Yeah, I always feel like I’m just watching people give themselves brain damage for trivial reasons when I see a football game. Especially one involving teenagers (or even younger). Then it’s the parents also allowing their kids to get brain damage. It all makes me a little queasy.
I used to be huge into college football, planning my weekends around when my teams were playing. I drifted away for a few years after they instituted the “targeting” penalty; in particular, there was a game where it was called twice on one drive, one was outright wrong (and overturned upon review*), and the other was borderline. It wasn’t a decision to protest; it was more of a “this isn’t important to me any more” kind of thing.
*It was overturned, but in that first year of the rule, the 15 yard penalty still counted. The player that committed the potential foul was simply allowed to remain in the game. (They have changed this rule since then.)
To be clear, I’m not in favor of people being injured. It was just that targeting penalty that made me realize that football was never going to be a safe game. No sport is completely safe, obviously; there’s always a risk of serious injury. But football seems especially designed to inflict injury, as opposed to other sports where the injuries are more incidental. And that scandal where the New Orleans (I think) NFL team was giving bounties for hits on specific players did not improve my opinion at all.
These days, we’ll watch football games if we don’t have anything else going on or whatever, but it’s not a high priority. We did watch some of the super bowl - in that it was on TV while we were reading or working on paying bills, etc. - but we definitely didn’t stay up late or anything like that for it. There’s not much else on TV during the super bowl anyway.
Yeah, I always feel like I’m just watching people give themselves brain damage for trivial reasons when I see a football game. Especially one involving teenagers (or even younger). Then it’s the parents also allowing their kids to get brain damage. It all makes me a little queasy.
I used to be huge into college football, planning my weekends around when my teams were playing. I drifted away for a few years after they instituted the “targeting” penalty; in particular, there was a game where it was called twice on one drive, one was outright wrong (and overturned upon review*), and the other was borderline. It wasn’t a decision to protest; it was more of a “this isn’t important to me any more” kind of thing.
*It was overturned, but in that first year of the rule, the 15 yard penalty still counted. The player that committed the potential foul was simply allowed to remain in the game. (They have changed this rule since then.)
To be clear, I’m not in favor of people being injured. It was just that targeting penalty that made me realize that football was never going to be a safe game. No sport is completely safe, obviously; there’s always a risk of serious injury. But football seems especially designed to inflict injury, as opposed to other sports where the injuries are more incidental. And that scandal where the New Orleans (I think) NFL team was giving bounties for hits on specific players did not improve my opinion at all.
These days, we’ll watch football games if we don’t have anything else going on or whatever, but it’s not a high priority. We did watch some of the super bowl - in that it was on TV while we were reading or working on paying bills, etc. - but we definitely didn’t stay up late or anything like that for it. There’s not much else on TV during the super bowl anyway.