How Has Football Changed Over The Years

Football over the Years Everything changes over time, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, and others you can’t really tell it has changed at all but in football you can easily tell the changes it has been through over the years. While all sports have changed over the years football seems to have changed the most dramatically from rules, equipment, stadium and even in the way we watch football today. When American football was born it was an all-white sport played with hardly no equipment for protection except for a leather helmet to protect your head, the game was played on hard dirt and as you can expect, injuries were constant and some deaths even occurred from the brutal hits and the missing component of protection equipment. As you can
already see the game we know now and love is very different from when it first started, back then touchdowns were worth four points and so were field goals and as time went on changes were made to make the game more entertaining from changing the point system and rules, and making the game by making more safety equipment. While football was an all-white sport as times changed and the movements of race and equality took flight blacks started to come into view and given a chance to show off their skills in the game and as you know the game now is more black dominant because of the movements for equality and because our views of races have changed. When we see our favorite players take the field we seem them dressed in tight pants fitted with pads and thick shoulder pads and state-of-the-art helmets, but this wasn’t the case back then. Players played with thin thigh pads and thin shoulder pads and soft leather helmets with no facemasks so it wasn’t a question of if they could get hurt. But when? As our concern for safety grew our technology got more advanced capable of making better, stronger equipment for the athletes and we started making thicker, stronger shoulder pads made to absorb the hardest of hits but keep the played as mobile as ever and the big evolution came when we threw out those thin pieces of leather for a hard plastic helmet with the best padding inside with an addition to a facemask to stop somebodies foot getting pushed into someone’s face when they made a tackle and a dogpile occurred, while the helmet is a good safety precaution it gave the teams more freedom to show off their colors and logo of the team and through the improvement of the helmet the numbers of concussions and head injuries have dramatically dropped. While we continue to make the game safer the problem most people have and argue over all the time is the changing of the rules and, we change the rules mostly to keep the players safe and while some other rule changes are for entertainment purposes like the rule change to back up the extra point position so maybe more teams will go for two points and also make it harder for the kicker but even that rule is under discussion as Roger Goodell wants the extra point removed by saying “The extra point is almost automatic, I believe we had five missed extra points this year out of 1,200 some odd. So it’s a very small fraction of the play and you want to add excitement with every play.” (Goodell). While the extra point has been around for a long time and the only change it’s been through is it moved back farther from the goal post but can we really see it getting removed all together and replaced with some other point system? Every year the football players are told new rules to make the game more safe and entertaining but with every rule change comes arguments that the rule makers should leave the game alone and with every rule made a little excitement from the game dies, the biggest one to cause arguments was the change to eliminate the big hits, and while that eliminates injuries it also eliminates some excitement from the crowd since they no longer or rarely see them and as time goes on football fans can almost expect new rules and new sayings to the game as the rule book continues to build up and look like a IRS code book. Since our ways of technology has improved and advanced we saw the improvements to safety equipment.
But when we go to the games the see what else technology can do to help us, and they help us building modern stadiums capable of holding thousands and thousands of people and able to have huge televisions bigger than houses everywhere so even people in the nosebleed section can see what’s going on in the game. As you know these stadiums come as a price a very expensive one and even though the changes in stadiums make football more available to people and able to hold more people to see the game, owners decide to up the price in everything so as the stadiums get more expensive to build, everything else gets more expensive from the tickets and food to the five dollar or more water you buy at the game and as people line up to the concession stands they see the prices and even if things are overpriced they still pay but inside the fans are shaking their heads at the prices and as Dan Zirin says “Sports fans are fed up”. Fans are fed up because while there to support their favorite team their wallets are getting smaller and smaller from the tickets they buy and the food plus merchandise is also expensive while some people want to wear their favorite players jersey, they can if they are willing to pay eighty to one hundred dollars for a simple jersey with the players name on it. But I and the fans don’t see the prices anytime soon since people are willing to pay for it even if it is
overpriced. As you can see football is an exciting game to get into and sometimes expensive. The history of football has dramatically changed and will keep on changing as our studies of head injuries make more breakthroughs and companies make stronger better equipment to keep players safe. The way of change will always be a part of football.