A sport that was once internationally beloved can continue profitably for years without widespread participation. In the United States, that means football games that span the country from border to border. Clemson ripped off 99 plays against Alabama — an obscene number of plays in the NFL, but not unusual for modern college football. But, hey! History, Postmodern Lit., and more are all welcome here. At the same time, many were surprisingly open to changes in the game when you suggested them — right down to extreme ideas like removing helmets and changing the number of players on the field. With all that mass and ass on the field at once, there is more potential energy on the field than ever before — and it all moves as fast or faster as it ever did. They shouldn’t be treated like one, or forced by design to be one. Schemers have already found one way to do this and it has been a part of football for the better part of 40 years: Spread players out and create a game of players in space, rather than a clustered mass of beef in cleats pounding away in close quarters. The rulebook already has a series of flagrant vs. inadvertent distinctions, but these should be simplified to the point where a referee, working by a generously worded rulebook, has enough discretion in a game to make those calls in a quick and decisive manner. For football in particular, there is an inextricable link between technique and equipment. However, football is a game of margins, and margins matter when talking about not one, but many different little things to help make the game safer. Using those as a stopgap to patch over the glaring issues in football’s foundations is only that: a stopgap, and an expensive one that won’t work for the game as a whole over time. “I don’t know what the overall effect would be, but yes, if you take that facemask or that helmet off, they’ll get their head out of the situation real quick.”. Football might not need more stakeholders in order to survive as a product. But, hey! However, the game of football is ever-evolving, and the question of what it will look like in the future is one I confront both as a designer and a (mostly college) football fan. Football as we know it is done, because the lawyers are here. Without question, one of the biggest stories of the season to date has been the October firing of Steelers coach Mike Tomlin after a slow start. So far the story is funny and really works. The NRL regular season, the Australian Premier League of rugby, is 23 games long all by itself. The other variable in football from a safety perspective is the “m” in F=ma — mass. These are the core obsessions that drive our newsroom—defining topics of seismic importance to the global economy. The 40-yard dash has become the standard for measuring straight line speed because football players rarely run further than 40 yards. The sum parts of the game of football should be made to be as close to free as possible. The second variable is time, and within it the number of repeated exposures to/opportunities for impact.
However, the game of football is ever-evolving, and the question of what it will look like in the future is one I confront both as a designer and a (mostly college) football fan. Football asked for this to happen. Robots, too, will have a role to play in the smart home of the future. That technique, in a future where football has to express less force as a game, must change. We tried to imagine what the NFL might look like in the 2024 season, and this is what we envisioned…. Reading through any of those rulebooks is only recommended if you want to understand what a technical, overwrought, and overwritten piece of pseudo-criminal code the rules of American football are. Weight classes and limits also only serve one purpose: to reduce force. Invert that comparison, and think about the horrors of football’s physics. After making an initial beachhead with concussion lawsuits in the NFL, The Lawyers (capital letters necessary) are pushing inland and making great, great gains. Even that marginal reduction in helmet use lowered the overall number of head impacts by 28 percent — a startling drop in any context, but even more so before you consider that just a small slice of the overall total of practice time was used. Disclaimer: The following article is set 10 years in the future. Yet there’s some logic in looking to football’s direct ancestor for answers. But if you want to know if you’ll like the style, this YouTube video serves as a good trailer: Kick off each morning with coffee and the Daily Brief (BYO coffee). That is a quality of life issue for fans — especially potential younger fans who have never lived in a world where they can’t watch exactly what they want when they want at their own pace. Yes, other sports have concussion problems — hockey, most notably, followed by soccer and wrestling. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. There are two other variables here that matter. It’s way easier to say snaps or plays — opportunities for impact and all the nasty things that come with that repeated impact. The future of football games is looking brighter than ever thanks to virtual reality. There are lawsuits against helmet manufacturers, against the NFL, the NCAA … anyone with a finger on the game at this point, in the year 2017, will be liable for the game’s excesses, violences, and lasting damage. If there’s a way to neatly avoid broadcast overruns and make game length more predictable, then yes:, teams and leagues and conferences will suddenly be interested in safety and game length. We tried to imagine what the NFL might look like in the 2024 season, and this is what we envisioned… Think of Ray Lewis and Eddie George in their prime, hitting each other head-first forever in a narrow hallway: That’s the running back vs. linebacker matchup in the conventional run game, and that’s the series of constant face-to-face impacts that likely reduced lions of the midfield like Junior Seau to CTE cases. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Someone will have to own the rest, including its future. compressed space and b.) This honestly my favourite American football based google maps YouTube interactive website fiction thing ever, it's pretty good. Returners, under any rules, are going to try to return kicks. JUICE: gonna be like some matthew brady shit where you can only take pictures of dead ppl because no alive person wants to be in your shitass photo.
Football does need more stakeholders to survive as a game, though. Eventually we are going to get to a point where TV delays and satellite transmission delays are effectively zero, and that will be a glorious day for the world of live gambling. every once in a while on r/nba someone will post some wild half-serious half-joking speculative fic take on near future nba or extrapolating current trends into the next thousand years or w/e and its really cool. In this future, the game of the American people — its most popular sport — will become something only available to those who can afford the resources to play it, much less watch it. Shut. That violence doesn’t serve anyone well in terms of entertainment value, or in terms of long-term safety for linemen. I just ran into this wonderful web novella by Jon Bois, and wanted to share it. It's an early effort so the football is better than the writing, but it's still a really fun read. What football will look like in the future. But what would the game look like if we opened things up and allowed players to throw the ball a second time? Disclaimer: The following article is set 10 years in the future. Regardless, the league is committed to developing new frontiers and expanding its fan base, so you might as well start reserving your 2028 Rockets season tickets now. if there can be a whole flourishing subgenre of MilSF why not SportSF? The data is imperfect, but it is also a start. His original line: “Football isn’t a contact sport, it’s a collision sport.
There are numerous websites designed to keep officials fluent and fluid in their understanding of the rules. What sent them was the slow realization by parents that Pop Warner football could be the gateway drug that leads their promising, unblemished child to an adulthood with a degenerative brain condition. The future of football will be about reducing force wherever possible, redirecting it, or eliminating it altogether. Possible bets could appear on the TV screen (or holographic projection of the game) and could be placed with a user’s mind (a remote control-free future)! Still, one college rugby coach I interviewed said the degree of violence in the basic interaction of tackling has no comparison. Setting weight limits could cause a whole different range of problems: players going to unhealthy limits to make weight; the difficulty of weighing every single member of a football team like cattle before every game; the many, varied, and creative lengths teams and players might go to in order to cheat the system. So if football’s evolution involves mitigating the massive forces exerted on players, there is another simple variable: require players to bring less mass to the party. It has changed once before, when football was a smaller pastime largely limited to colleges and universities. Why do we only care in first-down situations? The future of American football probably involves embracing things currently considered heretical to the NFL and its airtight branding. The hurry-up is entertaining, creates more offense and more scoring, and often allows overmatched teams to stay in games longer against superior competition. If the pass is incomplete, the ball comes back to the original line of scrimmage from the start of the play.
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Alt. The on-screen experience, too, is an inflated, overlong commitment for many fans.
The “100 commercials, 11 minutes of action” rule remains in effect in the NFL, where the league’s championship game features just 12 minutes of actual action spread out across four to five hours of pregame and postgame broadcast time. The hurry-up has its own issues outside of safety — it requires vigilant officiating, for one, and a small but dedicated crew of coaches despise it — but few want it to disappear in the name of shortening games. At this point we're all largely in agreement that David Beckham is one of the best looking veteran footballers out there, but one magazine didn’t think so. Predicting the future is hard, but that doesn't stop people from trying—especially people named Elon Musk . “The helmet definitely gives you that feeling of being invincible.” That’s former NFL lineman George Foster when I ask him if removing helmets makes any sense. Two: back to traffic management.
Marvin McNutt of Iowa nearly getting blindsided by a falling Skycam in the 2011 Insight Bowl. Reported concussions vs. unreported concussions is a thorny, difficult issue here given the number of concussions that aren’t diagnosed properly by sideline officials, or that are unreported by players not wanting to lose a single snap of play to injury. Stay for the existential angst! Two chess grandmasters battling one another with white and black pieces that embody the athletic grace and beauty of Misty Copeland’s balletics.