NFL players can no longer lower their head to initiate contact. It's the so-called "targeting rule," which during my middle and high school school years was also known as "proper tackling technique." "Put your helmet on their numbers" they'd scream, then blow their whistles a few minutes later to make the whole team run laps because someone was pussy and ran out of bounds to avoid a tackle. Those safeties ran in like hired guns, and spear tackled like, well, literal spears. I understand the safety reasons for the rule. I have two sons and no intent to ever let them play football, due to safety concerns and my own, extensive experience with concussions. But that doesn't mean I'm not at least a little bit sad. Since I read about the rule change, I've been watching videos like this: Focus: What did you do in your youth that there's no way in hell you'd be able to get away with today? Alt. Focus: The pendulum always swings back. As the NFL turns into flag football, something is going to fill that violent sports void. As the NBA turns into the social justice league, something is going to fill that skilled sports void. As the NHL -... nevermind, no one cares about them anyway.... Point being, eventually the pendulum will swing back. What do you think will come of all this?
I don't know how much age difference there is between us, but I was always taught to keep my head up during tackles, and this was before CTE concerns and was mainly done to avoid spinal injury.
I'm about to turn 30, but also I live in Texas where high school football rules. Y'all get your crazy ideas up in the smart states and a decade or so later it filters down here.
Focus: I was allowed to run and play all over the neighborhood without adult supervision. Today that's deemed so criminal, Utah had to pass a bill specifically allowing that.
I was taught roughly the same. Keep your eyes on the ball or the ball carrier's hips and then put your facemask on the ball with your shoulder buried in the runner's gut, wrap your arms around the runner and drive him into the ground. We had a guy that speared another player on a kick off and got hurt enough to miss a couple games and I remember the coach giving him hell for dropping his head and getting himself hurt. We were never taught to hit high, or low for that matter, so I'm not sure where some of those techniques came from.
Is it really going to change the game that much? Im sure ex-players in their 50s would rather not be dying of CTE.
I'm older than all y'all, and same here. I don't know anyone who was "taught" like RotN describes. That's not much of a coach.
El hubs played intramural for a couple years and it is way more fun to watch than football in my opinion, and I grew up watching football. I would be more likely to watch sports on the weekends and have viewing parties and things like that if it was rugby versus football. It has a better pace to it.
I was gong to say, as a former rugby player we used to laugh our asses off at football players’ “technique” when they came to try out for the team.
I was just talking about this earlier today. I'd leave the house after breakfast, maybe but not always come back for lunch, and be home for dinner. In between I was in the woods, at the lake, exploring old iron mines or the town dump, and walking along the old railroad tracks. No adults had any idea where I was at any given time. More significant these days though was my attitude towards school in the 70s and 80s - I was a typical kid who did fine in school but didn't really care for it or most of my teachers. A few friends and I would regularly make jokes about blowing up the school, throwing old Mrs. Smith into an alligator pit, etc, - "jokes" that were often written down and sometimes drawn. Of course we never had any intent of doing any of that, but today we'd be expelled, charged with crimes, and likely be all over the evening news.
By the time I was in second grade I walked to school a mile without a chaperone. I had free run to go play where I wanted as long as my folks knew where I was headed. When I was a kid, kids did things like play in unsupervised construction pit sites, “Bumper-jump” cars in the winter, go pool-hopping in the summer and play lawn darts while standing INSIDE the rings. If a city bus or school bus came along your walk home, everybody bombarded it with snowballs. Nobody has fun anymore.
When I was a kid I used to ride my bike several miles to school no matter what the weather was. One time, it was in torrential downpours. I showed up to school soaked all the way through every article of clothing. And they called my mother to bring me dry clothes. The look of shame and humiliation on her face was priceless. “Did your parents make you ride your bike to school like this?!” I was as happy as a pig in shit to whip through the rain on my bmx cutting dangerous turns and skidding my tires. But they made my mom out to be crazy abuser.
"My eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school, We've tortured all the teachers and we've broken all the rules, The principal tried to catch us but we flushed him down the stools, Our freedom marches on, Glory glory hallelujah, My teacher hit me with a ruler, So I shot her out the door with a Magnum .44, and she ain't my teacher no more." We used to sing that shit in class and the teacher would just say "Alright, alright, that's enough." If a kid tried that now he'd be locked up in a padded room.
I'm 41 and where I grew up in western Pennsylvania we were taught facemask-to-the-football as Hoosiermess described. Do anything like RotN described and you'd be lucky if you only sat out the rest of that game and ran laps for the entirety of the next few practices. In addition to wandering throughout the woods from sunup til sundown; if we were going anywhere in a pickup, nobody thought anything of the kids riding in the back, usually standing up looking over the cab. How we never took a bird/rock/bug to the face is beyond me
Perfect timing for this thread. You may have heard about the family that went off a cliff in CA and that they were being investigated by CPS. Why were they being investigated? "Bruce and Dana DeKalb, the next-door neighbors of the Harts in Woodland, told The Associated Press they called child services on Friday because they thought Devonte was going hungry. They said he had been coming over to their house too often in the past week asking for food." If that is truly the only reason for the investigation by CPS, damn. Hell, I used to show up at the neighbors place every now and then if I thought they'd be having something good...like something that wasn't fish. I got a bit tired of constantly having to eat fish.
All you senior citizens in here reliving the glory days raised this generation of wimps so I’m blaming y’all for this shit.
Guys, we may need to address the fact that ROTN's recurring concussion problems could have been deliberately created by some fuckstick football coach.