|
Where Is Football Going? By Charlie Barnes, Guest Columnist "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap was limping in my direction, shaking his finger at me and yelling. Such a thing was not unknown during our six-year relationship between the wealthy donor and the Booster fundraiser. But on this day, I had deliberately provoked him and I was laughing. Dunlap, his Security Chief Sean Thornton and I were playing golf on Hilton Head Island in July, where the maximum heat and humidity make it like walking through Hell on earth. Dunlap is 75 years old so we outplayed him pretty handily on the front nine. But just as the suffocating temperatures wore Sean and me down, Dunlap seemed to perk up. He's a tough guy and all the heat did to him was slow his swing, one of the secrets of golf. Al began to outplay us and to outdrive us and, as is his way, he loosed an unbroken stream of chatter about his superiority and our unworthiness. So having no defense of my poor play to offer, I started making fun of his limp. "Listen you!" he said, approximately, his phrasing shaped by modifiers too colorful for this page. "If you get to be my age and you don't limp, then you didn't play hard enough when you were a young man!" Dunlap played hard enough. He was the New Jersey High School shot put champion and a star on the New Jersey State football championship team. The limp is a lingering reminder of his playing days at West Point. And Dunlap is right about athletics. Such is the cultural association with between manhood, social status and sports injuries in America. Chicks dig scars. WHERE IS FOOTBALL GOING? Cultural forces have already had their effects on baseball and basketball. In the first half of the 20th century baseball was firmly enshrined as "America's Game." At the point when FSU joined the ACC in 1991, basketball brought the league more television revenue than any other sport else. In fact, basketball was far and away the big money engine in conferences across the board. Today, basketball - including the NCAA Tournament - does not draw television money to the conferences to the extent it used to, and the amount of money it does draw is not growing. This may be of little concern to the wealthy private schools not dependant on the money that football brings. Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski gushes about the addition of basketball powers Louisville, Pitt, Notre Dame and Syracuse. "[The expansion] sets us apart from anybody. And we shouldn't look at where football is, or whatever." Whether Coach K. likes it or not - and he doesn't - the big dog on the larger stage now is football, and it's so big it threatens to eat everybody's lunch. Krzyzewski isn't alone. The final Big East basketball tournament took place in March as the conference prepares to dissolve. "It was the greatest basketball alignment in college basketball history," mourned Louisville Coach Rick Pitino. "And all because a few people blew up our TV deal, everything was broken up … football is running our country right now. It is running rampant." Former Duke assistant and now Notre Dame Head Coach Mike Brey was less circumspect. "Sometimes I want to ask, 'Which football caveman did this to basketball? Can you tell me? I just would like to know!' " UNANTICIPATED INFLUENCES It's always a mistake to extrapolate a straight line based on what we think we know today. Surprises lie in wait for us. Football's dramatic rise to dominance has been driven mostly by money. The contracts between the conferences and the media engines seem almost surreal. Will those numbers hold or will they continue to rise? Or will the bubble burst? No matter how events unfold there are always unintended consequences. Consider four outliers; four influences whose impact may not be immediately apparent:
DISPARITY IN OFFICIATING BY CONFERENCE Most every year it seems like FSU is the most penalized team in the ACC. Conversely, there is the impression that Alabama rarely draws a penalty of any sort in their big SEC games. The current issues in college football may produce an effect on officiating. For instance, if the staggering amounts of money on the table continue to increase, will the officials in different leagues be given differing instructions? Will the officials of one conference be told to "let them play" and the officials of another league told to make every call and give deference to "safety" when deciding to make or not make a call? If such a thing were to happen, the impact would be seen first in the bowl games and in the national championship. Any team becomes used to the style of officiating common to their conference. The shock of a very different officiating standard in an important post-season game might prove too much for even a great team to overcome. There has been some chatter about a national corps of officials independent of the individual conferences, but so far no serious proposals have been put forth. HEADS, KNEES AND ANKLES Tallahassee Democrat columnist Gerald Ensley wrote an insightful column about the current issue of player safety and concussions. And, Ensley made an excellent suggestion - get rid of the hard hats. That might work, but there is another factor that eliminating hard hats can't fix: the mathematics of mass times acceleration. Because it has happened slowly, we really don't appreciate the incredible change in the size of our players. GOLIATH ON THE LINE Florida State's 1973 Seminoles had only eight offensive linemen on the roster, but that number is misleading. There had been NCAA trouble the previous summer and some players had dropped out, leaving the Seminoles with only 52 returning players. However, the incoming freshman class numbered 65 recruits, fourteen of which were offensive linemen. Our eight returning linemen in 1973 averaged 222.5 pounds and 6 feet 1 1/2 inches tall. The 14 incoming freshmen linemen averaged 6 feet 2 1/2 inches tall and about 222 pounds. Ten years later, the 1983 Miami Hurricane National Championship team carried 19 interior offensive linemen, averaging 6 feet 3 1/2 inches in height and weighing an average of 245 pounds. The Hurricanes' biggest lineman in 1983 was 6 feet 8 inches, 274 lbs. No player on the championship roster weighed as much as 300 lbs. The University of Florida brought in a 305-pounder in the fall of 1982 - supposedly the first of such at any of the three major schools in the state - and the sidebar chatter was that he also played tennis! No one could imagine that. In 2012, Ole Miss defensive lineman Terrell Brown is listed at 6 feet 10 inches and 377 pounds. He reportedly weighed 410 pounds the day he arrived in Oxford. Remember Miami's great tight end in 1983, Glenn Dennison? Dennison weighed only 214 lbs. In 2012, Tyler Eifert of Notre Dame won the John Mackey Award for the nation's best tight end. Eifert is 6 feet 6 inches, 250 lbs. Ten years after Miami's 1983 Championship, Florida State's 1993 National Championship team carried 18 interior offensive linemen. As a group they averaged just slightly less than 6 feet 4 inches tall and 273 pounds. In the twenty years since 1993, the nation's top lines have packed on an additional thirty pounds per man. FSU returns 13 interior offensive linemen in 2013. As a group they average just under 6 feet 4 1/2 and 305 pounds. The Alabama Crimson Tide National Championship team in 2012 carried 20 interior offensive linemen averaging 6 feet 3 1/2 inches tall and 305 pounds. What this tells us is that since 1973 the average Division I offensive lineman has increased in size by more than 80 pounds! Human knees and ankles have not grown correspondingly stronger. This February, a young high school senior named David Fangupo signed a letter of intent to play for the University of Hawaii. One sportswriter describes him as "terrifying." Fangupo is a 6-foot-2, 348-pound tailback. Yes, you read that correctly. I've seen the video and he can run, not that he has to. Mass times acceleration = mayhem. Glen "Big Baby" Davis played basketball for LSU and plays now for the Orlando Magic. In high school, the 6 foot 9 inch Davis played tailback at 354 pounds. He scored five touchdowns in one game before dropping football for basketball. Imagine that you're a 165-pound safety and that's coming at you. Our EJ Manuel is listed as 6 feet 5 inches and 240 pounds but standing next to him he looks a lot heavier. You wouldn't want to tackle EJ once he picks up a full head of steam. THE PURSUIT OF 'SAFETY' Paul Phipps is Chief Marketing Officer for Visit Florida. Until recently he was GM for Sales and assistant athletic director at FSU, and before that a national marketing executive for NASCAR. Phipps talks about the importance of balance. After Dale Earnhardt was killed driving in the 2001 Daytona 500, NASCAR set new safety restrictions in place that changed the nature of the race. "The new rules took danger out of the race," he says. "Attendance began to drop in 2006, and continued to drop, as the 18- to 24-year-old demographic left NASCAR in search of the thrills they found in extreme sports like MMA (full contact mixed martial arts)." In 2006 and 2007 the MMA phenomenon surged to its greatest popularity, its ranks swollen by the young audience. Canadian football never really caught on in the lower 48. The Canadian version promised to deliver "a faster game with lots more scoring." But so does flag football. Americans want to see the hits, the exhaustion, the heroism, the defensive drama of contact football. MEDIA MONEY VS. TICKET SALES Another outlier contributing to a decline in NASCAR attendance was the sale of TV rights. For traditional NASCAR fans the races were always held in the South, at 1 p.m. on Sundays. After TV purchased the broadcast rights, the races were run nationwide and at a variety of times. The things that once made NASCAR unique, the regional flavor and the dependable scheduling were gone. Gone as well, increasingly, were the ticket-buying fans. Phipps says the impact of season ticket sales is far greater than most people realize. "Tickets are the lifeblood of sports entertainment." It is important to balance the income from television against the effect of full stadiums. "Full seats drive interest," he says. "It's a mistake to assume that if people aren't buying tickets, they're at home watching the games on TV. That's not true." What is true, Phipps says, is that when people see empty stadiums they assume there's little interest, so they don't watch. NASCAR assumed that even though fewer and fewer races were sellouts, the fans were simply staying home and watching on TV. But it wasn't happening. "It's strange," he says. "When you don't have people in the stands, it affects everything. It all starts with tickets." Phipps encouraged Florida State to create a game-day uniqueness that television cannot duplicate. To be successful, FSU needs both the money from television as well the energy and identity created by a full stadium. Seminole Boosters has been working for years to enhance your game day experience, and you're going to see dramatic upgrades in that atmosphere as CollegeTown dazzles fans coming in for the games. THE RISE OF LACROSSE Americans have yet to be completely seduced by soccer. But lacrosse is fast gaining popularity, and lacrosse is a contact sport. Trust me; it is. The hardest I have ever been hit by an object not fired from a gun was a lacrosse stick in a pick-up game in Syracuse, New York on an otherwise pleasant afternoon long ago. It's possible that men's and women's lacrosse may be the fastest growing prep and collegiate sport. Young women are showing greater interest in more aggressive sports, and some parents see lacrosse as a safer alternative to football for their sons. Centuries ago the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles and Choctaw played a team ballgame that sounds like a combination of lacrosse and ice hockey. In his book "American Indians of the Southeast," author Michael Johnson described a playing field with goal posts 150 yards apart and two, 10-man teams. They had sticks, and a medicine man threw a ball on the ground between lines of the opposing players who used their sticks to advance the ball. Players "used their bodies to block their opponents or clear a path to the goal." "The game required speed, agility, cunning and strength - and sometimes ended in death." Yes, there were deaths, but for the most part and for hundreds of years everyone had a swell time. And according to Johnson, the Seminole Indians still play the game today. |