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The thing for me is, I never watched it for the contact. Its always been a rooting interest type of sport and if I wanted contact I'd go watch boxing or MMA. T
by brm 9y ago
The thing for me is, I never watched it for the contact. Its always been a rooting interest type of sport and if I wanted contact I'd go watch boxing or MMA.
The thing they don't seem to get(The NFL) is that most people don't care about the hits and they could eliminate them. I'd watch highly skilled athletes from my university or city play FLAG FOOTBALL at the highest levels of skill and athleticism as often or more often than I watch them now.
We need to think a bit about why people watch team sport as a society and realize that if flag football was the highest level we'd ever known we probably wouldn't lose a viewer.
Skills are skills and team rivalries and rooting interests remain regardless of whether its hockey or football or whatever.
- goatlover 9y agoPlenty of people like the hitting in football, both people who play and and those who watch. Lots of people have complan about how quarterbacks are protected nowadays. In fact, I've never heard a football fan say they would like to get rid of the hitting. Not once.
- freehunter 9y agoIt's similar in hockey, take away the contact and people complain. They still watch, though. People complain about a lot of stuff they don't actually care about.
- _dark_matter_ 9y agoWe have plenty of alternative sports that don't offer the hits, they just haven't gotten as popular. I would argue that goes against your point.
- olau 9y agoAccording to this list, you're wrong about popularity, once you look outside the US: http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans.htm http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans.h... Soccer is really huge in many parts of the world.
- duderific 9y agoI enjoy the skill aspect of football, and I love a great, hard hitting tackle, where a player gets low, sets their hips and stops a runner dead in their tracks by wrapping them up. Where it ends for me is the helmet to helmet contact, when defensive players leverage or launch themselves head first into another player's head, because they want to injure that player or get into a highlight reel. I don't see how anyone can enjoy seeing someone laid out on the field unconscious.