I think the staggering amounts of money made by the NFL and the TV networks has corrupted the sport. Nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them, so what once was seen as sports journalism has evolved into sports promotion. Almost everybody is happy with the status quo, even the fans.
If you watch a replay of a classic NFL game from up to about 1980, even the best players look skinny when compared to today’s athletes. It’s even more startling if you look at the change in college football players. Yet the announcers and journalists are reluctant to ask why the players are so much bigger than before.
There have been professional athletes for thousands of years, going back to ancient Greece. But starting in the late 1970’s, modern professional athletes started to get huge. It probably started with bodybuilders and weight lifters, then NFL and MLB. If it could have been accomplished simply with diet and exercise, we would have seen it before the 1970’s.
Americans used to joke about the obvious use of drugs by Olympic athletes from the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. But now everybody does it. Even if leagues and governing agencies get serious about stopping it, there’s a good chance the drug manufacturers will stay one step ahead of everybody else, either by making their drugs difficult to detect, or by inventing new ones that have not yet been banned.
The sheer size and speed of today’s NFL players is one of the reasons they suffer so many concussions and other serious injuries.
Yup.
NFL network sometimes play some real classic NFL games where the men were big boned and thick but not blown up by `roids.
Ditto for a channel I had the once played classic NHL games in black and white where they had no helmets and body checking was body checking, not taking full sprint runs at a guy to play him and not the puck.
Alas, those days are gone now with 20 somethings making millions per year.