Joe Flacco’s Problem with the Modern NFL (Edit)

10 comments

1. Love Joe, but the dude was a PI merchant back in his day. Talking about how the penalties ruin a game when he literally shot for penalties plenty of times himself

2. Preach it Our Brother Joe .

3. Came in and performed.

4. There isn’t a player in the league I want to take to a bar and pick his brain more than Joe Flacco. Me + Joe + 3 or 7 rounds of drinks at Milton’s = yeah that’s it.

5. We also have combat sports such as boxing and MMA where brain trauma is pretty much a given. So, it’s not so out of bounds to say that the NFL should go back to the no-holds barred days of Dick Butkus.

   But it also ignores the History of why the NFL took this seriously in the first place. Even beyond the lawsuits and bad press, bigger stronger guys in even more protective gear going faster… And playoff games with backup QB’s. Too many lost careers to CTE and other injuries.

   We also don’t want an NFL where the top QB’s are all on IR in week 10. And we also, as a society, have less of an appetite for combat sports than we did 50 years ago. We’ve had to watch our once heroes age bearing the scars of what they did for our entertainment. Science has shown us they die young, etc…

   My point being – he’s not wrong, but there’s a balance. In a perfect world, no defender would ever break the rule, so there wouldn’t need to be 15 yard penalties. The very idea that anyone would hit the QB late or with unnecessary force would be so farcical as to make specific penalties for such behavior a waste of time. It would be like writing a rule about throwing weasels at other players. Who would do that?

   The NFL became the nation’s most popular sport by amping up the scoring and protecting it’s stars. If it made them more money, they’d feed you into a wood chipper tomorrow. This isn’t really about your safety or what you signed up to do. It’s about what makes the sport palatable to a mass audience.

6. Joe knows ball

7. I love this guy.

8. Bless you Joe Flacco. You speak the truth that every fan wishes for our favorite sport.

9. Mahomes slo-mo dive among some real hits is hilarious.

10. I get what he is saying. You know the risks when you sign up to play. The ticky tack ones, if I were to guess, are what he is talking about. Like, how exactly is a 320 lb. d-lineman supposed to wrap up at the chest and not land on a QB? How is a DB who aims for the stomach supposed to know the WR is going to trip and put his head in harms way? I don’t want the head hunting, but this is a contact sport, and trying to legislate contact out of the game is spoiling it more than helping it.