Your Interest in the NFL/Vikings

[biggentleben]

Different perspective that might add/pile on/whatever...

 

I'm baseball first, no questions asked. I turned the TV in the football rec room at the U to a baseball game during summer workouts between two teams I wasn't even a fan of (don't honestly even remember who!), and I remember getting a lot of crap for it. That said, I was in the rec room because I was playing football.

 

Knowing what I know now, I won't have a son that plays football until high school in full pads. Many communities are going away from such below high school anyway, but it's certainly been shown that ahead of high school there is no amount of head impact that is okay, and while research is still very much in the infantile stages to finding causation of CTE, correlation between the earlier one starts playing football and the amount of CTE damage is pretty damning.

 

I played college football, but if I wouldn't have been from a family situation where baseball ended for me at 14 (and a state without high school baseball at the time), I'd have kept playing baseball as my first sport. That said, I played baseball in a much, much different level of consideration to the game than many parents try to make it now. Playing baseball should be about having an open space, a ball, a glove, and a bat. It SHOULD be the second-cheapest sport for a community and family to put together behind basketball, but for many communities, the sport that ends up being cheap and gives a shot to actually play (5 on the court vs. 11 on the field) is football, so poorer communities frequently drift there rather than baseball as far as their attention and their community dollars.

 

I've never personally had a favorite NFL team. I loved players for the Steelers because I was a center and studied the best centers, and the Steelers arguably have the top two, if not two of the top 3-5. The Steelers also had jerseys at the time I was in high school that perfectly mirrored our black jerseys, so that worked as well.

 

My NFL "viewing" has long been fantasy-biased, but it's even more so now with Redzone channel. I turn that on Sundays, and I don't watch any other night of the week at the NFL level.

[gocgo]

Helped coach my son's team to a championship and was excited that he quit football the next year.  I felt like we had tempted fate and got away with it.  I saw kids that were 9-10 years old get blown up and it only gets worse as the kids that develop early can really hit a smaller kid hard.  Nowadays he's into basketball and likes to do fantasy football with me.  If it wasn't for that, I would have no interest in football.

[Vanimal46]

 

  On 8/24/2017 at 9:18 PM, biggentleben said:

My NFL "viewing" has long been fantasy-biased, but it's even more so now with Redzone channel. I turn that on Sundays, and I don't watch any other night of the week at the NFL level.

 

That's what my NFL viewing has boiled down to as well. Doesn't help that I'm out of state, so watching a Vikings game is difficult, unless they're on national TV. Last year IIRC I watched maybe 3 Vikings games. The rest of the time it was either RedZone on in the background while doing other things, or the TV was off entirely. 

[Vanimal46]

If there's one thing football has done right, it's fantasy football. Millions of people play it, and you only have to pay attention to a couple days out of the week. I could never get into fantasy baseball, hockey, basketball, etc. because of the "daily" aspect of it. Always having to tinker your lineup, add/drop several players a year, and keep up with it for months at a time. 

[biggentleben]

 

  On 8/24/2017 at 9:37 PM, gocgo said:

Helped coach my son's team to a championship and was excited that he quit football the next year.  I felt like we had tempted fate and got away with it.  I saw kids that were 9-10 years old get blown up and it only gets worse as the kids that develop early can really hit a smaller kid hard.  Nowadays he's into basketball and likes to do fantasy football with me.  If it wasn't for that, I would have no interest in football.

 

That's just it. It's just like little league. You see during the LLWS that there are those unique kids that can tear through peers with their arms or bats because they developed early, not necessarily because of elite baseball talent. Heck, how many times have we had a LLWS star never heard from in baseball again?

 

It's one of the reasons you hear those folks with the brain institute encourage no contact until high school. By then, most have hit at least one growth spurt and can begin to add the muscle to balance the size inequality. Sure, there will still be imbalance (I lined up as a 270-pound DT in high school against a 145-pound OG), but it's much lessened by then, and the body has also matured significantly in its natural protections for the brain.

[drock2190]

If I'm choosing betweening watching the Vikings or the Twins, I typically lean Vikings. Mainly because, football season is short and there usually is optimism for them, while the Twins have usually just playing out the season at that point.

 

Basically the game that has the bigger stakes, I tune into. 

 

I never got into fantasy football like some people do. Fantasy baseball has more randomness involved, along with the prospects that get called up suddenly. If you draft a bad team in football, you're pretty much stuck with it, baseball is a long season. Roto league, not matchups, is the only way to play fantasy baseball though.

[jimmer]

I've gotten to the point where I watch every game my NFL team plays and just a handful of other ones.  It has to be a great match-up for me to watch an NFL game in which my team doesn't play.  Same thing with college football.  I have two college teams and I watch as much of those games as I can, and few others.

 

Hockey has turned into my second favorite sport to watch. I watch a lot of different teams, though the Wild and Sharks are my favorite.  

 

Baseball is the only sport where I enjoy watching almost any two teams play (though, obviously, I have the Twins and my favorite NL team I watch more than others).

[Mike Sixel]

The Vikes were on national TV last night, I think, and I watched 2 plays. And I didn't care that I didn't watch more.