Quote:
Originally Posted by RainMaker
I just think they are trying to make the league more dangerous. We were talking about ways to make it safer and I was just saying that they don't really care about that.
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You don't think they care about legal liability and injuries to star players?
Not every single decision someone makes can be 100% related to safety. If it was, you'd never leave the house. If you can increase revenue $x billion by increasing the amount of on-field time during the regular season by 12.5%, and increasing the odds of an on-field fatality/paralysis by about that amount, that might be a tricky risk/reward call. But if you can mitigate that 12.5% risk by changing the rules, increasing the roster sizes, cutting back on practice time, reducing the amount of kickoff returns, then maybe it's worth it. Same with Thursday nigh games, or expanding the playoffs, or expanding the number of teams. Everything has a risk. Every game itself carries some risk.
I just don't really get this "they don't care about safety" or "they don't care about safety except for lawsuits." What difference does it make? Unless you're saying they should have made sweeping changes back in the 80s when nobody was calling for them, just because should have felt like it was the right thing to do. They do have a complicated problem now, with issues of liability, public perception, risk of on-field fatalities and paralysis, and I think they're at least trying to address those things. Statistically, probably the best thing they did was reduce the amount of kickoff returns. It wasn't popular with the fans, but that's the most dangerous play there is, and (last I checked) there's fewer of those plays now.