Peak Football Means Non-Peak Football Soon

Full Marks

This NFL playoff season has been unreal. Every game in the last two weekends has been insanely close, there is a crop of great young quarterbacks, the ratings are up from last year, and no one is talking about concussions anymore. There are, of course, still concussions, but when the world goes on stop-start hold for two years due to a once in a century (we hope) pandemic, some non-working heads are going to get ignored.

And on some level, I can’t help but wonder if we will look back on this as the high-water mark.

College football, which is the feeder system to the NFL, has become something that’s mostly an afterthought in much of the country. Parents of well-to-do children routinely turn down football for their kids, steering them to sports with a far lower chance of permanent injury. Soccer and basketball get the kids with skills, and MMA gets the kids with bloodlust. High schools, already hard-hit by the pandemic, match that same regional pattern.

For the most part, this does not matter so long as there is good quarterbacking. But despite decades of more and more throwing at every level, good quarterbacking is still pretty hard to find. Most guys who tear it up at lower levels do so from system work, or rely on legs that don’t last very long in this league. If you aren't watching good quarterbacking, you need the games to be close if your team isn't in it, and after an absurd stretch of close games, we have to regress to the mean at some point.

Finally, there’s the game itself. Officiating is a constant source of annoyance. The rules change on a yearly basis, always in the direction of less of what older viewers recognize as the game. People under 25 are the least likely age group in the U.S. to be fans. The people who televise the game (especially ESPN) continue to dilute it to make it more palatable to a less interested audience.

I don’t doubt that football will continue to be the biggest thing on television and a massive commerce point. It’s the only live event we all still do appointment television for, and the people who have always watched it will always watch it. 

Bad NFL games get watched. 

Good ones get watched more.

And it's really hard to see games get any better, or even stay as good, as the last six...