Good column in The Ringer addressing the craptastic first 2 weeks of the 2017 season
How Football Stopped Being Fun
We are living in the golden age of failed completions, a statistic as grim as it sounds. Tracked by Football Outsiders, failed completions occur when a team doesn’t get 45 percent of the yards it needs on first down, 60 percent on second down, and 100 percent on third or fourth down. The stat goes back to 1989, and last season Joe Flacco set the record with 144....
The NFL has a sickness in which nearly everyone on the field and on the sideline has become conservative to a fault. There’s been a dramatic rise in completion percentage since 2000—Sam Bradford broke the NFL’s record last season—but yards per catch has gone down over that same span. ...
The product is diluted, and fans are tuning in and then tuning out. If that doesn’t scare the league, then nothing will. ...
“The great quarterbacks—[Aaron] Rodgers, [Tom] Brady, Big Ben [Roethlisberger]—they are looking for the daggers, the 25-yard throws,” [Chris] Simms said. He thinks most coaches want to default to less adventurous plays—and that any excitement you do see is when the individual talent of some of the quarterbacks wins out. “Look at Aaron Rodgers, throwing a 40-yard missile after a backflip, into a keyhole.” ...
The NFL isn’t dying: 46 million people watched last year’s NFC title game and well over 100 million watch the Super Bowl. But whether or not they’re beautiful, sports are supposed to be fun. Two weeks into the football season, not many people are having a good time
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2017/9...uality-of-play