A while back, The West Virginia Power, a minor league baseball team, had "Salute to Indoor Plumbing Night" at their stadium. They planned to close all the regular stadium restrooms and force fans to use porta-potties, or maybe the red tips in the outfield, I'm not sure. Anyway, the health department nixed the idea, so instead, the team's promotions department cooked up an alternate plan.
"We took some brownies and mushed them up and made them look like poo," Promotions Director Kristin Call announced later. Fans apparently spent the evening throwing mushed brownies at one another. Now, that sounds inane, but small minor league teams with limited advertising budgets come up with every outlandish gimmick imaginable to put fannies in seats (or on port-potties), garner publicity and draw attention to themselves. I went to a minor league hockey game a few years ago. I'm not an especially big fan of the sport, but seeing games in-person gives you a little different perspective and appreciation of the game and the athletes who play it. It's a much better experience in person than on TV in my opinion. Or it would be if you could be left alone to watch the game. Instead, your senses are deluged with music, lights, fireworks, doofwad announcers, t-shirt cannons, kiss-cams and an endless parade of other distractions. I guess they operate under the assumption that you have to be entertained by something every second you're in the building, even if it's by an obese blindfolded guy on skates juggling ring-tailed lemurs or something else that has nothing at all to do with what you came to see. It's frankly a bit of an indictment against their sport that they figure the on-field (or on-ice) product isn't enough to do get you to come back. The National Football League is not a minor league baseball team, does not really need more free publicity than it already gets, does not need to engage in silly tricks to attract attention and should have no worries about whether fans will keep coming back, but isn't acting that way recently in one respect. The NFL is the most popular, financially well-heeled pro sports organization on this continent. During football season, NFL games are regularly among the most-watched shows on television, games of even awful teams are usually sold out and the league makes who-knows-how-many-billions of dollars a year. That hasn't stopped the league (or at least the guy at the top of it) from trying to tinker with one of the foundational aspects of its game in the name of either making it "more entertaining" or of creating conversation and thus free publicity. Commissioner Roger Gooddell floated the idea of altering the extra point last year. See, the problem is that kickers have just gotten far too effective at their jobs. Out of the 1,267 extra points attempted in the NFL in 2013, 1,262 of them were made and four of the five misses were actually blocked. Goodell, essentially said that's too good to tolerate. Watching kickers competently ply their trade is boring and "you want to add excitement to every play." Actually, I don't. Yes, a successful extra point is all but assured and less than half-a-percent are missed. I'm not sure why that's a bad thing. If Tom Brady or Peyton Manning started completing 99.5 percent of their passes, would there be an outcry that the sport had gotten boring and that things need to be changed? The NFL seems to be adopting the attitude of that minor league hockey team I watched a few years ago, not being content to let their product speak for itself. You must have an exciting spectacle thrust in your face every second for some reason. Football fans aren't going anywhere. Given the unbelievable popularity of the sport on the field, on TV and in fantasy land, it seems a little illogical to change something that has been a part of the sport, basically, since its inception. Fans seem to like every aspect of the game just fine as is. I have been to, literally, hundreds of football games in my life at the high school, college and professional levels and I've never once heard anyone say "I love football and everything, but seriously, this extra point stuff has got to go!" Maybe large groups operate this way. They are tasked with "doing stuff" so they concoct problems that don't really exist and then offer dumb solutions to the non-existent problems...the government does that quite a bit. The only things I've heard of turning some people off where the NFL is concerned is the neutering of defenses and tackling. There was some experimentation with 43-yard extra points last preseason. Incidentally, NFL kickers generally make better than 80 percent of field goals of between 40 and 49 yards. I just wonder if people find the prospect of a minimal increase in missed extra points exciting or entertaining? I don't, particularly if my team of choice ends up losing a game over a dumb, gimmicky attempt at making what is already a very exciting game a little more so. When this came up last year, I thought it was, perhaps part of the NFL's attempt to extend its season beyond its normal bounds. They accomplished that last year by pushing the draft back. Between that and free agency it makes the NFL THE topic of sports conversation almost year-round. This extra point foolishness is being discussed again now, so I have to assume the PAT really is about to go the way of the dodo, Crystal Pepsi and safeties who actually hit people. That's a shame. I think making changes to foundational aspects of a great game to "make it more exciting" is a giant pile of mushed brownies.
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TravisI am Travis, the king 0f SC 1A Football Archives
November 2021
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