kearly":18wfgrit said:
There is a huge difference between the way Goodell has gone about his business and the way his predecessors did. Huge.
Well, it's also a completely different world now than it was even 15 years ago. WILDLY different. Hard to compare, frankly - like comparing passing stats from Marino's era to the modern day NFL.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
Banning certain celebrations for no particular reason
Which celebrations are you referring to? If it's the goal post dunk, Graham delaying a game by bending the damn thing easily explains that, IMO; as in, I don't blame the league for banning it after that. If something else, elaborate further, please.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
The potential 1 year ban for weed
Yeah, weed just needs to be an allowed substance. That being said...We only ever have the players' word that it's weed these guys are busted for. It's all but guaranteed that at least some of these substance abuse suspensions where the players just claim "weed" are actually for something a lot harder. The league keeping mum about what substance any given player gets suspended for is a pretty big boon for the player in terms of public relations.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
The proposed 18 game schedule
You referring to how they wanted to implement 18 games specifically, or the idea of an 18-game regular season in the first place? I'm all for the latter. A full month of games meaning nothing gets rather old.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
Thursday Night football (despite players saying they need 6 days of rest to recover, and that home teams almost always win these games)
As a fan, I love it. The fact that Richard Sherman loves Thursday Night Football games (he's on record saying that) is evidence that not all players are against them. There's also
no increased injury rate for them. Furthermore, Thursday Night Football has been at a
competitive disadvantage as far as choosing premier competitive games by design, which in my opinion, is mostly what accounts for home teams winning more/just fewer competitive games in general. Sure, if one team has a full week or more of preparation time compared to the other having a shorter week, that's less planning time.
So what? That's already been the case for many decades due to bye weeks, and we already know that teams perform approximately the same after a bye week as they do in any other week correlating to their overall record for the year, so an extra week of preparation and rest doesn't seem to matter much, if any, which also would suggest that the team at a disadvantage in terms of having the shorter week versus their opponent would likely even out over the course of a season because virtually every team plays a Thursday Night game against another team that does either that week or in another week that year. I think the whole "Thursday Night Football is bad for football/the players/the teams/whatever" thing is wildly overblown, to be honest. If you have proof or strong evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it. (Serious request, I'm not trolling.)
kearly":18wfgrit said:
The rule changes that have spiked penalties and made the game almost unwatchable (not just talking about 2014 either)
I agree with this. You know what, though? A pretty good number of the rule changes in recent years have been done to promote player safety. Plenty also coincide with "more profits due to fewer injuries to stars", of course, but we can't pretend that there isn't also a good benefit to the players themselves, even though they whine as do the fans about turning it into the "No Fun League" while also blaming the league for not improving safety, which is of course hypocrisy.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
The proposed expanded playoffs which would allow more 8-8 and 7-9 teams to make it at the expense of a legit contending team getting that second bye week
I am absolutely in agreement with this. I don't want the playoffs touched. At all. The current system is perfection, in my opinion.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
The proposed long extra point, which would cause the number of games lost by random bad luck on a PAT to jump 10 times.
I still don't get why you made such a big deal of this. It was a proposed experiment set to run for two weeks that no matter what, was never going to be implemented for this season. I cannot fathom one possible reason why experimenting with things during the preseason is bad. I'm all for trying new things out, and I think everybody else should be, too.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
NFL in London, which would be a travel nightmare and will probably turn into a huge mess very quickly if it fails to catch on with the locals.
Yep, hate this. Start a new, separate league in Europe. I'd love that. Don't make American teams travel there for games.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
The kickoff being moved to reduce the value of special teams, while having no provable benefit towards concussions
Hated that too.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
The general pussy-ification of the game
Eh, I'm fine with anyone that wants to dislike this...As long as they don't whine about wanting to see increased safety.
kearly":18wfgrit said:
IMO, you could put a do-nothing guy at Commissioner and he would be better than Goodell on most issues.
Can't say I agree, but I understand your perspective on it, and it's certainly possible.