard to watch these men hitting each other and know the kind of damage they are doing.  But watching flag football with a bunch of kids made me realize that there is nothing wrong with the game of football, we just shouldn't be tackling anymore.

Don't get me wrong the hits are great fun to watch.  When I was a kid that's the part of the game I always imitated.  But as time went by and I watched players like Bo Jackson have their careers cut short, and I watched guys that were once super athletes on the field now hobbling around, and then CTE.  Well for me it just got to be too much and all I could see and think about anymore was my fears for these guys and what they were putting their bodies through.  I decided that football was just a flawed game.

Then I went to a kids flag football game and I realized there is nothing wrong with the game, except that we tackle.  Why do we need to tackle?  Football as a sport is great.  It has all sorts of strategy and skill.  It has so many moving parts its fun to see it all come together and the truth is tackling isn't necessary for the game to be entertaining and great, it is a great game.

One of the teams last night ran a power sweep left at one point.  And is was great to see.  All these kids rolling out to set blocks for the kid with the ball.  It was a well designed play and so pretty to see developing.  Problem is the kid with the ball wasn't patient enough for his blockers to block and so a defender go to him and ripped off his flag.  Now how would that have been better with a tackle?  How would it have been improved by all the kids wearing a bunch of protective gear and hitting each other?  I don't think it would have.

I have thought that football has no future.  That we are at the peak or were at the peak a few years ago and are on the down-slope, but you know I think many of us could get into flag football.  It's the game that makes football a great sport, not the hitting, not the tackling.  Players could be much bigger stars when they don't have to wear helmets.  And size and drugs and all the other negatives around football would disappear.

I am now back in on football, but flag football.  Now I just need to find an 11 person per team flag football league. 

20 comments:

  1. I joined the AFFL email distribution. That looks great.

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  2. Good post here. Good tip to the AFFL.

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  3. I will never forget Jim Brown and the Cleveland Brown power sweep: a thing of beauty. Good observations about football injuries.

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  4. Watching live coverage of an AFFL game on the NFL Network ... The blue-jerseyed Mean Machine and its graying, paunchy quarterback are trailing Code Red, 14-0, with about nine minutes to play on the second half's running clock ...

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  5. INTERCEPTION returned 100 yards for a seven-point touchdown ... there are also six-point touchdowns in the AAFL, and I'll have to figure out when you get six and when you get seven.

    This game is being played in Pittsburgh. It's a live broadcast. NFL Network is also promoting a Saturday-night doubleheader coming up from Atlanta that I think they said would involve Michael Vick and (former Miami Dolphin) Chad Ochocinco.

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  6. OK, I think the deal is that touchdowns of 100 or more yards count for seven points.

    Clearly our calling is to launch a minor-league AAFL circuit with teams in Moscow, Idaho, and Madisonville, Kentucky. The NFL Network commentators just noted that Bridgeport, Connecticut, is home to what is considered the nation's foremost league for nine-on-nine flag football. (The AAFL plays seven-on-seven flag football.)

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  7. Code Red scores again ... 27-0 ... this team comes out of Connecticut.

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  8. Interesting. The penalty for offensive pass interference is turnover of possession. That's intense.

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  9. Mean Machine is out of Nashville, and middle-aged quarterback is a high-school coach.

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  10. OK, we've got another AAFL game coming on after this. One of the upcoming teams is called "Church's Money."

    This is genuinely entertaining. With Tiger too far off the PGA pace, I keep flipping between this and NBA Network for, hopefully, breaking reports of LeBron and Boogie to the Wizards.

    Hurrah! Nashville's Mean Machine get on the board with 14 seconds to go.

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  11. And now they convert some kind of "onside throw."

    But that's it! Code Red--"in a bit of an upset," the NFL Network play-by-play guy--beats Mean Machine, 27-8, in Pittsburgh.

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  12. And now NFL Network is airing a commercial for a product called "Bug-a-Salt," which is a pump-action gun that fires a burst of table salt for killing flies at outdoor events.

    Let me tell you something. I've gone my first 50 years on this Earth feeling as though change has come pretty constantly fast and furious, and it's nothing compared to how the (hopefully) second 50 seems to be shaping up.

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  13. How quickly can the HP masthead be changed from "A Celebration of Home, Kentucky, Sports, Music, and Other Passions" to "American Flag Football League Analysis, Handicapping and Board Games and Official Home Page of the AFFL2 Kentucky Division Charter Member Madisonville Popes"?

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  14. Two seconds after the snap, the defense can pursue the quarterback; by four seconds after the snap, the quarterback must've thrown the ball--or the play counts as an incomplete pass.

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  15. Very great-looking play ... the Church's Money quarterback rolls right, throws backward to a receiver backing up along the right sideline; that player then rolls left and throws back across his body to a wide-open receiver in the right corner of the end zone. The two-point-conversion try is intercepted, but home-standing Money Team finds itself in a 6-0 hole.

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  16. Pardon ... I had it wrong. Church's Money is the home team in San Diego; Money Team is out of Dallas, which makes sense given that Ramonce Taylor played football for the University of Texas.

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