Won't last. The NFL will come to its senses soon enough. After all, the NFL isn't popular because of the games themselves, it's popular because of what it really is: gossip for men. The beat writers don't understand the game, the announcers certainly don't understand the game, hell, half the coaches don't understand the game.
But what are NFL fans really interested in? Who's injured. Who has the best statistics. Who's on the schedule? Can we get a good seat at the sports bar? What's the spread in the game? Who's dating a hot model? Did T.O. fart today? How's my fantasy team doing? (Honestly, go to any sports bar on a Sunday afternoon and see how many guys are watching 5 games at once just to see how their individual players are doing.)
When the players go on strike and unknown replacements play, no one cares. Fans care about the players and all their exploits, on the field and off. Twitter would be the perfect addition to the media phenomenon that the NFL has already become. Guys who pay $200 for seats, $100 for a day at the sports bar, and gamble away all their discretionary income will salivate over tweets. It's only a matter of time.
Amen. I love fantasy too, but you can bet your ass I'm much more concerned with the game than the ancillary "gossip" going on. Parent definitely needs to meet some real fans.
There are also a limited number of players, and those players are employed only by the good graces of the league. In the case of broadcast, there are a very limited number of distributors, and they distribute live images of the game. In the case of Youtube, a larger number of people are broadcasting delayed images of the game. The ban, by comparison, affects millions of users describing, textually, what is happening.
That's like the RIAA attempting to sue you for humming a song being played by the performers in Miami tonight. I'm not saying it won't last, just that it won't stick.
"Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game."... "The NFL has strict regulations on who can report what from its games."
When will major organizations realize that these new-fangled web tools actually increase the value of the organization through user/fan involvement? Probably won't happen for a while...
Chad Ochocinco, formerly known as Chad Johnson, is famous for nicknaming himself "Ocho Cinco", wearing the name "Ocho Cinco" on his jersey because he thought it would be funny, getting fined by the NFL, and then legally changing his last name to Ochocinco just to get away with wearing it on his jersey.
The joke was on him though--due to legal obligations with the manufacturer of the jersey, he had to wear the "C. Johnson" jersey for a full year after he changed his last name to Ochocinco, since they had to get rid of inventory of Johnson jerseys.
Hehe, if you watch a game you will notice that most players spend most of the game sitting on the sideline surrounded by sophisticated cooling or heating devices (depending on weather).
Forget tweeting, they have time to write a novel out there.
Active players on the sidelines, during timeouts, and between periods can still easily be considered to be "playing" the game-in-progress, even for those moments they are not strictly "in play" or "on the field".
But you could even imagine -- with a team's permission for promotional purposes -- that players with helmet radios could dictate tweets to someone else.
> But you could even imagine -- with a team's permission for promotional purposes -- that players with helmet radios could dictate tweets to someone else.
That would never happen, not in any foreseeable reality.
Sure, it'd be banal -- "we really need to make this 3rd and long"... "my linemen are doing a great job today"... etc. -- but it could happen.
And if not on Twitter, it could be official league-sanctioned Facebook status updates, etc. as part of some other promotional tie-in with the league websites or cable network.
And if not the NFL, a scrappy upstart, like the UFL or new USFL or AAFL could try it.
Ah yes, when you put it like that I could see it happening easy, at least in an "NFL Films" or "mic'd up" kind of way where the player is only passively taking part.
My reaction was to the word "dictate" really, the idea of a player (which would have to be the QB) actively twittering in-game while on the field, eg actually saying "hey coach, tell twitter we're going to go long and school the Browns secondary".
As for non-NFL leagues, well I wouldn't put anything past them, they have no brand to protect so they'll try anything.
The NFL has proven very resilient. It absorbed the All-American Conference about 1950, the AFL in the 1960s. The USFL sort of hung on in the 1980s until Donald Trump decided to go head-to-head with a fall schedule.
OT: fellow yanks, watching a single game of Rugby Union, say, All Blacks vs Wallabies, will let you see NFL 'athletes' for the panty waisted, overpaid, timeouting-begging wussies they really are. Pathetic.
I understand your enthusiasm for Rugby Union, an awesome game. But you will never see me calling an NFL player a "pantywaist" or "overpaid", even in jest:
The level of angst that players live with was shocking. It’s something I’ve never seen in baseball or basketball. In football, everything is compressed. You enter the league right out of college; there are no minor leagues or places where you can apprentice. It’s 90 guys in the locker room fighting for 50 jobs. And the physical nature of the sport means that even if you make it, you’re looking at an average career of three years.
Professional football is an absurd proposition. Players collide, physicist Timothy Gay reports, with a force equivalent to the weight of a small adult killer whale. Injuries are constant, and players live with the knowledge that they may wind up crippled, depressed, or with Alzheimer's disease in their 50s. Coaches are merciless jerks. Contracts aren't guaranteed; you can be fired any minute. The media say a lot but know little. Fans scream and curse. The surprise isn't that a player like Quinn Pitcock quits the NFL. It's that it doesn't happen more often. "When I tell people that I left after five years on my own, you should see the looks on their faces," says Ed Cunningham, an offensive lineman with the Arizona Cardinals and Seattle Seahawks from 1992-'96 who's now a college-football analyst for ESPN. "Well, hey, man, it sucked. It was not fun. And oh, by the way, I was getting beaten up every single day at work."
With the possible exception of a few top-shelf quarterbacks and receivers, NFL players are indentured servants. Their whole lives are circumscribed by their employers and coaches. (Now they aren't even allowed to use Twitter, for god's sake.) And, though you don't always see the evidence onscreen, every single one of those players is sacrificing decades of their futures -- their brains, their joints, their very lives -- in order to entertain you.
"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
Rugby's a great sport, but it doesn't have anywhere near the tactical sophistication of gridiron. It also doesn't seem to involve any actual blocking, per se. Blocking in gridiron might be more like sumo than anything else, but it's probably pretty rough on a guy to repeatedly jump out of a crouching position to collide full-force into a defender, trying to shove him away from your teammates. Likewise, it's probably pretty fucking rough to get slammed into the ground by a dude capable of overpowering a 300 pound lineman. Rugby players are skinny dudes, and a skinny dude running into you at full speed is less force than a fat dude running into you at full speed.
I've seen rugby matches, and have something of an appreciation for both sports. Trust me: there's a damn good reason for the pads and helmets.
But what are NFL fans really interested in? Who's injured. Who has the best statistics. Who's on the schedule? Can we get a good seat at the sports bar? What's the spread in the game? Who's dating a hot model? Did T.O. fart today? How's my fantasy team doing? (Honestly, go to any sports bar on a Sunday afternoon and see how many guys are watching 5 games at once just to see how their individual players are doing.)
When the players go on strike and unknown replacements play, no one cares. Fans care about the players and all their exploits, on the field and off. Twitter would be the perfect addition to the media phenomenon that the NFL has already become. Guys who pay $200 for seats, $100 for a day at the sports bar, and gamble away all their discretionary income will salivate over tweets. It's only a matter of time.