Watch the line player in jersey no. 9, defending the defender, is the same as watching a cat catch a frisbee. It’s so weird that it’s a little disorienting.
The The NFL has softened its long-standing unified numbering policy for the 2021 season, making single-digit jerseys available to liners, defensive backs, beys and wide receivers. It will take some getting used to to change. In the pre-season games, so many jerseys were running on the field with a small number of people that it looked as if the players and diggers had raised an uprising.
The single-digit revolution would not have been so disturbing if the league’s biggest stars were the first to see the desired jerseys. After all, numbers 1 through 9 have been common in almost all positions in college football for decades because they are an effective lure for esteemed recruits.
But in the NFL, a boutique that is tied up, it requires every player who wants a single-digit uniform to first redeem an existing assignment of their old jerseys. The more famous the player, the more jerseys in circulation, the higher the price of the switch. As a result, mostly lesser-known players or those who have recently changed teams have taken advantage of the new rule. The giant wide receiver Sterling Shepard, who wore the number 87, will wear, for example, this year, while line player Matt Judon, a rookie in the New England Patriots, will move from 99 to 9.
So, instead of trophy pellets for All-Pros, single-digit jerseys look more like plates.
The new unique numbering system will certainly not be popular among neo-traditionalists old enough to condemn any change as evidence of further softening of society. “Seventy-three: Now there is a number a real man can count on!”), but not old enough to remember that center Giants Hall of Fame and line player Mel Hein wore the number 7.
Fans will have to adjust to some other unknown sights.
Taunt police
The NFL announced in its official video in August that it would make stronger efforts to do so enforce your rules of mockery, by labeling a player for “subverting or insulting an act or word” and “offensive, threatening or offensive language or gesture”.
History tells us that operations to kill the league’s sporting spirit inevitably turn officials into games into 16th-century priests eager to eradicate dance, laughter, and showing any emotion other than repentance and shame. Certainly, too zealous officials punished several players this pre-season who celebrated by looking in the general direction of the opponent.
History also tells us that the bonfire on the bars is usually extinguished by October, either because officials are tired of making decisions about breasts and self-confidence, or because public outrage has forced the league to stop them from behaving like younger dancers.
Ubiquitous betting
2015 NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, he stated that the league was “open to our position to oppose legalized sports gambling” and that “he did not expect us to change that forward at all.”
Last week, the league announced contracts with FOX Bet, BetMGM, PointsBet and WynnBET to join Caesar’s Entertainment, DraftKings and FanDuel as approved sports book operators for the 2021 season. was the one Uncle Junior ran out of the back of his candy in 1962.
The new agreement means more choice for players and even more visible gambling and foreplay programming ads for everyone else. TV analysts may still not openly comment on the spread of the topic, but it is likely to happen before Al Michaels withdraws.
If the league’s new lenient attitude toward gambling seems to be philosophically opposed to its puritanical mockery policy, keep in mind that one activity increases direct revenue and the other does not.
Now Streaming
Eleven NFL games will be available on Amazon Prime Video 2021 on Thursday night. The games will continue to air simultaneously on Fox and the NFL Network, but the league will severely cut cables in 2022, when some games will be available exclusively on streaming services.
A gradual transition from traditional television should give cable audiences time to prepare. Bartenders won’t be forced to toss smartphones from 80-inch TVs so their patrons can still watch the game, and father-in-law won’t panic at 8:30 a.m. Thursday night asking which “channel” Amazon is on.
For the part of the population that understands technology, switching will be as simple as logging in to Amazon Prime Video … oh, I forgot my password … now it sends me an SMS with a verification code … oops, accidentally clicked on the “paper towel palette” instead of “Cincinnati Bengals at the Jacksonville Jaguars.”
Well, at least the delivery is free.
Concert economics
Exercise teams used to consist of 10 players with less than two seasons of accumulated experience in the NFL. They are expanded to 16 players in 2020, six of whom could be veterans, so teams could gather some reinforcements in the quarantine training team. Those rules have been carried over to 2021, and teams are making full use of them, especially when it comes to emergency defenders. No team wants to run an unprepared broadband rookie in a back position due to a virus outbreak The Denver Broncos did last season.
Seeing a 12-year-old veteran, like New England Patriots defender Brian Hoyer transferred to the training department, is the same as discovering an old college colleague with an MBA deliver for DoorDash and drive for Lyft to make ends meet. In other words, completely normal for the 2020s.
Return of the holding
The NFL has wisely instructed officials to be less strict about their offensive stance in 2020, so that games are not marred by endless flags after the pre-season canceled for Covid. According to the Almanac of Football Outsiders, offensive penalties were reduced from 3.6 per game in 2018 and 2019 to 2.6 per game last year, with fines for holding down from 725 (1.41 per team per game) in 2019 at 430 (0.84) in 2020. Not coincidentally, scoring has increased to an all-time high of 24.8 points per game, and the games themselves were noticeably sharp and enjoyable.
The NFL had to think that everyone was having too much fun (see: rules of mockery), because the pre-season holding rate for 2021 canceled up to 1.58 penalties per team per game. That rate may have been inflated with fourth-quarter cunning, but it’s still a discouraging trend. On the other hand, abruptly holding sentences, like a swarm of crickets, can be an unpleasant sign that nature is healing itself.
All of these changes in the NFL can be daunting with the start of the regular season. Rest assured, however, that in a few years it will seem completely natural to bet, buy your favorite -3 jersey and watch the game from a single mobile app while Goodell and NFL corporate partners watch over us from orbit .
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